To the skeptics: what evidence would convince you?

[DysonSphere]

Under laboratory conditions, prove to me that a man who has been dead for three days can come back to life
AND
Prove to me that a woman who has not been inseminated (through sex or artificially) can give birth (it doesn’t have to be a baby boy

These would certainly result in my tentative acceptance of certain (maybe all) Biblical teachings. However, naturalistic explanations are possible, and in the future, even these demonstrations may not be sufficient to establish a miracle.

 

[Zatzat]

Argumentum ad populum speaks to me clearly as evidence

Please take the time to learn about argumentum ad populum. Once you have, you’ll not use it again, of that I am certain.

‘An argumentum ad populum (Latin: “appeal to the people”), in logic, is a fallacious argument that concludes a proposition to be true because many or all people believe it.’

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argumentum_ad_populum

 

[LittleSoldier]

How is this relevant? There is no evidence I can give you of my existence, and you’d be perfectly reasonable in thinking that I’m just a figment of your imagination.

How is this analogy supposed to convince skeptics that God exists?

Actually, although you (of course) have the right to respond to any post, my request for proof was for proof of Nozzy’s existence. I believe you exist, but I really don’t believe Nozzy exists. And as he has, well, “requested” proof of God’s existence from me, I think it would only be correct and “decorum” if Nozzy proves he exists, too. And then perhaps the same reasoning Nozzy uses could be used in an attempt to prove that God exists.

It isn’t an analogy. It’s a request for proof, not directed at you.

As far as convincing skeptics that God exists, I don’t think one can. Just as Nozzy can’t prove he exists and I can’t prove I exist, I can’t prove God exists and I don’t think any person who is alive can. I actually have agnostic tendencies which creep up from time to time. I don’t think anyone can prove to me that God exists. I want Him to exist; I hope He exists, and most of the time I am sure He exists. But not all the time.

BTW, Nozzy really doesn’t exist. Not anymore.

*Holy Mother, please keep
all unborn children safe today.

St. Francis, please pray for all unwanted and hurt animals.*

 

[LittleSoldier]

Derail threads often? You might want to change the subject from what the OP wanted it to being about me, but I am not about to pander to that. You can either discuss what I have said on the topic, or you can not. But do not think you can put up smoke screens with subject changes and tangents.

Suffice to say however, at least my existence does something the existence of god does not. It passes the initial credibility test of noticing that OTHER people exist, therefore the claim that a person like me exists requires no extraordinary evidence.

Your claim that a god exists however appears, thus far, to be based on literally nothing. Should you come up with anything I would be agog to hear it. If the best you can come up with is subject changes and a sarky attempt to take my own words and parrot them back to me, then I thank you for the generosity you have shown with your time thus far, but I require no more of it.

I do however thank you for your odd decision to quote my ENTIRE post in order to do your sarky parroting of my own words back to me. It increased my exposure.

You are quite welcome.

“Sarky”? Wow, that’s a new one. And for a poster who accuses others of using ad hominems, I think you should take a good close look in the mirror.

There are reasons I asked for proof of your existence. First, I don’t believe you do. Second, the fact that you can’t prove you exist yet use yourself as a reference is an indication to me that I can do the same with God.

As for quoting your entire post, that is common decorum on this forum. It makes it easier for people to follow the debate if they don’t have to guess about which member made a point. It’s not “odd” at all. Look around. Look at some threads. It’s considered rude to not quote the person you are responding to.

Oh, I also notice that you weren’t able to prove you exist. You can’t, can you? No. You can’t.

*Holy Mother, please keep
all unborn children safe today.

St. Francis, please pray for all unwanted and hurt animals.*

 

[tonyrey]

And if the vast majority of people believed the earth was flat and sitting on turtles, would you claim it was evidence that this is true?

No response!

Human beings are fallible, our minds are limited, and our intuitions are tailored to the particular environment we evolved in (modern physics doesn’t make intuitive sense to us for example).

In that case your arguments about evidence are unsound…

No response!

Quote:

For your second point, is the biggest virtue believing in God without evidence, or accepting the way of life God proposes?

A false dilemma! You are equating no evidence with some evidence.

No response!

Also, there is a contradiction in the view you hold. If God wants us to choose completely on our own, without being “forced” by things like our parents telling us to believe from childhood/being told that we’ll go to hell if we don’t, then it makes no sense for revealed religion to exist at all.

“completely on our own” is a false assumption…

No response!

