Why do people need proof to believe in God?

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Religion is something you have to buy into from a very early age. It makes certain cognitive demands on you and organizes your brain and thoughts around a cultural structure of concepts. Belief in God is just one of those concepts. But since it’s the ‘core’ that religion revolves around, atheists and theists tend to focus only on that unless it’s some kind of political-moral issue, like abortion.

Religion never ‘grabbed’ the atheist, atheists ‘escaped’ the clutches of religion by never buying into those foundational concepts. The main problem is that religious indoctrination is a pedagogic skill and between modernization and the fragmenting of Christianity, good religious teachers are far and few between. There is no longer a ‘critical mass’ of true believers that can sustain itself.

The moral aspects of religion have largely found their way into the secular fabric of society. We don’t need religion in order to get married, not anymore. The good, peaceful, non-judgmental life preached by Jesus is arguably already a reality for most Americans.

Religion has to do what religion has always done throughout history and change to meet the needs of more people. People aren’t so much looking for proof in the supernatural, but rather just a really good rationale for paying the cognitive costs of belief.

The already-avowed atheist may be too far gone, atheism involves a cultural structure of concepts to be believed in just as religion does, (shh! don’t tell them that!) and once you have adopted one of these structures, you generally can’t accommodate others unless you’re highly motivated to do so.

For atheism, the concept of scientific rationality occupies the same position that God / Jesus does in Christianity. Something to believe in even when it’s irrational. It makes no sense to ask proof of God, but that doesn’t stop them from demanding it anyway.