God? (Got proof? Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more) [ed. title]

Great Debates
41

[QUOTE=hotflungwok]
That’s because it isn’t innate, it’s interpreted. If it was innate, everyone would have it.
You sound confident of this. Confident enough to present actual evidence that it was in fact Jesus/God/Satan that you experienced, and not just a subjective experience you interpreted to be something you wanted it to be?
[/QUOTE]

Oh, the experiences were very subjective. But that doesn’t mean they’re not the way I called them. I’m a bit of a stickler for being accurate and honest about things, which isn’t to say I’m perfect. Main point is that I’m not stupid and wishy-washy about things I’ve been witness to (as your intellectual argument seems to suggest I might be).

I suppose I could present a strong objective case that any reasonable person with a brain would say, “Hey, this guy isn’t kidding; there really is strong evidence/proof that God and Satan are real!”

The problem with me trying to go about making my case with you is that I kinda get the feeling that your head is more into the “I’ll show you!” mentality than it is into a sincere, humble desire to examine things that I might lay out in order to get to the truth. (Please forgive me if I’m wrong in saying that.) On top of that, it would require me to basically use the shadow of the devil to contrast it against the light of God, as it were, and that would mean that I would have to reference specific things that no sane person would wish to consider, as its locus is couched in a very spiritually dark place.

It’s better and easier if you take my advice I gave to the other guy and get on your knees and sincerely ask God/Jesus to help you find a path that pleases them. There’s no other way to say it. Good Luck! :slight_smile:

42

[QUOTE=GuyNblueJeans]
I suppose I could present a strong objective case that any reasonable person with a brain would say, “Hey, this guy isn’t kidding; there really is strong evidence/proof that God and Satan are real!”

The problem with me trying to go about making my case with you is that I kinda get the feeling that your head is more into the “I’ll show you!” mentality than it is into a sincere, humble desire to examine things that I might lay out in order to get to the truth.
[/QUOTE]

It always boils down to that in the end, though, doesn’t it? The grand claim that objective evidence does exist, but it won’t be shown “because you would just dismiss it anyway!”
Just once, show some guts, and show us the objective evidence.
Please.

43

[QUOTE=GenericAzn]
I realize that many people believe in god, jesus, buddha, allah, etc.

However, what kind of proof is there to substantiate any of these beliefs?
[/quote]

Jesus and Buddha are historical figures, and their existence is documented as well as one would expect for anyone living in their places and times. Allah I do not believe in; you’ll have to find a Muslim to answer that one. Now, as for God:

1.) Like several others who have posted in this thread, I have had personal experiences which can only be explained by the existence of God.

2.) The existence of God is corroborated by enormous numbers of people, living in an enormous variety of places and times. This collection of evidence and testimony is sufficiently vast that it cannot be explained away as a mass hallucination.

3.) The universe exists, and therefore it must have had a beginning point. As it’s impossible for something to emerge from nothing, the existence of the universe can only be explained by the existence of some thing capable of transcending time and the entire chain of causation. I’m not aware of any reasonable explanation for what this thing might be, other than God.

4.) The Word of Jesus and of some of His followers contains an enduring wisdom that exceeds anything that has ever arisen from a purely earthly source. Thus, it must have come from some divine entity. Since Jesus and his followers agree that the divine entity in question was God, I see no reason to doubt them.

5.) The very first life form to ever exist must have arisen either from random chemical motion or from divine intervention. No one has ever observed any life form arising from random chemical motion or offered a plausible scenario in which it would happen. Consequently we can safely rule out the random chemical motion explanation. That leaves only the divine explanation.

6.) There have probably been millions of carpenters during human history, and almost all have been forgotten shortly after their death. If one carpenter beocmes the central figure in human history and remains in that position for almost 2,000 years after death, this is a difference that demands an explanation.

7.) I’ve encountered many Christians who have a type of life that only makes sense to me as the Peace of the Lord.

