On the nature of evidence.
October 25, 2014 at 3:50 pm
(This post was last modified: October 25, 2014 at 3:51 pm by trmof.)
I would like to know what the atheists on this forum WOULD consider to be persuasive evidence of God's existence. If you are interested in scientific evidence of the existence of God, how would one go about acquiring this evidence?
Assuming God is a personality and not just a force of nature, it would seem that it would be impossible to scientifically test for the existence of his personality and it's characteristics; just as it is impossible at the moment to come up with a functioning theory of another human's personality other than "It does what it does when it does it, and sometimes it doesn't." It's theoretically possible that if you had all the information in the universe available to you, you would be able to predict another person's behavior accurately. But given that this is currently unfeasable, it would seem to me that experiential and testimonial evidence are the only two avenues through which we could currently examine the possible existence of God.
So what could a God do that would personally convince you of it's existence? I presume for most of you that if he started talking to you personally, you would simply assume that this was mental illness. So if a God with a personality WERE to exist, setting the standard of evidence this high would be putting him in a position where it's impossible for him communicate with you in any way whatsoever.
Assuming God is a personality and not just a force of nature, it would seem that it would be impossible to scientifically test for the existence of his personality and it's characteristics; just as it is impossible at the moment to come up with a functioning theory of another human's personality other than "It does what it does when it does it, and sometimes it doesn't." It's theoretically possible that if you had all the information in the universe available to you, you would be able to predict another person's behavior accurately. But given that this is currently unfeasable, it would seem to me that experiential and testimonial evidence are the only two avenues through which we could currently examine the possible existence of God.
So what could a God do that would personally convince you of it's existence? I presume for most of you that if he started talking to you personally, you would simply assume that this was mental illness. So if a God with a personality WERE to exist, setting the standard of evidence this high would be putting him in a position where it's impossible for him communicate with you in any way whatsoever.
