What would it take to change an athiest's mind?

[Voyager]

I think I have proof that an alien couldn’t reproduce. Just predict something a year or so in the future exactly. Not “the stock market will be above 14,000” but a scene, with the names of all participants and their actions. Seal it in a mayonnaise jar and put it on Funk and Wagnall’s porch for a year. The idea comes from Doc Smith. In either Triplanetary or First Lensman, the Arisians convince someone of their godlike powers by predicting a scene in a barber shop. I don’t think any non-omniscient being could pull this off, and I’d accept anything omniscient as a god.

Any objections to this test?

[Slypork]

@Voyager

I think I have proof that an alien couldn’t reproduce. Just predict something a year or so in the future exactly. Not “the stock market will be above 14,000” but a scene, with the names of all participants and their actions. Seal it in a mayonnaise jar and put it on Funk and Wagnall’s porch for a year. The idea comes from Doc Smith. In either Triplanetary or First Lensman, the Arisians convince someone of their godlike powers by predicting a scene in a barber shop. I don’t think any non-omniscient being could pull this off, and I’d accept anything omniscient as a god.

Any objections to this test?

Unfortunately, if the alien has access to time travel technology that is outside of our understanding of physics, then it might be possible for them to know future events.

The aforementioned notion of rearranging the stars to spell something out and have it visible to everyone including through our sensory devices might be a good example of god-like power. It could also mean that they are part of the Q continuum.

Q was not God because, although he was immortal, he did have a beginning and could be killed. The Beyonder, from the Marvel universe, was effectively a god because of his powers but he came from another universe and was capable of being killed.

I can’t prove that there was a creator but I cannot disprove it either.

[Voyager]

@Slypork

Unfortunately, if the alien has access to time travel technology that is outside of our understanding of physics, then it might be possible for them to know future events.

The aforementioned notion of rearranging the stars to spell something out and have it visible to everyone including through our sensory devices might be a good example of god-like power. It could also mean that they are part of the Q continuum.

I don’t buy that time travel is possible, and that the future is predestined. Now, if you are willing to grant the aliens all possible powers of a god, then by definition they are indistinguishable - and in fact they are gods.

I think being immortal is far easier than knowing the future perfectly, given some sort of brain backup procedure.

I think rearranging the stars would be simpler also. It can be done either through an illusion (by distorting the light that reaches us) or by shoving stars around through hyperspace ala Edmond Hamilton. However any decent deity would refuse to do it because of the disruption, so the prediction scenario would be a lot more achievable.

[Yumblie]

@Slypork

You see, I am willing to put things to a test and am willing to question a claim. Instead of just saying that the idea of God is “foolish”, tell me what it would take to convince you that he exists. What tests would he have to pass in order for you to just say he exists?

That’s the thing though, the idea of God is such a complex, outlandish idea that it’s pretty much futile to try and prove it. With all the hypothetical evidence given in this thread, attributing it to this “God” guy raises many more questions than it answers.

It’s like trying to prove that gravity is the result of invisible elves that push and pull things all around the universe, magical elves that cannot be detected by any scientific instruments. Could you come up with a way to prove these elves existed? It seems like such a ridiculous thing to prove, because you’d also have to come up with an explanation as to the origin of the elves, what the elves are made of, how they are able to manipulate mass without being detected, etc. You’d basically have to give reasons why the elf explanation works better than the one we’ve got. Is there anything elves can do that Einstein’s equations can’t?

Everyone in this thread has attempted to come up with ways that a supernatural being could manifest itself as evidence, but every time, there’s always a simpler explanation. I don’t think there’s anything that can happen where the only explanation is a supernatural being. I’m still open the possibility that there could be some God-like thing out there, but at this time I don’t think we have any way to test for it. Maybe in the future, but not now.

[control-z]

@Yumblie

It’s like trying to prove that gravity is the result of invisible elves that push and pull things all around the universe, magical elves that cannot be detected by any scientific instruments.

AHA, I knew it! I find your ideas intriguing and would like to subscribe to your newsletter.

[gazpacho]

@Yumblie

It’s like trying to prove that gravity is the result of invisible elves that push and pull things all around the universe, magical elves that cannot be detected by any scientific instruments.

Isn’t that more or less the actual theory now? They just call the elves gravitons.

[Der_Trihs]

@Slypork

You see, I am willing to put things to a test and am willing to question a claim. Instead of just saying that the idea of God is “foolish”, tell me what it would take to convince you that he exists. What tests would he have to pass in order for you to just say he exists?

The majority of the versions of God I’ve heard of are internally inconsistent or violate observed reality; nothing could convince me of those. As for the others, as I and others keep pointing out, there’s no way we could tell the difference between the real thing and a fake; and a fake is simply more likely.

