What kind of proof would it take for you to believe in God? This is a question I get surprisingly often. I usually start with one of these two answers:
1. I’m not sure, but if God is all knowing, he will surely know exactly what to do to convince me.
2. A large live tuna would appear in front of me right now! *waits expectantly* … *disappointment*
Yeah, I’m kind of a smartass at times. But then I usually follow up with a real, thoughtful answer. Greta Christina has an excellent article where she does just this: 6 (Unlikely) Developments That Could Convince This Atheist To Believe in God. It’s long but worth the read.
So how about you? What kind of proof would it take to convince you that God really exists? This could be anything from a vague deist God to Zeus to the Christian God of some highly specific sect.
God would have to give me beer. Right now. And fix me up so I can safely drink it.Speaking of, gotta take meds. Ugh.
I always just throw it back on the believer. “What would it take to convince you that Allah / Vishnu / Zeus / Mithra / Ra / The Flying Spaghetti Monster really exists?”
If some omnipotent, or at least very powerful, being exists, all it would really need to do to convince me is drop by and say hi, and perform a few miracles.I wish I could say I was skeptical enough to wonder if it was just some extraterrestrial with abilities or technology I didn’t understand, but a real demonstrable miracle or two, the kind which absolutely could not happen without divine intervention, would convince me.
For the Christian God, it would take them smitting me, then St. Peter at the gate telling me that I am going to hell, then being there for a couple hundred years. For most of the other gods it would just take a small demonstration and a long conversation. For any deity, after proving their identity, they would still have to convince me why I should worship them.
For me, it would have to be an instantaneous injection of belief that would encompass every person in the world – and completely removing the whole notion of non-theism/secularism. This is circular argument, I know. But it’s the only thing that I think could demonstrate that there is a God – and by doing this phenomenon, well – it just told us that it exists.Any of the typical “miracles,” could be machinations of technologically advanced extra-terrestrials or inter-dimensional visitors.
The problem with most of these examples is that they’re personal experience which, as we know, is completely subjective.I would require objective proof, i.e. an experiment that, when run by anyone, anywhere, at any time, has the same results that can only be attributed to a deity.For example, first placing a rock, any rock, under a glass jar, then say a specific prayer, and having the rock levitate and carve the words “I am god” or something into itself in the language of the person observing it. This would demonstrate omniscience, omnipotence (of a sort) and intelligence, and not in a way that would be subjective.
I’ve never posted on here before, but I’ve been a long time reader. Up front for the sake of transparency I am a Christian, but I’ve always appreciated a lot of the honesty on the blog and in the comments.I’m curious, as many of you have encountered religious people, whether on campus or wherever you may be, do many of them give the answer that nothing could happen to disprove their belief in God? I’m just curious how widespread this ideas is.
Produce a universe for me (just the one – you don’t need to spawn a multiverse) and then micromanage one species within it, allowing your child to be nailed to some plant matter until they die.Show me that and even if you’re not a ‘god’, I’ll watch your TV show!
My comment on the Alternet article:As I’ve always said, if God exists and he is omniscient then he already knows exactly what type of evidence would convince me that he exists. If he was really omnipotent then he would have already done so.
Thats a tough one. I guess even a few of the types of things like you and Greta Christina mention – ‘technology indistinguishable from magic’ demos like 100-foot letters in the sky visible to all in their native language, live tuna appearing in midair – aren’t going to do it for me. It would have to be something big, I guess, but I’m having a lot of trouble coming up with anything. How about a bunch of (or heck, all of them) dead people coming back to life, complete with testable memories or events that only they and some living person share.
Icelander – I can agree with an experiment being a good way to convince the masses, but I would need to analyze every part of the experiment, check every finding, and I would probably be one of those conspiracy nuts who could find ways of explaining the experiment without omnipotence. Even if the experiment were to convince me, I would still need them to answer why they think they should be worshiped, seeing as how Clarke’s Laws reminds us magic is just someone else’s science. Normally someone smarter, but that is not a given.
She would joyously partake of a hot dog with me for lunch today.
Some well-aimed and very public smitings (Pat Robertson comes to mind). The God of the Old Testament had terrible aim, and made up for it in mass killings.
The concept of “god” would have to be coherent before I’d really be able to answer this question.As an example… I agree with the person above, who asks for a repeatable scientific experiment. The only problem I see with that is… if the experiment is repeatable, then “god” is merely another natural force and not really a god in the sense that people want (I’ve said before and will say again, if anything supernatural existed, it would be subject to the same kind of scientific inquiry as the natural and therefore wouldn’t really be supernatural at all: the concept is incoherent and self-defeating).I don’t really know what evidence would convince me a square circle existed either.
For the specifically christian god I would accept as proof five verifiable instances of the miracles claimed to be accomplishable by believers. The most basic of which would include poisonous snakes, some blood testing, and some biting. I don’t want anyone to die, just pointing out that technically Jesus did say that his believers could be bitten and not be harmed…I would also accept food multiplication, transmutation, and mountains sprouting legs and walking around, or even faith healing of …say… AIDS (again with pre and post bloodwork).
What was that quote? “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”Substitute ‘God’ for magic. Why would a God care what we think?
If there is an omnipotent, omniscient God, then it would know exactly what it would take to convince me and be able to do it, whether I know what that is or not.
If the doctor told me that my colon grew back (I had a total colectomy a couple of years ago) I would believe in the deity that then appeared and said (s)he did it.
Can I change my answer to this?
Sorry to pick nits, but the passage I’m familiar with (Mark 16:17-18) just says that believers will “take up” or “pick up” serpents, but doesn’t indicate that they won’t be bitten. On the other hand, it does promise that “if they drink any deadly thing, it shall not hurt them” – so drinking a glass of Drāno without any ill effects would be a nice, easily testable bit of evidence.
For me, the answer is simple. If there is boobquake, then there must be an entity called Boobquake God; therefore, I believe in God. Otherwise, there is no God.
I think I’m more in the line with EbonMuse’s “The Theist’s Guide to Converting Atheists” while it doesn’t deal specifically with a gods, it does a pretty good job on setting objective standards to believe in a religion.http://www.ebonmusings.org/ath…
A large tuna appearing in front of me would be pretty convincing, yeah. Really, anything obvious popping into or out of existence in front of me would do it.Getting me to *like* that God or god is something entirely different, and would require me to actually hold a discussion with it over its policies.
