Why do people claim that proving God's non-existence is proving a negative?

[PetrusRomanus]

When it comes to evidence for God there is a paradox for some. I like to call it the “Daniel Paradox”.

The Daniel Paradox goes like this. “The prophecies in the book of Daniel are so accurate that they must have been written after the events.” How do you prove that God exists with that kind of exclusive logic?

If God appeared to you right now they would say you were hallucinating because “God cannot exist”. If he appeared to you and thousands of people at once it would be called “mass hysteria” because “God cannot exist”.

God is excluded from possibility before any evidence is used. Therefore we sit in an unfortunate paradox where no amount of evidence will do it. In fact any evidence of God is immediately accepted as evidence of something else because at the first we say “God cannot exist”.

So you see “Making God Appear” will do nothing for some. No amount of evidence can do it so long as the first thought is “God cannot exist therefore it must be x”.

Exactly.

Instead of arguing from the premise that He doesnt exist, it would be accurate and appropriate to actually argue from the premise that He does, in fact, exist.

Instead of going from disbelief and demanding evidence and only accepting ideas that reaffirm this disbelief, ot would be wiser to look at the evidence that we do have and go from there.

If you live next door to your neighbor and the grass is always cut, the pets fed, the mail is always picked up, and you see the lights on inside, its only logical to belueve that someone is in fact occupying that house, despite never having seen your neighbor personally.

 

[Portofino]

Fair enough. Suffice it to say that a Christian would not go about arguing against the existence of other gods in the same way that a “hard atheist” would.

We capitalize Satan’s name because we capitalize all names. But we don’t capitalize the pronouns used for which Satan is antecedent. His “god-like” power is to tempt people; he does not have the powers of the Christian God (ie. creation, forgiveness, etc.).

I will admit the problem of evil is probably the greatest obstacle to my faith. I would only say that if God prevents humans from doing evil in all possible worlds, then they are by definition not free. If God’s will is good, then humans would have free will only if they can do not-good.

I think God does do the best that He can, under the circumstances that He created. He made human beings with free will, ie. humans with wills that are free to not be His, which is good. This is logically equivalent to the ability to choose evil. You may reply that God, then, created beings capable of evil - but He did so because only beings capable of evil are capable of love. Omnipotence does not allow God to do the logically impossible - to create beings that can love but not commit evil.

It’s an ironic byproduct of freedom, that an individual’s freedom can be used to violate the freedom of another individual. One would think that one’s free will only has currency in regards to oneself, not in regards to another (since that other also has an autonomous free will).

This would apply, as well, to God permitting Satan to use his free will to cause damage to other free agents. With Satan, I suppose there is more the possibility of vanquishing him mentally; but with other human beings – for example, some maniac who attacks a child – there is a paradoxical case of two free wills colliding, with one will violating the freedom of another. The other person’s freedom is compromised, as it were, because you misused your own freedom by acting upon them with force.

Incidentally, I don’t particularly see a conflict between free will and universal salvation. The way I see it, one has free will, but one does not have omnipotence. For example, one would not say, “how can you say I am free, when I don’t have the freedom to make God stop being God; when I don’t have the freedom to vanquish God?” Just so, my own sense is that it would be impossible to utterly destroy, utterly eliminate the link to God that exists within oneself. Love is eternal, and there is no truth in hatred, which means that hatred and hardness of heart cannot endure eternally. No hatred or hardness of heart is strong enough. This is the way in which, personally, I reconcile free will with a notion of universal salvation – that one has the freedom to lose oneself for as long as one is humanly capable, but not the power–the omnipotence–to lose oneself for an eternity. Eternity belongs only to the divine.