There are many areas of life besides religion where multiple conflicting beliefs vie with each other: politics, economics, education, science, diet, art, literature, music. We approach religion (or at least I do) the same way we approach any other field of experience: by observation and deduction.

(On a side note, I don’t believe your assertion that each religion has followers willing to kill themselves for their god. Do you have a cite that this holds true for Buddhism, Shinto, Taoism, Confuscianism, Mormonism, Christianity, Judaism, and Jainism?)

Actually, I can prove that wrong simply by pointing out that your claim contradicts what God has told us, that it’s unrelated to real spiritual experiences, that you have no followers to corroborate the claim, and that you made it up on the spot.

God loves the entire human race too much to do so. Buddha, as far as I know, never claimed the ability to do so. As for why Allah isn’t doing so if he exists, that’s a $%&# good question.

God has already sent Jesus Christ to save us all. That ought to be quite enough of a miracle for anyone.

44

[QUOTE=ITR champion]
Allah I do not believe in; you’ll have to find a Muslim to answer that one. Now, as for God:
[/QUOTE]

This is always an odd sentiment to my ears. “Allah” is just the Arabic word for God; it’s a bit like saying “I believe in God, but not in Dios.” Or saying “I think John Calvin was a great man, and admire much of German culture, but Jean Chauvin was a putz and there is nothing of value to be found in Deutschland.” Or “I’m a cat person, but I can’t stand los gatos.” Etc.

I mean, sure, you can believe that Allah matches the qualities Christians ascribe to the unique supreme monotheistic entity rather than those qualities which Muslims ascribe to the unique supreme monotheistic entity, but it’s a bit odd to say you think God and Allah have separate referents, the one existent and the other not.

45

Your comments shows a basic misunderstanding of scientific principle. **Scientific theories are not dismissed if unproven. ** They are dismissed if there is insurmountable evidence that they are false.

The Theory of Relativity remains unproven. The experiments which use that Theory as a premise provide more evidence that the premise holds true, but they do not prove the Theory.

What this particular piece was suggesting is that sometimes scientific inspiration can come in flashes. (As I recall, Einstein got to speculating in his own mind one day on what it might be like to ride on a light wave.) I don’t see any reason to get bent out of shape at the thought that scientists and the religious might be inspired in similar ways. That shouldn’t come as a surprise. You know, don’t you, that sometimes they are the same people?

Pure rubbish! How many times do we have to acknowledge the horrors of the Crusades? The Inquisition? Abortion Clinic Bombings? Laws that prolong suffering? Laws that prohibit gay marriage? Islamic Jihad? Yet you say we “carefully ignore” the bad things done in God’s name. That is not a true statement. Are you just ignorant of the facts or are you deliberately misleading by “carefully ignoring” our acknowledgments?

But what happens when someone like you does a bad thing such as spreading misinformation in the name of science? You are working against science when you do that.

To the OP: It is possible to be a Christian, believe that Allah and God are the same and value the teachings of the Buddha. It’s also possible to be a Buddhist and value the teachings of the Christ and many of the teachings of the Koran. I don’t know what the possibilities are for a Muslim.

Moses and Joshua, given the time period in which they lived, would probably have believed in many gods – especially gods for different nations, but they would have believed in only one god – Yahweh – for Israel.

46

[QUOTE=hotflungwok]
You sound confident of this. Confident enough to present actual evidence that it was in fact Jesus/God/Satan that you experienced, and not just a subjective experience you interpreted to be something you wanted it to be?
[/QUOTE]

With pleasure. I was a militant atheist for most of my life. (If you don’t believe me, search for threads that I started around 2001-2 in this very forum.) At that time, I obviously did not want to believe in God. I was scornful and contemptuous of anyone who did, and thus I obviously did not want to have any spiritual experience at all. Thus my spiritual experiences cannot be explained by my mind dreaming up the experiences that I wanted to have. Scratch that theory.

