Evidence that God exists

[Mark]

Do you have any recommendations for stuff written by Hume?

Well, Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion and An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding are probably the best places to begin.

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Hi Mark. That's a nice bowl of word salad you're tossing there. I dunno, the extents one has to go to to find a good reason to dismiss theism these days huh!

So you think miracles are provable do you? You're the first person I've known that does. You're stretching the meaning of words to make a point. A misguided approach. It would be simple for our small brains if a god gave evidence like you say, but then doesn't that go completely against the overwhelming evidence? I'm constantly shocked at logical minds that continuously fall at this hurdle.

Jesus' birth fits the religious model of unprovable. I believe God intervened in this world and became a regular bloke. That belief cannot be proven.

Look, it is you who asserted the logical impossibility of an event happening that everyone would concede was divine intervention in this world. But if Baal came up out of the ocean and magically dominated human life as in my little story, I submit that everyone would say it was Baal's direct, divine agency. Clearly it is possible to conceive of similar events with arbitrary other gods. It is possible to conceive, for example, of Jesus floating in the sky over Detroit accompanied by a band of angels, then waving his hand and causing the city to become encrusted with gold and fine jewels. What is it about such an event that is logically impossible?

I'm simply arguing David Hume's position that a miracle is one thing (he said, the one thing) that would be direct evidence of God. I certainly am not isolated in my assertion that it is possible to imagine events so extraordinary that no one would deny that they were miracles. It is rather you who have taken the quite extraordinary position that the miracles reported in the Bible not only did not occur, but could not possibly have occurred. What is the basis for this claim, I really cannot imagine.

There is in popular philosophy a certain strange idea that science cannot confront religion because science is about nature and religion is about some never-never world, a "spiritual" world for example, of belief. But in fact, if events started to happen that were clearly inconsistent with any possible set of natural laws and appeared very strongly to confirm that god walked among us and doled out miraculous benefits and punishments and so forth, then a new science of the divine would very soon supplant the old science of blind natural forces. So it really is not quite correct to say that modern science does not confront religion: it confronts it in the sense that it consistently reports that there is no evidence whatsoever of any sort of divine intervention in this world. (Actually I think the idea that science is incapable of confronting religion became current out of a desire of many scientists precisely to avoid such a confrontation, but that is neither here nor there).

Another version of this idea is that science cannot prove the existence of God, God being non-natural and science being about nature. Well, science cannot prove anything with the force of logic, but it can conclude that the existence of something is very strongly supported by the observed facts. And under the circumstances I mentioned science would become a science of the divine.

Now you seem to have taken the mistaken but very widely accepted notion that science can't prove the existence of God, and elevated to a logical principle, to the point that it is actually a kind of restriction on God's possible activity. It is simply impossible, you argue, that God could do anything that would unambiguously signal his presence and divinity. If this were true it would be an odd restriction upon a supposedly all-powerful divinity, but would be very convenient for his believers, since it would relieve them of having to worry about the absence of any cases of divine intervention in this world. But it isn't true. Logic simply fails to dictate that if an all-powerful God existed, he could not intervene miraculously in this world.

That all possible gods are impotent to perform miracles is not a logical necessity; but that if God exists then he is impotent to perform miracles is an empirical proposition that takes its support from the very striking absence of any miracles in actual experience. The question does arise though, of how and why an all-powerful god could be impotent of doing a certainly class of deeds.