Agreed. I like talking about this stuff, but I would never bring it up in any other context except for someone like the OP explicitly inviting me to.
I have started a thread on this subject before, something like “What evidence do you have that the god you believe in exists”, and I clearly stipulated in the OP that I am asking for evidence and not proof, and that said evidence has to clearly point to a particular deity. Try to guess how that turned out.
Thanks for asking! First of all, self-esteem has almost never been much of a factor in my life in either direction: I don’t do a lot of patting myself on the back, and I rarely get down on myself. It’s just one of those things that’s neither here nor there for me.
Second, I’d already had my low point: nearly a year earlier, I’d been seriously considering suicide. Not because of low self-esteem, but because the loneliness and isolation had reached a point of emotional starvation. How I was deflected from that is a story I’ve shared with very few people, and I won’t be sharing it here either. But suffice it to say that it happened, it had nothing to do with religion, and in the wake of that, I was fired up and determined to make something of this new lease on life I’d gotten, and hopeful that I could make improvements in my life.
It was the better part of a year later when a chance conversation in a coffeehouse I’d never spent any time in before turned out to change my life. No church was involved, just a one-on-one conversation with someone who was part of a loose religious group. But again, this happened at a time when I was already trying to change my life in positive ways, and was hopeful and optimistic about the future. But there was no comparison: the love of the Lord leaves everything else behind.
Well, this thread has given me a headache. Hallelujah?
And just like that, Athena ensues.
I am a life long atheist, but yes, LSD convinced me for a few hours that I was god, or rather part of god, as were my friends, the river, the mountains, and even my dog. All connected and all god.
It was a fun experience.
I’m still an atheist though.
If I read it right I think @Half_Man_Half_Wit was trying to make the point that not all claims require evidence.
Which is true, but not much of a revelation IMO.
Evidence, aka empirical data is something required for making empirical claims. Which the God claim is. If someone were merely asserting that they have the internal feeling or sensation of a God…OK, you do you…but normally the claim being made is that there is an entity that exists in our shared objective reality; that’s an empirical claim.
Sure, but it sounds like you were on your own journey that time. What would’ve happened if, say, a handsome storyteller with a convincing voice surreptitiously slipped you an interesting cocktail of drugs before carefully talking you through an outlandish and preposterous set of circumstances entertaining enough to persuade an audience to suspend its disbelief?
Incidentally, that’s maybe my answer to the OP.
There’s an Israeli journalist who is something of a fucking idiot, who likes to repeatedly tell the story of how he found God when he was doing drugs on a trip to India.
I can certainly understand someone who had some sort of experience or feeling that convinces them that God exists. But since the OP is asking about how to convince other people that God exists, that sort of story often wouldn’t convince. It would take something a lot stronger than that.
“We” are an emergent property of our experiences, so the fact that “we” don’t need evidence to “know” our own internal state is hardly remarkable or meaningful.
If @Half_Man_Half_Wit could provide an example of something extrinsic that we know without evidence, that might be remarkable.
Right, exactly.
Not trying to convert others was pretty much standard practice before Christianity. Alexander the Great was fine with living with other religions, even though he was convinced he was god descended. The Romans were fine with a diversity of religions as long as they included the Emperor as divine - except Jews got a pass. The rest of being forged by living in exile I agree with.
Back then the gods were smaller, and there was room for more than one to abide in the sky.
Yeah, infinity isn’t what it used to be.
To answer the OP; no evidence would convince me of the “Biblical God” because that god is logically inconsistent, contradicts reality in various ways and in general only makes sense as a character in a story, not an actual thing. When the evidence points towards a logical contradiction that means you are misinterpreting the evidence, not that the logical contradiction is true. The Biblical God is an impossibility. I’d believe in my own insanity before I believed in it.
For less impossible gods? Well it would take a lot, especially given how people are prone to be willing to lie and distort to “prove” their religion, but I could certainly see myself being convinced by enough sufficiently hard evidence. Of course that leads into an argument over what “counts” as a god; if the universe was created by a vastly powerful, totally non-supernatural entity, is that a god or not?
And then there’s the difference between believing they exist and believing they are gods. In the previously mentioned Stargate setting for example it would be foolish for the protagonists to not believe in the Goa’uld, but that doesn’t mean they have to actually consider the Goa’uld gods.
I’d go with the profundities with no bearing in logic or matter: “the hardest path through life is the easiest path to God.” Why should the Zen Buddhists get all the koans?
Not sure how you think that follows. “We” are an emergent property of atoms and elementary particles and quantum fields, but those are certainly not known to us without empirical inquiry and evidence.
Well, the classic example would be mathematical entities, I suppose. We know that there are infinitely more real numbers than rational numbers, but we certainly don’t know so from empirical evidence; and it’s an independent fact from us in the sense that it’s just as open for discovery to aliens from Alpha Centauri as it is to us.
It’s also a rather naive and restrictive view of the divine, laden with unwarranted assumptions, that sees it as just another part of our shared objective reality open to empirical investigation. It might be that way, but there are many other possibilities. Take pantheism, for one, or just the idea of a cosmic programmer: they’re not part of the simulation, and no evidence within the simulation need betray their existence; but we might still know if them, e.g. by this knowledge being included in our basic programming. Many other, more refined, theological concepts exist.
Do we? Obviously this would be a topic for another thread, but I’d agree with ‘more’ (defined as the inability to put the two sets into one-to-one correspondence) but not sure under what rigorous definition of ‘infinitely more’ that would be true. ‘More’ is just an awkward word with respect to infinities.
Eh, not sure I have a good argument for ‘infinitely many more’. But it’s surely not any finite amount more, since any finite number of natural number-sized things will just be natural number-sized again.
Whether something exists or not is an empirical claim, and empirical claims require empirical evidence.
It may be the case that there are things that exist that humans do not have evidence for: so be it; until we have good grounds for believing in something we shouldn’t believe in it, even if that means some false negatives. We have no other rational choice.
Are there empirical claims that could be proven absent any observation? I guess the null position is that such an argument might be possible.
But, right now, we have a long history of concluding things must exist on the basis of arguments later found to be flawed, or just incompatible with subsequent observations. So personally I would not be convinced that some X exists even by an apparently watertight argument. It would simply motivate me to find supporting evidence.