[QUOTE=Polycarp]
Okay, the grounds for presuming that a god exists have been spelled out several times before. But let’s take a walk through them, to make sure nobody is making false apprehensions about what’s being said.
- There is nothing logically inconsistent in supposing that a god created the Universe in a manner consistent with, and using the methodology of, what science can tell us about its origins. A literalist six-days part-the-waters scenario is inconsistent. But if we presume that to have been myth, and instead postulate a creation-by-Big-Bang, abiogenetic molecular biology for the origin of life, genetically-shaped punctuated equilibrium evolution for the diversity of life over time, etc., it’s not inconsistent. Not required, either – any honest theist will admit that. Occam’s Razor suggests there is no need to presume a god from the nature of the Universe. But remember that Occam’s Razor is abductive – as between you forgetting where you set down your car keys, and magical pixies moving them, the answer which calls for the least odd assumptions is the more likely.
Note what this suggests: the only reason for presuming a Creator God is if He has some further evidence pointing to His existence. God is not a conclusion to be drawn from the Universe as His creation – but neither does it exclude that possibility.
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God is a logical necessity. Any number of proofs in deductive logic and formal logic, of the sort that gives equations of the form ~K U L –> M if not N, are advanced, hotly debated, debunked, reformulated, etc. I don’t propose to advance any of them – I frankly lack the training to work with them, and in any case feel that this is not how He wishes to be demonstrated. I merely note that some great minds find them persuasive (as well as some equally great minds who find them totally unpersuasive).
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God can be redefined as this, that, and the other thing: pantheism (all that exists is collectively God); panentheism (everything that exists is within but not equal to God); God is the laws by which things happen; God is a philosophic construct, the ultimate ground of all being; etc. This is all well and good, but it transforms any dialogue into Humpty Dumptyism – “God is what I define Him as, so you have no right to disagree.” My bottom line here is that whatever God may be or not be, the characteristics of illimitable power (not necessarily omnipotence but practically so) and illimitable knowledge and wisdom (same caveat with regard to omnipotence) and the ability to interact on a personal level with humans are necessary characters. Caligula claimed to be a god; he died. Father Devine claimed to be the incarnation of God, but he couldn’t comprehend relativity. The Cosmos may or may not fit someone’s concept of God, but the Cosmos does not interact as if a person with many if any humans. ( ::: waits for Cosmosdan’s rejoinder ::: )
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The Bible bears record of God’s supposed interactions with His Chosen People and then the incarnation of one Person of a triune Godhead and His life and teachings as Jesus of Nazareth. Put on the brakes here, and let’s look at what is postulated and what is not. For the conservative Christian, the whole thing is supposedly “the word of God” either dictated directly by Him or written by humans somehow so inspired by Him that they could introduce no error into it. I suspect that there’s unanimity among Dopers in considering that postulate the digestive wastes of male bovines.
Rather, what liberal Christians think about the Bible is precisely what a scholarly atheist like Diogenes does: it was the work of human authors who purported to describe their interactions with and understanding of the God in whom they believed. But we take it a step beyond that, and say that an approach to an understanding of His true nature can be discovered by the critical reading of the work – not accepting with credulity that He commanded a genocide 3700 years ago (any more than He did the same thing with another of His believers four years ago) – but instead sifting through the detritus of various people’s preconceptions to see what lies behind and beneath them. And there is a consistent call to ethical behavior, worship as a mode of humbling human arrogance rather than sycophancy to a despotic deity, a call to humane treatment of one’s fellow man as equivalent to proper response to Him. When you see that same message reiterated as having supposedly come from Moses, Isaiah, Micah, David, Jesus, and Paul, you begin to get a sense of a common theme that is not purely human invention.
And you apply scholarly techniques to find out what exactly was being said, by whom, to whom, in what idiom and with what cultural presuppositions, before you start deciding what’s purely cultural myth and what’s from that divine substrate. This is not “cherry-picking” – it’s running quality control measures on what cherries you put up for sale to the public.
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The testimony of people who have claimed to experience Him in their lives. Now, any one, or even several, such testimonies can very easily be self-delusion, hallucination, delirium, you name it. Granted. But when there is a consistency across multiple cultures and 20 centuries to what such experiences are reported as, it becomes a bit less likely that it’s purely self-delusion. If your child comes and excitedly tells you there’s a tiger in the woods, you smile indulgently and think how wonderful a child’s imagination is. But if eight children and three adults independently report having seen a tiger in the woods, never having heard each other’s stories, you wipe off the indulgent smile and call the game warden to report the possibility of a cougar having entered the area.
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The nature of deity is such as to make demonstrating a proof or disproof by scientific means extraordinarily difficult. One can in fact analyze whether prayer is beneficial to health, whether claimed supernatural healings do in fact happen, etc. That does not relate to the existence of God himself, but to supposed claims about Him --though of course any such story debunked becomes that much less evidence for His existence.
For me, I’m quite prepared to concede a Jamesian will to believe and credulity in myself – I’ve been “burned” by unscrupulous people trading on that in the past. Therefore I approached looking at my theophanic experience with quite a bit of skepticism – the farthest thing from “blind faith.”
However, what He did in those events was, in a phased manner, to reshape my personality in a manner that I consider has made me a far happier and emotionally healthier individual – and to have, in part, done it by causing me to take steps that led to such results by things that I myself could not have foreseen. The most obvious one of those is my “son” Chris, probably the most fulfilling relationship other than my marriage in my life – and I am certain that I would never have met him if it had not been for following a sense of doing what God had implanted in me to do for what turned out to be his friends before he had moved away, close to a month before his return and our first encounter. And it was in learning to relate to Chris as father figure, and in the wisdom that 16 years of hard knocks had given him, that I came to terms with most of the problems in my own personality and to overcome them. As between a God who had already spoken to me in my life and for whom there was abundant historical testimony having moved me to reach out to Chris’s friends and in consequence to meet him (which is what appears to have happened), pure chance, and the putative presumption that my subconscious is not only a genius at reshaping my own pyschology in ways that I was as yet actively fighting but also clairvoyant and precognitive to know that encounter would happen, I find the “God kicked my ass into doing the right thing for those boys” scenario to be the one that requires the least presumptions. Yes, coincidences do happen – but this one requires the sort of complex sequences of coincidences to occur that one justly rejects a book as depending on deus ex machina too extensively for.
An exercise for people: sit down with a Bible, ignore the O.T. and everything from Acts on, classify if you like the miracle stories as credulous reports from the Weekly World News or National Perspirer-- but look at what Jesus’s actual teachings are, and what they say about the God for whom He supposedly spoke. The character of that God is not one who is interested in depriving gay people of rights in the name of some bizarre fundie morality scheme, nor of telling people to fly airplanes into buildings. Jesus uses hyperbole, parables (easily recognized as typical Jewish haggadah and halacha), pithy sayings, etc. But when all is said and done, he’s painted a picture of a loving God intent on bringing people to humane, righteous behavior – by working in their lives, not by externally commanding them. This is why I claim that there’s an intrinsic difference between our stance and those of the fundies and the Islamic terror-radicals.
Finally, I don’t claim that anyone is required to believe on account of that evidence. To me it’s highly suggestive of something active throughout history – and when that Something became active in my own life, I recognized it in history as well. What I do insist on is the same as always: your right to believe or not believe as you choose is conditioned on your willingness to extend the same right to others. Or, as someone once said, “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” 
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Just so you don’t think I’m ignoring you, I will try to respond to this throughout the day, but it may be in dribs and drabs as I just started a new job (thank god ) and at present I’m trying to figure out how to actually do it. Thanks for your response.