If I heard the voice of god or observed a miracle, I’d assume that I was insane or was witnessing something I couldn’t explain but was not therefore inexplicable – I got over that me-as-the-centre-of-the-universe thing when I was a teenager, just cos I can’t explain it doesn’t mean someone else can’t. Who knows why a large tuna would miraculously appear (and if we’re going to wish for stuff, why not a mud-cake rather than a tuna?)So yeah, it would have to be something completely objective, but appearing to say things in different languages is not necessarily that (babelfish, dr who have alternate explanations for such…wow, I’ve just realised what a geek I am!). I’d have to go with the smartass, any omniescent god would know what it would take to convince me.
But surely only after significant testing to show that you hadn’t undergone some kind of genetic mutation which made you immune?
I posted this recently on my blog:Well, frankly, it depends on what you mean by “god.”If the person asking the question is referring to some Superbeing With Really Amazing Powers, then the evidence that would convince me of the existence of such a being would be of the same nature as the evidence that would convince me of the existence of any being.However, if the person is referring to some entity in a religious or theological sense, then things get problematic. The acceptance and belief in such an entity is not subject to evidence. Sure, a believer can say that he or she has some evidence for the existence of such an entity, but when that evidence is found to have severe problems, the believer can also invoke religious faith to solve apparently insoluble problems. Faith can always come in and save the day. In that case, if evidence is not sufficient for the believer to believe such an entity, why should it be for the nonbeliever? This is why I think such claims just aren’t any good.Honestly, I think that as soon as you start making evidence important enough such that the claim of the existence of an entity is subject to evidence, you have moved out of the realm of religion and theology, and into the realm of general philosophy and even science. Then this so-called “god” is something else entirely — something more akin to a superhero.And when that happens, we’re dealing hyperheroology (the -ology of superheroes), not theology (the -ology of gods).
Great answer!
They would need to explain why Firefly got canceled.
Nothing. If God appeared before me with a billion dollars in one Hand and Jennifer Love Hewitt in the Other Hand, that would only convince me I was having a psychotic break with reality and was in fact in a “home” some place being taken care of by caring medical professionals. I’m not sure why, but I imagine it looks a lot like Shutter Island.
I guess I would ask, why do we need proof?This is not to support blind “followership”, but more to say that not everything can be explained or proven. When it comes to God, for me, I don’t need physical evidence of existence as my heart, that touchy, feely thing where passion stems, says that there must be something greater than all of “this.”I can’t prove there is a God, but neither can I deny that something inside of my says that It must exist.I have no issue with those who need proof, part of me doesn’t blame you a single bit truth be told, and I think we can all find a commonality among us because we’re both pondering the question of existence.
I don’t know about “believe”, but I would be strongly inclined to worship anyone who cured all diseases, *now*, that no one would ever get sick again. So long as that being neither engaged in nor encouraged hateful or destructive acts, I’d worship it.
It was placed in a really crappy time slot and Fox ran the episodes out of order, which made some of the long running plots confusing.Woot, I am a God now!
I’m going to go the “Hitchhiker’s Guide” route: If the Vogons could reveal themselves to the entire world all at once with perfect clarity, I’m pretty sure a supernatural, omnipotent being could do that too. Simple demonstrations/miracles that only I see wouldn’t work for me though. If no one else was around to corroborate my story, I’d be more inclined to believe that my mind was playing tricks on me than that some supernatural deity actually exists.
So you still want a God who interferes?
Miracles are a lousy reason for believing in God.
“Why would a God care what we think?”Now THAT is a great question!
“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”200 years ago, or further back, that was true. What “sufficiently advanced technology” could possibly make us think it is magic?
My general stance is, “I don’t care who or what any god that exists is, as long as it stays out of my way.” If it wants me to believe in something specific rather than just acknowledging there could be a detached ‘higher’ intelligence in the universe, it’d have to prove itself. I’m fine with it never showing itself, as I’d have to talk to it if it did.
I guess you’re asking about a monotheistic God and not polys, like Christians, Hindus, Greco-Roman or Norse.What would it take is a believable explanation of why the world is screwed up so bad and a good faith effort to correct it. Now for worship, of course, fix me, then pull all the polyhalogenated compounds and heavy metals out of all living beings and waste dumps.
I’ve talked with people that have had a crisis of faith and god came out the loser. Some I know lost faith when the cognitive dissonance of following Christian teaching and teachers justifying murder, murdering and then trying to justify our murders to their conscience and Christ’s word’s.
If something appeared that was a million years more advanced than us and granted all the requests posted here they said they would believe in a God (magic).
Carl Sagen wrote a fictional scenario at the end of his book “Contact” that, if it were true, would convince me. The idea was that someone computed PI to enough digits and they found an infinitely repeating sequence of numbers that, when considered as a raster bitmap image, made up an image of a circle. Beautiful!
Having a god prove their existence to me is one thing. Having them prove to me that the deserve to be worshiped is quite another – something that is even less likely to happen than for god(s) to exist in the first place.
See, I would automatically presume it to be an extraterrestrial, perhaps even pandimensional, entity rather than a god, but then, I’ve never been religious and never been provided an adequately precise definition of what such a thing is.So, in the struggle between ‘god’, a term with literally no meaning in my personal lexicon, and extraterrestrial, a word I have a quite clear understanding of, the victor should be readily apparent.Technically speaking, a previously unknown terrestrial entity of sufficient power could do the same. After all, all it takes is a smart combination of pharmacopoeia and priming to convince the staunchest skeptic that they’ve seen a ‘god’.
For me, there is no conceivable condition that could prove the existence of a ‘god’.This is due primarily to the lack of a usable definition, the criteria of which could be used to judge an entities ‘godliness’.Beyond that, *any* sufficiently powerful entity could seize control of my mind and force me to believe in it’s existence but, because the threshold for such an event is so low, it would be silly to believe that such an act demonstrates, of itself, ‘godliness’. Which is to say, were I to somehow come to believe that there was a ‘god’, the belief would still have no basis in reality.
Well, to reduce expenses, it would probably be more feasible to perform genetic testing only if resistance to the harmful effects was actually demonstrated.(Although this should go without saying, my suggestion is entirely tongue-in-cheek; I have no wish for some poor deluded person to kill him- or herself in order to “cure” my unbelief.)
