If you want to evaluate their claims fairly, you should try to understand what arguments and circumstances were most influential to them.
If someone doesn’t pursue this question about themselves, for themselves, it’s useless for someone else to (merely) ask it, as even if somehow you learn the truth, it probably won’t have the form of a good argument. Arguments need to be designed, they won’t describe the structure of a system as complicated as human mind (with influences of culture), unless there are laws of reasoning firmly in place that ensure that beliefs (by construction) result from arguments.
When a person becomes skilled at careful (correct/useful) argument, that point is reached already in motion, with some of their beliefs formed by something other than careful argument. After epistemic habits become moderately healthy at working on new questions, they aren’t automatically healthy enough to purge the mind of convictions that were previously put in place by less reliable processes (and studying the details of those processes isn’t necessarily a good use of your time; just ask the questions again, not forgetting the question of whether the questions are important enough to work on, to prepare beliefs about).
(In particular, God-related issues seem to be primarily a problem of distorted relevance. If you only observe the world and try to understand it, any specific supernatural hypothesis (i.e. with well-designed meaning) won’t become important enough to worry about. So a healthy way of discarding God, if you find yourself affected, seems to be about realizing that the meaning of the concept is unclear and there is no particular reason to focus on any clarification of it, rather than about falsity of related arguments.)
E.g., you could check whether there’s anything of pragmatic relevance in ideas like the convertibility of transcendentals. Just ditching convertibility of transcendentals can easily imply a God that is not similar to the God of e.g. Aquinas, to a lesser extent Aristotle, to a lesser extent Leibniz. This doesn’t take much time and quickly rules out large portions of the “God” conceptspace. (Also, people who believe in vague “God”s (e.g. “God isn’t a person, God is the Goodness inherent in the structure of the universe”) are forced to refine their concepts; of course, most people think of God ideologically and so the questions most immediately relevant to them would be more sociological than metaphysical, for better or worse.)
(Presumably I disagree with Vladimir_Nesov about the value of thinking about the problem in such terms in the first place; I can only argue that most folks aren’t decision theorists and so must grasp at morality and eternity in other ways, and that I am on the side of epistemic humility.)
If someone doesn’t pursue this question about themselves, for themselves, it’s useless for someone else to (merely) ask it, as even if somehow you learn the truth, it probably won’t have the form of a good argument. Arguments need to be designed, they won’t describe the structure of a system as complicated as human mind (with influences of culture), unless there are laws of reasoning firmly in place that ensure that beliefs (by construction) result from arguments.
When a person becomes skilled at careful (correct/useful) argument, that point is reached already in motion, with some of their beliefs formed by something other than careful argument. After epistemic habits become moderately healthy at working on new questions, they aren’t automatically healthy enough to purge the mind of convictions that were previously put in place by less reliable processes (and studying the details of those processes isn’t necessarily a good use of your time; just ask the questions again, not forgetting the question of whether the questions are important enough to work on, to prepare beliefs about).
(In particular, God-related issues seem to be primarily a problem of distorted relevance. If you only observe the world and try to understand it, any specific supernatural hypothesis (i.e. with well-designed meaning) won’t become important enough to worry about. So a healthy way of discarding God, if you find yourself affected, seems to be about realizing that the meaning of the concept is unclear and there is no particular reason to focus on any clarification of it, rather than about falsity of related arguments.)
E.g., you could check whether there’s anything of pragmatic relevance in ideas like the convertibility of transcendentals. Just ditching convertibility of transcendentals can easily imply a God that is not similar to the God of e.g. Aquinas, to a lesser extent Aristotle, to a lesser extent Leibniz. This doesn’t take much time and quickly rules out large portions of the “God” conceptspace. (Also, people who believe in vague “God”s (e.g. “God isn’t a person, God is the Goodness inherent in the structure of the universe”) are forced to refine their concepts; of course, most people think of God ideologically and so the questions most immediately relevant to them would be more sociological than metaphysical, for better or worse.)
(Presumably I disagree with Vladimir_Nesov about the value of thinking about the problem in such terms in the first place; I can only argue that most folks aren’t decision theorists and so must grasp at morality and eternity in other ways, and that I am on the side of epistemic humility.)