Conversion

[Eilonnwy]

This was said a while ago, but I'm a busy lady so I tend to drop in and out of convo's. So this is me dropping back in.

As for what would make me believe in God? Testable and reliable evidence, that satisfies the rigourous standards of the scientific method.

The core principle of the scientific method is that the scope of inquiry that it limits itself to is the investigation of the natural and observable world of natural causes.

In other words, that is an a priori exclusion of the investigation or even the testing of any hypothesis that contains propositions that suggest a factor which transcends the natural world.

This is methodological naturalism, and if you then ask for scientific evidence for God according to the principles of the scientific method, you are commiting the fallacy of question-begging, for God is not within the scope of investigation of the scientific method, according to it's own principles.

All you can possible ask without question begging is evidence for Gods existence according to the classical sense of science as "rational and empirical investigation and inquiry", which makes no a priori presumption of naturalism that would exclude the proposition of God to begin with.

The answer to that question would be, for instance, the TAG, an a priori argument, or the a posteriori argument from potentiality/contingency I formulated in my own thread.

If you believe in a god that has an effect on the natural world. It can be tested. Saying something is supernatural and cannot be tested is a cop out. You're basically saying "This thing is real, but you can't test it!" It's absurd. You're claiming knowledge about something you have just admitted you can't know anything about. The only way you can know something is real is if it can be tested and produce reliable results.

And please learn your logical fallacies. You say I'm begging the question, or exercising circular reasoning. Far from it. I didn't make a statement about god's nonexistence based on a conclusion that relies on it's premise. I said what it would take for me to believe in god. Simply put, if god is claimed to influence the natural world, then you have a parameter with which to make a judgment and that's the scientific method. Logical fallacies apply to truth statements, I wasn't making a truth statement. I was saying what it would take to convince me. An explanation of begging the question, since you need a reminder: http://www.logicalfallacies.info/presump...-question/

Here's a good argument explaining why saying something is supernatural and beyond "knowing" or "testing" makes believing in it completely absurd.
[youtube]Y2pxjDM-k0g[/youtube]