@Voyager

I think I have proof that an alien couldn’t reproduce. Just predict something a year or so in the future exactly. Not “the stock market will be above 14,000” but a scene, with the names of all participants and their actions. Seal it in a mayonnaise jar and put it on Funk and Wagnall’s porch for a year. The idea comes from Doc Smith. In either Triplanetary or First Lensman, the Arisians convince someone of their godlike powers by predicting a scene in a barber shop. I don’t think any non-omniscient being could pull this off, and I’d accept anything omniscient as a god.

Any objections to this test?

As said, the being could use time travel, which is a better explanation than God anyway. And if you disbelieve in time travel you should also disbelieve that God could pull this off, since that’s what it is, even if all that travels is information.

Or, the message in the jar could be a nanotech object that will change to display whatever actually happened. Or the being could screw with your mind so you saw whatever “future message” it wanted. Or, it could simply manipulate affairs so they happen as the message said; as someone once said, the easiest way to predict the future is to make it happen.

@gazpacho

Isn’t that more or less the actual theory now? They just call the elves gravitons.

No. Gravitons are the a simple explanation, covered by Occam’s’ Razor; elves aren’t. And they fit into theories that produce thing that we can detect; elves don’t.

[begbert2]

@Slypork

I find it fascinating the people who say that nothing will convince them short of having their mind changed for them (brainwashing, mind control, etc). I know it’s not what they mean but it sounds like they just have a stubborn streak a mile wide. “Nope, I refuse to accept any proof you might show me no matter what it is. I won’t change my mind. You’ll have to change it for me. Nyahh, nyahh.*<stick fingers in ears>*la, la, la, la, la, I’m not listening! La, la, la…”

What you’re hearing is hard agnosticism in action - that Cogito Ergo Sum is about as much as you can know about the universe; in all else you are a victim of your senses, mental processes, and memory. There is no evidence that god could possibly present that we cannot be fooled into believing by manipulation of our senses, or by manipulating our own perception of our senses via misinterpretation or delusion.

I’m a hard agnostic in this way; I do not know that I have a physical form that I’m moving around in a physical world; even though every speck of experience and evidence that I am aware of supports this belief. This does not mean that I don’t believe that I physically exist. I do, with nigh-absolute certainty. I just don’t know it. (The only things that can be truly known with perfect certainty are arbitrarily defined things, like math and logic systems. If anybody tells you otherwise they probably don’t know how to distinguish “believing” from “knowing”.)

Persons who say nothing will convince them of god’s reality have simply come to the conclusion that their being fooled or mistaken about any evidence is much more likely than that evidence having been genuinely provided by an actual god. This is not an irrational assumption; for some values of “God”, I agree with them. (Any god that that can make logical contradictions happen, for example.)

[Bryan_Ekers]

If the Catholic Church would tithe 10% of its income to me, I’d be prepared to spend half my Sunday doing some rituals.

The other 6.5 days… time for Bryan to go nuts.

[JustAnotherGeek]

@gazpacho

Isn’t that more or less the actual theory now? They just call the elves gravitons.

Sure we haven’t yet seen a graviton, but they are attempting experiments to find them. Current theories are attempting to explain the behavior of this particle, while experiments being done at Fermi and soon to be done at the large hadron collider may reveal this particle. Thus, even though they cannot currently be detected by scientific equipment, we’re building better equipment to try, instead of simply saying we can’t and never will be able to detect them.

To the OP: What definition of “God” are you looking for me to believe? That of a particular religion? A non-denominational, omniscient, omnipotent being? A non-denominational, omniscient, omnipotent, benevolent being? Something as simple as a mere universe creator / prime mover?

A being with powers far greater than mine would not have to be “omnipotent” for me to believe that it is. A being with intelligence and knowledge far superior to mine would not be “omniscient.” And if the being were a “simple universe creator,” what other purpose does it have? Was it created by something else?

I suppose, IOW, that there is nothing that I can think of that would convince me, because I know how easily I can be fooled.

[Princhester]

@Chief Pedant

If we define “God” in the common JudeoChristian tradition, however, his local Presence would be sufficient to change an atheist’s mind.

Imagine I have a machine I can turn on that causes everyone in the vicinity to believe what I say, and I turn up at an atheists convention and announce “I am God” in a stentorious voice.

Am I now God in the JudeoChristian tradition? Why aren’t I, going by your definition? Or does your definition need some work?

[begbert2]

@Princhester

Imagine I have a machine I can turn on that causes everyone in the vicinity to believe what I say, and I turn up at an atheists convention and announce “I am God” in a stentorious voice.

Am I now God in the JudeoChristian tradition? Why aren’t I, going by your definition? Or does your definition need some work?

Chief Pendant said that his dog has fur, and you’re asking whether if your cat had fur, would it be his dog. I don’t think your protest is valid.

