Perhaps you could tell me what the point is.
My point is, the title contains the word “convincing argument”. The santa “argument” is not an argument. It’s nothing.
Of course you will not find God looking outward.
Luke 17:20: Jesus said:
The kingdom of God cometh not with observation: Neither shall they say, Lo here! or, lo there! for, behold, the kingdom of God is within you.
If you would know God look within.
Love is a force within, it is the most powerful force in the Universe. God is Love. It is the primary state of our being.
Without love everything falls apart. Everthing.
Love
I find these arguements pointless…if GOD wished NOT to reveal himself, there is NO way that any human can become aware ofhim. Personally, I believ that man has matured sufficiently, that direct contact with God is no longer necessary. Hence, we should not expedt to receive revelations like the OT prophets did.
O course, God disposes, Man proposes.
So lekatt how do you know God is love ? What about hate ? Who brings hate ? Why are you so sure god is love and is not hate ?
Tell us where love is so strong that it shows god exists ?
You can’t prove the existence or the inexistence of God. God doesn’t reveal himself directly, at least not to everybody, and is not materialistic.
That is like trying to prove the existance or non-existance of a person in a room which is not accessible. It’s not possible.
Flonks… We all know you can’t prove/disprove God. Can you find “evidence” of his existence though ? Afterall if you beleive in god then something must support this belief.
Most of us are arguing “lack of evidence”… not lack of proof.
IMO, the lack of evidence is a part of God’s “strategy”. It all comes down to one question: what do do you think is the point of life and the universe? And here there is the big difference between atheists and believers of all kinds of sorts. Atheists - if I understand them correctly - think that life has no purpose, and that it’s some kind of coincidence that life exists.
Believers, on the other hand, think that God created life and the universe with a specific purpose. I believe that our purpose is to “learn”, to re-recognize our own divine nature, to evolve.
If people knew (from evidence) that there is an omnipotent God, then they would be “good” and “behave” just because of fear. But that’s not the point. Even as a believer I think that moral should not be derived from a divine being which imposes it’s “point of view” - Moral should be understood and followed because we think it’s right to live that way.
IMO, that’s the reason why there is no evidence of God - we are supposed to discover him ourselves.
As I said, I think you can’t prove the existence of God, but you can get clues - things that support his existence. Btw, experimental science (as opposed to maths) works similar - you can never prove a theory, you can only collect experimental results which corroborate its validate and wait for an experiment which shatters the theory. If you wait long enough you can get confident about the “validity” of the theory but you cannot prove it.
There is a plan to the universe, there are rules to life. Life is not a sequences of coincidences. Life is kind of logic.
Everything which happens to us, e.g. the people we meet, has a meaning. Think about the people you met in your life and when you met them. You always needed them in some way in order to learn something, to advance.
That’s nothing you can measure with a device, at least we cannot at this moment. For me that’s evidence.
And then there is of course the evidence revealed to people who seek God directly, eg. through meditation.
There is no evidence for Superman, Bugs Bunny or Santa Claus either-how much time do you think we should take to discover them? Usually, when someone proposes an idea but, dispite all efforts, no evidence can be found for, the idea is put aside. Can anyone give me one good reason way this idea of “God” should be treated any differently? How this god affects you personally doesn’t cover it-if personal testatmony counts, than astrology, homeopathy and the reading of tea leaves are valid. Y’know, nothing ticks me off more than the phrase,“But it’s real to me!”
Why we not treat God the same way as Bugs Bunny? Because God is not Bugs Bunny.
I think I gave an explication in my previous posting, which addresses this ‘problem’.
So what is the purpose of God?
Would you agree that people can be good and live “moral” lives without any belief in deities? Is disbelief “immoral” in itself
Could you enumerate some of these “clues?”
Cite? Cite? Cite?
I really just think you’re making wild assertions here. On what do you base them? I’ve met thousands of people who served no purpose in my life and taught me nothing. I’ve never seen anything but random chance in the timing of my encounters with other humans. I honestly think that you’re simply attaching a subjective “meaning” to personal events in your own life and are probably selectively forgetting about a lot of completely trivial events and encounters.
You haven’t demonstrated that such a phenomenon even exists much less that it’s “evidence” for God.