Of course we can talk more generally than just about me. We’ve heard claims that people who find God are merely having a hallucination of something that will comfort them. Is God comforting? Sure, for some people. But for many others He is the exact opposite. Encountering God for the first time can be perplexing, disturbing, even terrifying. As the song says, “Twas Grace that taught my heart to fear.” Obviously no one’s psyche would create something just to give the heart some fears.

47

[QUOTE=ITR champion]
With pleasure. I was a militant atheist for most of my life. (If you don’t believe me, search for threads that I started around 2001-2 in this very forum.) At that time, I obviously did not want to believe in God. I was scornful and contemptuous of anyone who did, and thus I obviously did not want to have any spiritual experience at all. Thus my spiritual experiences cannot be explained by my mind dreaming up the experiences that I wanted to have. Scratch that theory.
[/QUOTE]

It’s not possible for the mind to dream up experiences one does not want to have? The existence of nightmares, bad trips, etc., would seem to destroy this as a universal rule.

I have no doubt you had some profoundly moving experiences (it’d be very difficult to tenably hold that a man was misguided as to the sensations of his own experiences), but I, like every atheist here, am unconvinced that they were caused by God. Of course, none of us have had your experiences (just as you haven’t had ours), so it is at least a priori possible that your experiences do indeed provide you with acceptable evidence, just in an incommunicable form. But that’s no good to us; it does not serve the function of public proof. Is there anything you could give us which would provide reason to believe that God was the cause of your experiences, or otherwise give reason to believe in God?

48

Your post about all of the places you have been and the things you have done just blew me away. You’ve tried all the things that I would have to suggest. You seem so earnest. Do you spend much time among the poor or homeless?

Today I was trying to bring some order to my guest room. It was beginning to resemble Dresden. I came across a photograph that I made three years ago of my favorite painting when I was in Paris. It gave me chills to just remember that I had actually seen it with my own eyes. Hemingway used to study it for understanding. Part of your post reminded me of that painting. So I found a copy of it and I’m making a gift of it to you. Just don’t tell the people at the Musee D’Orsay!

Paul Cezanne, Pommes et oranges c. 1899

49

[QUOTE=ITR champion]
1.) Like several others who have posted in this thread, I have had personal experiences which can only be explained by the existence of God.
[/quote]
Do you have objective evidence, something that can be shown to others and convince even skeptics ? No ? Then there are other explanations than God.

[QUOTE=ITR champion]
2.) The existence of God is corroborated by enormous numbers of people, living in an enormous variety of places and times. This collection of evidence and testimony is sufficiently vast that it cannot be explained away as a mass hallucination.
[/quote]
You could also use the same argument to claim that UFO abductions, fairies, magic, Santa Claus and psychic powers are all true. If a million people believe a stupid thing it’s still a stupid thing.

[QUOTE=ITR champion]
3.) The universe exists, and therefore it must have had a beginning point. As it’s impossible for something to emerge from nothing, the existence of the universe can only be explained by the existence of some thing capable of transcending time and the entire chain of causation. I’m not aware of any reasonable explanation for what this thing might be, other than God.
[/quote]
Plenty of holes in this one. First, at most it pushes the question a single step back; where did God come from ? And if the answer is “he always existed”, one could claim the same of some previous/greater universe ours was spawned from; that it too has always been. Second, how do you know the universe ( s) couldn’t appear out of nothing ? What’s to stop it ? Third, why would it have to be God, and not some mindless force or the Devil or several gods or any number of other things ?

[QUOTE=ITR champion]
4.) The Word of Jesus and of some of His followers contains an enduring wisdom that exceeds anything that has ever arisen from a purely earthly source. Thus, it must have come from some divine entity. Since Jesus and his followers agree that the divine entity in question was God, I see no reason to doubt them.
[/quote]
Purely a matter of opinion. He doesn’t strike me as any wiser than some random guru-of-the-week. And given the incredible levels of evil Christianity has inflicted on the world, a real being of superhuman wisdom would either have created a better religion or kept his mouth shut, and not inflicted such horror on the world.