Scientific proof. Follow the rigors of science and if god comes out unscathed, I’d believe. I’m waiting theists!
If there were to be a serious miracle that is both verified to have actually happened, and have conclusively shown that there is no other explanation other than by a god, then I would consider it, though it might take more than one to truly convince me that it wasn’t just a clever hoax. I don’t think that this is too much to ask. Look at Moses. He had a bunch that he had a part in. Can’t we just get like 3? I mean it’s been about 2000 years (according to the Bible at least) of any significant miracles.
That would be beautiful, but since pi is infinitely repeating, there’s a “10,000 monkeys with typwriters writing Shakespeare” effect that’s possible.Better he/she should simply change the value of pi to exactly 3, then let everyone check it for themselves. Then I’d totally believe.
Guess I should have actually posted Clarke’s 1st Law. Thank you. Though the ‘does god exist’, and ‘why would he care’ questions are independent aren’t they?
Why would you believe it is magic instead of better technology?
“I have no wish for some poor deluded person to kill him- or herself in order to ‘cure’ my unbelief.”Ditto
I have to wonder how relevant trying to ‘prove’ a belief is. The non-believer who doesn’t want to believe is probably gong to impose a really massive burden of proof on anyone submitting evidence. What if a tuna pops into existence, you cook (or not) it, eat it, and there’s no evidence?
First off, you’d have to define what “God” we are talking about – like some other posters have said, “God” could simply be lifeforms who have far, far, far more advanced technology than us. If they called themselves “Gods” and they honestly believed it, and they could kill us dead or rule us with their technology, sure I’ll believe in them. To believe in the Christian God or Zeus or Buddha, it’d take a lot more – specifically a complete confirmation that their scriptures are 100% accurate AND they’d have to probably reveal themselves to everyone else in the world and tell us exactly what they want from us.
Not trying to sidetrack but … To all, check this out. There is a ghost protest where Jen is today. http://www.ghostvillage.com/news/2010/news_0614…
I hear that a lot, actually. But most of my extended family is made up of very committed Mormons, and there’s just no duplicating that level of intense, life-long, dogmatic indoctrination. For me, I never had a very strong “testimony,” and then once I got into college and started learning more about creation myths through art and literature throughout the centuries, it became impossible for me to believe that any “sect” could have the one, complete truth. And then I started looking into the life of Joseph Smith, the founder of Mormonism, and it became totally repulsive.
Were ‘god’ to be female, there is a discordance with women suffering as the ‘lesser’ gender over so much of the world, and throughout history. Illogic 101?!
Not quite. The expansion of pi to any positive integer base (including base 10) does NOT repeat. In fact, it is conjectured that pi is ‘normal’, which means that every possible sequence of decimal digits appears somewhere in the decimal expansion with probability 1.
He’d have to magically appear on a hog(motorcycle), with a bag of weed, and a whole case of beer, and say, “Let’s go smoke, and drink, and see if we can’t alienate some of the sects that follow me.”Now for a more serious answer… ;)What kind of proof would it take? He appears before me, with my mom and step-dad, and cures all of their ailments. That’s the proof necessary for me. Grant my family reprieve, and you shall earn my favor.
Anything that supports the existence of life after death would be a significant help.One such technique:James Randi leaves a coded message in a security deposit box that only he knows about. Randi puts out a million dollar challenge: That after he dies, if he finds (to his surprise) that he still exists and can communicate with mediums, he will find a medium and tell them that secret message. All that medium must do is relate the message to the JREF, at which point they will open the deposit box and check the message. If the medium gets it right, they get the prize. No single experiment is every going to prove anything – but this would significantly increase the plausibility of an afterlife.If the exercise can be repeated reliably and consistently, that would help to persuade me that our minds and personalities can survive the death of our bodies. That might seem unrelated to God persay – but the existence of an afterlife would really go a long way to making the existence of God more plausible.
Not necessarily. This is true (“he would have already done so”) only if you assume he wants you to believe. Admittedly, this doesn’t help the believer asking the question, because you can say if God exists, either he is not able to provide it, or he does not want to provide it, knowing full well what is needed, in which case, who am I to go against the will of God?I have always said, if God exists, then he created me a thinking, rational being, one who does not accept things on “faith.” Being omniscient, he knows that. However, he has not provided any rational reason to believe in him, and believing in him would require that I abandon the gift of rational thought that he gave me. Not utilizing my god-given gifts would be an affront to God, and would be a sin. Hence, I conclude that IF God exists, then it would be a sin for me to believe in him.
And the typical response?”Those are ridiculous ideas and don’t even compare to God. Stop being stupid.”i.e. Evading the question.
All that would convince me of is that I’m somehow been brain damaged and am lying in a coma somewhere.
If god exists in the way Christians say he does, then proof shouldn’t be a burden. If he knows us all intimately, like Christians say he does, then he should be able to convince all of us at exactly the same time in a way specific to us.
1) All disease and disorder (including amputated limbs), all over the world, eradicated over the course of a 24-hour period.2) All weapons instantly disintegrate, leaving all armies and violent criminals without a means to kill each other (other than bare hands). If somebody tries to fashion a weapon, or use an existing object as a weapon, it will vanish before they can cause damage with it — including cars, planes, rocks, kitchen knives, pillows, plastic bags, and water.3) Not a single woman, child, or man, to be raped or brutalised in any way … until the end of time.4) And if all that fails, which it might (I could just decide I’ve gone insane and am gibbering in an asylum somewhere), if god exists he would know a way to avoid that happening.
I should just point out that if it’s not something globally and lastingly benevolent, then it’s not a god I would want to believe in. Up to this date, even if God was proven somehow, I might believe in him but still wouldn’t follow the sadistic prick.
Ben makes a good point, but there’s something else too.’The non-believer who doesn’t want to believe…’That’s the point. Wanting something to be true does not make it so. The same goes for not wanting something to be true. If I really, really, really didn’t want the sky to be blue, just wishing to myself wouldn’t really help – because of the evidence.The demand of non-believers for evidence isn’t because we’re looking for excuses not to believe. As a rule, we genuinely insist that there is no good evidence (that we know of) to believe that God is anything other than a cultural artifact of human imagining – and nothing more.I and those like me admit freely that knowledge is provisional. We very well could be wrong about anything. Learning is largely the process of recognizing when our beliefs are wrong, and discarding them for something better. We *like* learning. We like being shown when we are wrong, because that gives us opportunity to move towards a view of the world that is correct.So if you want to persuade us that we’re wrong, nothing could be simpler. Just show us some evidence, already.If you can’t – then we’re justified in our non-belief. Perhaps more importantly, if you have no evidence for your beliefs about God, how can you claim to be justified in those beliefs?
