Will a sign from God will convince us of his existence?

[Lawman]

Dear friends,
We are atheist because there is no proof of god's existence or whatsoever.But what if ask god to send a sign to believe in him.If you pray to him and suddenly a plate of food comes to you from nothing.The food is what was never cooked in your home or you never ate it.Some oil or anything which would leave stain on your clothes falls on your clothes.You get up in the morning and say that it was a dream but really the stain is there on your clothes.Then will you believe.If not what will be your argument.

[tor]

Still not enough. It could be David Blaine making fun of me.

[Lawman]

I did not understood.who is David Blaine.Then what you want as A sign .how could food come from air.why won't you believe

[tor]

David Blaine is a magician.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Blaine

I won't believe because there is not enough information.
If food appeared out of nothing all it is telling me is that a food appeared out of nothing.
I have no idea why it appeared and from where it appared and if anyone is doing it on purpose.
It could be some magician making a prank on me. Or aliens making an experiment. Or quantum fluctuations produced it. Or it just fell out of some other dimension. I would need to investigate it further.
And which god? There are thousands of em and they are all different.

[Alex K]

If it only worked for me, but noone else cat witness it I'd get my head checked. If it worked reproducibly, I'd go about investigating the phonomenon before I make a judgement what kind and level of intelligence is responsible. Gods are not very well defined and a high intelligence is more likely than an omnipotent Im the creator of all - type of deal

[tommynba]

That depends on what kind of "sign". If it's a chips in a shape of Mary or Jesus probably not.

I had a dream once that i was waiting for a bus... and i actually had to wait for a bus that day. That just proves we dream about the things that had happened or are likely to happen in the near future, even though we're not conscious of it, and then we attribute magic meaning to the simple things.

[BrianSoddingBoru4]

The trouble with 'signs from God' is that you can never be even reasonably certain that they are signs from God. To paraphrase Sherlock Holmes, you can't posit a miracle until ALL naturalistic explanations are excluded.

You mention a meal appearing out of nowhere in response to a prayer. While this would be problematic for atheism, we have an out - the existence of so many starving and malnourished people in the world is pretty good evidence that food doesn't appear out of nowhere in answer to prayers.

Boru

[tor]

The trouble with 'signs from God' is that you can never be even reasonably certain that they are signs from God. To paraphrase Sherlock Holmes, you can't posit a miracle until ALL naturalistic explanations are excluded.

And even if there are no naturalistic explanations now doesn't mean there won't be in the future as history shown so often.

[Ben Davis]

I agree with Tor. One incident (or 'personal experience', if you like) is not enough data to form coherent hypotheses let alone workable experiments or viable theory. The evidence would have to repeated, repeatable and reproducible then experimentally examined before any practical judgement could be made.

The reason I'd be so rigorous is that we're not talking about a common-or-garden situation here, we're talking about one of the most important social issues in existence.

[LostLocke]

For this 'experiment' there isn't really enough information by itself to make me believe. At least not without further research.

I mean, granted, praying for a plate of food, and then having that plate of food appear out of nowhere would be a unique and unusual event. It would definitely warrant consideration and further study.

But, some other things I would also consider right off the bat:

- I'm hallucinating the food. Yes, I see it, feel it, even might be 'eating' it, but serious hallucinations are that real to the people hallucinating them.
- My own mind/brain holds the power to generate that food out of nothing. I have some type of ESP/super power.
- If it's food that I normally cook and eat, maybe I cooked this dish one year from now, and my home was hit with a massive dose of electromagnetic energy that caused this plate to time shift back to today.
- Mean spirited aliens are having fun with me.

As ridiculous as some of these sound, there's no specific reason why they can't be any more possible than a deity answering my prayer. And will the possibility that it was a god doing this enter my mind? Of course. But I'm not going to go right to that as "the answer" while rejecting everything else. Until I have more info, I have to allow for all possibilities. And if I never get any more info, then I just have to live with the fact that 'I don't know' what happened.