Decided not to start this in the “What kind of God would you believe in?” thread.
Several people there posted " one that proved it existed" which got me wondering both "how, and the follow up, then what?
The Bible says God will be revealed to those who seek God with a sincere heart. Who gets to judge a heart’s sincereity other than God? I note that it also doesn’t say that people won’t mistake things for some sort of divine revelation?
But, let’s say God as a matter of policy and practice did appear in a vision to those who prayed “Here I am God sincerely wanting to know if you really exist” God appears and says , “here I am I really exist, I created everything, Try to treat each other and the planet you share with some respect and consideration. Love, would be great.” How long would it be before people , in pursuit of their own interests, just blew off that vision and called it a bad potato hallucination?
Let’s say people were able to lay a fleece before the Lord and recieve something a little more substantial than a vision. God heals you or someone dear to you when you ask him too, or turns red roses into yellow roses, makes it rain just inside your car, whatever. I predict that would also be rationalized away in relatively short order. IOW, even if God did something to to very clearly say, “I AM” I think many people would still blow it off in short order.
You are making the assumption that we are rationalizing away God already. We are not, there simply isn’t any evidence.
If God wanted to very clearly say “I AM”, then it would be a simple matter to demostrate through a series of “miracles” that quite obviously exist without rational explanation. For example, a disembodied hand writing “I AM” in purple flames in the sky every 3 hours for a week would be pretty good evidence.
Yeah, I got the impression that OP think the evidence is already clear and exists, non-believers are just ignoring it. Because we love Satan.
For the sake of this discussion neither one matters.
Maybe they have always happened and the problem is mankinds flaws in interpreting them, or understanding what to do afterwards, or the real events are obscured by people who lie and use relion for profit, or people who misinterpret what the event means for them and to them. Or maybe they are all people’s imagination. It doesn’t matter in this discussion.
If you like , you can supppose they start tomorrow. What type of events would matter and not be dismissed at some later date? I doubt there are any.
FTR; I am an agnostic who finds some logical flaws with some of the standard arguments agasint the existence of God but that’s not the subject of this discussion.
I have to disagree with you there; saying that (some) humans have ignored or distorted evidence of God is very different from saying that (some) humans hypthetically would do so if such evidence suddenly became available.
Ok, I’ll go with…starting tomorrow, the following occur:
All prayers are answered by a figure, who responds the same way to multiple petitioners and presumably is capable of memory.
This figure begins answering prayers, such that the sick are healed, flowers change color, rain occurs inside cars, and other miraculous things.
Given that, I disagree with your contention. Such evidence would, in short order, convince the vast bulk of humanity that this god did indeed exist, and the message would likely supercede previous faiths within a couple of years. All culture soon incorporates this god as a central figure.
Care to summarize those logical flaws? Unless you prefer to focus on your hypothetical, which is fine.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
So - if we can’t decide what makes a ‘GOD’ a ‘GOD’ and not just a sufficeintly advanced critter that has ‘god like’ powers- then we have no framework to decide which is which , or what constitutes a sign that it is GOD and not just something/someone playing God.
The purple flaming I AM could be a natural occuring thing - and we see I AM becasuse we based part of our language on the symbol - etc -
The issue here is that, for a lot of people who believe in God, God HAS proved he exists to them. Lots of people will claim to have had visions of God, having conversations with him, and that sort of thing. So that leaves us with a couple questions. If God does exist, why does he reveal himself in such a way to some people and not to others? If God does not exist, whence these visions in such a large number of people?
For the former, I can think of a bunch of possible explanations. One, for instance, might be that communicating with God isn’t really all that different from communicating with people, in that it requires use of our senses and some mental faculties. Thus, someone who is deaf may have difficulty communicating with someone who isn’t, someone who speaks English will have difficulty communicating with someone who speaks Russian, or someone may fundamentally think differently from another person and they suffer in communicating those concepts. So maybe there’s some sort of “spiritual sense” akin to hearing. So just like one person might hear sounds others don’t, maybe some people just naturally have more or less of that. Maybe there’s some sort of language or thought barrier, in that a person expects one type of communication but it comes in another way, so they just miss it. Or maybe the way God is talking to them, they perceive it as their own thoughts or intuition or whatever. After all, there are plenty of people who believe God exists but have varying degrees of experience with him, from full on visions and conversations to no actual spiritual experience at all.
Or for the latter, other we could see just as many reasons. Sure, maybe some part of their brain isn’t quite working right, so they “get” things that aren’t really there. Maybe they’re seeing patterns in randomness or assigning credit to God to things that come from other places, like their own intuition, vague memories, or whatever.
As for me, though I do believe in God, my concept of him pretty much contradicts the idea of the OP. I don’t think God works in such blatant ways and, in fact, I’d be quite suspicious if I had such a response. Then again, perhaps that’s exactly why my experiences are the way they are.
Well, the OP describes a lovey dovey “god” with no hints of questionable actions or traits, i.e. Sunday School God. If this being was a god, it would know exactly what it would take to convince me, even if I didn’t. Once I was convinced that it existed, it would then have to convince me that it is worthy-power alone ain’t gonna cut it. I’ve raised everything from ants to cows, and I’ve never required any of the creatures I raised to fear me or obey my every whim, and if I wanted them to do something I didn’t give third-hand vague conflicting signals. Peace, love and understanding? I had that down pat without the need of any gods. Wonderful rewards in the hereafter? I don’t want one extra second of life until I’m convinced this god’s hands are clean.
If it was just me that had this vision, and it happened just once, I think the most parsimonious explanation would be that I was imagining things. If it happened lots of times, I may question my own sanity, or I may believe it, I dunno. But if everyone else on the planet reported the same exact thing, then we’re talking something that I could begin to accept.
It would need to be more substantial than an event that frequently occurs all by itself with no divine intervention.
I would chalk that up to a magic trick. That kind of stuff is simply what magicians do all the time.
That’s a pretty lame demonstration for the creator of the universe! I probably wouldn’t know what was up with rain in my car, but the thought that this was the almighty trying to get my attention wouldn’t even cross my mind.
All depends on how you define god. To be a deity, the wiki definition is:
That’s not such a high bar to clear. If you insist on the theistic concept that God is the creator of the universe, it’s of course trickier to verify that this would-be god is, in fact, God.
If we did bear witness to a powerful supernatural being of the kind described in the OP, I predict that it would be held to be the God spoken of in the various faiths of the world, and they would be modified or abandoned to accord with this being. In the face of such a supernatural entity, I don’t think there’d be overmuch quibbling about whether it was really God.
Right - which is why I try to distinguish between GOD (creator, max power guy) and God (any other being of sufficiently advanced tech/abiltiy compared to the people around him).
Of course they are different. I didn’t claim they weren’t. I said “For the sake of this discussion” it doesn’t matter, which is true.
So you’re saying if it was big enough, and wide spread enough, and sustained long enough, everyone would believe?
How big would it have to be? Do you expect all prayers to be answered, like “Lord, I want a new Hummer even though I work at Wal Mart”
What I’m getting at is that it seems to me that given mankinds makeup any God would have to continuously do things that are large and widespread to keep belief alive.
which prompts another “and then what” IMO but that might be another tthread.
Care to summarize those logical flaws? Unless you prefer to focus on your hypothetical, which is fine.
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Can’t say I’d be in any hurry to get on board w/ this feller. I’m not big on the whole “worshipping” thing. Prideful sumbitch, that’s me. Also, he’d have some ‘splainin’ to do in any event, assuming he was creator of the universe (and me in particular) and author of the Bible and all that shit.