You can’t have both ways: claim that miracles would force people to believe and this is not what God wants, and God physically coming to earth, leaving the Bible, commanding that nonbelievers be converted and children raised to believe (which amounts to removing their choice), Mary allegedly performing miracles like Fatima.

An absurd conclusion!None of what you have mentioned has forced people to believe…

No response!

Fundamentally, I would agree with you that it would be more valuable to leave us to find our own way than tell us what to do. Of course, this means it makes no sense for there to be revealed religion.

Another false dilemma! Total darkness or the light of Christ shining in the darkness are the true options…

No response!

How is this relevant? There is no evidence I can give you of my existence, and you’d be perfectly reasonable in thinking that I’m just a figment of your imagination.

That demonstrates the absurdity of your notion of evidence…

No response!

How is this analogy supposed to convince skeptics that God exists?

The existence of conscious persons is evidence that rational, purposeful minds are more powerful and significant than irrational, purposeless things. The use of Occam’s Razor makes one Supreme Mind the most adequate and economical explanation of reality…

No response!

Raising children from birth to believe at an age when they’re trusting and unthinking is not forcing them to believe?

No. It is educationally unsound to bring up children in a moral and spiritual vacuum. When they reach the age of reason they are free to decide for themselves what to believe and many do abandon their religion.

Why is it that people tend to adopt the religion of their parents?

Because (a) every religion teaches the basic truths about reality and (b) we are creatures of habit .

(In fact, I would wager that the reason you feel on an intuitive level that a “supreme mind” is the thing that makes the most sense, is that it’s the idea you were raised on. Most religious people had their free will to decide what to believe taken away from them by their parents.

You are mistaken. By the age of eleven I was not a practising Catholic and regarded religion as sentimental nonsense. It was only seven years later that I realised I was wrong because materialism is a hopelessly inadequate explanation of reality and the moral teaching of Christ is the finest the world has ever known.

People who were brought up in secular families tend not to have that intuitive feel for God, or at least that’s the sense I get from these people. For them, the idea of the supernatural and God is very alien and nonsensical.)

In a secular environment people are living in a spiritual desert and often realise there is something missing in their lives - that it lacks real meaning and purpose…

But returning to the subject of miracles, when Jesus was on earth, he allegedly performed miracles before others, is that not forcing them to believe?

It is helping them to believe. Many Jews rejected him because they thought he was a charlatan.

Mary has allegedly performed miracles, including the big one at Fatima, is that not forcing people to believe?

Why are there sceptics then?

That is where I see a contradiction. Your argument is that it makes no sense for God to perform a large scale miracle so that we would all know he exists, but at the same time it makes sense for God to have Mary perform a miracle, or to become man and perform miracles so that others might believe?

You regard God as a miracle-worker who should be at your beck and call to do your exact bidding!

You’re essentially saying that God is okay with doing unconvincing miracles that might be explained away naturally, but he doesn’t want to go all the way and do a convincing miracle. Why bother with the unconvincing ones then?

You think it’s a waste of time curing the sick and giving hope and consolation to the dying?

And that brings me back to what would convince me. Miracles that are truly miraculous would, “miracles” that are entirely consistent with a godless universe would not.

How do you distinguish the two? Events that are entirely consistent with a godless universe are not miracles…
Why are you utterly convinced that this universe can explain itself? Or that it has a natural explanation? Or that you are not mistaken? What is the **evidence **for your rejection of God???

 

[flyingfish]

No response!

Okay, here goes:

You are contrasting a worthless, false supposition with a significant, established fact!

I was using that to illustrate that just because the majority believe something, doesn’t mean it’s true. It wasn’t such a worthless assumption either, not that long ago people did believe those kinds of things about the universe and now we know them to be false.

In that case your arguments about evidence are unsound…

That demonstrates the absurdity of your notion of evidence…

I am not a hardcore skeptic, I was just illustrating a point. Strictly speaking, the only thing I can know for sure is that I exist. On a fundamental level, I can say that I don’t know that there is a universe or other individuals, they could well be generated by my subconscious. I could be a brain in a vat etc.

However, I said that only to make a point. I don’t consider this seriously. I generally trust my senses, because that is the only thing I can do, and the only way to function in the world.

The existence of conscious persons is evidence that rational, purposeful minds are more powerful and significant than irrational, purposeless things. The use of Occam’s Razor makes one Supreme Mind the most adequate and economical explanation of reality…

I don’t know how you want me to respond to that. Personally I think that an omnipotent, omniscient mind is a very sophisticated thing. Where did this mind come from? Why should it exist rather than not? Did it develop? Did it pop into existence of its own accord?

