What is the best argument to prove the existence of God to Atheists?

[Unnamed]

Also the universe is set up so that all of the molecules combine and have properties that makes life possible to begin with. There could be an almost infinite amount other ways physics and atomic properties could behave. Why do they behave in a way that makes life possible? Also if time never had a beginning then we could not be here at this point of time since there would have been an infinite amount of time to have to have passed to get here and you cannot reach an infinite amount of time.

 

[Russell_SA]

Every verse taken out of the bible is by definition taken from its context. We all know the story of your deity killing all the first born of Egypt to punish the pharaoh.
It’s the same mentality of a parent hitting the children because the other parent pissed them off.

 

[margaret42]

There’s nothing like the conversion of an atheist to a Catholic-going from a state where you don’t believe in a “higher power” to coming to believe in the “fullness of the truth”, where God is.

 

[sevenswords]

To just narrow this down a little if I walked into your consultancy room you a doctor me a patient with cancer, you see me for a 6 month period and have to tell me the cancer has spread and there’s not much hope of me living 6 months. So I turn to prayer and ask for help from the Saints or from a healer or from one of Padre Pios gloves etc etc and when I do I feel very good and the next day I go to the doctor and you as the doctor have to shake your head and tell me all my cancer is gone, now what do you call that? this is the case for some people who have named the events miracles. that is a very narrow version there are many things we call miracle that science can not answer too and in cases science has to document the event and claim to not have a clue what just happened or how it happened in the Case of the Shroud of Turin etc etc so when you claim there is no evidence it is simply you with your free will denying the obvious most likely because you are outside of grace in living in mortal sin so your heart is closed and you are left in the dark with all your delusions believing them to be true and having to close your eyes when this delusion is challenged.
Why not google |Catholic miracles as they are all rigorously tested before a decision is made to call it a miracle, also you need to open your eyes and heart and repent to God and then if it is Gods will you will receive grace to become a child of God and be released from your curse. I will pray for you.

 

[sevenswords]

Look you can not take a snippet from an Atheist website and claim to know something, you can’t do it as it is wrong and the only person suffering from lack of true knowledge is you. I suggest reading the whole passage, read how the Egyptians enslaved the people for 400 years, read how they treated them and then read how it was a command of the Pharaohs to kill every first born male of the Israelites and then you may judge God a little different and note how at any time the Pharaoh could have relented repented and let Gods people go, he was warned and God shows here the obstanate Pharoah that it is God in charge it is God who judges it is God who has power over life and death etc etc. God releases all those first born males that Pharaoh and his predecessors kilied with Levittes. So I hope that clears things up for you and you now know that God is a powerfull judge and will judge us all some day and the sentence depends on our way of living.

 

[Russell_SA]

No sir, Atheists don’t need their echo chamber sites to find documented terrible characteristics of your deity. The holy texts are all we need to directly reference and quote.

command of the Pharaohs to kill every first born male of the Israelites

So your argument is that since the Pharaohs were bad people, your deity had to act that way in kind? To kill innocent children of the Egyptians because the Egyptians were doing this to the Israelites? What the hell!? Your moral reasoning makes me want to go take a shower.

God in charge it is God who judges it is God who has power over life and death etc etc

Your deity is a mob boss then.

Pharaoh could have relented repented

Your deity “hardened the heart” of the pharaoh, so actually the pharaoh couldn’t. Your deity removed his free will.

God is a powerfull judge and will judge us all some day and the sentence depends on our way of living

Yes, your deity is a powerful immoral bully.

 

[Unnamed]

Russell_SA Please go find someone who can reproduce the Shroud of Turin (you can even use today’s technology). Let me know when you are done. Thanks buddy.

Here is a summary of what you need to reproduce: http://www.shroudofturin.com/Resources/CRTSUM.pdf

 

[sevenswords]

Instead of asking how the Church goes about determining if something is a miracle, you immediately assumed they did not use due diligence or involve the scientific community even though you had no evidence to support your view other than your prejudice against the Church.

it is a simple thing to look at say Lourdes the church has established that 63 miracles took place after the full investigations scientific and medical and the results being that there was no known medical reason for it to happen and there was no known scientific natural answer as to why the persons had come to Lourdes with various ailments and went home cured.

