Evidence for a god. Do you have any ?

[Cod]

Come down to our local hospital. Visit the children's cancer care ward, look at the parents anguish, turn on the news see all the starving children.

Do it, and tell me that God exists.

Missionaries and church groups helping the sick and needy.  What are the atheists doing?  Mostly complaining, whining, and protesting.  The sad part is that you think you have to use the sick and needy to push your agenda, yet many of those patients believe in God.

I'm not pushing an agenda... Just pointing out that the "look around you" argument for a God is ridiculous.

[Deesse23]

Still no pics of a supernatural stick?  
Should be easy to provide simple pics of a supernatural stick, if one had one.
After all i am not demanding pics, just think it would be awesome if someone had a few pics.
Well, maybe after page 80......or 1100.  Ill wait here, just out of curiosity, not because i demand anything of course.

[downbeatplumb]

@ T0 Th3 M4X :

Which tells me that you don't actually have any legitimate evidence for the existence of God and you're just messing with us. I'm not wasting my time with you. Case closed.

Nope.  It tells me you don't have any evidence on the contrary.  Don't waste your time with me.  I didn't invite you.  You invited yourself.  Case closed.

---

Please define the supernatural. 
At the moment it seems to me like it is the excuse to why you don't have evidence, and that's all.

You're working off assumptions.  Not interested.

I don't have to give evidence, but I offered to consider it based on what would be considered objective evidence.  Do we really have to go through this again?

So you have nothing. that's what I thought.

[Jehanne]

Missionaries and church groups helping the sick and needy.  What are the atheists doing?  Mostly complaining, whining, and protesting.  The sad part is that you think you have to use the sick and needy to push your agenda, yet many of those patients believe in God.

I have an answer for you, Max, unfortunately you will never see it as you have me on ignore because you are afraid of me.  Maybe some generous atheist will repost it for you.

Atheists are generous, they just don’t give to charity

Over at NCRegister, one Father Thomas Willams is busy telling us how selfish and greedy atheists are. In support, he’s dug up the analyses that Arthur Brooks (Professor of Business and Government Policy at Syracuse University) did using data from the US Social Capital Community Benchmark Survey. Brooks showed that, after controlling for other factors, people in the US who profess a religion tend to give more to charity than those who don’t.

On the face of it, these results are a slam dunk. Father Williams certainly thinks they are, and Christian commentators don’t bother to dig further (the data were published in the house journal of the US Association of Christian Economists, after all!).

If you look at different countries around the world you’ll find that there is, in fact, quite a strong correlation between religiosity and how wealth is shared out. But here’s the interesting thing: the direction of the correlation is the opposite of what you would expect if religion did actually lead to more giving. Charity is a form of wealth redistribution from the rich to the poor. But if religion leads to greater charity, it does not appear to have any meaningful effect. So what’s going on?

Well, one possibility is that atheists are just as altruistic as the religious – altruism is, after all, an inherently human attribute. Maybe they just don’t do charity to the same extent.

A major demotivator for giving to charity is the presence of free riders. These are people who don’t contribute, but who benefit anyway. If you give to a heart research charity, then everyone benefits whether they contribute or not. If you give to a charity for the homeless, then unless you give an enormous sum your donation will be a vanishingly small portion of the total. So there is a temptation to be a free-rider yourself. The free-rider effect occurs because the utility of charitable giving (i.e. the benefit that accrues to the donor from giving, compared with the benefit that would accrue from keeping the money) is low.

One way to get round this problem is to make giving non-anonymous. If you do this then the donor benefits because their social standing is increased. Two of the most substantial private donors in recent times, Warren Buffet and Bill Gates, both benefited in this way from their donations. Both Buffet and Gates are non-religious. And it’s interesting that non-religious doctors are just as likely to work with the needy as religious doctors. This is an environment in which the the donor and the recipient are directly connected – one human to another. And here religion (or lack of it) makes no difference.

Religion can help to counterbalance the free-rider effect. Those religions that include a reward in the afterlife increase the utility of charitable giving to believers, because it provides them with a personal benefit. So religious believers with an incentive to give, even when there are free-riders around.

For altruistic atheists, however,the free-rider effect is much more pertinent. One secular way to get around the free-rider effect is to make giving from rich to poor compulsory, rather than voluntary. In other words, they might prefer that wealth is redistributed via taxation and the welfare state, rather than by voluntary donations. For the religious, this would actually decrease utility because taxation would reduce their surplus cash and so reduce the potential for them to give to charity and reap supernatural rewards.

But is there any evidence that this is true? Well, if it was then you might expect that countries with a high proportion of atheists would have a larger welfare state. And indeed that is exactly what you see. Gill and Lundsgaarde have analysed a cross-section of countries, and found that those countries with more atheists also have higher state welfare spending.