[QUOTE=ITR champion]
5.) The very first life form to ever exist must have arisen either from random chemical motion or from divine intervention. No one has ever observed any life form arising from random chemical motion or offered a plausible scenario in which it would happen. Consequently we can safely rule out the random chemical motion explanation. That leaves only the divine explanation.
[/quote]
There are plenty of plausible scenarios as to how it would happen. And we haven’t observed it happening because we don’t have millions of years and a planetery ocean in our labs, although we certainly see tendancies that way. And the self assembly of organic life is not “random chemical motion”; such molecules have a strong tendancy to self-assemble into complex forms, some of which life uses.

[QUOTE=ITR champion]
6.) There have probably been millions of carpenters during human history, and almost all have been forgotten shortly after their death. If one carpenter beocmes the central figure in human history and remains in that position for almost 2,000 years after death, this is a difference that demands an explanation.
[/quote]
Luck. He had the right message, at the right time, and the right things happened after his death. If things had been a bit different he’d be just another random religious loon.

[QUOTE=ITR champion]
7.) I’ve encountered many Christians who have a type of life that only makes sense to me as the Peace of the Lord.
[/quote]
And I’ve seen plenty who are bigots, jerks or just plain loons. There’s little evidence that religion makes people or the world better, and plenty that they and it are made worse. Christian or otherwise.

[QUOTE=ITR champion]
There are many areas of life besides religion where multiple conflicting beliefs vie with each other: politics, economics, education, science, diet, art, literature, music. We approach religion (or at least I do) the same way we approach any other field of experience: by observation and deduction.
[/quote]
No, we don’t, or it would be dismissed out of hand, the way we dismiss claims of fairies out of hand.

[QUOTE=ITR champion]
Actually, I can prove that wrong simply by pointing out that your claim contradicts what God has told us, that it’s unrelated to real spiritual experiences, that you have no followers to corroborate the claim, and that you made it up on the spot.
[/quote]
And except for his/her honesty in admitting that it was made up, that’s just as much evidence, and just as sensible as any other religion.

[QUOTE=ITR champion]
God has already sent Jesus Christ to save us all. That ought to be quite enough of a miracle for anyone.
[/QUOTE]
If there was a benevolent God, he certainly wouldn’t have sent someone to create a religion as grim, hateful, destructive and miserable as Christianity.

[QUOTE=Zoe]
What this particular piece was suggesting is that sometimes scientific inspiration can come in flashes.
[/quote]
No, it was a lie, intended to convince people that religion and science are equal by ignoring the important parts of science, such as finding the facts and testing one’s theories. The things that make it better than religion.

[QUOtE=Zoe]
Pure rubbish! How many times do we have to acknowledge the horrors of the Crusades? The Inquisition? Abortion Clinic Bombings? Laws that prolong suffering? Laws that prohibit gay marriage? Islamic Jihad? Yet you say we “carefully ignore” the bad things done in God’s name. That is not a true statement. Are you just ignorant of the facts or are you deliberately misleading by “carefully ignoring” our acknowledgments?
[/quote]
And how often is it handwaved away with the No True Scotsman Fallacy ? "Oh, yes they did all those bad things, but the weren’t true Christians. It’s a circular argument; “How do you know Christianity is good ? Because Christians do good in Gods name ? What about these people who do evil in God’s name ? Oh, they aren’t true Christians. Why ? Because they aren’t doing good !”

[QUOTE=Zoe]
But what happens when someone like you does a bad thing such as spreading misinformation in the name of science?
[/quote]
Hopefully, someone corrects me, of course. And fortunately, in science, unlike religion the term “misinformation” has meaning, as opposed to religion where it doesn’t since it’s all made up.

50

[QUOTE=Sgt Schwartz]
As an atheist, I will try to weigh in here. Jesus, Moses, Buddha probably existed. It would be extremely difficult to make up the men and the legends surrounding them. There had been beliefs in a god or gods of some type probably for as long as humans were self aware. If a person very bright for his time stated that his knowledge came from a supreme being, he may be listened to a bit more than someone who said, “Hey listen to me, eating live animals is really a bad idea health wise. Also, try to love one another.” Through a deity into the mix, i.e. “God says this is the way to eternal life and happiness,” and you may get more people to listen to you.

