An omnipresent, omniscient, omnipotent, and omnibenevolent being would know what I’d need to see/hear/touch/taste/smell to be willing to believe in them. Any lesser being would probably be some version of Ardra and I have no interest in helping them improve their con by telling them what my criteria are.
Enjoy,
Steven
I am willing to bet with some gadgets I could travel 2000 years in the past and go to the Middle East and convince everyone I am a god.
So that’s the benchmark for me, what could they do I could not dismiss as simply a technological marvel.
If they were THE God, they would know what that is.
Here’s another way I’m thinking about this.
A god could insert themselves into the universe in such a way as to be necessary. That they and their nature would be the only possible explanation for the phenomena we see.
By that I mean that we understand, perceive and define the world through our senses and the scientific method and we have developed methodologies to make sure that we do not fool ourselves. I’ll hold gods to the same standard. For me to accept that a god was real they would have to reveal themselves through the same means as gravity, germs, the electromagnetic spectrum etc. and be testable through those same methods.
When the evidence points exclusively to a being with the specific properties that the theist claims then I’ll believe.
But again, to even start to think about this the onus is on the theist to define their specific god
Let’s be less speciesist about this. Why assume that God is trying to prove his existence to a human being?
Could God prove his existence to a chimpanzee? Would an all-powerful and all-knowing being be able to frame the reality of his existence in terms that a chimpanzee could understand?
Let’s move down the ladder. Could God prove his existence to a mouse? To a housefly? To a tree? To a bacterium? To a rock?
And if God can’t do any of these things, then how is God all powerful and all knowing?
Yup, the Biblical miracles are somewhat short of being truly miraculous, apart from raising the dead. The jury is still out on the latter. The scientists want to know if that can be repeated, and if so, then please do it in front of the TV cameras.
I can’t fathom the idea a god that has recognisably human attributes, so I assume that if such an entity should drop by, the experience will be more like swimming than like buying a car or signing a contract.
Quite so. The written record is … spotty, apart from the sayings of the prophets, which got written down. Much later. For that matter, Jesus is not well documented either. We are still looking for the May 33 CE edition of the Jerusalem Bugle and Clarion with reports that some guy came back to life after being crucified.
As for the prophets, and especially the fella that produced the Book of Revelation, do they stand up to modern medical and psychiatric diagnosis?
It has been said that if god (capitalization of your choice) appeared to us, it would be in a form that we would not recognize. I am not sure if that is a plus or minus for the religious. Historically, man started off with a god that had a visible and recognizable form, anything from anthropomorphic to psychedelic. Then he/she/it became more intangible and the depictions where no longer literal, or in the case of Islam, even permitted. If god is a construct of the mind, can he appear? Or is he an electrochemical artifact in our grey cells? Skipping a long discussion on our perceptions of what reality, and what reality itself is, the point is that the fella at my door claiming to be god / God has a credibility problem.
“I can give you eternal life”
“Uh, great … maybe. But how would I know?”
“I am almighty and omnipotent”
“That’s nice. But why do you allow so much sh!t in the world that you created? That was not nice. Or do you have limits?”
<silence>
It is just a lazy “out” that is inserted by the religious to allow pretty much anything to labelled as a god, as the mood takes them.
Seems to me that a god of any notable power would be able to appear in a form that *would *be recognized. After all, have gods not already done that in the past? why not now?
It is almost as if what passed for irrefutable evidence in the past is suddenly impossible to reproduce. How strange, I’m sure it has nothing to do with us replacing ignorance and credulity with science and reason.
That would work for me.
Not that it would prove anything about the being, other than extremely powerful abilities.
But from my viewpoint, I am quite willing to call anyone/thing that does that for me, “God”.
With the uppercase-G
Isn’t that the sin of pride?
I was thinking that one issue is that many of the attributes we attribute to god could be just of our own human creation. It could be that there is a ‘god’ which created the universe. However, that god may have been just some entity which set the universe in motion. All the stuff about heaven, hell, good, evil, etc. could just be things that the sentient beings within the universe have made up. Such an entity could have unique skills because of their position relative to the universe, but they wouldn’t necessarily be omnipotent and all that other stuff.
For example, if I setup an ant farm, I am a ‘god’ to the ants in some sense. I created the world they’re living in and control the food and water that allows them to live. If subsequent generations of the ants create myths, fables and religion about me, the future, the past, what happens after death, etc., all those things are just made up by the ants and none if it may be true. Since I live outside the ant farm I have special abilities, like being able to reach in and move things or drop in things from outside, but I don’t have any special abilities to make ants trustworthy or heal them. If I can somehow communicate with the ants to tell them that I am their god, they may expect me to meet certain requirements that fit their fantasies about me as proof, but there’s no certainty I would be able to do what they asked.
It is necessary. There is no useful reality without misery, no construction without destruction, no life without imbalance. Without resistance to strive against, you have nothing[sup][/sup]. Perfection is death.*
*of course, as they say, nothing is greater than god: believe in nothing
If Perfection is Death, then God is Dead
Hell, I can do that. All I gotta do is find a big enough boulder, then chip off a small portion. I have now made TWO rocks one of whicb I can lift. The other is a rock so big I Myself can’t lift it.
I think the only way to get from a god to the god would be for the entity to cow me and the rest of the world into submission with plagues, quakes, famines, death, disease, until coerced worship is the only means to preserve ones life. Oh yeah, and then to claim it was done out of love.
Assuming a Christian God:
“If the Bible is the infallible word of you, and you are never wrong, what’s with all the contradictions? And none of that ‘mysterious ways’ bullshit”
Give me unlimited knowledge and wisdom to use it well: then I will believe you are either god or the devil, but I will not care which one of the two you are.
That is easy, I can do that with a bit of concrete and water (wine would be a waste, but would work as well). Many rocks out there I can not lift. But (SPOILER!!) I am not god.
That is a good one I had not heard/read before 