So you see, it is not true to say that more atheists will lead to a selfish, dog-eat-dog society where the weak go to the wall. Atheists are every bit as caring as the religious. They just go about it in different ways.

Peter Singer, an atheist, donates 25% of his income to charity:

https://www.forbes.com/2009/03/30/peter-...fc26b57d5b

[T0 Th3 M4X]

Still no pics of a supernatural stick?  
Should be easy to provide simple pics of a supernatural stick, if one had one.
After all i am not demanding pics, just think it would be awesome if someone had a few pics.
Well, maybe after page 80......or 1100.  Ill wait here, just out of curiosity, not because i demand anything of course.

I never said I had one.  I don't even know what qualifies as a "supernatural stick."

The request wasn't reasonable in and of itself.

---

OMG did someone actually do the “look at the trees” shtick? Ha!

Look, first you need to provide a coherent definition for your god. You need to define properties that would be verifiable and falsifiable. You would then need to point to things in the real world that are exclusively indicative of this thing. So far religion has done this. None.

I don't need to do anything. 

Your statement about religion is presumptive.  No reason to accept it as being factual.  I'm guessing you pulled your conclusion out of your behind, but I can't say I know for sure, so as such my presumption holds no value like your presumption.

[Natachan]

My conclusion?

I’m not making any claims. I’m not asking that you accept the existence of a thing. Theists are asking me to believe that a thing exists. I am asking them to prove that the thing exists. They have proposed the thing, it is up to them to prove it. So first they have to define the thing in a coherent way, and then provide a reason to believe them. Until then i am fully justified in dismissing their claim.

[T0 Th3 M4X]

Nope.  It tells me you don't have any evidence on the contrary.  Don't waste your time with me.  I didn't invite you.  You invited yourself.  Case closed.

---

You're working off assumptions.  Not interested.

I don't have to give evidence, but I offered to consider it based on what would be considered objective evidence.  Do we really have to go through this again?

So you have nothing. that's what I thought.

Of course that's what you thought.  I could've told you that's what you thought before you even said so, but had no reason to.  Still, it's irrelevant in the context of this discussion.  Just another atheist dodging the question.  That's nothing new.

[vulcanlogician]

I never said I had one.  I don't even know what qualifies as a "supernatural stick."

Is it the thing that turns to a snake when you throw it on the ground? Even Pharaoh's peeps have those things. Apparently, they're nothing special. (On a side note: wasn't it a dick move on God's part to send Moses in there with a lame gag like that?)

Seriously though, Max. Even assuming that God exists, there really isn't much in the way of convincing evidence. I think it is reasonable for people to believe based on a personal mystical experience (though other people's experiences can hardly convince me, since I think there are alternate explanations for the source of their mystical visions).

You guys are gonna have to go with the whole "take it on faith" thing. You have nothing in the way of evidence.

If there were compelling evidence for God, people who are convinced by compelling evidence would be convinced of God's existence. They are not. It seems that most theists hold their beliefs due to things other than evidence. They were raised that way.-- Religion gives their life structure.-- Existential despair.-- Social pressures.-- and last but not least: credulity.

As I said before: if you think God exists, fine. You may be right. But even if you are right, you've got to admit, there's very little in the way of evidence.

[T0 Th3 M4X]

My conclusion?

I’m not making any claims. I’m not asking that you accept the existence of a thing. Theists are asking me to believe that a thing exists. I am asking them to prove that the thing exists. They have proposed the thing, it is up to them to prove it. So first they have to define the thing in a coherent way, and then provide a reason to believe them. Until then i am fully justified in dismissing their claim.

Well dismiss their claim then.  I don't think anybody is trying to control your mind, nor can they.

I simply threw out an offer.  Beyond that, it doesn't assert, claim, or suggest someone should believe or adhere to anything.  Additionally, the offer doesn't suggest I have whatever evidence the OP would need, and would depend on what they are requesting.  If someone says I would need to show "Noah's Ark", then obviously I can't show that, even if it was buried under the ground somewhere.

[Natachan]

Well good on you for being so accepting of my wanting to be left alone. Unfortunately we don’t live in a vacuum, and not everyone is like that.

The title and subject of the tread is evidence for god. Meaning this is a call for theists, who again are claiming a thing exists, to define the thing and then make the case for it.

I happen to live in the US, and in a particularly religious part of the US. I mentioned in another thread that I have been threatened, physically assaulted, and harassed by cops because I am an “out” atheist. I don’t go up to people, but I have the gall to wear atheist t-shirts and have a Darwin fish on my car. Clearly there is pressure in our society to believe that the thing exists.

In addition I like to believe things that happen to be true. So if I’m wrong, I want to know. So if there are people saying thing x exists, and it actually does exist, I want to know that. But I’m not going to believe it for no reason. I need a definition and I need some reason to believe in this thing. I don’t think that’s unreasonable.