Sgt Schwartz
[/QUOTE]

In my study of history, there is no historical reference to Moses, had he been raised by a Pharaoh’s wife there would have been some indication of it in Egyptian writings. some of the stories,such as the time in the desert showed no exodus of a large number of people, and no sign of a pharoh who died in the Red Sea,and the Pharaoh’s sons all lived to adulthood as they have found the graves of 50 (the Pharaoh of the time indicated.

Monavis

51

[QUOTE=GuyNblueJeans]
Oh, the experiences were very subjective. But that doesn’t mean they’re not the way I called them. I’m a bit of a stickler for being accurate and honest about things, which isn’t to say I’m perfect. Main point is that I’m not stupid and wishy-washy about things I’ve been witness to (as your intellectual argument seems to suggest I might be).
[/QUOTE]

I did not accuse you of being stupid or wishy-washy, nor do I have to. All I have to do is accuse you of being human. Human’s have all kinds of interesting psychological features that developed to help them survive. When presented with complexity, sometimes these give bad results. You don’t have to be stupid for this happen, every time you see a face in a collection of shapes it’s happening. Some part of you wants there to be a god, and so that’s the pattern you try to fit to things.

Please do.

Fair enough, I’ve seen enough of these claims that I tend to start out as skeptical right off the bat. But if you can present actual evidence, then I won’t have any choice but to accept it.

And there’s the cop out. This is a new one on me.

Been there, done that, got the candle.

52

[QUOTE=ITR champion]
With pleasure. I was a militant atheist for most of my life. (If you don’t believe me, search for threads that I started around 2001-2 in this very forum.) At that time, I obviously did not want to believe in God. I was scornful and contemptuous of anyone who did, and thus I obviously did not want to have any spiritual experience at all. Thus my spiritual experiences cannot be explained by my mind dreaming up the experiences that I wanted to have. Scratch that theory.
[/QUOTE]

You didn’t? Wow, that’s rather unique. Every human I know wants, on some level, some kind of magic. Something different, something deeper, something, anything. I’m going to go ahead and guess that you’re no different. If you can prove that you actually had no desire for deeper experiences, go for it. One of the things about being an athiest is you tend to spend a lot of time thinking about or discussing things you don’t believe in. Tends to keep it on your mind. My desire for this has lessened, but early on I certainly had a part of me that wanted me to be wrong.

Wow, you really don’t know people do you. People make their own fears all the time. Wanna guess how common fear of public speaking is?

53

[QUOTE=ITR champion]
Obviously no one’s psyche would create something just to give the heart some fears.
[/QUOTE]

Spoken like someone who’s never been afflicted by a phobia :).

Fear is an adaptive trait: it gets you to go away from things that are dangerous. But adaptive traits aren’t perfect (as they might be were we designed by an omnipotent omnibenevolent God): sometimes the fear module in our head–and here I’m speaking very simplistically, not within the rigors of cognitive science, of course–overreacts.

Your posts on this subject are full of way too many “obviously!” statements that are not nearly so obvious as you claim. Jesus’s teachings are great, sure, but I’m not sure I’d call them any better than Gandhi’s teachings. You don’t accept the miracle of Mohammed’s angelic flight from Mecca to Jerusalem, but you expect me to accept the miracle of Jesus’s resurrection; what’s the significant difference between these two purported miracles? The origin of life only needs to happen once in billions of years in trillions of tons of water; the fact that it hasn’t occurred in a laboratory in the couple of centuries we’ve been watching does not indicate it was divinely caused.

I have great respect for many religious folks, and I deny neither their experiences of God nor their interpretations of those experiences. I do, however, ask for them to give me the same respect: when I say that I have looked for the divine and not found it, I expect them not to deny my experience or my interpretation of that experience. If their interpretation is incommensurate with mine, of course I’m going to go with mine: after all, my experiences support my interpretation, not theirs.

