Okay, so I’ve been talking with some atheist and they are always telling me to provide them with “proof” of the existence of God. Is there such a thing? Can anybody give me a valid, logically sound proof without using the word “faith”? How many Christians do we have out there?
Maybe the LBMB would be a better place to ask this? (not to deter you from posting here of course) They’re a bunch of freaked out god-squaders.
Yours repulsed by religion
Andy
I’m a Christian, from the cradle, and I feel fairly confident in telling you now that you’re never going to be able to prove God. At least, not in this lifetime.
I could go on, but that might turn this into a GD thread, so I’ll stop.
As I understand it the key concept of Christianity is FAITH. IF you lack it you aren’t going to find salvation.
So the proof athiets ask for and decline as proof, is EXACTLY what proves Christianity.
A vicious circle indeed.
If there were a God, He would inspire people to place their original posts in the correct forum.
He doesn’t, therefore He isn’t. QED. (OK, GED is more like it, but whatcha gonna do.)
Asking for proof of God’s existence is - well, silly. The question of God’s existence probably can’t be answered in a context where the concept of proof (scientific proof, anyway) has any meaning. (Did that make sense ?) I guess atheists who insist on seeing proof of God’s existence are about as misled as theists who try to provide scientific proof.
Norman (agnostic)
There is no empirical proof of God.
That is why it is called faith. With faith, you do not need empirical proof.
Yer pal,
Satan
http://www.raleighmusic.com/board/Images/devil.gif
TIME ELAPSED SINCE I QUIT SMOKING:
One week, 18 hours, 21 minutes and 0 seconds.
310 cigarettes not smoked, saving $38.82.
Life saved: 1 day, 1 hour, 50 minutes.
Most modern concepts of God don’t lend themselves well to the notion of “proof.” God is typically omnipresent yet invisble, or spiritual and not material, and so on.
Some earlier notions of God lent themselves much better to proof (or perhaps I should say disproof)… e.g. you could go to the top of Mt. Olympus and see that Zeus wasn’t there hurling thunderbolts.
Most of those who have tried to prove the existence of God, like Aquinas with his cosmological proof or Descartes with his ontological proof, have instead provided some sort of arguement for the existence of God if you accept their assumptions. Actual proof is hard to come by, and, IMHO, impossible.
“…Dark Matter, every pound of which weighs ten thousand pounds” -Futurama
Im an athist I am not in the habit of aks for proof. But what realy gets to me is all the time im ask “if there is no god then what started the big bang or genisis”. Well then how did god come to be?
History is on our side we will bury you -Nikita Kruschev
No.
I don’t know who these atheists are who ask you for “proof” of God, but they sound awfully stereotypical and, well, not much like the real ones you’ll find 'round here.
If you can handle a bit of self-promotion, you will find an incredibly interesting article related to this subject here: http://www.csicop.org/si/9907/scientific-skepticism.html
Threll’s signature says:
“We will bury you” was actually a poor translation of an old, time-honored Russian expression Kruschev was using. The expression is much better translated as “We are going to live so long that when you die of natural causes, we’ll be there at your funeral to bury you.”
(Esperanto enthusiasts like to bring this up whenever somebody says, “Mistranslation never hurt anyone”.)
Christinity isn’t just based on faith. God’s proof is Jesus Christ, at least for the Christian.
Some books - Evidence that Demands a Verdit and More than a Carpenter I think the author of both of those is Josh McDowell.
If I remember correctly, he started out trying to refute Christianity and actully fortified it. He’s now a Christian.
Even God got ticked off when people asked him for proof.
Yes, I have heard that the translation was different but I decided to keep it that way to reflect cold war hostility.
I once considered myself a Christian and was in a charismatic church. At that time the “proof” Elleon mentioned above somehow made sense to me. But after a few people in the church let me down, or in a couple cases, purposely took advantage of me, the bloom was off the rose enough, so to speak, that I actually thought about the logic of being a Christian. And I realized the statement “Jesus is the proof” was a proof of nothing. I felt a lot of inner joy when I first “became a Christian” and I guess I considered this joy proof of Jesus and Jesus the proof of everything else. But the joy didn’t last forever, and my faith flagged and when I tried to buttress it by logically understanding it I realized it is a subject that can’t be logically explained.
That was about 20 years ago, and I have long since abandoned Christianity. And while I don’t have enough faith to be an atheist either, I think the only thing Christians can say concerning god is that they have subjective proof of god, proof that is satisfactory to them, but as so many posters on this OP have detailed, there is no objective proof of even the existence of god, much less proof concerning Jesus being god.
Well, I understand how that is. But you should NEVER let anyone come between you and God. They’re bad practice in faith shouldn’t be the end of yours. As for the lack of joy… you can always fan the flames of that fire. I find great joy when I talk to others about God, it helps me keep God and Jesus on the front burners. I hope someday you can feel that again. God wants us all to love him.
**
Maybe nobody is coming between anyone. Maybe there really is no God. Maybe they’re right.
Or maybe His name is Allah and the stories as told to the prophet Muhammad by the angel Gabriel which make up The Koran, the first wordfs of which are, “This book is not to be doubted.”
Or maybe Jesus was not the son of God, and the Jews are right in waiting for the correct messiah to lead them to milk and honey. The prophesies in the Old Testament remain unfulfilled to them, and they think the New Testament is a bunch of hooey.
Or maybe God is all of these things, and more, and the right way to understand Him is to listen to how He spoke to everyone ina language that they all could easily understand.
Tell me - can you prove the Koran wrong? Can you prove without a doubt that Jesus was the messiah, thereby showing the Jews they are wrong? In fact, can you prove anything to any athiest of nostic that there is a God, any of them?
I don’t think so. Be happy with your faith. I would never belittle it. But if you are looking for converts, it will take a lot more than claims of “the Bible says so” and “the empty grave” to convince anyone here that you are right and they are wrong.
Yer pal,
Satan
http://www.raleighmusic.com/board/Images/devil.gif
TIME ELAPSED SINCE I QUIT SMOKING:
One week, four days, 1 hour, 58 minutes and 32 seconds.
443 cigarettes not smoked, saving $55.41.
Life saved: 1 day, 12 hours, 55 minutes.
I found it easy to blow off God when I was a younger person. This turns out to have been a simple lack of life experience. As the years went by I found myself in serious deep shit many times. Really serious.
Like the time my wife was delivering our child and she had to have an emergency c-section and her blood pressure was dropping too fast and the baby’s pulse was weakening.
I found myself appealing to something more important than medical science. There was definitely a moment there when I was sure that Somebody could make this work out all right, regardless of what the EKG said. I found myself “praying”, although I didn’t call it that at the time. I just remember thinking, “Get me out of this! Make this part work out okay and I can take it from there.” And I was absolutely certain that it could be done, again; regardless of what any of the machines or people in the room said.
And it all worked out fine. I have a beautiful baby boy and a healthy wife. I still don’t know if I have Somebody to thank or not, maybe it was all going to work out fine anyway. But there was a moment there when I was asking Somebody for help and I knew that that Somebody could make it work out okay. Whether S/He was actually listening or not is beside the point, I was talking.
I’m still working on all of the virgin birth and resurrection stuff, it can wait. At least I’ve settled one point to my personal satisfaction; Somebody’s out there somewhere or everywhere.
FYI: The Jury Is In: The Ruling on McDowell’s “Evidence”
A fairly comprehensive rebuttal of Josh McDowells “Evidence That Demands a Verdict.”
Dr. Crane! Your glockenspiel has come to life!