Is there any proof God exists?

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Concise and unequivocal. Well said.

Of course there is... But it requires the use of reason.

It requires evidence...

By anti-matter I mean that He does not occupy a space.

Anything that is contained within a space is not God.

I don't see how God disagrees with experiment. So why choose to (dis)believe the way you do?


There is no LOGICAL NECESSITY for a first cause. Doesn't mean there wasn't one. As to complete and utter lack of primary evidence…well, that's debatable. If you hold that "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth," then the existence of the universe is testament to God's existence and is thus the primary evidence you're talking about. In my view, the evidence pushes God's existence further UP the probability scale. Again, you're simply making a choice to (dis)believe something I don't.


What is "rational"? I hate semantic wars, btw, so rather than asking for a definition, all I'm going to do is point out that what constitutes rationality will vary from person to person. Are you making the claim that you or a group of like-minded individuals have a monopoly on reason? I don't believe that you are, nor do I think such a claim would be reasonable for anyone (myself included).


Again, why choose to believe either way or anything in between? If we're being honest, whether you're right, I'm right, or petunia-ists are right, there IS a right answer in there somewhere, and we'll never know for sure. We have to acknowledge the petunia-ists at least have a point. Because we don't know, and yet the answer is so important to us. Why is that answer so important? It's really an emotional question, isn't it?


One man's facility is another man's parsimony. Remember that.

I'm very easily distracted. Is the REAL issue here about who should be put to death or marriage inequality? As much as I'd enjoy getting into that discussion, and as pertinent as I feel it is, I've gotten "official warnings" from mods for that. To me, that's just INSANE, but this isn't my website or forum. So rather than criticize people in charge I disagree with or get into off-limits debates that would end my usefulness here, I just leave the issue alone. I'm sure there are places we can discuss that, but that place simply isn't WP.

In the end, though, all we have left is this, if that's REALLY how you feel: You have a disagreement with God as to how He chooses to run things. And, yourself being created in God's image, it's natural to feel that you can relate to God the same way you relate to other people. A very, VERY highly effective way of dealing with people you dislike is to simply ignore them out of existence. And the single best effective way to get rid of God is to ignore Him until He goes away. Obviously, people don't actually cease to exist just because you ignore them…but they do cease to have any perceivably meaningful function in your life.

I don't mean to stray from the topic, but you did bring up some issues people tend to be very emotional about. I don't want to assume too much, but I do sometimes wonder if most of us aren't closet fideists. Choosing to not believe in God because you dislike certain aspects of Him isn't a rational position. Fideists are open about the role (or lack thereof) of reason in their choices regarding faith in God.

No logical necessity means that it's not rational to believe it. And you can't say the universe is evidence for God, it's a circular argument. For instance, if I said ghosts cause hiccups, then is every hiccup evidence for ghosts? Of course not. You are making a choice to believe something in the absence of evidence. Everyone has a right to believe whatever irrational thing they want, but they can't claim that it's rational. That's why they call it faith.

This caught my eye because the term fideist is unfamiliar to me so I had to look it up. Here's its wiki page just in case I'm not the only person who wasn't familiar (although maybe I am )

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fideism

After reading it I am absolutely sure that I am not a closet fideist.

I never made a decision to reject a God I found cruel, although revulsion at Old Testament wrathful/vengeful God has been expressed by some others in PPR. I have just always noted that religious belief is completely a matter of location,time and upbringing. It's so arbitrary. Why is it seen as an irrational and emotional decision if I don't believe in the Abrahamic God but nobody even notices that I also don't believe in Zeus? To me that just looks like an accident of location and time, modern U.S.* rather than ancient Greece. If I lived in ancient Greece would it be irrational for me to not believe in Zeus? It's just so arbitrary that what I'm supposed to default to belief in and would theoretically have to angrily reject is just an accident of when and where I was born.

I was taught the Pythagorean Theorem in a middle school math class. Presumably Pythagoras himself was expected to believe in Zeus. My math teacher taught me to use the Pythagorean Theorem for certain math problems. It is timeless, not culture-bound. It is an observation about how the world works that is not dependent on when and where a person is born to be applicable (and I've read that other ancient mathematicians discovered it too but Pythagoras gets the name check). Over in the middle school social studies class I was taught about Zeus, who Pythagoras either believed in or decided not to believe in. But nobody ever expected me to believe in Zeus or else make an active decision to reject Zeus. Unlike the Pythagorean Theorem, Zeus was just an interesting artifact of the past. But yet I was expected to default to belief in God or else make an active rejecting decision not to. But why? Just because I was born in modern America rather than ancient Greece?