Pablo, that makes sense, but if god is benevolent, then he would have done it already. Not doing it, apparently, relegates one to hell. A god with the capacity but not the desire to save somebody from hell is, by definition, not benevolent.That doesn’t mean that god doesn’t exist, just that he’s not benevolent and therefore not something we should necessarily want to follow.
When numerous powerful male-bodied anti-choicers are discovered (and reported) reported to have unexplainable ectopic pregnancies. Of course, first I’ll have to rule out that my subconscious hasn’t somehow found access to semi-divine powers, because that’s the sort of thing I start wishing would happen when I see yet another report about pregnancy- and unsafe abortion-related deaths around the world. So I guess this would be more effective if the deity wants me to convert to Buddhism or another belief system that encourages you to get rid of desires.If the deity wanted to convince me they were a force for good instead of just really good at applied irony, a lot of wars around the world would end on the same day, with eyewitness (both on battlefields and in centers of power) reporting that they had a vision of a female talking triceratops that came and convinced them to lay down arms and find a peaceful resolution to the conflict. I don’t expect everyone to know what a triceratops is, and in fact I’ve chosen it because I don’t know of any world religions that have something that looks much like one in their mythos, making it unlikely for many people to hallucinate or imagine that creature specifically. Of course, it would be difficult for me to be sure it wasn’t just a trickster god ending wars so I would be duped into believing it had a non-trickster nature, but if the cost of world peace is me looking like an idiot for the rest of eternity, so be it.
I’m never sure about the timestampy goodness, but assuming it’s friday wherever you are:That would be with a bun, yah?
In following with the “sufficiently advanced technology”* comments:I submit that Jen has asked for proof of teleportation, not god. Now if, say, all her office supplies sprang to life and formed a civilization on her desk in order to present a post-it tuna aquacultured in a water bottle, that might be something more along the lines of proof of the divine (or LSD).*I don’t think I saw it in any of the other comments, so: That’s one of Arthur C. Clarke’s laws – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C…
I doubt this has an answer. Many atheists can never be convinced as a natural explanation can be found for any evidence of God (the same as any scientific evidence can be denied by creationists). Much of this has to do with mind set. Creationists begin with the assumption that the Bible is literally true (at least, their interpretation). This literal truth is axiomatic, and all physical evidence must fit within that axiom.Many atheists take an analogous standpoint. Everything can be explained without resorting to the supernatural, and if it can’t be we need to study it more to find an answer without resorting to the supernatural.Take the proof of “unambiguous prediction of the future” some say would convince them God exists. Biblical scholarship routinely dates texts based on the events in the text. If an event is predicted, the text must have been written (or edited) after the event, implicitly denying the possibility of prediction. One reason for dating the Gospels after about 70AD is that Jesus predicts the destruction of the temple. Since that’s when the Romans destroyed the temple, the reference must have been written afterward.This solves the problem of prediction for anything written long ago, since there is no unambiguous proof a text was written before the event. Recently written religious texts haven’t shown any great ability at prediction. Of course, neither have economists or weather forecasters, perhaps we should deny they exist :-)The insistence on prediction also assumes a deity with perfect knowledge of the future, which brings up philosophical issues and can rapidly lead to the world being a clockwork machine driven by God, contradicting the concept of free will. Any of the “proofs” that God exists make assumptions about God, turning into proofs that a particular form of “god” exists.In fact, some proposed “proofs” (e.g. asking for a religion whose followers have never done anything mean, to summarize one set of criteria) assumes that the god of a true religion must have total control over all followers (and the ability to prevent anybody else from claiming to be a follower). Again, this presumes a particular form of “god” and in the end is designed so that it cannot be fulfilled.Arguments asking for scriptures to be scientifically accurate are self contradictory. The Bible is criticized for classifying bats as birds. Yet this takes our modern definition of the word “bird” and applies it back 3000 odd years. If a “bird” is defined as something with two legs and two wings, the biblical definition is perfectly accurate (I’m sure somebody will show I’m wrong here, but hopefully you see my point). If birds must also have feathers, then the Bible is wrong to class bats with birds. Unfortunately, I’m not aware of a Hebrew dictionary from biblical times which would resolve the question.The creation story in Genesis has similar issues. First, trying to tell early nomadic herders about the big bang, billions of years, etc. would be an exercise in futility. The concepts didn’t exist. Any creation story, etc. will be written in terms understandable by its audience. It’s only those who insist that the creation story be read literally who have a problem. And there are two groups who read the creation story literally — one is creationists, who believe in its literal truth. The other is those trying to disprove the creation story, since a literal reading obviously doesn’t match the evidence. Lost is the point of the story, being that God created the universe, that Man is special, and going further along the question of evil.Similar criticism of a religion for making one species on one small insignificant planet God’s primary concern also denies the audience (that one species) and presumes that not mentioning other planets or creatures somehow denies their existence.Criticisms of “contradictory” scriptures are similarly unreasonable. Again, it’s those who are anti-religion who harp on contradictions, using an “if this is the word of God why did he get it wrong” argument. But if contradictory accounts imply the accounts are false, then 99% of history is false, since there are always contradictions different accounts of the same event. Take a look at any developing news story. Initial accounts will inevitably contradict later accounts. Does this mean the story isn’t true?The Christian Gospels are often criticized for containing contradictions. Yet where they aren’t contradictory (e.g. the large parallels between the first three Gospels) they are considered to be from a single source. Contradictions show that scriptures aren’t true, but perfect consistency (especially between “independent” accounts) would be criticized as being contrived by a single author or group.I don’t think there’s any evidence sure to convince the dedicated atheist of the existence of God, just as there isn’t evidence to convince the dedicated theist of the non-existence of God. In the end, all evidence can be interpreted to fit a particular world view. Obviously people can be convinced one way or the other. There are atheists who come to believe in a deity and theists who become atheists. But there’s no consistent, predictable way to produce a conversion either way.In the end, belief or lack of belief in a deity becomes a matter of faith and assumptions. Faith here doesn’t mean “lack of reason”, and belief in God doesn’t mean denial of science. Unfortunately, the view that science and religion are mutually contradictory has become entrenched in the debate, though for many believers there is no contradiction. As in many areas, those on the extremes have defined the debate and left no room for the majority who are someplace in the middle.
