If I understand correctly, at least some versions of Calvinism claim that God does, in fact, decide/choose/determine who does and does not believe in him.
It would literally be a full of something in ME - like restoring [blargh] my uterus and ovaries, restoring my anus and rectum from the proctocolectomy, returning ME personally to the body and age of 18. It couldn’t happen to anybody else, and it couldn’t be raising someone specific from the dead [I have seen several people and their dopplegangers, and personal knowledge can be taught to someone enough to pass.]
I’m not easily convinced. This so-called god would need to do something big to make me a believer, like pat his head and rub his tummy at the same time!
Fund his own churches. A god capable of creating the universe doesn’t need to panhandle his followers.
I suppose if my dad walked into the room, that’d get me wondering, since he died 20 years ago.
The problem here is that you don’t want to just convince me that something exists. You want to convince me that God exists. That’s explicit in the last paragraph of the OP. And once you’ve crossed the rather low bar of “something weird is happening that we can’t explain”, then getting from there to Goddidit is not just a high bar, but basically an impossible one.
Let’s suppose that some entity stepped forward to claim credit for the miracle - appearing and saying “I did it”; having it implicit like if the words “God did this” appeared in fire in the sky; some dude with a history of fraud claiming to speak for the god - whatever, credit has been claimed. Why should I thing the entity is actually God? Because it claimed to be? There’s ample reason for an entity to lie and pretend to be God; the potential benefits are obvious. So I’m really not inclined to take this miracle man at their word about this - and in fact, claiming to be God will instantly convince me that they’re a charlatan, because I believe that the god as described in the bible has already been amply disproven by the contradictions its claimed description and actions have with reality and within itself.
So, to get me to believe that the miracle man is God it has to get past the fact that I know God is fictional. I can only see two ways to do this:
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A change in reference frame, which is to say, I die and suddenly am in an afterlife. Being suddenly transported into a completely different reality after having a near-death experience would put me in the frame of mind to learn about the reality I’d just found myself in. If an entity showed up then, claimed to be God, and was able to all the many questions I would have reasonably and convincingly, (good luck with that) and this experience continued on long enough and consistently enough to seem to be genuine to as great a degree as reality currently does, then given enough time and consistency and reasonable, consistent explanation of the many, many, many problems with the God mythos, then I would eventually accept that the new reality I was in was what it appeared to be and that the entity within it was God - or close enough to being God, anyway.
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Cognitive reformatting. As others have mentioned, if the entity rewrote my brain to believe in God and removed the knowledge that I have that prevents me from believing in God (either by locking it behind mental biases or simply making me stupider), then that would be a miraculous event that would indeed cause me to believe in God.
Minimum level? I too will have to go with the “Tweak my brain to the “believe in God”-setting” approach. Shouldn’t be too hard since it presumably exists in other people. Too mundane to be a miracle? You do it then! Preferably to a willing volunteer who isn’t me.
A good companion thread would be “What convinced you to believe in God?”. I think it would work better if started by a declared religionist to avoid “trap” claims.
I am a deist. Life and activity on Earth and in the universe at large is too precise for everything to have happened by chance for there not to have been a creator, and I don’t buy that anything could have come from nothing. Creation itself has convinced me there is, or at least was, a creator. Other than creation itself I don’t believe my creator has ever revealed itself to me or anyone else. Not to Moses, Noah, or Abraham. And it surely didn’t visit us as Jesus so it could sacrifice itself to itself so it could become a zombie.
I see no evidence my creator gives a rats ass if I believe in it or not. So things like miracles leave no impression on me. Miracles are just coincidental cause and effect. Nature is a self regulating system the creator made but does not interfere with. After an eternity of not revealing itself it would be unreasonable to believe the creator would start sticking it’s fingers into things.
In other words, I don’t need convincing there is a, what some call “God”. But I could not be convinced that the “God” of the bible, talmud, or koran exists.
Firstly, thanks for giving your opinion.
Next (I’m sure you’ve heard these before):
- if matter + energy have always existed, then there is no claim that ‘something came from nothing’
- who created God?
And this is like the puddle saying “This hole in the road fits me perfectly!”
I don’t know.
Which is the best, most honest answer there is regarding issues like this.
I don’t know.
While others may pull some gobbledegook answer out of what I consider an ancient book of ridiculous fairy tales, I just say I don’t know. Perhaps it’s beyond the scope of human understanding. Either way, I don’t know.
And I prefer to use the term creator. “God” to me seems like a term for a being that is lording over me day and night. My creator set up natural law which has checks and balances to regulate activity on Earth. My creator created me and nature and that’s that. It doesn’t judge, it doesn’t reward nor punish. It doesn’t need to be worshipped and told how great it is. It doesn’t acknowledge or answer prayers because that would be a revelation of itself. It just is, or at least it was.
In what way is using the word “creator” different from saying “I don’t know”?
I don’t exactly understand your question.
I don’t know how my creator came to be, and I’m not going to guess. It doesn’t matter. And I don’t need some other human to get up on a pulpit and tell me what they think the answer is.
Nobody is doing that here. I am merely asking why the answer “I don’t know” is sufficient when the question of who/what created the creator you propose, but not for the initial “How did the universe come to be?” question.
I don’t want to speak for @pkbites, but I think the distinction is whether the universe just happened to come into existence “on its own,” or whether it was deliberately created by some entity (something or someone with intelligence or purpose).
I have found the fine tuning argument to actually be a strong argument against the existence of a god that cares at all about its creation. I would be much more impressed (by the claim that some creator both exists and wants to have a relationship with us) if, rather than looking around and seeing the conditions of our universe are such as could accommodate our existence–however harsh, however improbable–we looked out into the wider universe and saw it was (1) impossible for planets like Earth to form, (2) impossible for a star like our sun to exist for billions of years in relative stability, (3) impossible for an oxygen atmosphere to remain around a planet for more than a few thousand years without getting whisked away by high velocity star dust, etc, etc.
Like, if we looked out beyond our world and saw a heavens blanketed in fire beyond our solar system, and it were as if we were living in a metaphorical snow globe (or better yet, a snowball within a snow globe within an inferno), rather than the metaphorical depression we find ourselves (temporarily) existing in as a lingering puddle formed by the rain that evidence tells us falls all over the place, and might well fall occasionally into or around our depression to accumulate from time to time.
But then the question is: if the universe was deliberately created by some entity instead of coming into existence on its own, then: was that entity deliberately created by some entity, or did it come into existence on its own?
(And if the answer to that question is “I don’t know,” then why not answer the question about the universe the same way?)
The answer given by most monotheistic religions is: neither; the Creator is eternal.
The universe, or rather the medium in which the universe resides, could be eternal too. One could reasonably argue that for a creator to create anything, the creator needs to be experiencing time and have the ability to take actions, so the creator must be existing within a medium -a universe of its own- that provides it a space-time continuum in which to do things. So presuming the existence of a creator necessarily presumes the existence of a medium in which universes could spontaneously form, if spontaneously forming happens to be a thing that universes are inclined to do.