Did I look over the flaws of Zeus and decide he was just so capricious and cruel that I couldn't justify a belief in him? (All the Greek Gods seemed pretty capricious and cruel.) No. I was never expected to auto-believe because I wasn't born in ancient Greece. If I was, I would have been. But I was born in modern America and so am expected to auto-believe in a modern conception of God that has just come down to us because of the way various historical events played out. I'm not rejecting. I just never auto-believed in the first place.

If Pythagoras had never been born the Pythagorean Theorem would be just as true. It would just have a different name, maybe one of those other ancient mathematicians. It isn't an accident of history. It's an observation of natural laws governing the universe.

It isn't emotional, irrational and faith based for me to not believe in God. Thus I'm not a closet fideist. It's just that this piece of the culture I grew up in didn't attach itself to me. In a thousand years (or maybe a couple few thousand?) I am theorizing that culture will have changed so much that what we are currently expected to believe in (God) or have to emotionally reject will just be seen as a quaint artifact; as irrelevent in the year 4000 as belief in Zeus is now.


*no American exceptionalism here. This expectation of auto-belief in the Abrahamic God is common in many,many countries. I just happen to have been born in the U.S.

A circular argument means you assume what you're trying to prove. Evidence such as the existence of the universe and the observation that everything that begins to exist in our universe has a cause would be evidence for God.

HOWEVER, the first cause argument depends on agreement that everything in the universe IS caused. If we can agree that everything begins to exist has a cause, and there IS evidence to that end, THEN, yes, it IS a logical necessity that God is the first cause. It is NOT logically necessary that God Himself be caused, because only things that begin to exist have causes. God could be eternal, existing without any kind of beginning. Therefore God would be an uncaused Cause. It's not logically necessary to assume an eternal being would be caused. That would, in fact, be a contradiction and, therefore false. But circular argument? Not at all, and the evidence points to the existence of God.

Now, you COULD say that I have to assume God exists in the first place. That's fair. But if you're going by strict physical evidence and the most rigorous empiricist methods, you have to make the assumption that your methods are the right ones. As I've already explained, your methods don't get a free pass, either. But since you can't prove that, either, then you're resorting to circular reasoning (i.e. assuming your methods get accurate results without externally verifying them). You are forced to accept that your methods "just work." OK, fine. I can accept my faith "just works." Why are you more right than I am? You can attempt to answer that question any number of ways, but I don't see any answer that could be completely satisfying. It's an unsolvable problem.


Right. However, I don't think conclusions in favor of God's existence are entirely irrational. There's more to logic than evidence. What makes it difficult for the believer in going through all the proofs for God's existence is that they all start from the unbeliever's presupposition that there is no God and THEN try to show that presupposition is wrong and that God can be proven. The proofs work just fine. They're just never very convincing, and you can go back and forth eternally with one person trying to prove himself right and the other person wrong.

You won't convince me that there is no God, the irony being that I can draw the opposite conclusions with the same logic that is supposed to show the opposite. That's not WHY I believe in God…there's a lot of history there that's pointless to go into here. The point is that the counterarguments are just as circular as mine are and unconvincing. So…again, if (and we agree here) logical arguments either way aren't convincing, if evidence isn't convincing, why lean one way or another? There's no right/wrong answer, I mean, everyone has their own story. Classic logical proofs/disproofs/whatever just get stale after a while.

Maybe not, but you're still taking a lot on faith. It's just faith that leads elsewhere. That's half the point the fideists make.

A lot of Christians would be averse to the fideist label, too. I don't fully adopt it, either. The reason I don't wholeheartedly "come out" as a fideist is because I think one can have a justified, true belief in God that one could arrive at empirically (I believe there is a God-sense that is better developed in some than others) and through reason.

You would think. How is it God has survived all this time? History hasn't always been kind to Christians and Jews.

