That in the past people used to deceive (delude) themselves and other fools around them with theology, speculations and metaphysics, today they do the same with statistics, probability and abstract models.
So sheer quantity of believers doesn't work for making a point.
They're basically saying that sheer quantity of believers in anything proves that their God exists!
Coming from a Christian perspective however, I would agree in general people have evidence to believe in God. I don't intend the quote from the Bible below to serve as an sort of evidence. This would not be a logical line of reasoning for someone who does not believe in the truth of the Bible. However, it may serve to further clarify my position.
"For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse." -- Romans 1:20
It definitely doesn't provide any proof, but I didn't say that. I said "sheer quantity of believers doesn't work for making a point", as in, how can the number of people in any way support the validity of any beliefs held by those people?
There's plenty of concrete historical evidence that beliefs held by many many people turned out to be wrong. It's basically the story of science. I.e. we have clear evidence that the fact that a lot of people hold a belief does not mean anything about the truth of that belief.
> In any case, at least Christianity and Islam each have over one billion believers globally.
But that illustrates my original point.
I find it difficult to deny the achievement of tangible progress that is implied by, for example, the self-driving car.
Most of the time it feels like the people who are somewhat successful in those branches simply got lucky by randomly mixing elements A, B and C in an unexpected manner and boom -- magic.
In other words, things progress painfully slow and almost always it's due to intuitive shower/sleep revelations than anything else.
I built a program that played tic-tac-toe in -94, using a combination of traversing a problem tree while evaluating the positions using a neural network.
To my understanding, this is basically the same approach used to develop a Go player, only that it took a month training a minimal network to do something useful at all at the time on my small Amiga 500...
You could read about a fundamental difference between a properly controlled, replicable scientific experiment and computer simulation according to some abstract/unverified model and why results of such simulations cannot be substituted for experimental results or any form of evidence in my older comments.
It sounds kind of like you think that all attempts to codify human knowledge are bunk!