I am more comfortable with accepting as a starting point some simple principles (like the laws of physics) that naturally lead to the development of minds.

No. It is educationally unsound to bring up children in a moral and spiritual vacuum. When they reach the age of reason they are free to decide for themselves what to believe and many do abandon their religion.

Maybe so, but when you teach young children that there is a supernatural and God, they might come to have an intuitive sense of God that someone brought up without God would never have.

I have met people who grew up without being told that there is a supernatural. If you talk to them about God, they have this “huh?” look on their face and ask me if I am being serious. For them it’s like talking about Zeus, they don’t have that feel that there might be something more than the material world.

Why are there sceptics then?
You regard God as a miracle-worker who should be at your beck and call to do your exact bidding!

No, I just said that in order for me to become a believer again I would have to see some evidence that God exists. Just because someone, somewhere claims that they talked to God or saw God is not enough for me. People claim all sorts of things.

How do you distinguish the two? Events that are entirely consistent with a godless universe are not miracles…
Why are you utterly convinced that this universe can explain itself? Or that it has a natural explanation? Or that you are not mistaken? What is the **evidence **for your rejection of God???

I am absolutely not convinced that the universe can explain itself. I think questions about why a universe should exist at all, and why it should exist in this particular way, whether it’s the only universe that exists, whether it will at some point stop existing etc. are all very serious and unanswered questions. Perhaps unanswerable questions.

But this doesn’t make me say, there must be a supreme mind that designed it all. I could ask those same questions about the mind. It just moves the problem one step back and answers nothing.

It’s not that I can say with certainty there is no God, it’s that I see no reason to believe there is (especially when talking about the kind of God who communicates with human beings and intervenes in human affairs).

I actually think it would be pretty cool if there was an infinitely powerful mind who was interested in me, my development, and made an afterlife for me.

 

[Thing]

Please take the time to learn about argumentum ad populum. Once you have, you’ll not use it again, of that I am certain.

‘An argumentum ad populum (Latin: “appeal to the people”), in logic, is a fallacious argument that concludes a proposition to be true because many or all people believe it.’

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argumentum_ad_populum

Excellent, here we go again. Everybody runs → that way, past me. I wonder why. Could it be evidence of something that way <–.
I’ve already said that something is not true *just *because everybody believes it. I said it is *evidence *of something.

 

[Black_Angel_1]

The Human Mind is in no way limited.

Your mind is capable of things you can’t fully understand because unfortunately, unless your a true genius, you can’t unlock all of its potential in this generation.

The Human Mind could have easily creating every belief in every religion in existence.

All of the scriptures, all of the miracles can be easily thought up by a single man with no belief in them.

In fact, every time you think, your body undergoes a change. If you think negatively, then your body is changed negatively. And vice versa.

Hence why people who are very healthy can die from a heart attack through anger alone.

 

[tonyrey]

You are contrasting a worthless, false supposition with a significant, established fact!

I agree with you but the fact that the vast majority have always had a belief in God requires explanation… and the simplest explanation - taken in conjunction with other evidence - is that God exists.

I am not a hardcore skeptic, I was just illustrating a point. Strictly speaking, the only thing I can know for sure is that I exist. On a fundamental level, I can say that I don’t know that there is a universe or other individuals, they could well be generated by my subconscious. I could be a brain in a vat etc.

Which is evidence that the existence of the intangible mind is far more convincing than any**thing **else…

The existence of conscious persons is evidence that rational, purposeful minds are more powerful and significant than irrational, purposeless things. The use of Occam’s Razor makes one Supreme Mind the most adequate and economical explanation of reality…

I don’t know how you want me to respond to that. Personally I think that an omnipotent, omniscient mind is a very sophisticated thing. Where did this mind come from? Why should it exist rather than not? Did it develop? Did it pop into existence of its own accord?

It is unreasonable to believe we can understand the nature of Ultimate Reality. It is also unreasonable to believe everything has emerged from nothing. The success of science demonstrates the conscious mind is far more powerful than inanimate matter. The human mind is very sophisticated but it is an integrated entity which is more valuable and significant than any material object.

I am more comfortable with accepting as a starting point some simple principles (like the laws of physics) that naturally lead to the development of minds.

