Faith creates reality

 

Despite the sign's assertion, its owner is surely not claiming to know the mind of God regarding the 2020 election or, for that matter, anything else. How could he?

Rather, the owner is making a faith claim not about God, but about his own personal conviction, against all evidence, that Trump won. Invoking God gives that claim an unwarranted gloss of certainty, and inserts the election outcome into the domain of religion. A faith claim is necessary here, because there is overwhelming empirical evidence about who won, and it wasn't Trump.

If, contrary to evidence, and to the officially reported outcome, it was Trump who really (had all legal votes been counted and illegal ones rejected and "rigging" not occurred) won, God would surely know it, because God, being omniscient, knows the real winner, whoever it was. But there's no sense in which God endorses the claim being made. (I stipulate God's existence only for the sake of this particular discussion.)

Thus does the sign owner promote an alternative reality whose belief requires faith and eschews evidence, since the facts at hand utterly contradict his preferred reality.

Which aligns nicely with the practice of religion generally. Religion is, after all, at its core an assertion of faith-based "reality." Once the believer has learned to construct reality in this manner, belief in all sorts of propositions not based on facts readily follows. Such construction is one of religion's enduring intellectual perversities, and it utterly pervades the religious mind.

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