I'm wondering if any of the atheists here would prefer that God did exist.
If a god did exist, and it were benevolent, the earth would not look the way it does.
In my view, a benevolent god would fix problems before they happen. People and animals would not evolve to cheat, lie and kill. Instead, people would have phobias about rape and be unable to do it. They would have phobias about murder and break down catatonically before being able to commence it. They would be compulsive about not harming or exploiting others and to violate this compulsion would cause them to break out in itchy hives. If there were a god, there would be no “problem of evil,” because a god-like creature would be able to divert it. And would want to. Even if the god did not divert natural disasters or problems like earthquakes and cancer, they would still divert crime. Because they could, and they would want to.
Moreover, the existence of a god does not imply the existence of an afterlife. That’s an add-on feature that is not required. However, it frames the vacuousness of the whole “free will” answer to “problem of evil,” because whatever the god could do to “fix people” in the afterlife to no longer be “sinners,” a benevolent god would just do at the outset prior to suffering. If a perfect heaven is possible, then an imperfect earth is unnecessary and cruel for no reason. Just make the people perfect in the first place.
But the query,
I'm wondering if any of the atheists here would prefer that God did exist.
…leaves some critical questions.
Is the god benevolent? If not, then no, of course I would not prefer that one exists. If yes, then is it wholly benevolent, or flawed benevolence?
The latter reminds me of the god in Brandon Sanderson’s Mistborn series. (The second god that is. It killed the first god and was later killed by a new god.). Anyway, this second god killed the first one because it was acting badly. This seemingly benevolent second god was plagued by unintended consequences of the benevolence it tried to deploy. Tried to make the planet warmer, moved it too close to the sun, it got too hot, so the god made it constantly rain down ash to create a shadow from the sun, this left the humans to nearly starve, and on and on. Our heroes spent three books trying to kill it because they thought it was evil. It didn’t think so, it was trying its best. Nevertheless it was hunted down and killed. So flawed benevolence may not be better than no god.
How do we define our god? When I look at the definitions, “god” doesn’t seem like it should be flawed. But they all are. The christian one is spectacularly flawed by its own admission. It
can make a heaven with free will but no suffering, they say, and then they turn around and assign it culpability for creating people that have to live outside of this perfect place and then later that it won’t let in. To me that’s not just a description of a monumentally flawed god, it’s actually a plot hole so large that it defines the god as not existing.
So can I answer the question without a plot hole? Yes, but earth wouldn’t look like it does today. If a god existed that was benevolent and had no plot holes, it seems like that would be cool, whether or not there was any eternity to it from my perspective.
But it’s just a thought exercise because it is achingly obvious that we do not have one.