This leads into the next part of your question, why did God harden the heart of Pharaoh?
First understand that every house hold owned slaves and treated them very badly ( reference if you like black slavery in the USA) so it was not just Pharaoh on trial here it was the whole nation and it is very clear why God hardened the heart of Pharaoh as it says it clearly in the text and that was so God could show his power to the people. Now you may think that God has no right to treat people that way but you fail to see two things first is that God is God and creator of all things and death is only a step in our lives that reaches into eternity so death of the flesh is not death it is only the passing of flesh. secondly God had chosen his people long before hand but they had been slaves for 400 years and God was now showing the rulers of the world who thought themselves gods that he was God of all things God of Miracles and the judge of all things. Who would tell a judge that he was a bully or evil for sentencing a murder to death or a rapist to life? I hope you see the double standards you set here!
The Catholic church does not go around trying to convert people by way of proving God in the supernatural, it notes them archives them and moves on with prayer and worship.
I know no proof would satisfy you and I know that you are like pharaoh with your hard heart and that is the result of your own making, as like pharaoh your heart is hardened by your refusal to listen to God and that is what God means when he said he hardened his heart, he hardened his heart because it is the sentence handed down to those who do not listen and as Peter says send them to the Devil for correction and I;m afraid that may be the way for you as you have a hard heart that will not take the time to look at the evidence in a non bias objective way just as science does or should do. I know of many miracles that have been tested by science and science has said it has no natural explanation so you can take your view that it is for future science to figure out or you can say ok maybe that late stage cancer that is 100% incurable did disappear because of intervention of prayer. either way the choice is yours and I hope like pharaoh you eventually come to your senses and stop fighting God and start looking at things scientifically not as a dopey Atheist like Dawkins who is so blinded by hate he is not worth listening too as he is a rambling fool who clearly is loosing the plot.

 

[Russell_SA]

So you bypass what was needed to even allow the idea of the supernatural to the table and just go with another god of the gaps response. Until you demonstrate the supernatural to be any different than a comic book series, it’s irrelevant to point to the unknown and claim its evidence for the existence of aliens, the hulk, or your favorite carpenter superhero.

 

[Russell_SA]

The scientific method is the best tool we have for verification of reality. You’re suggesting the church has a special method that is different and better than this process? Cults do this. They claim they have the evidence and verification but that there is a conspiracy from the science community to ignore it. Or its more likely your church’s evidence and procedures for supernatural verification are bunk. Funny how the church loves to prop up its accepted contributions to science, like the priest that worked on the mathematics for the big bang theory and then whine about not being taken seriously about its magic claims. Sorry but we must have standards for evidence and proper processes to weed out cult claims.

 

[Unnamed]

So you bypass what was needed to even allow the idea of the supernatural to the table and just go with another god of the gaps response. Until you demonstrate the supernatural to be any different than a comic book series, it’s irrelevant to point to the unknown and claim its evidence for the existence of aliens, the hulk, or your favorite carpenter superhero.

I am giving you the opportunity to show how from a strictly scientific basis the shroud of turin was formed. Also let me know how the universe formed as well in that the universe made itself. Shouldn’t science be able to easily show these things? If you are saying no that science can’t then are you not then just using blind faith in your science just like how you accuse those who believe in God as doing? You are using fairy tale science and putting faith in that kind of like believing in the Hulk.

 

[steve-b]

KJW5551:

The “visions hypothesis” is as absurd as any other. It really takes a lot of mental jumping jacks for the atheist to try to explain the empty tomb and post-resurrection appearances.

More absurd than proposing someone was raised from the dead?! The “visions hypothesis” when applied to many people I don’t find that compelling. When applied to a few close to Jesus and then persuasion taking over seems much more plausible to me.

And I see no reason to doubt the appearance to the 500. Remember, Paul was writing a mere 3-5 years after Jesus’ death. It would be pretty ballsy to make a claim like that that could be easily refuted if not true. Also where is the Jewish response that says the appearances never happened? They don’t exist.

Not that ballsy. Things like that occurred during those times a lot. Everyone believed in gods, so convincing people wasn’t overly difficult. Paul was a zealous religious freak who wanted everyone to convert since he did. Convincing the educated Romans was challenging, but most never even heard of Jesus. Convincing the peasants was pretty easy I would imagine, especially the ones from Jesus’ area.

Attestations do not equal reality. If they did, why are the Muslims wrong about Muhammad?