And yet proving your point at the same time. Even if they don’t acknowledge that you won, you still know. =)
Seconded!
Him/Her/It/Them showing up in person on the White House lawn or somewhere equally impressive would do it for me, but not in the Vatican and definitely not on Fox News….
I dunno, if a God appeared on Fox News and bitch slapped some of their people, I’d be inclined to believe the clips I would see from the Daily Show…
Like many others, the existence of a personal/personified/anthropomorphic ‘God’ would be proved to me sufficiently and necessarily by a personal visit, chat, etc. I still wouldn’t necessarily agree they should be worshipped/deferred to, though.
Well, it’s a bit sci-fi but I’m pretty certain that is still in the realm of possibilities.A few hundred years into the future we might have a grip on nanobots, maybe even self-replicating ones. Let them replicate and cover the world, whenever they hear that phrase and are sitting on rock, start carving (the levitation is tough…some nano-stilts?) and determinate local language through sensors.It’s scifi, but I’d be more impressed if that prayer would turn off the laws of physics and so on…
I’m pretty sure there’s no event that would convince me that God exists, that would be distinguishable from some kind of psychotic break or other drastic rearrangement of my mental map of reality.There’s no kind of event or apparition, no matter how miraculous in aspect, that couldn’t be explained as the result of some unknown technology, or an incident of some vanishingly improbably but still possible natural event (e.g. all the air molecules in the room suddenly rushing to one corner, leaving the rest of the space in hard vacuum) OR as delusion or hallucination. If I saw such an event and so did others, I would presume it was an example of the former. If I did not so presume, that would be evidence that my mental outlook had changed in such a fundamental way that in some sense I would no longer be “me”.
Religious writings giving long-reaching, specific, and accurate predictions for future events and developments – without surrounding the correct ones with a bunch of BS that never happens – would do it. The predictions would have to be of the level of specificity given in the article you linked. Also, I’d add the caveat that there would need to be some pretty solid documentation proving that the predictions were made centuries in the past, rather than falsified and “revealed” after the events they concerned. Some deity contacting ME specifically and explaining things wouldn’t cut it, or at least I hope it wouldn’t. The simpler and more likely explanation for such a thing would be that I had gone insane.
The point is that you wouldn’t be able to objectively distinguish between them. It’s not “any sufficiently advanced technology will seem to be magic”, it’s that they’re indistinguishable. Try some of the canonical ‘examples’ in Clark’s own novels (and some short stories).
Getting Christians to follow the Golden Rule would be a good first start.
That was a good comment. Well written and well structured.But for all the work you put into it, you completely ignored the position of those who conform their beliefs to fit the preponderance of all the available evidence. Instead, your comment assumes that everyone does things the other way ’round.This excludes two whole classes of people that are significant to your analysis.1. People who conform their beliefs to fit the preponderance of all the available evidence, and turn out to be theists.2. People who conform their beliefs to fit the preponderance of all the available evidence, and turn out to be non-theists.I don’t know of any theists who are under category 1, but I grant it’s possible such a person exists. I’m open to becoming a member of 1 myself – if the evidence should drive me to that conclusion.It is implied in the paragraph above that I consider myself to fall under category 2. So would most other non-theists I know. This category is entirely excluded by your comment – which greatly undermines your argument.This is known as the fallacy of the excluded middle (also false dilemma) – although I don’t expect it’s something you performed intentionally. This particular fallacy is very easy to perform when presenting a persuasive argument, simply because it amounts to a naturally occurring blind spot in the writer’s view of things. *Everyone* – myself included – performs this fallacy frequently and obviously.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F…
Ha, ha, good one, libraboy!Libraboy, spend some time amongst the Amish or Mennonites, or with Mother Teresa’s Missionaries of Charity…and you’ll have all the proof YOU specifically need.The outlook of God is…you ALREADY have all the proof you need.So what’s the problem?It’s not my fault, or the Divine One’s, that YOU can’t process the data.God is never going to play by your rules, but you are going to play by His.The proof is there…beyond a reasonable doubt…it’s just your motivation to sift through, consider, and reflect upon, isn’t.You don’t believe yet in Catholicism, because…”The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, But in ourselves…that we are underlings.” Julius Caesar (I, ii, 140-141).You’re not ready for Holy Writ, or Jesus, so Shakespeare must be called upon to tell you the truth about yourselves.
@ Never Was an Arrow III read a book written by one of Mother Teresa’s Missionaries of Charity. Well, former. She left because the order basically opposed planning and education and in some locations had a serious dearth of empathy. She was rebuked on multiple occasions for providing aid to dying people on Thursdays, which were prayer days.
Nice that you had to dig so deep for an example, and that your examples are sects to which you don’t belong.Also interesting is that you claim to be a deity of some sort, in that you’re apparently able to read the minds and intentions of atheists.If this is god, thanks but no thanks.
If one considers religion an artifact of our oversized brains, then prayer is a form of masturbation. That means that religion can be true even if God does not exist. The entire God does/does not exist argument is quite likely irrelevant. (Then again, I’m wading through the 3rd book of Nietzche’s Gay Science which starts out with “God is dead”, so I might just be overdoes on Nietzche).
“The proof is there”?Where?Show it to me.Hollow words are cheap and easy.
The instant there is “proof” everything will cease to be. The god is finished playing with his toy (us, our reality). Which would make this eality pointless. And everything I have learned and/or experienced leads me to conclude it isn’t pointless. So there won’t ever be real proof!
Creating a book so mighty that would come to EVERYONES liking, excluding no one(which is idealistically impossibe) Leaving no reason to create any form of punishment in the first place… OR HE COULD JUST STOP BEING INVISIBLE AND COME OUT OF THE CLOSET.. OR FROM BEHIND THE CLOUDS.
