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

[emjay]

And does that satisfy you? 

That's an interesting question. I hadn't thought of all this in terms of my personal satisfaction. 

I know from reading lots of things that these are basic themes in theology and philosophy, so it makes sense that anyone interested in those fields would look into them. 

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.

Yes, I think it would be a mistake to get bogged down on issues of modern English usage. Whether the word "thing" can refer to Platonic Forms or not isn't really the problem. 

If there are such things as Platonic Forms, they are generally not knowable through the senses. But I would have no trouble with a sentence like "You can't know about those things in the way that you know about rocks and lizards." 

I guess my point is just that whatever kind of thing a Platonic Form is -- or what God is -- we have to be careful not to treat it as something that would necessarily be definable, quantifiable, or locatable in space. For millennia, those are not characteristics attributed to them. 

At the moment I'm reading Plato and Dialectic, by Rush Rhees. This guy worked closely with Wittgenstein, so he's not someone who's stuck in the past. So far in the book he hasn't said anything about what a God would be like, but he does accept that there are aspects of the world that cannot be spoken of adequately in human language. He finds Plato's approach to be relevant and useful here.

Right, well it's in that overarching, comparative sense you've described that a 'thing' is meaningful to my own questions of why, and how, something not nothing. So I'm asking 'how can any 'thing', regardless of type or even kind, material, immaterial, knowable or unknowable etc, come into existence from nothing or exist eternally?'. Call this question 1.

Whereas the question from theology would seem to be different, more like 'how can one type/kind of thing - material things - come into existence from nothing or exist eternally?' and with the answer given 'by being created by another type/kind of thing - unknowable, spiritual, Platonic etc - that does come into existence from nothing or exist eternally'. Call this question 2.

From my perspective then, question 2, and its answer, is not satisfactory in the slightest because it does not address question 1 in the slightest. So I was basically asking if question 2, and its answer, is wholly satisfactory to you, and if so, why you and theology in general seem to have no interest whatsoever in question 1 (correct me if I'm wrong)? To me, question 2 is at best kicking the can on some questions, but not the key questions, and at worst, a red herring.