Then you are putting the cart before the horse! You have already agreed that our sole certainty is the mind… You also have to explain why there is order, development and purpose rather than disorder, confusion and chaos…

No. It is educationally unsound to bring up children in a moral and spiritual vacuum. When they reach the age of reason they are free to decide for themselves what to believe and many do abandon their religion.

Maybe so, but when you teach young children that there is a supernatural and God, they might come to have an intuitive sense of God that someone brought up without God would never have.

Which is desirable! Just as you teach young children about truth, goodness, freedom, justice, beauty and love…

I have met people who grew up without being told that there is a supernatural. If you talk to them about God, they have this “huh?” look on their face and ask me if I am being serious.

For them it’s like talking about Zeus, they don’t have that feel that there might be something more than the material world.

In other words they live in a spiritual desert… In a secular society many people never even stop to consider whether abortion is right or wrong…

You regard God as a miracle-worker who should be at your beck and call to do your exact bidding!

No, I just said that in order for me to become a believer again I would have to see some evidence that God exists. Just because someone, somewhere claims that they talked to God or saw God is not enough for me. People claim all sorts of things.

What about the teaching of Christ? Do you accept it? How did it originate?

Why are you utterly convinced that this universe can explain itself? Or that it has a natural explanation? Or that you are not mistaken? What is the evidence for your rejection of God???

I am absolutely not convinced that the universe can explain itself. I think questions about why a universe should exist at all, and why it should exist in this particular way, whether it’s the only universe that exists, whether it will at some point stop existing etc. are all very serious and unanswered questions. Perhaps unanswerable questions.

They may be unanswerable with absolute certainty but we can’t sit on the fence all our lives… “Probability is the very guide of life” - Butler

But this doesn’t make me say, there must be a supreme mind that designed it all. I could ask those same questions about the mind. It just moves the problem one step back and answers nothing.

I think it answers a lot! For a start it corresponds to the fact that the most valuable “things” in life are intangible…

It’s not that I can say with certainty there is no God, it’s that I see no reason to believe there is (especially when talking about the kind of God who communicates with human beings and intervenes in human affairs).

A God who leaves human beings to their own devices, makes no attempt to enlighten them and liberate them from their ignorance, selfishness and folly is not a God worth having…

I actually think it would be pretty cool if there was an infinitely powerful mind who was interested in me, my development, and made an afterlife for me.

Why else would we exist in a world dominated by cruelty, bloodshed and injustice? Isn’t that evidence of the reality of evil? Do you regard life as “a tale told by an idiot full of sound and fury signifying nothing”? That won’t give you a solid foundation for any philosophy except pessimism and nihilism…

 

[LittleSoldier]

You’re missing the point of what I said. I am talking about the kinds of things that would make me believe in a theistic God. The points about the universe are not even the main points.

The main points would be evidence:

-limbs growing back in front of my eyes after praying to God
-other prayers being answered, and statistical evidence showing that prayer works
-God performing obvious miracles like rearranging stars in the universe to tell us he exists,
or appearing before us to talk to us
-holy texts containing information it would have been impossible for humans to know (such as the Old Testament having the equations of General Relativity)
-holy texts and other relics displaying magical properties such as indestructibility

These, for example, would make me become a believer again.

Just a quick suggestion: I think you should check into the scientific work being conducted on the Shroud of Turin and also check into Our Lady of Guadalupe. You might find what you’re looking for.

 

[hillsteven]

Just a quick suggestion: I think you should check into the scientific work being conducted on the Shroud of Turin and also check into Our Lady of Guadalupe. You might find what you’re looking for.

There are a number of miracles surrounding the Eucharist that have been scientifically verified. (bread turned into true flesh or wine turned into actual blood)

There are also examples of what have been termed as incorruptible corpses in that there are bodies of Saints which, centuries later, have shown little to no evidence of bodily decay. (again, some of these have been scientifically verified)

One other thought would be the Old Testament prophesies fulfilled by Jesus. True, there are a number of them that a well-informed human might have been able to manipulate, but there were also many, many more that were completely out of his control. Taken one, or even a few at a time, they might be written off as coincidence. Taken as a whole, the chances of this being a coincidence are slim to none… and Slim left town.