If you want to persuade me that my interpretation of my experiences is incorrect, you’ll have to do more than make smug demands that I keep trying. I first heard those smug demands from a Hare Krishna, who insisted that I too would have Krishna’s divine nature revealed to me if I would just chant for long enough. I don’t doubt that’s true: a rudimentary understanding of brainwashing techniques indicates that a regimen of physical denial coupled with a repetitive, preferably aesthetically attractive statement of facts will eventually result in an acceptance of those facts, no matter what the nature of the facts is.

Daniel

54

[QUOTE=Czarcasm]

Just once, show some guts, and show us the objective evidence.
Please.
[/QUOTE]

Show some guts?? If there is no objective evidence then how is this related to having or not having courage?

Show some guts and admit this makes no sense at all.

55

[QUOTE=GenericAzn]
And the whole idea of a hell and a heaven is very shifty and dubious
[/QUOTE]

I really like that - “shifty and dubious”. bwahaha.

Although I rely on, and benefit from, a belief in God, I also agree completely with your criticisms of the religious model as presented. It IS shifty and dubious. I’ve been an atheist several times, for those exact reasons.

I never understood how it could be that God is “universal” if I have to go to some minister or preacher or someone to get access. Why would there be a gatekeeper?

Here are some ideas we were discussing a little while ago for you to consider, GenericAzn. Nothing earthshaking (and it may not have any meaning at all for you) but it’s what I can offer by way of an explanation for my choices. I think it’s up to each of us to find and create our own version of God, our own slice of the infinite. I don’t think there is “an” answer.

56

[QUOTE=Czarcasm]
So, to receive evidence that God exists, I have to first believe that he exists?
[/QUOTE]

That’s pretty much what the hilarious Stephen Baldwin said on whatever religious show he was babbling on last night- once you become a Christian, things are “revealed” to you that you couldn’t see before.

57

[QUOTE=Wee Bairn]
That’s pretty much what the hilarious Stephen Baldwin said on whatever religious show he was babbling on last night- once you become a Christian, things are “revealed” to you that you couldn’t see before.
[/QUOTE]
Of course, the exact same thing is true when you become a Hare Krishna, or a Scientologist, or a Sufi, or a Zen Buddhist, or a Wahabbi Muslim, or a member of just about any religion (excluding Unitarianism). Problem is, these revelations are often mutually exclusive.

Daniel

58

[QUOTE=Chief Pedant]
In my 25 years as an ED physician I’ve had a number of occasions to resuscitate people who were in the clinically sorta dead category. They were as near-death as anyone else’s near-death folks.

I made it a point to ask the coherent survivors what the experience was like.

Not a single one ever had a good story.

I think if you’re nutty, you’re nutty. And nutty folks who have a near-death experience (or are nutty enough to think they did) recount nutty events, indistinguishable from dreams or what they would expect to experience should they actually die.
[/QUOTE]

I guess for some, nutty is good enough, but for dozens of other physicians it isn’t. They have written books and done research on the subject which has shown consciousness does live after the dead of the body.

59

[QUOTE=Czarcasm]
It always boils down to that in the end, though, doesn’t it? The grand claim that objective evidence does exist, but it won’t be shown “because you would just dismiss it anyway!”
Just once, show some guts, and show us the objective evidence.
Please.
[/QUOTE]

No it doesn’t always boil down to you having to do something in order to find God. Some people just get hit by lightening, die, and God is revealed to them.

That’s what I call objective evidence.

It can happen at any time in any manner.

60

[QUOTE=lekatt]
No it doesn’t always boil down to you having to do something in order to find God. Some people just get hit by lightening, die, and God is revealed to them.

That’s what I call objective evidence.

It can happen at any time in any manner.
[/QUOTE]

Then you clearly do not know what “objective evidence” is.