(My protest would be, I am vaguely aware of some Judeo-Christain traditions, and have never even heard this odd claim of his, that God has this property. I’d wonder where he was getting it from, and upon what basis he claims that the “common” JudeoChristian tradition shares this position.)

[Left_Hand_of_Dorkness]

@Malacandra

Analiendidit. But you haven’t demonstrated that this hypothetical alien can do anything but mind-control you into belief. Hence “credulous fool”. (The name applies only in the circumstances that you actually have been duped by an alien, which I do not for a moment suppose to be the case.)

Unless that mind control allows a saving throw, it’s not fair to call someone a credulous fool for having their mind controlled by alien technology. Of course someone mind controlled into believing in god will believe in god. That’s a tautology.

Given the limited definition in the OP (that is, God is the creator of the universe, not necessarily an omni-anything critter), I’d evaluate that hypothesis just like any other hypothesis. In other words, is it the best available explanation for the available data? Do its implied predictions bear out? Can I falsify it?

Assuming that it fits these criteria, then I’d accept that I’d encountered evidence of a creator of the universe. By the OP’s definition, right now I guess the Big Bang is God.

Other stuff–miracles, walking talking icecreamcrapping tacos, history lessons–would be totally irrelevant to the claim that I’d encountered the creator of the universe. There’s no particular reason that a particular rockyroadshitter would happen to be the Creator.

If you make other claims for God, I’d expect to see evidence in similar proportions. The more grandiose the claim, the more grandiose the evidence has to be. For example, if you claim that your god can move stars around at will, I will evaluate that claim based on evidence that your god can move stars around at will; I won’t just accept it on faith.

If you make the supremely grandiose claim that an entity is omnipotent, the evidence must be equally grandiose. I suspect that, just as omnipotence is beyond my understanding, the evidence itself would be beyond my understanding; I’m not sure I would be qualified to evaluate a claim of omnipotence.

But changing my atheist mind wouldn’t necessarily mean making me a believer; you could much more easily change my mind by moving me toward the believing end of agnosticism. If, for example, each night the stars reconfigured themselves so that everyone saw “Love one another, you bastards!” written in the heaven in their own native tongue (and those who couldn’t read nevertheless could read this message), and if conversations and observations through multiple channels consistently verified this finding, I’d find myself moving much closer toward being religious. If someone appeared who explained how to make the world a place devoid of suffering, the problem addressed by theodicy would disappear, and I’d become much closer to being a believer. Various incredible things could happen for which God would suddenly become a plausible explanation, if not necessarily the only plausible explanation.

Daniel

[Princhester]

@begbert2

Chief Pendant said that his dog has fur, and you’re asking whether if your cat had fur, would it be his dog. I don’t think your protest is valid.

No he said that you’d know it was his dog if it had fur. And I said if I turned up dressed in fur, would I be his dog? Stating the defining characteristics of his dog is his problem, not mine.

(My protest would be, I am vaguely aware of some Judeo-Christain traditions, and have never even heard this odd claim of his, that God has this property. I’d wonder where he was getting it from, and upon what basis he claims that the “common” JudeoChristian tradition shares this position.)

See my earlier post. I don’t know what the heck a god is, and I don’t see any consensus amongst even those who believe in them. Not my problem, though.

[Chief_Pedant]

@begbert2

Chief Pendant said that his dog has fur, and you’re asking whether if your cat had fur, would it be his dog. I don’t think your protest is valid.

(My protest would be, I am vaguely aware of some Judeo-Christain traditions, and have never even heard this odd claim of his, that God has this property. I’d wonder where he was getting it from, and upon what basis he claims that the “common” JudeoChristian tradition shares this position.)

Let me elaborate.
The first point is that a miracle of any kind is not going to persuade a rational man, for the reason I mentioned above.
The second point is that the Presence of God (as defined in the JudeoChristian tradition) demands and receives absolute recognition of his position as God. See for instance, Romans 14:11: “As I live, says the Lord, every knee shall bow to me, and every tongue shall confess to God.” (emphasis mine) The Old (Jewish) and New (Christian) Testament describe personal encounters with God that are fairly one-sided in terms of establishing who is the Big Guy.

I’m uninterested in arguing that there is a God or what the chances are that he’s about to make a personal appearance. I am simply addressing the OP’s question. Assuming he’s referring to the JudeoChristian God, it’s the Personal Appearance that is 100% effective in persuading Der Trihs that he’s God. I understand Der Trihs’ point that this would amount to a brain rape and not simply a capitulation to Pascal’s wager, but such a complaint is irrelevant to the question being asked. Either way he’s going down and acknowledging God if God shows up (according to JudeoChristian tradition). He might still have a choice over whether or not to rebel (another whole theologic string) but he won’t have any trouble recognzing God as God. The whole scenario also seems unlikely to happen at all so it’s probably not worth getting steamed up over.

