Oh, grim… 
You still in London?
What is also not legitimate is to assume that asking what evidence exists that a god loves us is the same thing as openly denying that love. Is there any falsifiable evidence(not proof, not a completely airtight argument-just falsifiable evidence) that we are loved by any god? So far, all I’ve seen is:
- No, and
- This is not a legitimate question.
But there are indications, things you can point to and say ‘See? The omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent being I believe exists loves me.’ If it affects you, really affects you, then you can show it. If god, the Abrahamic definition, actually loved someone, it would be quite obvious.
Think of the most you can love someone. More than a pet or sibling. Someone you love with all your heart, mind & soul. By definition, god can love more, infinitely more. Would a person loved by this god ever be raped? Have a debilitating disease? Go hungry? If so, then you are obviously using a different definition of the word love than I am. So does the world look like this god loves everyone?
“It doesn’t matter what happens to me, I know in my heart that he loves me, and nothing you say will ever change my mind.”
-Also said by thousands of abused women.
Well, it’s not a scientific question, which is where the idea of falsifiable evidence is really relevant.
Maybe “falsifiable” isn’t the best word to use here.
But I would agree that, in order for a statement like “God loves you” to mean anything, it has to be logically possible for it to be false, and it has to matter whether it is true or false: there has to be some “evidence” that would not be there if God did not love you.
In a statement attributed to Bejamin Franklin, “Beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy.” In a sense, I agree with this. In the joy of drinking a cold beer, and a thousand other experiences, I sense a benevolence behind the world. But I don’t blame you if you don’t accept it as evidence.
I have plenty of evidence that my parents love me. I could tell you of things they have done for me and given to me throughout my childhood (as well as during my adult years) that I accept as more than adequate proof of their love. But you could come up with alternative explanations. In this case you’d probably give me the benefit of the doubt, but you could argue that the thing I saw as evidence of their love was really motivated by something else. Your explanation might be quite plausible to you, who do not know my parents and have no relationship with them, but to me, with my experience of my own parents, the explanation that they did what they did out of love is infinitely more plausible.
Ah, yes: the Problem Of Suffering. “How could a loving God allow…?” If that’s what this thread is supposed to be about, I don’t think we can say anything here that hasn’t already been said at least as well in plenty of other threads, books, articles, sermons, etc. The world is full of people who find this an insurmountable obstacle to believing in a loving God, and of people who think they have a satisfactory answer to the problem, and of people who trust that an answer exists even if they personally don’t understand it.
The difference is that you at least can show evidence that, through various actions throughout the years, your parents have shown you that they exist and they love you. Would you still claim they love you if you never met them personally, they never talked to you verbally or through mail or email? Would you then attribute anything positive that happened to you as evidence of their love?
I might not accept this as proof of their love, but I would certainly accept it as positive evidence of their love. Got any evidence of equal quality when it comes to God, that can be attributed to God and not chance?
Czar,
My own statement began that asking for proof of love is a denial of love. Not limited to the specific case of the love of God. If you tell your wife you love her, and she really believes you love her, and accepts that love, she is not going to ask for proof. Asking for proof is tacitly denying love exists. Now it is not logically equivalent to a statement of the negative premise, but love is not a logical thing. Love is outside of logic.
Now if I wish to prove to you that God loves me, the case is different. I cannot do that. I don’t wish to do it, although I believe He does love you. I don’t wish to prove to you anything at all about God. I am not arguing a logical or rhetorical position, merely giving testimony of my own faith, because the OP asked it.
Now, on the subject of your question about my love of God, and how I know it is so, the answer will be unsatisfactory to you, but I will give it anyway. I perceive the love of God directly. I feel it. I have experienced events that set aside my own logical, and skeptical point of view, and put an end to my questions. However what ended my skepticism was not answers. I don’t have any evidence for you, and the evidence that I have is not logical proof of the existence of God.
I believe that if you did not look for answers you would be better off. There are no answers. Logic dictates that if there are no answers, there is no God. Logic is not God either, so what is really the case is that God doesn’t fit into the universe of logic.
