What would make me accept the existence of a deity?

[Celi]

Well, I thank you for your candor, but I find the answer troubling. For one, you conclude that whatever evidence a putative god might provide, it's always possible that theses effects were brought about technologically. This seems to imply that, at least in your scheme of things, "anything" is possible (except the impossible, which is defined by what is possible). If you accept that "anything is possible" as a premise for ruling out a god (the actual is possible by definition), then I would have to ask why you don't apply the same "anything is possible" standard in hypothesizing the existence of a god? It seems the maxim provides irrefutable evidence both for the non-existence of a god and irrefutable evidence against the exclusion of a god. And the reason is because you've abandoned evidence as a means of deciding whether there is or isn't a god. This sounds like classical agnosticism: not that god does or doesn't exist, but holding that knowledge of god's existence or non-existence is impossible. If we take the proposition G being "God exists" and conclude that no evidence of any kind could demonstrate that it is true, that seems every bit as faith based as the position that no evidence could prove it false. It seems like you've simply defined god or gods so that they can't exist; if you're going to simply use definitions to rule out gods a priori, why not simply say that you rule out gods because circles aren't squares or blue isn't green; ruling out something by simply defining it out of existence is not any more reasonable than ruling that god exists regardless of what the evidence does or doesn't show. Both are arbitrary and unfalsifiable.

I'm not necessarily using this as an argument against the existence of God, just as why, even if a deity existed and it wanted us to know about it, it would be impossible to prove itself to us or even provide any convincing evidence for its godhood. Not anything is possible, but the possibility of anything is possible, because we don't know everything that's possible, so anything apparently supernatural could really be technological. If I were Scully, I wouldn't deny all the crazy stuff I saw, but I would assume that there was a rational explanation for everything that current science might not be capable of figuring out. That's not something I could prove--hey, maybe that guy can shoot fire from his hands just because--but it's certainly far, far more likely.

I realize that, practically speaking, a sufficiently advanced being that came to our planet and swiftly took it over, invulnerable to all our weapons and capable of defeating human armies with a mere thought, could certainly be considered a god in the lesser lowercase G sense--but that's still something very different from an actual deity. It's not supernatural.

(Of course, this is all hypothetical--in reality, we're not dealing with a higher being claiming to be God, we're dealing with humans who claim that God exists.)