 

[LittleSoldier]

There are a number of miracles surrounding the Eucharist that have been scientifically verified. (bread turned into true flesh or wine turned into actual blood)

There are also examples of what have been termed as incorruptible corpses in that there are bodies of Saints which, centuries later, have shown little to no evidence of bodily decay. (again, some of these have been scientifically verified)

One other thought would be the Old Testament prophesies fulfilled by Jesus. True, there are a number of them that a well-informed human might have been able to manipulate, but there were also many, many more that were completely out of his control. Taken one, or even a few at a time, they might be written off as coincidence. Taken as a whole, the chances of this being a coincidence are slim to none… and Slim left town.

Thank you for the suggestions.

I agree - taking it as a whole shows that the chances of all this being a coincidence (or a massive hoax going back millenia) are really next to zero.

 

[NoMoreGames]

I may be skeptical, but that doesn’t mean I don’t believe. In fact, I do. I am never sure of anything, however, which is what makes me a skeptic. My outlook is pretty much summed up in this:

Don’t believe anything. Regard things on a scale of probabilities. The things that seem most absurd, put under ‘Low Probability’, and the things that seem most plausible, you put under ‘High Probability’. Never believe anything. Once you believe anything, you stop thinking about it. The more things you believe, the less mental activity. If you believe something, and have an opinion on every subject, then your brain activity stops entirely, which is clinically considered a sign of death, nowadays in medical practice. So put things on a scale or probability, and never believe or disbelieve anything entirely.
-Robert A. Wilson

So to answer your question, as a believing skeptic, what could convince me 100% of anything (be it science, faith, what ever the case is)? Death.

 

[flyingfish]

I agree with you but the fact that the vast majority have always had a belief in God requires explanation… and the simplest explanation - taken in conjunction with other evidence - is that God exists.

I don’t see the logic behind this argument. Our species has been around for some 100k years now in its present state, our written history comprises a tiny fraction of that time, and most of our understanding of the universe came in the past few hundred years.

Also, the kinds of things people have believed throughout history can’t quite be called “God” in the same sense you might mean it. People have believed in multiple gods, people have believed in spirits, people have believed in mystical energy/life force. People have believed, and still believe, in a variety of supernatural realities. Is that evidence for their existence?

Which is evidence that the existence of the intangible mind is far more convincing than any**thing **else…

The existence of my mind is more convincing to me than anything else because my own thoughts are the only thing I truly experience. I don’t know with certainty that your mind exists, how can I possibly be certain about the existence of a supreme mind that isn’t even communicating with me?

Then you are putting the cart before the horse! You have already agreed that our sole certainty is the mind… You also have to explain why there is order, development and purpose rather than disorder, confusion and chaos…

Our own mind, not some external mind “out there” that we have no evidence of.

I don’t agree that I “have to” explain those things. I can’t explain them, no human being can. Perhaps human beings will never have the capacity to understand those things. To me giving simple answers to such fundamental questions cheapens them, and leaves me deeply unsatisfied.

In other words they live in a spiritual desert…

You could call it that, but to me it’s also an argument that belief in the supernatural may not be natural to all human beings. Maybe it’s not all upbringing, it may be genetic as well. Some people’s brains may be more prone to feeling as if there is another reality than others’.

What about the teaching of Christ? Do you accept it? How did it originate?

I’m no longer a Christian, so I don’t. I don’t know how it originated, how did anything originate? How did the teaching of Mohammed or the Mormon prophet or Buddha originate? Maybe with one man, maybe with a group of people, maybe it’s the mythology of a culture.

They may be unanswerable with absolute certainty but we can’t sit on the fence all our lives… “Probability is the very guide of life” - Butler

Why not? Is it better to make up “certain” answers or accept that human beings don’t have the answers to all questions? Personally I don’t need to be certain, and I would rather not know than be given false answers.

A God who leaves human beings to their own devices, makes no attempt to enlighten them and liberate them from their ignorance, selfishness and folly is not a God worth having…

So it seems to me like you require a certain minimum of involvement, but only to a point? Past a certain point you would say we’re being forced? I mean, it would be easy for God to liberate us from our ignorance. We could be told the fundamental answers about how the universe works, and for that matter how God exists, whether it caused itself, how it perceives time and so on.

None of the religions do this though, they don’t tell us anything mere human beings couldn’t say.

Why else would we exist in a world dominated by cruelty, bloodshed and injustice? Isn’t that evidence of the reality of evil? Do you regard life as “a tale told by an idiot full of sound and fury signifying nothing”? That won’t give you a solid foundation for any philosophy except pessimism and nihilism…

I see life as a mindless material universe becoming aware of itself and coming to understand itself through conscious beings such as ourselves. If I were to call anything “God”, it would be this.