I would agree that personal experiences, “theophanies,” if you will, seem to be extremely persuasive to the individuals who experience them. These experiences can be life-changing and some of the people it happens to can find some pretty deep insights, comfort, inspiration, etc. Some people can even be successful in communicating their experiences to others. Some of these individuals can be quite charismatic and compelling. New religions have been started this way.
However, a personal experience, no matter how intense, is still only a personal experience and does not really constitute “evidence” in a scientific sense…that is, it does not something which can be “observed” by others or which can make any predictions.
These individual experiences can also contradict each other in some fundamental ways. Are Hindu experiences of Krishna just as valid as Christian visions of Jesus?
God told Mohammed that Jesus was not God. God seems to tell others that Jesus is God.
Is God lying to somebody? Are some of the experiences “true” and others “false?”
How do we know which is which?
The question is why should the existence of “God” merit any more serious consideration than the existence of an infinite array of other supernatural hypotheses?
Does monotheism have any more empirical evidence going for it than polytheism?
The statement “The square root of 2 is an irrational number” is not absolutely undeniable; it’s simply a true statement. Its denial would be a false statement, but not a self-contradiction.
I’ll never sleep with Natalie Portman. Ergo, no God.
No, it is absolutely undeniable. People can claim that it’s false, but they would be utter fools to do so.
And YES, denying that the square root of 2 is irrational is self-contradictory. In fact, the principle of ratio ad absurdum is used to proved its irrationality. (That is, one first assumes that the square root is rational, and from that premise, derive a contradictory conclusion. This is a well-known and extremely well-established principle in mathematical proofs.)
You said it better than I did.
Basicallly, the existence or non-existence of GOD is irrelevant.
Faith and Religion are NOT the same thing.
Happy to, my friend. Jon_pi explained that he/she has never seen any difference between the evidence for God and the evidence for Santa Claus. He/she explained that in spite of their efforts, noone has ever been able to successfully explain the supposed difference. You then blithely responded by saying, “Just because Santa doesn’t exist doesn’t mean that God doesn’t exist.”
Here’s the point: It’s NOT “just because”. I defy you to identify anyone here who said “just because”. In fact, there is no objective evidence for God, and YOU have admitted as such, to wit:
[emphasis mine]
Therefore, there is no objectively inherent reason to put any more stock in the concept of God than Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, or any of the other supernatural entities that have been mentioned in this thread. You have provided no reason why we are “supposed” to discover God ourselves, yet aren’t “supposed” to discover Santa Claus, other than “because you say so.”
Unfortunately, it seems to be the most effective way to illustrate the obvious to people who reject Occam’s Razor and insist on worshipping hypothetical supernatural entities with no evidence until they can be disproven, while at the same time endowing them with precisely the hypothetical characteristics that would make them impossible to disprove. How awfully convenient.:rolleyes:
Essentially correct, but poorly worded. The word “coincidence” implies some sort of uncanny set of events. But of course it only seems uncanny in light of the fact that life exists. You cannot apply probabilities to the outcome of events retroactively after you already know that outcome.
Also, while atheists don’t believe life is given purpose by magical sky-beings, that doesn’t mean humans cannot give life their own purpose. To me, finding my own purpose is much more sublime than being told what to do by an imaginary magical being.
from Futurama. 
I will explain again.
We are created in Love, Love is within us all. God is Love, so the Kingdom of God is within us.
Hate was created by man out of fear, and as long as we fear it is blocking the Love within us. Spiritual experiences like NDEs remove the fear. We learn through these experiences and also through the teachings of the Masters, like Jesus.
Love
My favorite statement on this subject:
My sense of God is my sense of wonder about the Universe
- Albert Einstein
I don’t believe or disbelieve in God. I believe in trying to spend my limited time of existence in trying to understand the universe and my place in it. I don’t discount the possibility that one day we will discover something that will make me believe that a higher power was involved. But until such evidence comes along, I’ll just keep using the scientific method and my rational brain to make sense of it all.
Love is an emotion, not a force.
No, the most powerful force in the universe is the strong nuclear force. Until love can hold quarks together to form subatomic particles, it has to take a back seat.
Baseless assertion. I assert that “God is hate”. My assertion carries just as much weight as yours.
Bacteria cannot feel love (or much of anything, for that matter), yet they fail to fall apart. Ergo, you are incorrect.