Nothing could prove to me that god exists in the sense that believers want, i.e., as an entity with genuinely free will, because I believe this to be logically impossible. Anomalies, “miracles”, or entities with apparent “superpowers” would just mean that the realm of the physical contains things we haven’t figured out yet. The purported “god” must, however, still be a physical being grounded in mathematics, because there is no other logically possible form of existence.
I could come up with some specific examples of things that would convince me that God was worth further investigation, but the answer to “what would it take to convince me that God exists” is pretty similar to the answer to “what did it take to convince me that all of the present-day species on Earth were arrived at through the process of evolution”: a large amount of mutually-consistent evidence from different fields of study, and relatively few anomalies.Any of the more obvious manifestations of something seemingly God-like could be too easily explained away as a sufficiently advanced technology (Clarke’s 3rd Law) showing off for the natives. (I guess I’m agreeing with Wmn, but I hadn’t read that comment before I wrote this.)Oh, but this might also work: if the laws of physics, logic, and/or mathematics were known to fail under certain circumstances which were consistent with the idea that those laws were not intrinsic and inviolate but rather were being provided and maintained by a being with its own motivations. (…sort of like a cosmic MUD, I guess.)
Likewise. I can’t conceive of circumstances that would lead to my believing, but for a different reason.I assume a god is by definition omniscient, omnipotent and perfect. It would be a sign of insecurity for such a great being to care whether I acknowledge its existence, and such insecurity would be inconsistent with perfection or greatness. So therefore any god fitting the definition would not care whether I believe, and would have no reason to prove its existence to me. Any being that did try to prove its divine status would therefore make me very suspicious.
“I assume a god is by definition omniscient, omnipotent and perfect. “Why?What kind of evidence would it take to persuade you of both:a) that God (or the Gods) do not possess all of the attributes you have suggested; andb) that God (or the Gods) exist?
“…not everything can be explained or proven”…*yet*.Speak for yourself. I’m not pondering the question of existence.
“If they called themselves “Gods” and they honestly believed it, and they could kill us dead or rule us with their technology, sure I’ll believe in them. ” Goa’uld? Ori? (And my geek status is confirmed…)
Well, I do believe in God, but if the question were “what sort of proof would you need to expect someone *else* to believe in a god(s) (choose your brand here)?” the answer is way the hell more than is on offer currently, something objective, measurable and unexplainable by any other means (which, I think, rules almost everything possible out as while current science doesn’t have an explanation for everything, that doesn’t mean that a scientific explanation doesn’t exist).But then, I acknowledge that my belief is at least in part an emotional crutch, I just prefer not to yank someone’s crutch away unless they’re hitting other people with it (the “hitting other people with it” thing does tend to qualify a lot of organized religions for yanking).
He so should’ve asked for Firefly: Season 2.
Because presumably God (w/a capital) is a special entity rather than just a normal, natural and material being with superpowers.As others have noted, I could be convinced of the existence of Superpowers Guy given repeatable and observable miraculous phenomena. If let’s say, the Rapture as according to modern Christian fundamentalists happened, I would even accept that this particular Superpowers Guy is likely to be the same Superpowers Guy as referenced in the Bible. However, I wouldn’t be convinced that this entity was a god.There are two problems with asking for evidence for God:1. Any reasonable evidence or explanation of a supernatural entity makes it no longer supernatural, and so even if God is just a really powerful alien or something it’s still a material entity. Since God(s) are usually presumed to be beyond natural by definition, finding evidence for a God would indicate that the entity isn’t really God.2. As the above posters note, I’m not convinced there’s any observable difference between a world where a philosophically plausible God exists and one where there is no God. The only type of God I’ve ever found plausible is something like Spinoza’s conception– a pantheist or deist God– and that sort of God has no empirically discernible effect on the world. The fact that I believe there is no possible proof for God’s existence is the reason why I am an atheist. (To be pedantic, I’m an atheist for all gods but a certain pantheist-style God, on which I am epistemically agnostic).
Like Daniel, I’ll also say thanks for a relatively well-written theistic perspective on this question.I think you are getting at something with proofs and disproofs of God which is important to well-reasoned theists and athiests, and that Daniel is talking about when he talks about examining the evidence and coming to a conclusion.In both philosophy and science one must come up with something to test before you see if there is any evidence for it. The thing you test is typically called a “theory” but in this case it might be best to refer to it as a “concept”. So if we’re trying to see if God exists we first have to have a concept of God or a theory of God to test to see if it is coherent and whether it fits the available evidence. You very rightly note above that disproving one possible conception of God doesn’t rule out the others. So let’s say I have a concept of a “6000-year-old-earth God”. This doesn’t fit the evidence about geology and astronomy and so forth, so I refine my concept to “Generalized Protestant God”. I might come up with another problem (prayer doesn’t work, inconsistent morality, etc.) and boot those all out. Now I get “Omnipotent, Omnipresent, Perfect God”. As you note there are still problems with determinism, etc. So I might refine further. Maybe I take out the omnipotence and see what happens. But we still have to stay within some plausible boundaries: if I end up refining until I get “jelly donut” as a consistent interpretation of God, then that’s ridiculous. Like your bat and bird example: refining “bird” to mean “two wings and two legs” is a plausible way to get rid of the inconsistency, but refining “bird” to mean “furry mammal” or “warm thing” is getting away from any meaningful, acceptable definition of a bird.The reason why we all go on about contradictions is that a contradiction is indicative of an inadequate concept or theory. Yes, accounts in history contradict each other, but this actually does indicate that one of the accounts went wrong somewhere. For example, if the Bible tells us not to kill, but condones slaughter, then we either have to reinterpret what these passages mean (like in your bat vs. bird example) or we admit the Bible to contain a falsehood somewhere. Since we have no guidance for interpretation except the Bible itself, we can never be assured that we are getting it right. It would be like if you were given a book about the French Revolution, but you weren’t allowed to look at any primary documents or artifacts, and you were told to come up with the real story.You are right in that athiests, skeptics, and scientists are naturalists and refuse to admit the supernatural as evidence. I am one of these people, but it is because I don’t believe that the idea of an observable supernatural event is a consistent idea. Most other people like me reject the supernatural for similar reasons, not out of a pre-accepted world view. Once you are committed to naturalism, and do the sort of testing of various God concepts that I talked about, it becomes apparent that none of them work: they either contain a contradiction or don’t match up with empirical evidence. You seem to understand standards of argumentation and so forth and seem to have done this already with a few concepts of God, like a God that predetermines things or a God that controls his followers. You and I aren’t so different: I just went further and kept testing types of gods until I had exhausted most of them. Could there still be a God that I haven’t tested which could exist? Yeah, probably. I actually think there is a sort of concept of God that might be philosophically consistent. But that just means I’m agnostic about God-concept-100 and an atheist about God1, God2, God3, God4…
I like the tuna idea. It’s similar to one I’ve mentioned to my believing friends: “An 18” trout would have to land on its right side on the hood of my car as I’m driving down the expressway.”If that ever happens, or something equally improbable, I’ll be a believer too, but not until then.
