What proof would it take for me to believe in god?

[Clueless Morgan]

So, looking at that, it looks completely indistinguishable from any other ancient mythology. Picture, instead, this same god revealing himself to all peoples throughout history, making meaningful and useful predictions they couldn't know about (like the germ theory of disease), and him still showing up in verifiable ways to this day, with no 2,000 year gap in seeing him. That would set the bar a lot lower.

As it is, even if he showed up right now, I'd be really skeptical of the whole thing, just because the entire setup is so ridiculous.

Exactly.

I have a Mormon friend who loves to equate the existence of a god with knowing the Sun exists, but they're not even close to the same thing. We repeatedly experience the sun, we can measure it's energy output, we can feel it's energy output, we can photographic it, look at it through optical instruments, conduct experiments to gather information about, study how it interacts with the Earth and on and on and on.

But this god of hers refuses to make itself as evident, as plain to see, as easily verified as the sun.

By not doing so, I have to have a higher standard to judge its existence by than I would have for the sun. Not only is this god not evident, not testable, not measurable, not photographable, not observable by any optical instrument, or by any instrument at all, as far as we know, it doesn't seem to want to be.

And by making itself so difficult to detect, my standards for evidence before I accept its existence must be equally high.

I mean, c'mon.



If Darth Vader can do it, why can't a god?

[Neo-Scholastic]

Finding evidence for something depends of the nature of that for which someone is looking, yes? In the case of God, people must decide what type of god. If the type of god you seek is just one thing among the multitude of things, then even I would say no amount of evidence would be sufficient. The god that appears before you could be like Marley’s ghost or some powerful extraterrestrial.

As a panentheist (not to be confused with pantheist) the God that I worship is more fundamental, similar to Plotinus’s One, Aristotle’s Unmoved Mover and Aquinas’s Necessary Being. This means that knowledge of God is deduced from reason applied to experience. As such God does not appear as any particular thing; but rather, is understood as the fullness of reality to which all particular things owe their existence.

[tjakey]

I don't think there is any. Any "proof" that showed up for a god would be like "proof" that the world is flat and the center of the solar system. Clearly someone misunderstood something. Can we learn new things? Sure, and sometimes we learn a new thing that makes us rethink what we learned about an old thing. The general theory of relativity was a rethink of Newton's laws. But Newton wasn't "wrong", the universe really does function in accordance with Newton, his just wasn't the complete picture.

Since quantum mechanics is incompatible with relativity, it is clear there is more to learn. But when (if) we do, the things we have observed that led to the understandings of relativity and QM will not change, they will not be "un-learned". The depth of knowledge behind them will be deeper and more complete.

We are not going to unlearn that Jesus, Allah, Thor, Titan, Vishnu, etc. are mythologies created by human kind, we are not going to find an all knowing, all powerful, created-the-cosmos-from-outside-the-cosmos entity. Nothing is going to pop up where we all point and say, "God!"

"Proofs" to the contrary never arise, and never will arise. Still, bring me a "proof" and, most likely, I'll be polite and take a look. It never hurts to be kind so long as one has the time and I will, generally, not be the least bit interested in insulting you or depriving you of some belief or ideology you need to be happy. (So long as you don't use it as an excuse to hurt someone else or insist that everyone MUST be taught your mythology as "truth".) But even if your proof proves interesting, the chance is zero that I will see a god in it. At best I will find some new facet of our being in or understanding the cosmos that adds to what we already know. "God" however, is a childish thing already decided and set aside.

[Clueless Morgan]

This means that knowledge of God is deduced from reason applied to experience. As such God does not appear as any particular thing; but rather, is understood as the fullness of reality to which all particular things owe their existence.

Hello, argument from ignorance. It's been a while since we've seen each other, how ya been?

What reason applied to experience equals knowledge of god?

[lifesagift]

God would have to do something miraculous, but to be fair, surgeons and athletes and engineers, and ballet dancers, and soldiers and violinists are all miraculous in my book. So god would have to dance on the moon and turn the sea into custard and back again, then science would analyse and try to explain and I would still believe in science, but it would be the science of god !

[Minimalist]

This means that knowledge of God is deduced from reason applied to experience.

How convenient for the man who has no evidence at all.

[genkaus]

Finding evidence for something depends of the nature of that for which someone is looking, yes? In the case of God, people must decide what type of god. If the type of god you seek is just one thing among the multitude of things, then even I would say no amount of evidence would be sufficient. The god that appears before you could be like Marley’s ghost or some powerful extraterrestrial.

As a panentheist (not to be confused with pantheist) the God that I worship is more fundamental, similar to Plotinus’s One, Aristotle’s Unmoved Mover and Aquinas’s Necessary Being. This means that knowledge of God is deduced from reason applied to experience. As such God does not appear as any particular thing; but rather, is understood as the fullness of reality to which all particular things owe their existence.

ow about we start with the thing most gods seem to have in common - intelligent agents without material existence who can nevertheless affect the material. Once you have evidence that that is possible, then we can go further.

[Neo-Scholastic]

How about we start with the thing most gods seem to have in common - intelligent agents without material existence who can nevertheless affect the material. Once you have evidence that that is possible, then we can go further.

Actually, that’s not a good starting place since such a conception of God is as a thing among and apart from other things. A better starting point is where all monotheistic traditions agree; God in His fullness is ineffable. Just as God is not a thing among other things as mentioned above, knowledge of God is not some piece of information that you can store alongside other facts. It is like knowing oneself as a knower, a kind of gnosis that is immediate and intimate. People gain this type of knowledge about God from either general or special revelation or both.

[Aoi Magi]

Chad, you seem to be considering experience of an event as evidence, which is not a bad thing if instead of taking the event as the evidence you use it for finding actual evidence. Are you absolutely sure that there is no other explanation for that event? have you asked for a second opinion before jumping to the "special revelation" conclusion? I understand that experiences in life can seem hard to explain at times, but also know that if you cannot explain something to others that means you don't understand it yourself, and that in turn means you lack knowledge.

[Neo-Scholastic]

I understand that experiences in life can seem hard to explain at times, but also know that if you cannot explain something to others that means you don't understand it yourself, and that in turn means you lack knowledge.

A sighted person can have knowledge of color even though he cannot adequately convey the experience to the blind. As someone that has had an ineffable experience, I can say that it remains clear in my mind and yet it is impossible to put into words.