A friend brought up the subject of people demanding signs from God, which reminded me of a thing that comes up sometimes among atheists where they say that if God wanted people to believe in Him, he should do [whatever]. It doesn’t take much experience of atheists to realize that it doesn’t matter what the thing is, it wouldn’t be enough. There could be mile-high letters in the sky made of unquenchable flames saying, “I made the world. –God” and atheists would say it’s an unexplained natural phenomenon that guided the development of language and its inexplicability was what drove the development of religion before the advent of modern science.

Vary the thing as much as you like, as long as it predates what the atheist sets as the condition, the result will be the same. It will only be believable if it happens in response to what the atheist asks for. That is, it will only be believable if God’s actions conform perfectly to the will of the atheist.

That’s the key to understanding the fundamental problem.

You can see the exact same phenomenon in romantic relationships where one partner is insecure. Let’s call them I and O, for brevity: I isn’t sure that O loves her, and asks him to do something reasonable to show it. But as soon as he does it, it occurs to her that maybe he did it for some other reason. Maybe he just thought it was a good idea, or thought that he was going to get something out of it. So I comes up with some other test for O’s love, this time more extreme; something he couldn’t think is reasonable. When he does it, she then wonders if he really loves her or is just trying to humor her because he wants sex. So she needs to push him away and demand something that he would have to hate. If O is sane, I will eventually succeed in driving him off, proving that he didn’t “really” love her. And if he isn’t sane and stays, it’s always possible that he’s doing that because the alternative is even worse, which isn’t really love, etc.

Ultimately, the problem in both cases is that the person will only believe in what is a complete extension of their own will. But if it a thing were a complete extension of one’s will, it would be a part of one (since we can’t create ex nihilo). Ultimately, the only thing that the atheist and the insecure person can believe in is… themselves.

It’s a solipsistic trap.

They will tend to be very angry that they are in this trap; they don’t want to be. They cry out to people to get them out of this trap. But no one can get them out. That’s the problem with mental prisons: the prisoner is the guard.

Actually, it’s worse.

The prisoner is the prison.