It’s as good a definition as any, and it’s the one I got in Catholic school.An alleged god that did not have those qualities would not be distinguishable from a material entity that was in some limited aspects greater (smarter, more powerful, with better technology) than me. And anyway, caring what a little speck like me thinks or does just seems really petty for any kind of really great being, whether material or divine. Acting petty just isn’t god-like.
Done! It is in movie form and called Serenity.I am still God!
Simple. A deposit of $10 million in an account in my name. Now you might say, but any extremely wealthy person could do that and not just god. And you would be right. But I would promise to believe in any god you would like me to believe in if I get that deposit. ;)
Thanks for the kind mention.As a side-issue – I disagree with the statement that “the idea of an observable supernatural event is [not] a consistent idea”.The statement is trite if we consider the trivial definition of ‘observable’. However, if supernatural events do occur, it should be possible to observe their effects.Let’s say that tomorrow James Randi puts a secret message in an envelope inside a safe-deposit box. After he dies a medium comes along claiming to have spoken to Randi’s spirit. We get the coded message from the medium, then open the safety deposit box. If the message matches, that’s a weak confirmation of both the afterlife and necromancy. If we could replicate the experiment reliably *and* the growing body of evidence should strongly support the existence of an afterlife/necromancy over competing solutions, this would then become strong confirmation. Which would probably in turn birth a new telecommunication industry – for some reason, no-one ever seems to consider the commercial and military applications of *genuine* spirit-aided telecommunication.
“Acting petty just isn’t god-like.”Again – this is an unfounded assumption about the attributes and properties of God.The point I’m trying to get at here is that our conception of what God ‘must be like’ is largely to do with our own intuitions and preconceived notions.Many cultures throughout history have held conceptions of God (or Gods) that are full of pettiness, rivalry, lust, passion, cruelty, bitterness, and even outright immorality.The point is that we don’t really ‘know’ that God has the attributes of all-powerful, all-knowing, and all-benevolence. It’s not the case that we looked at evidence under a microscope and drew the conclusion that this must be how God is, if there is one. No. We just think to ourselves that these are the kinds of attributes that a God should be in order to satisfy ourselves in His/Her/Its/Their Godhood, and so we go with that one.So even though you call yourself a speck, you still seem to regard yourself as great enough that your mere intuitions about God are sufficient to conclusively define Him. Humility is overrated. ^_^Sorry if I’m coming over harsh, here. Given the topic is evidence for God, I wanted to make the point that what evidence we do have from humans who are believers suggests that our view of God is built up out of our intuitions and emotional requirements.Epistemology and theology don’t mix.
Second word in your response gives the game away: ‘Presumably’.I’ve only just discovered that ignosticism is a thing, but I’m liking it more and more. ^_^The interesting thing to me in your response above is that it shows the modern cultural influence of monotheism. Under your conceptions of what God must be in order to qualify for the title, Zeus, Thor, Odin, Ra, Joss Whedon, Osiris, Quetzalcoatl… These entities that are worshiped as Gods by their followers would not qualify as a God in your understanding *even if they existed*. Which seems like cheating, in my book.Your reason for being an atheist is sound – but I’m warming up to what I think is a better reason. Not only is there no evidence for God – there isn’t even any evidence to suggest what God’s attributes should be. We can’t even claim to have a basis for knowing what God must be like in order to qualify as God in the first place.In the absence of a sound epistemic definition, we can’t even be so bold as to claim atheism – because the concept ‘God’ is still incoherent. It’s like asking whether or not we believe in the existence of quexiborlets – the question doesn’t even *mean* anything.
Sorry, no – there’s no comparison between a feature-length movie and a full season. The movie wasn’t nearly enough to wrap up all the plot-threads that Whedon was weaving throughout the series. He had to drop *most* of the budding storyline in order to shrink it down enough to fit in a movie.
This raises a good point. Add to my requirements for “acceptable evidence that God is worth further investigation”: you (meaning “theists who want me to Believe”) must first define what you mean by “God”.In other words: What’s the actual hypothesis you want me to accept?
The really telling question comes afterwards: *Why* did you choose that hypothesis?I’ve only used this a few times – ignosticism is new to me. Each time I used it, the question cut to the quick of the matter; the person being questioned recognized that they had no objective basis for their belief in God. It all boiled down to intuition and what they found to be emotionally satisfying. In all three cases, the theist seemed surprised at their own answer.I don’t think this is a question people ask themselves much. I hadn’t even noticed that it was a question worth asking until recently myself! ^_^
Nice metaphor. Made me smile.
Oddly, I stopped believing in God shortly after I came to a point in my faith when I stopped depending on divine intervention of any kind to know he existed. It seemed quite childish to me, for a grown man to expect the creator of the universe to resort to mere sideshow tricks to demonstrate his existence. Surely, I thought, such a God would be self-evident and need no tricks. But the evidence is quite the opposite, in every field of knowledge, and far more awesome than any human depiction of diety. In fact, the dieties worshipped by all men are quite petty, and strangly human, in comparison to the universe they are purported to have created.
1. You can’t really have a useful conversation about whether God exists without specifying what kind of god you are talking about.2. I defaulted to the type of god most commonly believed in where I live, the Judeo-Christian god. The definition is not conclusive, or based on my intuitions, it’s just a commonly-held starting point from which to base a conversation.3. I agree whole-heartedly that the Judeo-Christian god is a product of the imagination of human beings, as were all other gods.4. I suggest that the Judeo-Christian concept of god is fundamentally contradictory, the perfection vs. pettiness being one example of inconsistent qualities that are mutually exclusive. Another example is all-benevolence+omnipotence vs. allowing terrible suffering of innocent people. Furthermore, I suggest that the inherent contradictions and inconsistencies are aspects of the meme that gives it staying power, that entices the human brain to mull it over, trying to make sense of it.