[Sam_Stone]

Someone with a scientific mindset will never just ‘believe’. If presented with evidence for a God, I would simply apply the same logical, scientific, and philosophical tools I use to make sense of any other empirical evidence. It’d be like, “Okay, this dude just drew a smiley face out of the Andromeda Galaxy. What does that tell me? Let’s form a hypothesis and test it.”

I would then follow that process and come to a best working hypothesis, and use it until a better one came along. One of the possible hypotheses might be that a ‘God’ is involved, but that would just send me on a scientific expedition to attempt to define and understand the nature of what appears to be a “God”.

There’s no point at which I would go, “Hail, Messiah!” and throw the calculator away.

You know, if you just study real cosmology, you’ll find stuff out there weird enough to make you really scratch your head. Wondrous things. Mind blowing things. Even things that could create alternate realities and immortality. You can study all this within the realm of science. You don’t need to shut down your brain and just ‘believe’.

And some of us couldn’t do that if we wanted to.

When I was very young, I believed. I remember what it was like. I knew God existed and was with me at all times. I didn’t have to rationalize it any more than I had to rationalize a feeling of contentment or sadness. It was just there. It was self-evident.

Then one day it wasn’t there any more. It was like having an invisible friend as a small child, and one day realizing that you knew the invisible friend didn’t exist and never had - and being perfectly fine with that. Oh, sometimes you miss the warm feeling of knowing someone had your back and you were never alone, but really… reality was a much better alternative.

I’m happy I felt that way once when I was a child. It gives me insight into the minds of true believers. I get what they are feeling. But I’m ecstatically happy that I’m not one of them. The real universe is just far more interesting and beautiful. And even more comforting. I’m not afraid of dying - Pascal can take his wager and stuff it. I’m content knowing that I’m just one small speck in a much larger tapestry.

[Princhester]

@Chief Pedant

The second point is that the Presence of God (as defined in the JudeoChristian tradition) demands and receives absolute recognition of his position as God. See for instance, Romans 14:11: “As I live, says the Lord, every knee shall bow to me, and every tongue shall confess to God.”

What does this mean? It could be read as simply the demand of a megalomaniac, or as a statement (everyone in my presence will bow their knee). I don’t think there’s anything in here you could call any kind of definition.

Assuming he’s referring to the JudeoChristian God, it’s the Personal Appearance that is 100% effective in persuading Der Trihs that he’s God. I understand Der Trihs’ point that this would amount to a brain rape and not simply a capitulation to Pascal’s wager, but such a complaint is irrelevant to the question being asked. Either way he’s going down and acknowledging God if God shows up (according to JudeoChristian tradition). He might still have a choice over whether or not to rebel (another whole theologic string) but he won’t have any trouble recognzing God as God.

You’re not answering the question at all. You’re just saying when the JudeoChristian God turns up, we’ll know he’s turned up. How? What will happen? What features of that particular god will mean he’s turned up? Colour, shape, size, glowing red eyes? Don’t duck the question.

But really, it seems that as per your earlier post, you are saying that the key characteristic of the JC God is that he can just cause people to believe he is God. Is that the long and short of it? And if so, how do you deal with the point I raise at #65? Is there a difference between me with a mind control machine and the JC God? If so, what is it and how can anyone tell?

[Malacandra]

@Left Hand of Dorkness

Unless that mind control allows a saving throw, it’s not fair to call someone a credulous fool for having their mind controlled by alien technology. Of course someone mind controlled into believing in god will believe in god. That’s a tautology.

Thanks for explaining that, I might have struggled with the concept of a tautology otherwise. But I think I still get to look on and say “He’s using an old Jedi mind trick, you weak-minded fool!”.

However, I’m willing to be fair about it. When we have actual instances of people being mind-controlled by alien technology to the point it becomes a social problem, I’ll mollify my tone somewhat.

[Containing_Iron]

@Slypork

I can’t prove that there was a creator but I cannot disprove it either.

If you combine that with your earlier

(I hope this quoting works)

@Slypork

To convice me that the Star Wars movies are a documentary (…) far, far away.

Since you (not you, but the guy that came up with the idea) can’t prove that the Star wars movies are a documentary and you (this time you as in you)can’t disprove it… wouldn’t that hypothesis be equally valid as your belief in God?

so wouldn’t your:

(again hoping the quoting goes right)

@Slypork

Even then I would still be skeptical about any claims of the documentary status

be as callus as some atheist who are skeptical (to put it mildly) about the claims of God’s existence?
Or alternatively, shouldn’t you be looking at you beliefs with the same amount of skeptisism?

[monavis]

What if this God took all the stars,planets comets etc. Re arranged them to spell out :“Hey earthlings I see you, I am invisible but know I am here”?

Monavis