What Would It Take To Be Convinced?

[Pyrrho]

Israel was a primitive, barbaric backwater.  

Got it!

What the Romans brought to Israel:





What makes it funny is that the list is accurate.

[Mudhammam]

Alpha male, you should try reading Homer (8th/7th century BC), or Herodotus from the 5th century BC, or Plato's Timaeus from the 4th, or Book I of Cicero's On Divination, written about 40 years before the birth of Christ. Those are just a few examples of how deeply superstitious even the most intellectual of persons were, not to mention the mass of mankind which has always been too willing in its embrace of ignorant and silly explanations for human experiences. You'll find after doing serious research and reading those texts that nothing separates Christianity from the countless other mythologies that reason demands we treat as simply that.

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Also, you can read basically any Greek and Roman work on this amazing research tool: http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/coll...reco-Roman

[RobbyPants]

An interesting question to ponder is what would qualify as substantial enough evidence to convince atheists like us of the existence of something greater? If the very simplistic scenario of a big man with a white beard appearing before us was contemplated, most of us would probably still believe it to be more rational to attribute this to some sort of hallucination; thus, this leads to the question: what would be enough to convince us non-believers? I think it's a difficult but interesting thought.

Honestly, the bar would be set a bit lower if God hadn't been hiding for the last 2,000 years and had spend all the time before and since the Biblical events also appearing to other peoples throughout the world.

At the end of the day, the Bible was written over a period of 800 or so years, and everything up until the Epistles takes place in an area on the globe the size of a dime. If it looks like an ancient religion specific to a single culture and it smells like an ancient religion specific to a single culture, it probably is.

The chance that this one specific religion (or any one of these religions) is correct seems incredibly remote. I mean, if God is real, why are we even discussing if he's real?

[Dystopia]

I think some atheists exaggerate when demanding evidence. Asking for physical evidence for a supernatural creator that exists outside time and space seems ridiculous and unreasonable to me, so I'll be happy with a coherent, logically consistent deductive argument that leads me to conclude a god needs to exist (either to explain, justify or fill in something that is completely and forever empty)

[Simon Moon]

I think some atheists exaggerate when demanding evidence. Asking for physical evidence for a supernatural creator that exists outside time and space seems ridiculous and unreasonable to me, so I'll be happy with a coherent, logically consistent deductive argument that leads me to conclude a god needs to exist (either to explain, justify or fill in something that is completely and forever empty)

The idea of a supernatural creator that exists outside time and space is a ridiculous and unreasonable concept in the first place. There is no need to request evidence for such a being, because the very concept is incoherent. 

Existence itself requires space and time, so existence that is without time and space is meaningless.

But, for arguments sake, lets say there is a god that exists outside of time and space. If this god interacts with this universe at all (miracles, answering prayer, etc), then it would leave physical evidence, and therefore asking for evidence is well within reason. 

[robvalue]

Once such a thing is defined in that way, it means no one can know anything about it or whether it exists at all. Including the theists who claim to know so much about it, like its innermost thoughts.

[Cyberman]

I think some atheists exaggerate when demanding evidence. Asking for physical evidence for a supernatural creator that exists outside time and space seems ridiculous and unreasonable to me,

Except when that supernatural creator is supposed to intersect and interact with the physical Universe, which falls smack in the purview of science.

[Dystopia]

I think some atheists exaggerate when demanding evidence. Asking for physical evidence for a supernatural creator that exists outside time and space seems ridiculous and unreasonable to me, so I'll be happy with a coherent, logically consistent deductive argument that leads me to conclude a god needs to exist (either to explain, justify or fill in something that is completely and forever empty)

The idea of a supernatural creator that exists outside time and space is a ridiculous and unreasonable concept in the first place. There is no need to request evidence for such a being, because the very concept is incoherent. 

Existence itself requires space and time, so existence that is without time and space is meaningless.

But, for arguments sake, lets say there is a god that exists outside of time and space. If this god interacts with this universe at all (miracles, answering prayer, etc), then it would leave physical evidence, and therefore asking for evidence is well within reason. 

What if this god does not interact with the universe?

I think it is intellectually dishonest to refuse the concept in the first place because you consider it ridiculous - I could do that with anything I wanted to repeal the possibility of debating.

You are assuming theists want to scientifically prove god exists when some just use philosophical possibilities but don't assert with certainty.

I'm not arguing in favour of god's existence, I just think some atheist arguments are fallacious and it's possible to improve the position

[Cyberman]

What if this god does not interact with the universe?

Then we can safely ignore it.

[Mudhammam]

The idea of a supernatural creator that exists outside time and space is a ridiculous and unreasonable concept in the first place. There is no need to request evidence for such a being, because the very concept is incoherent. 

Existence itself requires space and time, so existence that is without time and space is meaningless.

But, for arguments sake, lets say there is a god that exists outside of time and space. If this god interacts with this universe at all (miracles, answering prayer, etc), then it would leave physical evidence, and therefore asking for evidence is well within reason. 

What if this god does not interact with the universe?

I think it is intellectually dishonest to refuse the concept in the first place because you consider it ridiculous - I could do that with anything I wanted to repeal the possibility of debating.

You are assuming theists want to scientifically prove god exists when some just use philosophical possibilities but don't assert with certainty.

I'm not arguing in favour of god's existence, I just think some atheist arguments are fallacious and it's possible to improve the position

By god, I take you to mean a being with personality or at the very least, something like an all-encompassing mind. ( A ) If you mean something like a law of nature, then you might as well call the force of gravity or the nuclear forces deities, or divine movements, which is absurd, and pointless. ( B ) But if your all-encompassing mind is non-physical, your definition of mind is nonsensical: what does it mean to be mind eternally detached from any medium of sense, such as vision, sound, touch, etc.? It is only though the senses that we have any mental conceptions at all. ( C ) If you say that your mind is physical, then you have something that ought to be evidenced by physics, not merely logical deduction---otherwise you're just speculating, though we might be inclined to do so when considering the possibilities of Pre-Big Bang Physics, such as conditions which give rise to an infinite multitude of universes. And what difference is there between a multiverse and a multiverse that thinks? The only that I can conceive is that the former conforms with meaningful usage of words, whereas as the other doesn't, as it runs into the exact same problems mentioned above (( B ) & ( C )). God as personality is really an unintelligible notion, and God as a supreme force of nature is redundant.