And then there's ISIS. Either believe or we'll believe FOR you. Brute force. I'm not saying Christians have always been pure as driven snow when it comes to politics and foreign policy. It's just you'd think by now people would have figured it out and would stop trying to blow ourselves up back to the Stone Age.

Even if we were to decide God is non-existent or irrelevant, "faith" (emphasis on scare quotes) remains a formidable force in our world. I wish I were optimistic enough to say I could see that changing, at least for the better, but things aren't looking good at the moment.

OH GOD, Seriously, GOD doesn't care how folks describe GOD in metaphors.

GOD IS GOD.

And god is no words at all.

The greaTEST ideal and IDOL OF ALL IS WORDS, PERIOD.

GOD EXISTS WITHOUT WORDS.

FAITH IS NOT A WORD.

FAITH IS AN EMOTION.

AN EMPOWERING EMOTION IS FAITH.

THE EMOTION OF FAITH IS A GIFT OF THE GOD OF NATURE THAT YES
CAN MOVE MOUNTAINS, AT LEAST A HALF A TON, IN MY CASE.

NO MATTER WHAT SILLY LITTLE HUMAN WORD(S) ARE AND IS USE(D) AS SYMBOL(S) TO EDIFICE THE
ESSENCE OF FAITH WITH OR WITHOUT A THREE LETTER WORD, FAITH REMAINS AS AN EMPOWERING
HUMAN EMOTION.

THE best way to see god, IS to LOSE ALL THE ABSTRACT ILLUSIONS IN SKELETONS OF LIFELESS WORDS.

MEDITATION, TRANCE DANCE, YOGA, MARTIAL ARTS; WHATEVER GETS PEOPLE OUT OF THE PRISON OF WORDS AND back as one with GOD aka Mother Nature TRUE like my frigging cat IS; WHATEVER CAN WORK to do JUST that.

Meanwhile, 'GOD' just sits back and 'giggles like a school girl', at this entire frigging thread and says oh well, humans did this to themselves, they can enjoy the bed they make for themselves 24-7, with their smaller or greater levels of relative human free will.

I would rather work with GOD, instead, of doing nothing, really nothing but make symbols of words all day long.

But yeah, the story, and all of that......

the never ending story and all of that......



Imagination and creativity IS THE greatest 'GOD GIVEN' GIFT OF HUMAN BEINGS.

Nihilism and Reason, RELATIVELY SPEAKING, IS EMPTINESS, IN SKELETONS OF WORDS.

LIFE AIN'T BLACK AND WHITE, UNTIL SOMEONE DIES IN LIFE.

AND that's the saddest part of this thread of all, and I'm sure 'GOD' sheds a tear FOR that IS to stray away

from the GREATest gift of now; the heart, the soul, the spirit of humankind, in all the ARTFUL CREATIVE WAYS
FROM THE TAO, TO THE BIBLE, TO FRIGGING STAR WARS; THE ESSENCE OF TRUTH IS IN IMAGINATION AND CREATIVITY ALWAYS, UNLESS HUMANKIND BECOMES a robot, in singular way of mechanical cognition DEATH.

BE AFRAID or not, it's not up to GOD, it's up to 'YOU', live or die in life ALIve that's 'your' choice, in RELATIVE HUMAN FREE WILL.

LIFE CAN BE AN OCEAN OF HEAVEN IN NOW..

OR PIT OF HELL IN SYMBOLIC WORDS OF YESTERDAY OR TOMORROW.

THE NEVER ENDING STORY, AS ALWAYS, IS
NOW.

TO make the best of now is smart.

To do anything else, is dum or dumber...

Rho, I don't believe in God because there is no evidence for god and I do not accept the writings of people ignorant to the natural laws as evidence. I most certainly do not reject God, to reject God suggests that I accept its existence, rather I reject the notion of god in the same way I reject the notion of santa, the tooth fairy, and the monster in my wardrobe. None of them were real although some of them I once had faith in (especially the monster). Maybe faith is not the word to use for children believing in Santa and the Tooth fairy. After all faith is the ability to believe in something with no evidence, yet these two did provide evidence, young kids for whatever reason trust that their parents will tell them the truth so you no have two bits of evidence IE the presents and verification from the parents. As we grow older and are able to better evaluate we realise that it is far more reasonable to assume both Santa and Fairy are in fact a ruse played upon us by our parents. I see god in the same way, once we had no idea how things worked, no idea of illness, climatic events, cosmological events etc. Superstitions were rampant before large scale common knowledge of the natural laws, all these unexplained events seemd to be evidence of higher powers. We know different now.

