It would be especially cool if the message came from billions of light years away, and therefor was sent before the species to read it even existed yet.
Yeah, that would probably do it, if the explanations are good enough. 
Why do you think that if god-fearing people are wrong there’s no problem for them? What if they’re fearing / worshipping the wrong god?
For example, what if Christians and atheists are wrong and believers in Ra are correct? Ra may think that there is no difference between Christians and atheists - they both disbelieve in him, and he’s equally pissed at both. (Or perhaps he dislikes Christians more, because they actively worship another god, while atheists commit a lesser sin.)
Moreover, what if there is a god of some sort, but this god appreciates above all else rational thought. In this god’s opinion, atheists are a-OK. Believers who base their belief entirely on faith, however, are punished eternally for their epistemological sins.
There are numerous possibilities.
Blackknight, I was thinking much the same thing. What if it was one of the old Greek or Roman Gods… say, I dunno, Nautilous, Nimrod, Nemo? Whoever the hell that Sea God was. So about all he can do to the US is fuck with Florida and the Pacific coastline.
Wouldn’t that be a kick in the ass? Like, a halk-assed, kinda weak god that couldn’t touch you unless you got near salt water.
Boyo Jim:
Yeah, well put.
OK…as I pointed out, there are aspects to the abstraction that is God, if God is indeed an abstraction, that make it different from other abstractions.
The theists (a goodly many of them, at any rate) pray, and consider it to be more than a strictly internal meditative process. And, as I said, they ascribe to God intentionality and purpose.
I have prayed; have, indeed, received personal and direct revelations from God in response to prayer. Having said that, I will immediately turn around and say that it is inaccurate to describe God as an entity with a thought process, with opinions that develop over time, and that it is incorrect to describe the process of prayer as some kind of dialog between the praying person and the separate entity God who listens and replies. Confused? It is equally inaccurate and wrong to describe God as merely an abstraction representing our attempts to understand the world, or the world thus understood, or to characterize prayer as an internal process within the singular self.
These wrongnesses, these parallel misconceptualizations, are all attempts to describe the contents of an understanding or experience within the bounds of our everyday understandings of self and intention, identity and world — both the conventional theistic mother-goose-style oversimplifications and the conventional atheistic everyday-rational, nothing-new-happening-here reductionisms are doing this. And therein lies the problem: the abstraction God is a non-everyday kind of abstraction to experience, comprehend, get hit by.
(Fast clues: the Self you think you are, an individual Self, isn’t your only valid — and concretely & literally true — answer to the question “Who are you”. And in the process of understanding that, a lot of what you think you know about the difference between self and Context (world around you) becomes something that’s only true from a limited standpoint. The location of Intentionality, as contrasted with something more passive called Environment that is acted upon, gets interesting in a hurry, as does cause and effect.)
In much the same way that you cannot easily discuss with a 4 year old the sense in which, via the continued progress towards racial equality, the life or the spirit of Martin Luther King transcends his death — you’ll get bogged down either sketching a nonpermanently dead and still-living Martin Luther King or conjuring up a piece of invisible seafoam called “spirit” that persists even though he’d dead —I think people who have received that hit (and quite a mind-blowing hit it can be) have had very little success conveying what they’ve understood to others, and have instead contributed to this body of silly superficial religious theology that is touted as literal concrete truth. (Christianity seems to have more than its share of it but as far as I can tell all religions have a basketful of the stuff).
I’m saying “there’s something there”. That there has existed a rather vivid experience (or range of experiences) of sufficient commonality that folks who have had the experiences have recognized in the words (even the silly superficial stuff, sometimes, like suddenly seeing a modern political message in an old Mother Goose tale you’d known from childhood) enough of what they’ve experienced for them to say “Oh yeah, that’s what has given rise to our notion of God, that’s our name for it, God, now I see”. (One could, in that situation, just as easily not call it God and call it something else, invent a new word for it. Forget “God”, let me tell you about Ishma-Kabibble.)
Neptune. And he was also the god of earthquakes, not just the ocean.
