Is there any proof God exists?

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Since I am very late to this discussion party, i was wondering if there is a consensus around here on the existence of G-d.

Do most of us here believe G-d exists or do we mostly believe he does not exist or is there a roughly even split between those who think He is real and those who think He is not?

And of course, this is a fundamentally different question from asking who is religious. Who can very much believe in G-d's existence without being religious in any way, shape or form.

In the past whenever a poll has been carried out on this forum the atheists respond in the majority. I am not sure where you get your figures from adhogday, as I remember it when the strident atheists were in full swing this was a very agnostic --> atheistic forum. nearly all of those posters are no longer active, which is a shame as many of them had a great deal of knowledge and i and many others learnt a great deal from them.

Thanks for the link. Should be good reading

As for evidence, it helps to have an historical perspective.

Go back a few hundred years and beyond, science as we now know it, was virtually non-existent. What we had instead was the great unknown. And the great unknown could only be explained supernaturally. Observation demonstrated that there was no other explanation. The great majority did not say, "We don't know why this is so," instead turning to the even more ancient explanations that have been around since long before Adam was a boy, that all had to be the handiwork of deities. No other explanation was possible.

The observers could not see micro-organisms that caused disease. They could not observe cellular functions in plants. The sky looks just like the dome (or firmament as they called it), with stars stuck onto it, like in the Ptolemaic system (as used in Genesis 1), the earth was flat, storms and earthquakes had to have supernatural origins, and anything else that seemed unnatural was also filed into either supernatural good or supernatural bad.

Move along slowly over the next few hundred years and one by one, a myriad of supernatural explanations are moved aside as science progressively explains them away. The earth is not flat. The sky is not a firmament with things stuck on it. We are not the centre of the universe. Disease is observed under microscope. Mathematics progresses and calculus is born - a new tool for seeing things that the eye can't see. With the aid of mathematics, the circumference of the earth is discovered, physics is born, giving us ways to understand force and energy, electricity and electrical forces are discovered, electron microscopes show us what molecules look like, design using calculus gives us buildings and machines only ever dreamed of by the gods.

Bit by bit, almost all of the universe is explained. For what is not explained, we have theories and mathematics. Mathematics has proven to be a reliable microscope for viewing the unviewable. Is it infallible? No. But it has proven itself a better tool for explaining much of what is provable.

If science has reduced superstition by 99%, what is left that this progress of science has not been able to uncover for us? As far as I can tell, we are unable to go beyond subatomics / QM because the mathematics for going beyond that has not been invented yet. And in related fashion, we cannot go back beyond Planck time, that microsecond after the Big Bang, for much the same reason. We have theory and experiment giving us the first cause of cellular life, and only deists wouldn't put that into the proven category, but I'll allow it for the sake of argument.

When it comes down to it, the only major thing that science has not found a visible, calculable or otherwise verifiable answer for is the cause of the Big Bang. Thus, wiping away thousands of years of superstitious explanation for just about everything you can point a finger at.

Please correct me if I'm wrong or forgetting something. I'm not trying to say that science is everything, only that a huge majority of our history had superstitious explanations for everything, and as knowledge had broken the ignorance of that superstition and has been able to find natural explanations for virtually all of it, it makes the case for any superstition all the harder to maintain.

Lay out the Red Carpet--Blow the Big Trumpets!

It's David....gracing us with his Presence once again!

[quote="Andrejake"]


To me, God works through logic. This mean that He can create everything that is logically possible.
So He can creates the World, Galaxy, Atoms, animals, me... But can God create something that is logically impossible? No
Can God create a stone so heavy that he can't lift it? NO
Can God create a square circle? NO
Can God create a one ended stick? NO
Do you understand what I mean?
/quote]

So in other words god is the same as the natural world. All you are doing is taking the laws of nature and adding a superfluous value. Eg f=ma becomes f+g=(ma)gor e=mc2 becomes e+g=(mc2)g (i am useless at math so forgive mf if my equations are correcly expressed)The only thing in your comcept that differs from the natural laws is direction and purpose, neither of which has any empirical evidence.

And tonight ladies and gentlemen for your amusement and bewilderment, I present David, The Walking Talking Logical Fallacy.