Evidence God Exists

[OnlyNatural]

First off, you are making an assumption in saying that they did not understand the natural world. You don't know that. I don't know that. They may have very well understood the way in which things worked, just not the processes by which it worked. Do you see the distinction?

how can you claim to have any better understanding than the societies of old?

So you're saying they may have had a sense of how things operated, they just didn't have the science and technology to explain the specific processes at work? I have no doubt that they understood the natural world in their own way, but we've gained an incredible amount of knowledge since then, and our current understanding has evolved accordingly.

Second, God reveals Himself to us in many ways in this world. Their evidence would have been the same evidence you or I could behold, simply in a different timeframe. And who knows? Maybe the way in which God worked back then was much more fantastical. I don't know, and you don't know, because neither of us were there.

You're right, we weren't there, so we can only theorize and think about possible arguments.

In what ways do you believe God reveals himself, other than private revelation?

I sincerely doubt that things were ‘more fantastical’ in the past. Why would the laws of nature be suspended back then, but not today? What perceptive abilities did our ancestors possess, but that we have now lost? In that different time period, I suspect that people gave a great deal more weight to supernatural explanations, particularly because of the lack of other kinds of knowledge and evidence.

However, I realize that humans have long had a need to find meaning and purpose and feel connected to something beyond the natural world. A yearning for the spiritual, I guess you could say. This doesn't mean that there actually is another dimension or Great Spirit or anything, but I think it says a lot about the meaning-making and symbolizing powers of the human brain.

I agree that many religions anthropomorphize God far too much, far too often. Just look at the Greek gods. It speaks volumes on our tendency to project human emotions and concepts onto things we do not fully understand, but not of God Himself.

If there is a god, it's really not something we could ever understand. I don’t know how some religious people can insist that they know the mind of God, or they know what God wants of us, or what being in the presence of God (in the afterlife) would be like. The only way our ancestors could make this god entity comprehensible was to believe that it thought, felt and behaved at least somewhat like a human, because human motivations were the only kind they knew.

That's interesting. I guess for me, that would be another unnecessary inference, since the process of evolution has everything necessary to unfold by itself.

Except a reason to unfold by itself. Why?

Does it need to have a reason? And if it does, why must the reason involve an intelligent supernatural being?

I have had experiences in which the world around me was 'arranged' in just such a way as to lead me to my goal, or to direct me down a certain path. Not a literal path like a sidewalk, mind you, but an emotional, mental, and spiritual one. Following this path has proven to not only benefit me, but to work out in such a way as to verify the path's own correctness and arrangement.

We’re all searching for meaning and direction in our lives. We automatically look for patterns and tend to capitalize on coincidence. If you believe a certain path is the right one, and you hope that things will work out, they often do. I’ve had experiences just like you’re describing here, without attributing any of my intuitions to an outside force. I guess you make a leap of faith when you attribute it to God, because I can’t see the logical connection.

Then all of science is bunk. All of our claims must be subjective because we are subjective beings. If we have no capacity to go outside of our subjective selves, then having multiple subjective claims lean towards one answer does not go anywhere in proving that that answer is true. Science relies on peer review for giving weight to its answers. But if personal experience is invalid, then science holds no weight whatsoever.

You make a very good point. How can we ever know that anything really exists, if we’re all seeing the world from within our own subjective minds?

I still think there’s something to be said for science, however. Science is the accumulation of knowledge over hundreds and even thousands of years, and evidence is tested by many different minds working together, collaborating and confirming their findings. If a theory is found to be inconsistent or to lack observable evidence, it is not held onto because of any strong intuition that it might be true.

Religious experiences, on the other hand, can never be tested or confirmed to represent anything in the real world. There is no accumulated knowledge or evidence, only the persistent feelings and intuitions of people who are all too ready to give credit to God. And God, as a theory, can never be disproved; and as we know, an unfalsifiable argument is no argument at all.