Let’s see… whatever it was, it would have to be something only god could do - which I guess means something impossible(not just something that appeared to be impossible. So the thing would have to withstand examination and scrutiny and still have no other explanation. And I’d have to be sure it was something real and not a product of my own imagination.
I’d say that only an omnipotent, omniscient being could think up something that would convince me, with 100% certainty, that he existed.
Of course, that brings up the possibility of an omnipotent, omniscient (or nearly so) being who wasn’t God fooling Earthlings into thinking he was “the” God. Say, an alien like “Q” from Star Trek. Or maybe even another “supernatural” being—like Thor, or Merlin, or something—posing as “God.”
I mean, “any signifigantly advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic,” and all that. Hell, a lot of natural phenomena is/was mistaken for magic. Something or someone impressive and “alien” enough could probably convince a lot of people of it’s divinity, without having a single shred of holiness to it.
Supernatural events don’t mean Gods exist… just that something like magic, paranormal powers or elves exist… not God 
We had a thread about beleiving in the Supernatural not being against an atheist position.
As for me... if there were justice in the world... love were greater than hate and men respected their neighbors I might beleive in God. So I guess I will die an atheist.
If I heard voices in my head I would go to a neurologist… not a church. Unless the voices accurately predicted the future of course.
Aesiron’s thoughts pretty well mirror my own. Even in the presence of an apparent “miracle,” I’d be inclined to interpret events as evidence of some natural phenomenon or trickery I (or humanity at large) hadn’t encountered before. Even someone presenting absolute proof of some supernatural ability (say, telepathy) wouldn’t cause me to take the leap to “there is a god” - only that there are additional wonders in the natural world we can’t explain yet.
This God would have to be subjected to a 100-question interview. Maybe more. I would have to be convinced of my own sanity. (Really. I think most mystics/ what have-you were bordering on insane. You try living forty days in the desert on mushrooms and see what it does to you.) And then, damnit, he woul dhave to explain somethings like progeria (an aging disease which only affects children), childhood luekemia, polio, child abuse, child rape, why did my father abandon me, and so on and so forth.
It could take a while, and after all that I probably still wouldn’t worship him. If he wishes to make me afraid of him, then he could I’m sure, but that still wouldnt’ mean wordship.
Whenever subjects like this come up, I wonder exactly what it is that the folks demanding proof hope to accomplish. It seems to me that a large component of “God”, as he is commonly presented by most religions, is the fact that some type of a leap of faith is required, taking the existence of God completely out of the realm of scientific proof. If “God” were to show up, work all kinds of miracles, change the Sun’s path through the sky, raise the dead, etc…How would any of us be able to say that it was “God” and not, say, a wormhole alien? Which leads me to Weirddave’s Theistic Uncertainty Principle (with apologies to Heisenberg, and full realization that other have likely had the same thought before): The act of proving something or someone God invalidates the concept of God so as to make the proof meaningless.
I’m honestly not sure there is such evidence, but as an open-minded skeptic I know there must be something that would do it for me. I mean, I’m open to all possibilities. I have to be. One of the cornerstones of scientific thought is that all explanations are provisional pending the introduction of better evidence, and as far as I’m concerned that goes for the existence of God as well. Right now, given all the available evidence, the most reasonable conclusion is that supernatural deities are an invention of the human mind. Implicit in that statement is the possibility that new evidence could make another conclusion more reasonable.
And as others have said, a personal experience would not be sufficient. By coincidence, I watched Contact again over the weekend, and while it’s still a flawed movie, there’s a lot to recommend about it with respect to this debate. In particular, I was impressed again by the rather nifty irony of putting a scientist in a position of knowing something is true without having a scrap of evidence to back it up for others. It’s handled rather hamfistedly in the film (James Woods demanding in an inquisitional setting: “You want us to take it all on faith?” Yeah, Mr. Z, lighten up a bit, we get it), but it’s still a very good idea. And best of all, the film faithfully shows the difference between how a scientist thinks and how a believer thinks: Arroway has to concede that without evidence to back up her narrative, she basically has nothing at all. (In this predicament, in turning Arroway into essentially the kind of prophet figure in whom she herself would put no credence, the movie distills the question at the heart of the debate more effectively than Sagan’s original book. Doesn’t mean it’s better, just that this one aspect is clearer. JMHO.)
