3. If God does not exist why do so many people believe in God? How can all these people be wrong?
The vast majority of people do believe in God, it is true. But so what? Let me turn this question around. Why do you believe in God? Where did the belief come from? Were you born with it?
No.
Everyone, in a practical sense, is born an atheist. A baby knows nothing. It has no conception of God, or it's mother, or even the fact that it is an infant human being. Knowledge and awareness come from experience. People, in general, gain their religious beliefs from their upbringing. If this were not true demographers (population scientists) would not be able to draw pretty coloured maps showing the distribution of world religions, such as the one below. Religion is commonly taught in school, religious practice is entrenched in society and even in those people who are not 'religious' the idea that there is a God in the sense of some kind of 'higher reality' is nonetheless very common.
I am not claiming that all the people who believe in God are stupid. Religion is a social phenomenon, and social phenomena are very difficult to change. Let us take another example. Until relatively recently in human history it has been almost universally believed that men are intellectually superior to women. There has been a male role and a female role and the male role (in the vast majority of societies) has always been dominant. Even today this is largely the case (how many Heads of State are female?). To most of us today this attitude is not just wrong, it appears to be irrational and stupid. Using the argument that since time immemorial man has always believed that there is some higher force and that therefore such a force MUST exist one is forced to conclude that the historically inferior position of women, too, must be valid. Changing the latter attitude has not been easy and over the last 2 centuries, though a lot has been achieved in setting the myth of inborn female inferiority to rest, the problem still exists. Changing beliefs about religion is no less difficult. People are changing, but it is happening very slowly. One day our descendants will look back at us and ridicule us for the central position that we have allowed religion to take in our lives, and in the governance of our societies.
Just to further illustrate the foolishness of this argument, let us consider the flat earth model. The earth basically appears flat when you look at it (if you don't consider 'the horizon'). Although the ancient Greeks, among others, had proven the earth not to be flat, it had continued to be considered so by many. Even when Ferdinand Magellan proved that it was not true by sailing all the way around the planet he wasn't believed. The Catholic Church denied his claims (as it later did when it jailed Galileo Galilei for advocating the hypothesis that the Earth orbits the Sun). It took a long time for the socially imprinted notion of a flat Earth, or the Earth as the centre of the universe, to wear off. Yet it is ridiculous to claim that all these people were just stupid. Society and received wisdom are very powerful forces upon human thought, especially in the uneducated who do not have access to the information .
One tends to find that in religious societies the prevalence of atheistic and agnostic religious beliefs in highly educated groups is much higher than it is in the general population. The United States of America is a perfect example. The US is probably the most religious country in the "Western" world. The Aris study in 2001 found that 81% of Americans identified themselves with a specific religion (76.5% Christian). Only 14.1% of Americans do not follow any religion. I am not considering the extent to which they actually practise, only the belief in God and making a choice about a specific religion's take on that God.
Now compare that statistic with scientists. 60% of US scientists, a much better informed subset of the population, do NOT believe in a personal God. This trend to increased levels of disbelief becomes very remarkable when one looks at the best scientists. A 1998 survey of all members of the USA's top scientific society, the National Academy of Sciences, found that 93% did not believe in a personal God (72.2% atheist and 20.8% agnostic).
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"God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we, the murderers of all murderers, console ourselves? That which was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet possessed has bled to death under our knives - who will wipe this blood off us? With what water could we purify ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we need to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must not we ourselves become gods simply to seem worth of it? There has never been a greater deed - and whoever shall be born after us, for the sake of this deed he shall be part of a higher history than all history hitherto."