If you don’t believe that the following can and has been proven 1 Corinthians 15:13-23 then how are you any different from Jesus own disciples who saw Him perform great miracles, yet walked away from Him Here because they didn’t believe? Faith is huge. Without faith one can’t please God. One can’t believe in Him either. Post resurrection, big numbers saw Him and His disciples saw Him rise back to heaven Lk 24:50-53 in their presence again

 

[Zerg]

Why not explain to the atheist the concept of faith–in believing in the seen and unseen without needing proof. (Did I make sense?)

Professor Greenleaf said that Jesus’ resurrection must have happened. Why? Because the Apostles recorded it.

 

[Russell_SA]

What markers are you linking to the supernatural that you can demonstrate came from the supernatural sources that you can verify are there and have verified leave these markers?
Example: marks on a peice of wood. Now in a reality where fire has not been demonstrated to exist at all, you claim that fire left marks on a peice of wood but can not demonstrate that fire is a possible option to consider or demonstrate what fire marks would actually be when this imagined idea of fire interacts with wood. You can not know that since no one knows what fire is and how it actually interacts with wood or anything else verses marks left by things demonstrated to be part of reality, like grass stains or mud stains.

 

[Unnamed]

What markers are you linking to the supernatural that you can demonstrate came from the supernatural sources that you can verify are there and have verified leave these markers?

I have already demonstrated a few.

• The Shroud of Turin
• The existence of an intelligible universe that could not have made itself.

Example: marks on a peice of wood. Now in a reality where fire has not been demonstrated to exist at all, you claim that fire left marks on a peice of wood but can not demonstrate that fire is a possible option to consider or demonstrate what fire marks would actually be when this imagined idea of fire interacts with wood. You can not know that since no one knows what fire is and how it actually interacts with wood or anything else verses marks left by things demonstrated to be part of reality, like grass stains or mud stains.

Science is constrained to the physical universe and physical laws of the universe. To be able to prove that God exists you would have to have access to testing things outside the universe (outside time and space). God is a a Spirit and is not part of the universe. That is why we have to look at what he has made and how he has revealed himself through matter in the person of Christ to ascertain the credibility of his existence.

One thing to note is that one can’t prove that God doesn’t exist either. I cannot prove that you exist. Maybe I am talking to a complicated AI system right now. Maybe we are all a bunch of dreams of a butterfly.

I would highly recommend books by Edward Feser. You seem highly intelligent and it might be worth a look.

 

[Russell_SA]

I have already demonstrated a few.

• The Shroud of Turin
  [/quote
  No, the Shroud of Turin is the piece of wood in my example. What markers on the shroud are you convinced are supernatural markers? How did you determine that the supernatural exists? How did you determine what the supernatural can and can not do in our reality? How did you determine that the supernatural actually left markers on the shroud? How did you rule out all natural means of how this shroud is were not just unknown natural causes? See what the problems are I have with this example and every other example of claims of the supernatural? It’s no different than experiencing something in reality, like the shroud, and wanting to have an answer for it. So we imagine what could create it instead of working from what we have to what the evidence indicates. What supernatural evidence do we have to work with that indicates the supernatural was involved at all here?

The existence of an intelligible universe that could not have made itself.

God of the Gaps again - we only know up to a point and then you are inventing a solution to the unknown without any way of verification or falsification. You can be logically correct and still factually wrong. We do this all the time with our mathematical models of reality that fail when we apply them in a test. The math was logically correct, but reality told us we were factually wrong for our predictions. No one knows how universes are made, so it’s just fun to imagine a deity or the comic book hero Fancy Pants caused it. I don’t actually know what caused the universe and neither do anyone else. That’s the honest response.

Science is constrained to the physical universe and physical laws of the universe.

Science constrains itself to what is justified to investigate. There is not dogma in science that restricts it to our reality, its just reality that restricts us. This is the exact same argument for saying that science restricts itself to not investigating Hogwarts. If anyone could actually get to Diagon Alley, then we would investigate it. But right now, there is no way to tell the difference between your supernatural idea and an imagined idea of the supernatural. They are indistinguishable. All arguments of, “Well how else could it be?” are just arguments from ignorance and God of the Gaps since everything that we don’t know, you’ve imagined an entity that can do literally everything. So “poof”, your deity did it since you imagine it has the power to do anything.

 

[Russell_SA]

universe (outside time

How can you be outside of time? Time, as I understand it is just event A to event B. So since we can not go beyond the big bang, that is, tentatively reference point 0 for time on the number line. That will change once we understand what happened before the big bang. But since we can’t, that is our reference point of time=0.

