A shame you had to put this at the end, isn’t it? If you want to reformulate your post, feel free, and I’ll discuss with you.
Daniel
If there was evidence would you believe it?
Asumming you are asking everyone who care to answer, and not just the last person you spoke to, then yes I would believe sufficent evidence. However, a lot of people have shown me what they claim to be evidence on the same issue as your, and it turned out not to be evidence at all.
Such as?
I don’t know how many times I’ve said this, but here we go yet again. An all-knowing and all-powerful god would know exactly what it would take for me to believe that she/he/it exists. This being would know my thoughts, my beliefs and mindset, and wouldn’t bother me with “almost, kinda, sorta” evidence, because such a being would know that this type of evidence is guaranteed to push me in the opposite direction. The only conclusions I can come to at this time, the only conclusions that are even possible at this time, are either:
- There is no god, or
- There is a god, but she/he/it is an childish and vindictive asshole that delights in confusing people.
I don't want to start any blasphemous rumours
But I think that God's got a sick sense of humour
And when I die I expect to find him laughing
Depech Mode, “Blasphemous Rumours”
I think there are many more options than that, Cz. Off the top of my head here are three more:
- There is a God, but he’s not omniscient,
- Ditto, but he wants you to come to believe in him through other ways of thinking (metaphysical rather than rational),
or my personal favorite
- God simply doesn’t care if you believe in him or not.
'Course, you could be talking about a strictly fundaloony Christian God, in which case I agree with you.
Pi is not just a number though it is (circumfrance of a circle)/(radius of a circle). I don’t think LHoD really thought out this example though. I have no idea and I don’t think anyone can visualize what a circle would look like if (circumfrance of the circle)/(radius of the circle)=5 or so.
I don’t know how often it happens in your life but the odds of someone predicting 8 times in a row is pretty impressive. In fact the best odds they could have (choosing 8 7s) is .0000595374%.
Yes if god desires a relationship with me he has to communicate with me or at the very least let me know he does in fact exist.
There have probably been thousands and thousands of religions on this planet each with their own sacred text or oral tradition. If this is how god chose to prove that he exist it was certainly a poor choice. If I looked at the sky each night and saw God exists, Gott besteht, El dios existe, Dieu existe, Il dio esiste, O deus existe, ???, ?? ???, ??? etc. etc. in clear text I think that would make me a believer.
On preview it doesn’t look like the Chinese, Japanese and Korean scripts made it.
What in envision when I heard this is that during the recitation of a prayer, the value of pi would change, in a fundimental fashion. The text books would reflect this. When I am not praying, it would be 3.14 etc. When I prayed, it would be reflected in the books as :Hippo.
This makes no sense, but would be funny, and a good example of “god’s omnipotence”
Pi also is the representation, for instance, of the relationship between a circle’s circumfrence and its radius. If this relationship changed as a result of a prayer to God, it would be a hefty piece of evidence in favor of God. Now do you understand what it means to change the value of pi?
So God has limits now? What exactly is restraining God from temporarily violating my free will in the small case of this dice roll? I would appreciate it if you answered this without using passive sentences; when discussing religion, it’s important to know exactly who or what is acting in a particular case.
Why are books an eminently sensible form? Books are typically written by human beings. Information in a book in every single case I have ever experienced comes from a human being. Since God is not a human being, to grab my attention, he should be using a medium that makes it clear that he is not a human being.
Further, what are these books God has written? Where is his publishing house? Who did he contract with? How does he handle distribution? How can I know, on the balance of probability, that it was actually God that wrote these books? I mean, sure, the book could say it was written by God, but that isn’t really much of a proof. There are many books written by people other than whom the text of the book appears to be written by - try Roald Dahl’s BFG for an enjoyable example.
I would imagine the sky dots would be pretty close together, so as to make the message expilicit. Us unbelievers would pay attention because it is a message written in a medium that is likely not available to non-dieties.
If I want to know if human beings have responded to my posts, I open a browser, which is something human beings use. If I want to know what God is saying, I will use a medium that human beings don’t have ready access to.
As science discovers more about the world in which we live it dispells previously held superstitions. It also points out the likelyhood of a creative intelligence.
Miricles are apparent all around us every day. Atheists have there own form of superstition. It’s called the latest scientic theory. In looking at the history of science one thing is apparent. There is much more that is unknown than is known.