Personally, I hope (not to mention pray 
) that you can leave it all aside. Instead, love every one you meet, and treat them as you would have God treat them were he to exist. To be come the world you wish to have exist, as Gandhi suggests. Even if God is not, good is, and it is better than evil. If it required logic, only logical people would love, and only philosophers would know God. It takes love, and if you don’t know how to direct your love to God, it really isn’t important. Just direct it everywhere. He’ll find it.
Tris
Evidence, not proof.
Evidence, not proof.
Evidence, not proof.
“Do you have any evidence?” does not mean the same thing as “Can you prove it?”
From here on in, I can only assume that that anyone who brings up “proof” when “evidence” is asked for is doing so deliberately.
Asking your wife for evidence of her love is only logically different than asking her for proof. Actually, it sounds emotionally a lot more like a denial of love.
But, to quote a member of this very board: “I don’t have any evidence for you”
Now, tell me what you want this evidence for, since you are so profoundly indifferent to proof?
Tris
I’m actually speaking generally. I think we can assume that if God loves you than he also loves me and that kid in the tree. Refutation of the hypothesis that God loves us requires finding cases that seem to contradict this proposition, and not showing that God doesn’t seem to love any of us.
So, any person saying that he is sure God loves him is not a response. If I believed in God, I’d have ample data to think that God loved me, for instance. I think it is far more humble to think that I’ve been lucky than to think that the creator of the universe has a personal love for me, and not for that poor kid starving in Darfur.
I think we have the answer to Thudlow last question already. It seems clear that to a believer in God’s love all experiences, good, bad or indifferent, provide evidence to them of it. Clearly no human or natural tragedy, no matter how horrific, seems to affect this belief.
Proof comes from evidence. First comes the evidence, the evidence is examined and weighed, then it is determined if there is enough positive evidence to provide proof. It’s usually a bit more complicated than that, but I do hope you get the gist of it. I am not “profoundly indifferent to proof”, whatever the hell that means. I am saying that, until evidence is provided, talking about proof is nonsensical.
Proof involves a logical argument. Evidence is data. One can claim he has proved things in spite of evidence to the contrary or lack of evidence - attorneys do so all the time if they have a crappy case. And I am assuming here everyone is talking of proof in the legal, not scientific sense.
I’d say that even the need for proof of love from a spouse or God shows it is not there. The evidence should be out on the table and evident. There should also be a lack of contradictory evidence. To follow Czarcasm’s analogy, is the proof that a wife beater gives of love, such as “I love you because I bring home a paycheck, even if I’m out every night and hit you when I’m here” going to outweigh the evidence she has that he doesn’t? I’m sorry, the evidence of suffering of flood victims more than outweighs the proof that God loves us because he makes the grass grow.
I don’t think any of us are indifferent to proof - we just aren’t anywhere near believing any “proof” that contradicts the evidence.
I read the link. There are so many ways people believe in God that no one could cover them all. So I will just give my thoughts from my experience. Most people assume God exists in the physical world as they do, but that is not the case. The physical world is duelistic, there is good and bad, up and down, people think in terms of opposites as the link implies. However, God is in the spiritual world which is not duelistic, but is known as the Oneness. In the Oneness we live in unconditional love, it is the substance of everything. We humans have temporarily stepped outside of the Oneness when we took a physical body. This body shields us from the Oneness of all things and makes us think we are alone, unconnected, and unloved. We voluntarily do this to learn about ourselves. How could you know what “red” meant if everything was red. In order to learn there must be choices, and our choices are Love or not-Love. Now while we may think we are far from Love, it is always within us. Those who seek this knowledge of love will find it, there are many ways, one of which is dying, or almost dying. Those who have classic near death experiences feel that unconditional love and remember who they are, that is why their lives are changed forever. Actually we are the ones that cause all the problems here in the physical by not choosing Love. God doesn’t cause us problems or harm us in any way. We will all die and return to the Oneness. We will all come out winners in knowledge of ourselves. Beyond this are vast events we will experience and infinite knowledge to be learned. We are the beginners.