5. I suggest that we actually do have evidence *against* the existence of the Judeo-Christian god–the contradictory and mutually exclusive elements of the definition of the Judeo-Christian god. It’s like me telling you that I have an amazing object here at home, it is an object that is both entirely spherical and entirely cubical. That’s silly, it can’t be both, it can’t exist.
There’s too much to post on this board. I would suggest you consider going on an Alpha course. The evidence is all laid out in a neatly structured way. It won’t cost you anything, just 10 evenings out of your life, you can investigate all the evidence for yourself to the extent you want, and you can discuss it with whichever group you’re part of. And depending on the course you could get some decent free food, and maybe even meet some interesting people. No questions are out of bounds on Alpha – you can ask *absolutely* *anything*. And you won’t get brainwashed either; it’s not a high pitched sale; you can leave any time you like or stay as long as you like; at the end of it it’s perfectly OK to say “no this is not for me”. I’ve just finished leading an Alpha course in my church and can assure you that nobody will try to force you to accept anything you don’t want to accept. It’s a presentation, that’s all, and “No Sale” is a perfectly fine outcome.
…and if you don’t believe in magic?
I understood that to be the point of the saying. Paraphrase: if it seems like magic, it’s probably a technology you haven’t seen before. There is no literal magic; “magic” is just a word for technology we don’t understand yet.
Just did a quick check, and it seems there are Alpha courses available in New Zealand.I’ve added attending one of these courses to my ‘to-do once I can scrape together some free time’ list.I can see at least three possible outcomes:1. The course is really instructive and the evidence is persuasive. I emerge more open to the possibility that the metaphysical claims of Christianity are true than when I went in.2. The course is really instructive but the evidence is unpersuasive. I emerge a more educated critic of Christianity than when I went in.3. The course is flat out uninstructive and a total waste of time. I emerge more jaded, cynical and disappointed with Christianity than when I went in.Based on past experience with Christian apologetics, I’m anticipating that the likely outcome will be 3. From what I’ve seen, the Christian apologetics versions of ‘logic’ and ‘evidence’ bear little resemblance to either concept. In place of logic I’ve been presented with barely disguised fallacious reasoning. In place of evidence I’ve been presented with subjective experience, anecdotes, analogies and assertions about personal intuitions.But I’m adding it to the to-do list anyway, in the hopes of a 1 or a 2.
I don’t know about anyone else, but if someone can’t at least summarize their argument in text, then I wouldn’t waste time on a seminar.For one thing, you’d have to make a recording and then transcribe it in order to have anything substantial to argue with. They should be doing this work, not you.
You’re very much correct. The burden is on them to provide the summary, and I would be well within my rights to dismiss Bh Dave’s invitation.However – I get a perverse kick out of this kind of thing. Some people make model trains. Some people play tennis.I critique religion.Everyone should have a hobby.
>>I’m not aware of a Hebrew dictionary from biblical times which would resolve the question.<<Did you consider that there must be a Hebrew dictionary >somewhere< or we wouldn’t have been able to translate the word in the first place? The answer is as follows:The Hebrew word, written in English letters, is owph, which literally means “has a wing.” Anything that is described as a “fowl,” as per the KJV, then, is simply anything that has wings. Since wings are just extensions of the body that aid in flight, this covers birds, pterosaurs, bats, and insects. Contradiction dispelled.>>Contradictions show that scriptures aren’t true, but perfect consistency (especially between “independent” accounts) would be criticized as being contrived by a single author or group<<I’m glad you acknowledge this discrepancy.>> In the end, all evidence can be interpreted to fit a particular world view.<<I wonder if you’re an old-earth theist or an atheist. It’s hard to tell judging by your words.
I think you’re playing the classic theist game of false equivalence — “the answer you get depends on the assumptions you start with”.Theists arrive at “God” as an explanation, and don’t ever test that explanation. How do they know it’s true? They don’t; they just believe it. It’s internally consistent, but not externally consistent (i.e. consistent with external reality).Non-theists arrive at natural explanations for things, and then they test those explanations. If the tests fail, then they keep trying new explanations until one of them works.Metaphor:A group of theists and atheists build a bridge together. The bridge falls down.The theists pray all day, seeking advice from God, and sacrifice a goat in case it helps. The atheists study the wreckage and determine that one of the bolts was defective, and a cable was improperly tied down. New bolts are ordered, and a more rigorous tie-down inspection regimen is proposed.The new bolts arrive, and again the group builds a bridge — which doesn’t fall down.Which group’s actions do you think made the difference?Here endeth the lesson.Evidence for God would, I think, have to satisfy two criteria:1. inconsistent with any known or hypothesized natural laws2. consistent with acts of a conscious willbecause –#1: if it follows the laws of physics, then what does God have to do with it?#2: if there’s no consciousness causing things to happen, then there’s no God’s Will we need to obey.
From the proper viewpoint, an observable supernatural event is impossible. In your example, the first response to the message from the medium would be show how it could still have been faked (the medium saw the message or got secret access to the safety deposit box).If the experiment were reliably repeated, theories would be proposed and an explanation found for the event. If nothing else, a “theory of spirits” would be developed, thus showing that it was always part of the natural world.
From the first paragraph: Yes, people could very well try to show how the experiment could have been faked. Secret access to the security box can be reduced via a tamper-evident seal. Even so, you’re still correct in that a single event proves nothing. That’s is exactly why I said that a single occurrence would be weak confirmation – and that reliable and consistent replication coupled with a growing body of evidence would be required to give satisfactory confirmation to the notion of an afterlife.From the second paragraph: You’re playing at semantics, there. If you don’t consider an afterlife that actually exists to qualify as supernatural, then at least one of us has greatly misunderstood the meaning of the term ‘supernatural’.It’s a language game played by some of us skeptics, and I don’t like it.1) Define ‘natural’ as everything that exists.2) Spend several paragraphs/minutes in explanation to distract from the implied assumptions included in 1).3) Conclude that the ‘supernatural’ cannot exist.4) Declare victory.I’m always first to criticize theologians and other advocates of woo when the commit a fallacy of assumption – in this case, petitio principii. Fellow skeptics don’t get a free pass either.We don’t need to commit fallacies to drive our message home.