God is a a Spirit

What positive characteristics are attributed for describing a spirit? Not what it isn’t, but what it is? I’ve never found a good definition of a spirit and what it is so we can identify it in reality when we interact with it, if we can interact with it.

That is why we have to look at what he has made and how he has revealed himself through matter in the person of Christ to ascertain the credibility of his existence.

Presupposing a deity was the cause when you have not demonstrated that a deity or the supernatural exists in the first place. Just like how I can presuppose my level 3 mage exists and the wind you felt was from her level 2 gust of wind spell.

One thing to note is that one can’t prove that God doesn’t exist either.

Irrelevant. Your group is making the positive statement that a deity or the supernatural is part of reality. The default position is to take reality as it was before that assertion until the person presenting the claim provides the evidence for why we should update our internal model of reality. That is why the default position for jury members is to assume the person was just a random person in the crowd that didn’t have anything to do with the crime and it is up to the prosecution to make the case that the defendant is most likely the person that did the crime. However, in your case, there is no evidence of the defendant at all at this point. There is no one even sitting in the defendant’s chair.

Maybe I am talking to a complicated AI system right now. Maybe we are all a bunch of dreams of a butterfly.

No solution to hard solipsism, but I have to deal with the reality that I experience, regardless if it is actually real or not. If I can not tell a difference, then they are no different until I have a justified reason to believe I am in a matrix or in reality.

 

[Unnamed]

Just curious is it possible in your mind that God could exist and you just need proof? What specific proof do you need?

 

[Unnamed]

I am assuming that you have seen St. Thomas Aquinas: Five Proofs of the Existence of God

The First Way: Argument from Motion

• Our senses prove that some things are in motion.
• Things move when potential motion becomes actual motion.
• Only an actual motion can convert a potential motion into an actual motion.
• Nothing can be at once in both actuality and potentiality in the same respect (i.e., if both actual and potential, it is actual in one respect and potential in another).
• Therefore nothing can move itself.
• Therefore each thing in motion is moved by something else.
• The sequence of motion cannot extend ad infinitum.
• Therefore it is necessary to arrive at a first mover, put in motion by no other; and this everyone understands to be God.

The Second Way: Argument from Efficient Causes

• We perceive a series of efficient causes of things in the world.
• Nothing exists prior to itself.
• Therefore nothing [in the world of things we perceive] is the efficient cause of itself.
• If a previous efficient cause does not exist, neither does the thing that results (the effect).
• Therefore if the first thing in a series does not exist, nothing in the series exists.
• If the series of efficient causes extends ad infinitum into the past, for then there would be no things existing now.
• That is plainly false (i.e., there are things existing now that came about through efficient causes).
• Therefore efficient causes do not extend ad infinitum into the past.
• Therefore it is necessary to admit a first efficient cause, to which everyone gives the name of God.

The Third Way: Argument from Possibility and Necessity (Reductio argument)

• We find in nature things that are possible to be and not to be, that come into being and go out of being i.e., contingent beings.
• Assume that every being is a contingent being.
• For each contingent being, there is a time it does not exist.
• Therefore it is impossible for these always to exist.
• Therefore there could have been a time when no things existed.
• Therefore at that time there would have been nothing to bring the currently existing contingent beings into existence.
• Therefore, nothing would be in existence now.
• We have reached an absurd result from assuming that every being is a contingent being.
• Therefore not every being is a contingent being.
• Therefore some being exists of its own necessity, and does not receive its existence from another being, but rather causes them. This all men speak of as God.

 

[Unnamed]

The Fourth Way: Argument from Gradation of Being

• There is a gradation to be found in things: some are better or worse than others.
• Predications of degree require reference to the “uttermost” case (e.g., a thing is said to be hotter according as it more nearly resembles that which is hottest).
• The maximum in any genus is the cause of all in that genus.
• Therefore there must also be something which is to all beings the cause of their being, goodness, and every other perfection; and this we call God.

The Fifth Way: Argument from Design

• We see that natural bodies work toward some goal, and do not do so by chance.
• Most natural things lack knowledge.
• But as an arrow reaches its target because it is directed by an archer, what lacks intelligence achieves goals by being directed by something intelligence.
• Therefore some intelligent being exists by whom all natural things are directed to their end; and this being we call God.