The thing we embrace as truth today, scientific or theological, may be exposed as less than true and discarded a generation from now.
Eventually the truth, scientific and spiritual , will converge.
You say you demand hard evidence in order to believe in something.
Then please present the evidence that dreams exist.
You’ve probably had dreams and can quote personnel experience, but please provide hard evidence that this commonly accepted phenomenon actually exists.
An omnipotent God could indeed preform some unusual miricle to prove his existance to all unbelievers. The fact that that doesn’t happen certainly doesn’t prove that God doesn’t exist. It only indicates that mere belief is not God’s purpose.
The more poignant and typical question for atheists to ask is
Why does a loving and benevolent God allow all the pain, suffering and evil in the world?
I understand the place within us that this question comes from.
I don’t have an answer except to say that we will know the answer when we are passionate and determined enough to answer this question.
Why do we allow it?
Independently verifiable evidence? Of course I would. I can’t imagine anyone who wouldn’t (except maybe certain fundamentalists).
But even if pi changed to something as obvious as :Hippo, how would we know?
Would we all remember the old value?
Wouldn’t it have changed in our minds also, thus erasing the evidence of God’s power?
Would wheels suddenly have a strange shape?
Kind of a weak argument. Can you prove you exist, and aren’t just a dream somebody else is having? It’s close to the brain-in-the-vat puzzle; at some point it becomes absurd. Have you been to Siberia? No? Then how can you prove it exists? You’ve seen pictues? Met people who claim to be from there or have visited? How do you know it’s all not a vast conspiracy to get you to believe in Siberia?
Besides the fact that everybody on the planet dreams (in contrast to the number of people who believe in a supreme being) - and I’m assuming you’re not going to try to write this off as a conspiracy - they can monitor brain activity during sleep with an EEG and measure differences in brain activity during REM sleep, which, if saying nothing about the subjective aspect of dreams, at least is evidence that something scientifically agreed upon as “dreaming” occurs. There is no such evidence for the existence of God, either objectively (experimentally tested) or subjectively (on a universal level, as with dreams).
I don’t know - those last two sound like they might fit in with the idea of a “childish and vindictive asshole that delights in confusing people” (with the “vindictive” less pronounced).
Why does our knowledge of the World make a creative intelligence likely?
Is this the religious belief known as ‘intelligent design’?
Please cite an example of a miracle.
My dictionary defines superstition as:
- credulity regarding the supernatural
- an irrational fear of the unknown or mysterious
- misdirected reverence
- a practice, opinion or religion based on these tendencies
- a widely held but unjustified idea of the effects or nature of a thing
Which of these definitions applies to scientific theory?
Using your definition, is an agnostic scientist superstitious? Is a religious scientist superstitious?
Actually, looking at the history of science, many things are apparent. For example:
- we know much more than we did
- everything we currently know has been based on evidence and testing
- every time religion predicts something that can be tested, science proves it wrong
All science is constantly tested, based on the evidence. Religions fade away or produce new sects. But no religion has ever produced any verifiable truth, so it’s hard to see why you compare the two above.
Understanding brain functions is certainly a field science hasn’t completely researched. Nevertheless there is widespread agreement on brain wave patterns and the reported experience is common across the World.
It is a logical assumption to study dreams.
By contrast, the belief in God varies enormously. Several major religions, divided into branches, split into sects.
Or that God doesn’t exist.
I’m sorry, but I think this is just superstition.
IANAAtheist, but part of the reason that we allow (some) suffering is that we have no choice - we are powerless to prevent it (in some cases, unable even to see it coming). Sure, there’s a lot of suffering that arises as a result of various aspects of human nature such as greed, bigotry, stupidity and even misplaced noble intentions, but there’s a whole heap of suffering that happens regardless - the recent tsunami being a particularly memorable example. There are steps we could have taken to minimise it, but we’re powerless to entirely eliminate this kind of suffering.
No, because there will still be a relationship between a circle’s circumfrence and its radius, and that is what you will (hopefully) still call pi.
Self-control?
Because people read books.
What is to prevent your asking these sorts of questions about any arbitrary event? Who made the dice you’re rolling? How do you know they aren’t trick dice? Where did you get them from? What did God look like when He was giving you His predictions? More like George Burns or more like Mrs. LandingGod?
What about aliens? For that matter, what about wealthy eccentric humans? Why couldn’t a sufficiently advanced technology accomplish the task?
