On the nature of evidence.

[trmof]

I would like to know what the atheists on this forum WOULD consider to be persuasive evidence of God's existence.

First define your god and its attributes; because we don't have a god to examine, we have to depend on what is being claimed about it.

If you are interested in scientific evidence of the existence of God, how would one go about acquiring this evidence?

That depends on whatever you're proposing for this god. Does it interact with the Universe in any way? Does it answer prayers and so on? All those claims are testable.

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."

Why would you think this god would be scientifically untestable, unless you're defining it to be so? Making your god claims unfalsifiable isn't a good thing; it just means they cannot be tested. And that's a double-edged sword, since you cannot then go on to make any claims about this god, including whether it's even there at all.

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.

No, you don't need all the information in the Universe to do this. Advertisers, supermarket designers and the like have developed it almost to the level of art. Plus we already know that, unlike gods, other people exist and must have personalities. Unless you're advocating solipsism, in which case I have no reason to believe you even exist. Not to mention I would have to account for why my mind created all the greatest and the least music in history, from Beethoven to the Beatles and on to Bieber. And if my mind created Justin Bieber, I deserve to be tried for crimes against humanity.

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.

Not even close. I would investigate that option first, to eliminate the more common and obvious explanations first. If at the end of it the only option left to me was that a god was in fact speaking to me, I would have to accept that. Then I would track it to its lair and destroy it.

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.

It's generally not the atheist making whatever god is being touted unfalsifiable. Besides, a god which would find anything impossible isn't exactly what I would call worthy of the title.

My definition of a God would be an intelligent universe-wide personality with power to influence physical matter, either through explicit means, or simply as a result of being the origin of the laws which effect that matter, in the same way that your current thoughts may simply be the result of their initial starting position. This being could have numerous good reasons for self-imposing rules of conduct concerning when it is and is not appropriate to interfere with human affairs, and if this were the case this God would be limited in it's options for how to directly communicate with people. The point of the post is that there may be a God that exists that is at the same time unfalsifiable.

Regarding advertisers predicting peoples actions, this is would fall under sociology and psychology, which are both considered "soft" sciences for the exact reason that they are only able to make non falsifiable predictions; I'm talking specifically about making a falsifiable prediction about the future decisions of an INDIVIDUAL based on the decisions they've already made, which science is currently unable to do. Perhaps at some point in the future neurology and physics will combine in a way to allow for this. However, the fact that it is currently not subject to scientific scrutiny does not negate the fact that your personality exists.