That’s where I’d be in that kind of situation. A visit to Heaven? A voice from above? I would personally interpret such input as a problem with my neurochemical mechanism, and seek medical intervention. At least, I hope I would.
Whatever the evidence is, it would have to be (1) tangible and reproducible, (2) available to people other than me, and (3) utterly inexplicable by known or theoretical physical means. That’s a pretty tall order. But were it met, I would have to re-evaluate. How could I do anything but?
By the way:
If you haven’t already read it, you may find some amusement in Terry Pratchett’s Small Gods.
there is no way to prove something doesn’t exist because we haven’t been everywhere in the universe, probably never will.
there is no way to prove something exists because our sense of reality is based on our senses. our senses can be fooled. forgive a fictional analogy, but something on a level of The Matrix. of course there is always the possibility that i am a in a coma and that the entire world i inhabit (and you for that matter) are just figments of my unconscious imagination. i’m not suggesting this is the truth, but can we ever definitively say something is real. do you remember your plato? everything we see could just be a shadow on the cave wall.
for all i know you are the results of a million monkeys at a million keyboards with scientists screening the results 
Close. I am ONE monkey at a keyboard, flinging figurative feces.
You’re an ape, not a monkey. Bit of a difference.
You’ve never even met me.
I don’t think this ape would make it all that difficult. Hey, grant me a wish, God. F’rinstance I wish to go to Mars. Right now. And live. That means I go to Mars in my street clothes, and walk around perfectly fine; then I stroll up to the Spirit Rover, and wave hello to all the folks back on Earth. Immediately after that, I instantaneously appear in the JPL, and tell the dumbfounded scientists there that they are about to download a picture of me waving to them from the slopes of the Columbia Hills above Gusev Crater (I got back to Earth with supraluminal, speed after all). Later that week I’m on Larry King discussing the miracle God performed at my behest.
That’d about do it for me.
How about Carl Sagan’s Contact answer to the “does God exist?” puzzle – plain and simple messages to us encoded in the digits of universal constants like pi. And not something Bible Code-ish that could only be found through creative interpretation of the data; it would have to be straightforward and obvious to anybody, and beyond any possibility of it being a coincidence … what might work? A message like “GOD” would be expected, being so short, but “Hi, this is the creator of the universe here; I’m encoding this ASCII text in binary, starting at the 10[sup]whatever[/sup]th digit of pi, so you will know how to properly worship me, but only once your computers have gotten really, really fast. Now then, on the subject of how I wish you to worship me … you’re going to need some antibacterial hand soap, a stretchy rubber octopus, some pieces of scrap wood, and some red paint. Go ahead – I’ll wait.” etc., now, that might be a good start…
This is a tough one for me, and something I have been pondering on my own.
Are there no beings between God and us, and wouldn’t they have some god-like powers.? A lot of the things people have mentioned, I wouldn’t be able to tell if they were done by a god-like being or the ‘creator of all things’ God.
But then I wondered would it matter? If a god-like being took a personal interest in me, while God did not, what choice would I have. If I god-like being told me to quite my job and just plant pomegranate trees, and gather followers. I would consider it stupid, but this god-like being could probably throw me into a pocket-hell-universe inhabited by all my nightmares for disobeying him.
To believe in the Christian God, I would take the arrival of a alien flotilla of lightships. Millions of years ago, at the height of this alien civilization, a prophet rose among them. He prophesized the coming of the Son of God at a time in the future, and at the galactic coordinates corresponding to Earth. The have prophecies of what Jesus will do, that are more accurate and detailed than our Gospels. The Prophet reveal that it was their mission to leave their homes on a pilgrimage to Earth and pave the way for the Second Coming of Christ. They left their home traveling faster than light. They meet other alien cultures who were similarly instructed to travel to Earth. After their arrival there is a contiuous stream of alien civilizations arriving at the same time.
That would convince me.