Yea hoax would be my first guess too, I’d be wondering why the researchers even checked in the first place. I mean when you get data to process is your first reaction to see if’s religious texts when it’s binary file is read as ascii?
Scary part is, I switched to decaf a year and a half ago.
I disagree that existing just to exist is without purpose; If you are born your purpose is to live as long and as well as you can. Life itself is purpose. Human life as well as all the rest of existence
Monavis
How do you know that the Holy Bible is really from God? Isn’t it because some human told you it was? The Bible like all writings are of human origan, Humans decided to call it God’s word and that God inspired it, but it is the human we believe not any God.
Some believe that God directly told Mohammad what to write the Koran, so how can one tell the difference?
Monavis
Monavis
I simply think that you should give yourself a purpose. Whether it’s to cure cancer or just enjoy yourself. We don’t need a God to have a purpose; giving purposes to things is something humans do all the time.
And again; I don’t see why being given a purpose by someone else is desirable in the first place. Or, for the matter why it’s acceptable; if I knew that God existed and had a purpose for me, I’d want to do something else out of principle.
I agree with you somewhat; being born is purpose to Live,living and enjoying the company of others,helping them in any way for a better life also helps one have a better life themselves.
If we keep our environment safe for others we also help our selves,etc.
Monavis
So, does anyone have anything remotely related to the topic, “Scientific evidence of God’s existence”, to add?
If there’s ever scientific proof of God it won’t be one big piece of evidence. It will be thousands and thousands of little pieces that all add up together. One piece of evidence could be a fluke, or a hoax, or any of the other explanations offered in this thread. In order to be convincing the evidence needs to be confirmed and reconfirmed over and over again.
Theists often don’t understand this aspect of science. They look for things like “the missing link” – the one big piece of evidence that proves evolution beyond a shadow of doubt. Then, when they don’t find it, they reject evolution. But evolution isn’t proved by one big piece of evidence. It’s proved by thousands and thousands of little bits of evidence that all fit together into a coherent whole.
There’s a lot of misunderstanding of science, unfortunately. The anti-AGW folks claim that some scientific establishment which benefits from AGW is actively suppressing anti-AGW research, and the fact that 90%+ of reputable scientists believe in AGW is evidence of a conspiracy. This couldn’t be any further from the truth: the scientific community loves nothing more than a massive paradigm shift and many would drool and greedily lick their chops over the chance to prove that the AGW hypothesis is wrong–but competing hypotheses just don’t add up and can’t stand up to peer review; it’s the anti-AGW folks who often have a financial interest in fossil fuel usage.
I’m happy for people to take the discussion wherever they like, but I was really hoping for some atheists to give some examples of what they would consider to be scientific evidence of God’s existence.
What if some guy appeared who claimed to have a direct “mental phone line” with God, and could answer any question posed to him, as long as it didn’t violate some paradox, etc.
For example, he could readily peel off any answer to some of the great unsolved problems in physics.
Would that convince you?
Or for the staunch atheists like Der Trihs, what would compel you to rethink why you have already disqualified the possibility of an eternal, omnipotent, omniscient creator?
Well, no. That wouldn’t be good evidence at all. The reason the unsolved problems in physics are unsolved is because we don’t have enough evidence to solve them. He could say anything at all and we would have no way to verify if what he said was true or not. Maybe in 10, 20, 50 years… But I think god can do better than that.
Well, it’s not possible to prove the existence of an omnipotent entity. For any test of power one could devise, there would always be a greater one. But for practical purposes, there are things an omnipotent entity could do to be considered omnipotent for all intents and purposes. Something on the low end might be say, moving the position of the Earth so that the sky is obviously different, while still keeping temperature and climate the same. A better one would be to beam the knowledge of him straight into every single person’s head, with every detail and characteristic consistent between them. Of course, as Der Trihs mentioned before, if a being could beam thoughts into our heads, it could just make us believe anything it wanted to.
You’d have to carefully define what you mean by “God”. If you mean the Abrahamic God like in the OP, nothing would; it’s not something that makes logical sense. You might as well really try to convince me that the Flying Spaghetti Monster made the universe; I’m not joking when I say I find it just as plausible as God.
If you mean the kind of God that’s, say, a Sufficiently Advanced Alien in another or previous universe that built this one; evidence that the universe is constructed would do that. But it wouldn’t be what the vast majority of people mean when they talk about “God”.
Why would it ? It could be an alien; that’s much more plausible than God.
Nothing; omnipotence is logically contradictory, and omniscience violates physical law. And as for “eternal”; that makes no sense,something that complex would have to have come from somewhere, have had a chance to either develop or be designed by something else.
There are some unsolved problems in math that might be better, since they wouldn’t need the construction of large experiments to confirm. Whether P = NP is the example I like, since you can either give a proof or a counterexample. Even if the proof requires math we don’t get yet, God can provide a textbook. That isn’t totally convincing, since advanced aliens would certainly know this, but it would be a start. Some other things would be knowing the contents of a randomly selected file folder, for instance, and perhaps writing something in the stars. I’d be provisionally convinced with enough of these.
In real life, none of the gods supposedly talking to us have even come close to being correct about how the world works, so I’d say that this supposed god would be nothing like any of ours. Thus the current believers would be more likely to reject this god than the atheists. There is surely more evidence for evolution than there would be for this god, and the true believers reject that.
Righto,
Here are some characteristics of the “God” in question:
- Uncreated
- Intelligent
- Sentient
- Creator of matter/the universe
- The one and only of its kind
While these are also some/all of the characteristics of the Abrahamic God, I am not specifically suggesting the God of Islam/Christianity/Judaism.
I’d like to add “uncaused” on to the above list.
There is no Scientific evidence for God’s existence, and there probably never will be. Just as there is no evidence for an after life or a spirit. God can only be perceived by Faith in the someone who has told them there is a god, yet no one can define what the word God means, as there are many definitations.
Monavis
A way of saying that “God” ( and the spirit and afterlife ) is pulled out of your own imagination.
You can’t provide evidence . . . it can only be “perceived by faith”, in other words by someone determined to believe . . . and people have to be told about this “God” before they can “perceive” it. Self delusion, in other words.
Request for clarification–you surely mean “no evidence exists for an afterlife, and Occam’s Razor therefore insists that we reject the hypothesis until there is evidence.” The way you phrased it says that you have positive evidence for a lack of afterlife, which I’d love to see.
To be fair, if the data being generated was obviously binary I would likely be able to spot at least a few ASCII letters if they existed in the datastream–I’d imagine the same is true of anyone who’s worked on computers for too damn long. 
Think about it though. When “magic superpower guy” comes down from the clouds and starts doing advanced theoretical physics, how in the world could he possibly convince someone that he is uncreated for instance? Or the only one of his kind? That’s why I say that no matter what evidence there is, it is always a more plausible explanation that this guy is just very powerful and smart, and not the one and only Creator of the Universe.
It all comes down to faith. Even if all the evidence lined up perfectly for the Holy Trio of Ghost, Father, and Jesus, and they decided to break their ‘hands-off’ restrictions and came down to Earth, chumming it up with all the Christians and smiting atheists left and right, I still wouldn’t have faith. The best they would get is conditional acceptance. There would always be the possibility in my mind that they’re super intelligent aliens playing a big joke on us or something.
In short, even a huge amount of convincing evidence isn’t make me believe anything 100%. There is always doubt, which those brought up on faith don’t quite comprehend. There is never absolute certainty. Faith and Worship are things I’m just not capable of giving anyone or anything, even God.