If I get a guess, I’d guess you got that line from ChatGPT. 
Believing in God or God’s non-existence is a leap of faith. There has been a couple millennia of efforts in apologetics to try to make the steps appear smaller or ‘reasonable’. For some, it’s a small step or not one at all. For others, it’s a gap too far. You benefit no one by presuming motive or mindless compliancy, through projection of stereotypes. People are diverse & different, stupid & smart, thoughtful & not in many different ways & dimensions. If one wishes to piss and moan about stuff one finds aggravating, that’s fine. That has it’s place. I do that all the time! But if you want to truly understand and engage with those ‘others’, it helps to ‘trying meeting them where they are, not where you want them to be’. [/moral scode tone off]
We really live in the age of the “death of God”
What God wills, happens. Similarly, what God doesn’t will, doesn’t happen.
Lol. It’s ‘mu’ – A Zen thing refrased as “unask the question” in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig.
Aside: I don’t think the book is what inspired me to ride & repair motorcycles but it helped. What got me to give up motorcycles were smartphones the inattentive drivers they created.
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They suggest no such thing. That is a non sequitur.
Using an analogy from mathematics might be helpful. Suppose I assign my students the equation 2x = 4 to solve and this is the response of three of them:
• Xander: “You need to multiply both sides by 2 and x = 8. ”
• Willow: “You need to divide both sides by 4 and x = ½.
• Buffy: “You need to add 2 to both sides and x = 4.”
All three students are incorrect, and their math teacher should probably find a new
occupation. But what if all the students agreed with Buffy (she is the chosen one)? What if they formed a club with other math students all around the world and they all agreed x = 4. Several students might even bring in their sacred scriptures and say, “Look, the book of Numbers was written by the great Sohcahtoa and verse 3:14 reads, ‘When 2x=4 then x must equal 8. So declares the lord. ’”The verdict does not change. All of these students and their holy book are incorrect.
Objective facts are such that they remain true even if everyone in the world disagreed with them. As an example, if every human being alive today thought it was objectively true that the moon was made of Cheese Whiz, they would all be mistaken.
Many people also have a tendency to overstate the diversity (what you call active diversity). If I wanted to know what most relevant experts thought on climate change, I would not ask botanists, cosmologists or scientists in general. If I wanted to know the latest on origin of life research, I would not ask theoretical physicist working on super-string theory. Likewise, I wouldn’t go to a mechanic or optometrist when an obstetrician is called for.
By my count, 70% of the philosophers of religion (the so-called experts on this subject) accept or lean towards the existence of God. Only around 20% of them identify as atheists or lean away from God.
I am not big on appealing to authority. But the diversity you seem to be using to make a fallacious leap in logic doesn’t even exist. I understand many of these theists might disagree with one another on some arguments. But most experts in the field are theists or lean towards it.
Vinnie
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That’s the point I was making: great efforts have been made to make the belief in God appear infinitely less reasonable than it is. And unfortunately they have succeeded in the west. The same could be said about the resurrection of Jesus but UNFORTUNATELY FOR THEM things here have gone in the opposite direction as the third quest has demonstrated that the sources where far closer to the events than previously believed and the critical scholars also came to the conclusion that the apostles were really convinced that they had seen the risen Jesus (even though they can’t affirm the reality of the resurrection because of methodological naturalism)
But before the third quest the common view was that the Gospels were as historically relevant as Esopo’s tales and that the divinity of Jesus was a later and forced construct that was developed through the centuries.
This didn’t have the objective to destroy faith but to make it as less reasonable as possible.
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There is an enormous difference between God’s positive will and God’s permissive will…
Philosophers of religion are kind of a self-selective population. An interested metric is what proportion started in philosophy of religion as believers (I think that survey has been done). And “having personal belief” is not the same same thing as asserting that philosophical arguments are conclusive. The subjective ‘personal’ is not the same as what we hope is more objective, ‘professional’, rules of logic and argument assessment where you “show your work to the rest of the community”
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It’s unclear whether the God of Philosophers can have that difference. The God of the Old Testament might.
I can do that, as long as there is good faith. But when, for example, I encounter a hyper-empiricist atheist who begins doubting even the existence of his own mother if he hasn’t seen her for more than a week (I’m being hyperbolic of course), and then that same person goes on to affirm completely unprovable theories such as the multiverse, simply because they feel the need to explain, through chance and meaninglessness, the otherwise astronomically low odds of the universe being the way it is, then I’m not dealing with someone arguing in good faith. The multiverse, which is essentially a kind of cosmic Darwinism, allows them to claim that the dice have been rolled trillions upon trillions of times, and therefore a universe like ours was bound to occur eventually. But there is no proof for it, and I don’t accept seeing it embraced so enthusiastically by people who otherwise struggle to believe even what they see. Or better yet, I accept it but the inconsistence and ipocrisy is there for all to see.
Luke 16:8: “For the children of this world are more shrewd in dealing with their own kind than are the children of the light.”
And I know that fairly well because I was a child of this world too.
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This is not relevant since. I don’t argue from consensus. Your error was two-fold.You made a logical leap based on diversity (active debate) that does exist or exists in such a fashion that it does not carry the force your comment needs it to.
Whether philosophers of religion are self-selecting are not is irrelevant. The same could be said of non-philosophers of religion. At best your argument from diversity would be akin to claiming a bunch of botanists deny super-string theory. I would recommend exploring other avenues upon which to evaluate the strength of super string theory.
Vinnie
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Does anyone have any good suggestions for resources? This conversation has got me thinking a lot, and though I still have some things to work through, would like to know if anyone has any books that are well written and have helped their faith. I would especially appreciate it if someone had any books that involved the intersection of faith and religion (especially written by Evolutionary Creationists) or in the reliability of the resurrection accounts (especially responding to criticisms thereof).