Evidence God Exists

[everythingafter]

ev·i·dence /ˈɛvɪdəns/ Show Spelled [ev-i-duhns] Show IPA noun, verb,-denced, -denc·ing.
–noun
1. that which tends to prove or disprove something; ground for belief; proof.

Ahh, yes, the ol' "grounds for belief" claim as a way to scoot around providing anything like physical proof for fantastic claims.

Basically, I am claiming that there’s evidence all around us that God exits.

Exits? Was that a Freudian slip?

Do you believe in evolution or intelligent design, or evolution spurred by God?

But any disrespectful responses will be immediately ignored, regardless of how intelligent your point is.

Agreed on the respect part, but it doesn't really matter which arguments you choose to ignore or not. I doubt anything said here will change anyone's mind one way or the other, especially not yours since you are convinced that this world is the handy work of a master.

Without further ado, here’s the evidence:

Drum roll ...

Humans are the only species, out of millions of species, which have evolved into an intelligent life form. Other species live pretty much to eat and sleep -- survival. If our evolution were only a result of natural selection, shouldn’t other species, or even just one, have evolved into intelligent beings after millions of years? But the fact is that no other species have been able to develop science, literature, art, music and intelligent thought process as humans have. Isn’t this evidence that God exists?

Yes it is, and for several reasons. For one thing it corroborates what’s written in the bible, which is that God created man in his image, and that animals are inferior. But to truly understand why my evidence points towards a deity one needs to be able to appreciate the grandness of this gift that is human intelligence. And you have to ask yourself, why are we the only species, out of millions, that have achieved this type of intelligence? Evolution is about natural selection, but shouldn’t at least one other species, out of millions, have benefited from intelligence? I think so. And there would be a myriad of other intelligent species if there were no God. If you can appreciate the grandness and uniqueness of human intelligence, then you’ll understand why only humans were given this gift, and you'll know why what I've outlined here points to a God.

Intelligence is quite relative (even among humans!), as others have mentioned. I thought you might have argued that humans are the only species that exhibit morals and create moral frameworks (relative to different societies, of course). As it turns out, arguments from human intelligence are easier to refute than the ones based on morality, but not much more so. On the intelligence point, we are still evolving and are far from "perfect," as it were. Insert our highly evolved brain into a monkey (assuming this is possible, a la, Dr. Frankenstein), and you will find a monkey perfectly able to type in complete sentences, paint or create music, assuming again that the unlucky human subject was knowledgeable in the arts.

And given the incredibly large number of possible planets that may exist in the universe, as yet undiscovered, scientists say that it would actually be more surprising is no intelligent life exists somewhere else in the cosmos. We exist on a spiral arm on an incredibly tiny planet compared with the rest of the cosmos. Our sun is headed toward entropy. We can be erased by a solar flare or a comet in an instance. We aren't the center of anything. Ninety-nine percent of species that once lived are now extinct.

On the morality question, I've linked to two sources in a previous post, but here they are again and a couple more: 1 and 2 and 3 and 4.

Here is a discussion on the (immensely high) probability that life exists elsewhere. Obviously, "life" is not to say "intelligent life," but given what we know about evolution by natural selection, the 10 to the 18th power (1,000,000,000,000,000,000 or one quintillion) probably that life could exist on another planet could represent a very high probability that some of that life is of a higher intelligence.

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AngelThMan when I was a Christian fundamentalist I too thought that I felt God's presence around me all the time, I was constantly praying in my mind and thought I was in touch with God at all times. I later came to the conclusion that what I was experiencing was not God but rather my own mind stimulating my body through the use of emotionalism coupled with my unwavering beliefs. Many religious groups outside of Christianity claim to feel the deity of their choice in various ways, they all claim the feeling of the divine. But in the end it is nothing more than psycho-emotional.

And I've read CP story about how he came to not believe. He once was apparently casting out demons and doing all kinds of stuff "for God." I think CP knows the "experience" you are getting from God quite well. Me, I have felt inspired in church to some degree when I believed, but it was quickly fleeting when I walked out the door. Hmm ... wonder why that was. And for so long, I couldn't figure it out. But it dawned on me: "Gee, those sure were good some tunes we played this week!" and "What a thoughtful and well-delivered sermon he preached!" The things you do in church are designed to stir your emotions to make some experience you think you have appear more real. The more fervent believers have simply found a way to self-induce this experience, look for patterns and "clues" that some prayer has been answered, and the like.