Re: lekatt’s “response”-nonsense.
'Nuff said.
I dunno Czarcasm. What constitutes evidence for a believer is going to be subjective.
some folks will point at a flower, and say:
“If you accept that God created everything, look at that! Look at it’s simplicity in form and function, it’s beauty, it’s fragrance, and so on. Also consider the fact that I, who am not a bee, finds great joy in the beauty around me. I find great joy in many other things, too. Only a loving God would create a Universe that will contain so many things I find so much joy in. Otherwise, I would be as mindless, and emotionless, as an insect.” (Not everything is joy, obviously, and some consider that some of the mundane things are there to give greater contrast so that the joyfull things to be more… err… joyfull.)
However, while the exisistance of joy and the wonderment of being alive may be “evidence” to some, other folks “explain away” that evidence as evidence of selective evolution, or whatever.
So your demands for “evidence” of god’s love is bound to run afoul of the subjectiveness of feelings and emotions (the nonlogical side of our human psyche) that we use to try to understand that which is not easilly seen or touched.
I think us humans have a dualistic nature to our minds, the logical/intellectual, and the instinctual/emotional. We use science to help define (and eventually manipulate) the physical world, and we substitute instinct, gut feelings, and philosophy to help try to come to grips with other things and concepts that are more abstract. Some people favor one type of thinking over the other, but to apply logic to an illogical reasoning process (like philosophy) is using a somewhat illsuited tool for the job, IMHO. (I can use a screwdriver as a hammer, but it would be ineffecient.)
Can logic or science put a number value (is “quantify” the right word here?) on the value of the color of the sky? Science can explain why the sky appears blue (or whatever) to me, but it cannot tell me the amount of joy I should be feeling when I sit on my front porch watching the sun set.
Yes, if you already believe, everything is “evidence”. If everything is evidence, though, all evidence has equal value and that value is logically zero. If it rains, it’s evidence. If it doesn’t, it’s also evidence. You are saying in effect that the word “evidence” has no real meaning. I do not accept this definition, and thus refute this argument.
So, your answer to the question of how Christians “know” God loves them is that they look at the good stuff (like trees and flowers and chirping birds) and ignore the bad stuff (like floods.) I think that sounds plausible.
Defensible, no, but definitely plausible.
I’m sorry to disappoint. My very point was that there is little or no agreement on what qualifies as evidence.
We are attempting to define something (that is, “Gods Love”) that is spiritual, non corporeal, and something that humans are ill suited to explain by using the common concepts associated with our physical sences of taste, touch, and so forth, or some facsimily thereof, like radio telescopes that peer into energy spectrums that we didn’t evolve to see.
I suspect you want something that can be subjected to the same rigors of scientific theory and testing, with independent repeated experiments to verify the evidence as not being something else than “God’s Love”. Good luck, heh.
It seems to me that you want to be able to quantifiy with science something that is in the realm of philosophy.
You cant put a scientifically tested and 100% valid number value on my appreciation of the beauty of a sunset, it’s entirely subjective. You can’t come up to me with a Fluke meter and say “Hey bonehead, your a little underwhelmed at the moment, here. Kick it up a notch. Get with the program.” (Well, I suppose you could say those things if you felt like it… I suppose. heh.)
Why do I gaze in wonder at a sunset? (Good perscription durgs, I suppose…sigh.)
Why do some folks have different “favorite” colors, or music, or art styles? Some of it is explained by “that is what they are familiar with”, but not all of human philosophying and thought-based explorations into ourselves and our universe can be waved away like that, in my very humble opinion.
I realise that it is disappointing to you that a spiritual believer cannot explain to your satisfaction why they feel about those things the way they do.
I don’t share the religious convictions of some of the folks around here, but I have a repect for the fact that they are very real to them. Their feelings are as valid to them as mine are to me, and just because they can’t explain why, I should not dismiss them lightly.