No human other than you has access to your own heart. Why don’t you look there?
I think the real question here is not whether there is proof for the existence of God or not, the question is how much proof is enough.
When it comes down to it we can’t really proove anything. Proof really is restricted to mathmematics. Of the examples of proofs that people would accept, all of them can be explained away in some way if you want to. God writes a message in the sky? Maybe it was not God but aliens, maybe it was some weird reflection from something in the sky, maybe you were hallucinating, or dreaming, or just imagined it. For anything miraculous if you want to ignore the existence of God there is always something else you can ‘explain’ it as.
In fact Jesus told a stroy that was kind of like this. In Luke 16:19-31 Jesus tells a story about a rich man who dies and goes to Hell. When he is there he tries to get Abraham (who was in heaven) to send someone to warn his brothers about what awaits them if they don’t turn to God. Abraham however tells the man that there is nothing that he can do. They have the law and the prophets, if they don’t believe them, then they won’t believe even if someone comes back from the dead. Jesus is saying that the bible (in his case specifically the Old Testament) is enough evidence for God. If you don’t believe in God after reading that, then nothing else will convince you.
And there is certainly a lot of evidence for the existence of God out there. So for instance as a Christian I would say that the proof for the existence of God is in the person of Jesus. The life, death and resurrection of Jesus shows me that there is a God, and also shows me what that God is like.
And it is not like there is nothing that religion predicts. You can quite easily look at the worldview that religion presents and then compare that with the world as you see it. So for instance the bible says that everyone is sinful. Therefore you could predict that something like communism (which is based on the idea that people are not sinful but good by nature and it is unfair economic and class systems that cause sufferiing) would be an abject failure. And looking at every country that it has been tried in it has demonstratably failed to live up to its promises. Something that the Christian could have told you from the start, had people listened to them.
Onesimus
Do you have a circle handy? Take a look at it, and pretend that you don’t know the value of pi. Offhand, can you estimate the ratio of the circumference to the diameter?
I know I cannot.
I believe, strongly, taht if I measure the circumference of my water glass’s rim and compare it to the rim’s diameter, I’ll get a ratio of approximately 3.14, because I know mathematics.
Imagine, though, this. I say, “I believe in Tushnamatay, God of Knowledge, Under Whose Kind Beneficence the Ratios of the Universe Might Change,” and I measure the rim of my waterglass and its diameter while making this speech. The ratio comes out to 3.0. Five minutes later, I make the same measurement, not making the speech this time, and the ratio comes out to 3.14 and change. And this experiment is easily replicable by myself and by anyone else, using any roughly circular object.
That’s not proof positive that Tushnamatay changed the Ratios of the Universe, but it’s sure going to make me give serious weight to the proposition.
I read an easier version of this challenge once. A circle composed of atoms with a diameter equal to the width of the universe would have a circumference:diameter ratio equal to pi carried out to 32 (I think) digits. Any deity who could round pi off to 32 digits would get the grand prize.
That said, I put this at the top of the list because it’s probably the hardest challenge for a deity to accomplish.
Exactly. It wouldn’t even need to be in a language that I spoke, as long as it were in a language that I could verify didn’t derive from star-reading. (That is, if a culture formulated the words “God exists” based on a particular constellation’s formation, that’s not going to count; I would need evidence that the constellation’s formation came after the words “God Exists” in that language, or at least after those words’ etymological roots).
However, we’re talking God here. Why not formulate it so that every literate person saw the words appear in the sky in her own native tongue?
Daniel
An excellent first post, Onesimus. Welcome to Straight Dope. I hope you stay around.
It sounds to me like you want your cake and want to eat it too. Without the 3.14 ratio, it wouldn’t BE a circle. You are incapable of perceiving an object that is both a circle and not a circle, so you get only one. Or are you asking that He suspend ALL reason so that you’re in a sort of looking glass world where you don’t know what’s real and what isn’t?
You mean something like the Pentacost?
Let me ask you a question. Why is it that when scientists conduct experiments to determine something about people’s behaviors, preferences, opinions, and whatnot, that they do not interfere in the experiment? Why doesn’t a psychiatrist print on his Rorschach card “Normal: butterfly, Crazy: demon”? Why doesn’t a medical researcher print on the pills “Fake” and “Real”? Why don’t pollsters word their questions like, “Do you agree with us that Bush is a good president?”?