RE: Evidence for a god. Do you have any ?
October 8, 2018 at 6:18 am
(This post was last modified: October 8, 2018 at 6:18 am by Alan V.)
(October 8, 2018 at 12:19 am)Belaqua Wrote: In both the Platonic and Aristotelian traditions, though, which make up the bulk of Christian theology, nobody expects tangible (touchable, empirical) evidence of God. They don't think he's (it's) that kind of thing.
Roughly speaking, for them, we know about God the way we know about numbers. Nobody has ever touched the number two, but we extrapolate facts about it based on our experiences of two of this and two of that. Working from these basic experiences, Platonists extrapolate an immaterial but eternal ideal called the Good, which Christians identify with God. Aristotelians notice the actualization of potential in the world, and from this develop elaborate and difficult arguments to conclude that there must be full actualization with no potential, which the Christians identify with God. In neither case is this God something you can hold up and show, as you do with your telephone.
I'm not saying that their arguments should persuade you, necessarily. Just that the complaints you make in the OP aren't things that are relevant to the main traditions of theology.
By the major theistic traditions, God is said to care about and interact with humanity and the world. That implies evidence. Believers expect evidence and point to what they think is evidence all the time, even if they are incorrect or disappointed again and again. Misattribution is a huge problem with religious people.
The problem with trying to boil a God concept down to some abstraction, as philosophers do, is that every god is said to be a being with consciousness and willfulness. Those attributes can't be reduced to mere abstractions.