Dear Atheists: what would convince you God/Christ is Real?

[emjay]

And then we have to ask if thing is a defining quality of A (we don’t have to call it god), what does it mean to be a thing? Keeping in the same line as before, I take thing to mean something of this universe whether it’s quantum foam or latte foam. If that’s not what TGN meant, then I may need to adjust my statements. 

This is always a surprisingly tricky question when we're talking about the God of classical theology. "Thing" turns out to be a pretty fuzzy concept. Certainly God, in that tradition, is not said to be a thing in the same way that rocks and lizards are things. Nor is he a thing in the same way that heat waves or gravitational fields are things. 

I think we get nearer the mark when we start to ask whether goodness or justice are things. Or, as you say, whether being is a thing. 

My guess is that a lot of people get mislead by the idea of God being a thing -- they may assume this means he's one of the things we could list if we listed up all the other things in the universe. But I think this would be an error. As they say, "God and the universe do not make two." 

There is truth in theists not being able to adequately define god. Though I am a theist, I am trying to not come at this from that perspective but keeping it philosophical. (Or, at best, pop-philosophical)

It seems to me that this issue was pretty much dealt with by Plato. 

He makes it clear that the Forms are ideal and therefore not definable by the human mind. His whole schtick is that he challenges someone to define something we all know about -- like justice -- and demonstrating that no definition we can come up with is satisfactory. We know about things like goodness and justice, but no single definition is available for any of them. Some of the most important things in life are not definable. And of course this thinking is imported into Christian theology early on. No definition which the human mind can conceive of will adequately define a thing which exists only in the ideal. 

But Plato also teaches us how to do dialectic, as a way (I think) of talking in enough different ways about the indefinable thing that we can in fact improve our knowledge of it. This is partly by forcing ourselves to articulate our pre-conceptions -- a practice which often shows how inadequate those are. And of course being challenged by others forces us to rethink.

And does that satisfy you? Even if you or classical theology are not comfortable thinking of God as a material thing it's still presumably to you not-nothing? If so, then for me, they're tantamount to the same thing; why, and how, is there something not nothing, is to me the same core question as why, and how, is there not-nothing not nothing, so to speak. So in whatever über sense you mean God is above and beyond the material world, whether in a Platonic forms sort of way or something else, that's still not a distinction that makes any difference from my point of view, to the core question of how any non-nothing/thing can either arise from nothing or exist eternally.