Now it is possible (even though the evidence points to our parents) that santa and the fairy do actually exist. And this is what you are asking me to do, accept that God exists in spite of all rationality, before you ask, I find it irrational to have a belief in something that has no evidence, or cannot be falsified.

Lastly, you bring up a version of pascal's wager. This is often presented as the ultimate "get out of gaol free card" it has no cost and the rewards are great. Except it does have a cost, it has a cost to every person who does not fit the model of a particular religion. I wont go to far into subjects you have been gagged on, but suffice to say many hold your views on sexuality etc. So believing in the Christian God as an insurance policy affects many many people in a negative way.

No, you're making a huge jump here. Leaving aside that there is evidence for uncaused events.

If there was an "uncaused cause", why assume that it is a sentient, omnibenevolent, omniscient deity? There's no way we can assume any characteristics about it at all.


Empiricism being a good idea can be derived logically.

If the world behaves in a (somewhat) consistent manner, according to laws, then repeatedly doing something and checking the results should tell you what "doing something" does.

If, however, the world is total unpredictable chaos, then empiricism doesn't work and we're all idiots for practising it every day.

Now, which is a bigger assumption: that all the empirical observations made in the past few billion years were solely due to chance, or that a deity exists despite there being no good evidence for it?

Labels are a double-edged sword. On one hand we use them as short-hand, so people catch on quickly, but on the other hand a label means people will make wrong assumptions.

Labels are static, individuals are usually dynamic.

Sure. Let's make it my fault that you can't keep up.



That's The Invisible Pink Unicorn. It's an allegory representing, among other things, the method by which gods are invented. Just like The Invisible Pink Unicorn, the "God" of Christianity is a specific idea - as are the majority of gods.



Your reasoning may have something to do with your lack of comprehension. For clarity, I asked about the traditional punishment for blasphemy, not the Christian punishment for blasphemy. The question was posited in response to your rather puerile response to the following.

"Thousands of years of doctrine and dogma, enforced with pointy sticks and blunt objects galore, have led to a society that is permeated with superstition and fairy tales."

Which you chose to misrepresent as "a few a***holes" conquering a world of atheists. This is arguably the most obvious and clumsy example of a strawman in the history of this board.



That's how conversations work outside echo chambers. New ideas are introduced, often as a means to cause the other party to consider their position. If it's making you uncomfortable, you're under no obligation to respond.



Sources? Unless you have access to a time machine, the above is no more than speculation.



An oversimplification, but yes, religion has effectively been a multi-millennial game of Chinese Whispers.



Explain precisely how I'm "reinventing world history".

I have no particular beef with Christianity - I hold all beliefs in supreme beings in equal contempt. Christianity has been used as an example, primarily because it's an obvious example to use on a board frequented primarily by people who live in Christian nations. Perhaps you're guilty of a touch of projection here. It was you, after all, who inserted Christianity into my question about blasphemy. Let's try to stay on point shall we?

If we're "haggling" over anything, it's over the validity of the Invisible Pink Unicorn as a metaphor for supreme beings. It seems a bizarre subject as a focus for such a sticking point, but rather than answering a simple question I put to you - regarding three staples of Greek Mythology - you've led a merry prolixious dance to a fictional past, replete with 50 million human beings alive on pre-civilisation Earth to the present, and another strawman representation of my position.



What a delightfully patronising waste of words.

You do realise that the whole point of the Invisible Pink Unicorn is that you can replace "God" in the above with "Invisible Pink Unicorn" without changing the meaning, right?



I am unsurprised at the revelation that bafflement is your response to an idea. Your idiotic assertion of my knowledge of "the subject" is based entirely on a narrative you spun out of whole cloth, largely due to an error of comprehension on your part.

There is no "evidence for uncaused events" anywhere, ever. Your assertion is entirely gratuitous.

There's no reason to "assume" anything about an uncaused First Cause. It's a logical necessity according with all reason and observation.