RE: What would you consider to be evidence for God?
October 20, 2015 at 4:02 pm
(This post was last modified: October 20, 2015 at 4:09 pm by Simon Moon.)
(October 20, 2015 at 3:35 pm)lkingpinl Wrote:(October 16, 2015 at 8:28 pm)IATIA Wrote: One would think that any god would have no trouble convincing one of it's existence. The fact that it has failed to do so means either it does not exist or it does not care.
I'm not so sure. There have been countless personal accounts of God being revealed to people in such that the one person believes but others may call that person crazy. If you walked in to a room at work and a being appeared to you claiming to be God, floating there angelically and knew things about you no one else did, would you believe? How do you know the room hadn't been filled with hallucinogenic gas?
And there's the rub.
People all through history of differing god beliefs claim to have had personal experienced of their god revealing itself to them, yet I'm sure you don't believe their encounters with their gods are accurate, correct?
Why should Christian personal accounts of encounters with the god you believe exists, be any more compelling to us, than accounts of people having personal encounters with other gods that you don't believe exist, be to you?
You are correct, the image of a being claiming to be the Christian god as you describe it, could vary well have natural, mundane explanations.
But you claim that your god is extremely powerful, and knowledgeable of all things (the 'omnis'). A being with those attributes would know before his 'angelic appearance' to us would not be convincing (maybe it would convince some of us), and would know that we would not be convinced. Therefore, he would do something else that would convince us.
If he thought that his 'angelic appearance' would convince us, and we were not convinced, he's not much of a god then. Or at least, he does not have the attributes Christians claim their god has.
You'd believe if you just opened your heart" is a terrible argument for religion. It's basically saying, "If you bias yourself enough, you can convince yourself that this is true." If religion were true, people wouldn't need faith to believe it -- it would be supported by good evidence.
