What fire? I’m curious now! 
One of two things will do:
Either god will come down, in all his, her or it’s glory and talk to me.
Or (and I prefer this one)
What gum said.
I would have to experience something that absolutely could not be explained by anything else. Of course, anything like that could be attributed to an advanced alien. And a sufficiently advanced alien would seem God-like, from our point of view.
I’ve often joked about believing in God if my chia pet suddenly burst into flames and started screaming at me.
I have a friend who became convinced her boss was in love with her. She’s under court-ordered psychiatric care now.
I’ll settle for Jesus popping up on my doorstep one morning and coming in to explain a few things.
<Ricky Ricardo voice>
“Jesus, you’ve got some esplainin’ to do…”
</RRv>
That sounds almost exactly like what happens when the “God Helmet” stimulates the proper spot on the temporal lobe magnetically – the feeling that an intelligent supernatural being, the identity of whom usually corresponds to the subject’s existing religious beliefs, is present.
Not to say that what you experience was or wasn’t real, of course – it just sounded quite interesting to me how similar your description was.
I’d start believing if irrefutably supernatural events began occuring, like those in the damn Left Behind novels. The portrayal of atheists in those books is ridiculous because they’re all ignorant, knee-jerk skeptics who continue to disbelieve even when the Revelations start playing out as written (well, sort of) and supernatural events are happening left and right. If all the world’s Christians suddenly vanished in Rapture, that would certainly give me pause.
I agree with most of these posts as being sufficient evidence to believe were they to happen, but I wanted to add:
Visiting God in heaven a la ‘Bruce Almighty’, coupled with a physical ‘souvenir’ of the event to make sure I didn’t just dream it.
But then you might think you’re in a short story written by a twelve-year-old.
"And then the monster disapeerd, and he hurd the alarm clock ringing, and he realsid it was all a dream.
Sudenly next to the alarm clock he saw… an old pocket watch, just like the profesor was wearing!!!"
And…
“Was God the profesor? Was the monster the devill? Was it just a dream… or not? THE END”
Disclaimer: I am not an atheist. I can speak atheist well as a second language though (often better than I can I can explain my perspectives to theists using theistic language, in fact).
From Angle 1:
Atheist:
“I’ve examined this symphonic performance in the best sound wave editor available, including frequencies the human ear can’t hear. I can’t find any trace of this ‘beauty’ you’re talking about.”
Consider that for a moment and then pose the question “What evidence might convince this atheist that beauty does exist”? — do you see why it’s the wrong question?
There are words for abstract concepts: goodness, beauty, quality, elegance, style. We have words for them because we experience these things as real. That doesn’t mean we believe them to have a physical manifestation as mass or electromagnetic force or causal power in physical events under laboratory conditions.
Now, I will readily grant you that the world’s discussion of “God” isn’t quite like the world’s discussion of “elegance” or “goodness”. (This despite the fact that etymologically “goodness” and “God” are close kin). Most centrally, abstract concepts do not generally go around forming their own opinions and having intentionality and acting with deliberate purpose. Any consideration for beliefs about God indicates that for an abstraction, God appears to be a very willful critter indeed.
Still, I suggest bracketing that off for a moment. It might be an anomalous aspects to what is otherwise best understood, nevertheless, as an abstraction, not as a member of the existing set of “entities possessing intent”, the rest of whom are very obviously and very compellingly not abstractions, and which do have mass and act on things in measurable manners and so on.
From Angle 2:
Theist: “We worship THAT DUDE as the manifestation of God. We know he was God because he rose from the dead, and that’s evidence enough for me.”
Cool, there’s a well-dressed pale fellow named Vladimir Dracula at the door. Well, I’m not sure there’s ever been a critical mass of credulous believers in vampirism as a real rather than nonreal phenomenon, but it lets me point up the fallacy in positing tests as determinants of Godhood. IF Vladimir Dracula could, hypothetically speaking, come a-knocking on your door, several thousand years old and quite undead and risen and walking around eons after having first been rendered dead and buried, would you worship the guy as God as a consequence of this evidence, whether you be theist or atheist now?
How about Superman? “Hi, I come from the planet Krypton, I can fly, bullets bounce off of me, I can melt stuff by staring hard at it or see through bricks, and I can lift all the weight of the world with one hand.” Why would Superman not be God? It would be a pretty amazing demonstration of something. If not sufficient to indicate that he’s God, what would be?
If the final sweep of the Hubble telescope’s deep field photography were to yield the image of a huge face, hundreds of millions of light years across, staring back and holding a sign that said (in 97 languages) “You found me at last, I am God”, do you worship that? Accept it as God?
I put it to you that the concept God actually makes no sense except as an abstraction. The moment you’ve got a physical entity present in the concrete, the question “Is this God” puts you right back where you started from. You’d be saying “I dunno, it’s something beyond my ken and pretty freakin’ impressive if not downright scary as shit, but God? I dunno, what is God? I don’t know whether this is God or not, what does it mean to be or not be God?”
I’m not entirely sure whether this is ‘you’ speaking or your hypothetical atheist speaking, but either way I don’t think I particularly like it.
None of these things you listed are ‘real’ in the sense that this computer monitor I’m looking at is real. They’re all words for types of subjective opinion. You know, as in the old saw ‘Beauty is in the eye of the beholder’.
Of course you’re not going some all-encompassing ‘right answer’ to the question of whether or not a piece of music is beautiful by examining it in a sound wave editor, just as you’ll never find whether a particular action is ‘good’, form of interior design is ‘elegant’ or item of clothing is ‘stylish’. Only ‘quality’ can, in certain cases for which there is an objective standard such as cut diamonds, be defined objectively.
Hmmm. My last two posts in this thread were utter fluff, and then this head-scratcher comes along for me to ponder!
you know what sucks is if atheists are right and there is no god, they can never die, see no god, and say i told you so.
**AHunter3 **, I understand your point, and I admire your “low-impact” approach to theism. But if you are willing to abstract God down to a concept like beauty, then even I can agree there’s a God and there’s no meaingful distinction between theism and atheism. It’s not the aheists you will need to convince of this definition, either. Most of us woyld be happy to accepg God as a construct of humand minds attempting to ecplain great mysteries.
I imagine more theists would object to your position than atheists.
And I recognoze there are some shortcomings in my OP question. Many of us would want to see evidence akin to the stories of our own religious mythologies; resurrections and the like. I myself was thinkg about the purported miracles at Lourdes when I wrote the OP.
And I also failed to come up with an example of a God that I could conceive of that would lead me to worship. Wonder certainly, work for probably, but not worship. Again, that’s probably my Catholic background. Most of our Christian gods seem to need a lot of regualr ass kissing.
I just thought it was an interesting question, though I’ve failed to come up with a satisfactory answer even for myself.
You can find a few people calling themselves atheists who might dispute this, though. There’s are New Age concepts about conciousness as some form of energy that could possibly survive the body’s death through some as-yet-undiscovered naturalistic process.
Personally I feel this is tin foil hat stuff, but I feel the same way about Christianity.
you got to admit though, if god-fearing people are wrong, whoop-dee-do, but if an atheist is wrong there’s a bit bigger consequences
note: not trying to offend/insult/argue with/or convert anybody, just thought i’d cover my bases
That’s cute. You’re new to Pascal’s Wager, then?
How about a giant message, spelled out in hot plasma letters billions or trillions of miles long, light years away, written by god, telling us who and what he/she/it is, the correct form of worship and behaviour, the reason for evil and suffering, and various other things. The message would rotate weekly between the ten most widely-spoken languages on earth.
This could only be done by God, or by an entity so powerful that for all practical purposes it would be the equivalent of God.