What proof would it take for me to believe in god?

[Clueless Morgan]

So, looking at that, it looks completely indistinguishable from any other ancient mythology. Picture, instead, this same god revealing himself to all peoples throughout history, making meaningful and useful predictions they couldn't know about (like the germ theory of disease), and him still showing up in verifiable ways to this day, with no 2,000 year gap in seeing him. That would set the bar a lot lower.

As it is, even if he showed up right now, I'd be really skeptical of the whole thing, just because the entire setup is so ridiculous.

Exactly.

I have a Mormon friend who loves to equate the existence of a god with knowing the Sun exists, but they're not even close to the same thing. We repeatedly experience the sun, we can measure it's energy output, we can feel it's energy output, we can photographic it, look at it through optical instruments, conduct experiments to gather information about, study how it interacts with the Earth and on and on and on.

But this god of hers refuses to make itself as evident, as plain to see, as easily verified as the sun.

By not doing so, I have to have a higher standard to judge its existence by than I would have for the sun. Not only is this god not evident, not testable, not measurable, not photographable, not observable by any optical instrument, or by any instrument at all, as far as we know, it doesn't seem to want to be.

And by making itself so difficult to detect, my standards for evidence before I accept its existence must be equally high.

I mean, c'mon.



If Darth Vader can do it, why can't a god?