Is there any proof God exists?

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There is no proof that anything exists, except your own mind. Everything you see, touch, eat, breathe, hear, smell, including your own body - all of it may be a hallucination, or a dream. Other than the existence of your own consciousness, anything you accept as true, is something you choose to believe.

That said, you need to specify to what "god" you are referring. There are and have been hundreds (at least) of deities worshiped by human beings, some local nature spirits, some said to be the lord of this or that natural phenomenon, some lauded as the one and only, gen-u-wine, original Creator-of-the-Universe. Even within a single religion, you will find different experts disagreeing on the qualities of their accepted divinity.

Since you reference Heaven and refer to this god as HE, I assume you're talking about Yahweh, the god of Abraham and the supposed progenitor of Jesus Christ. You talk about "Heaven" in the same way most Sunday School children and adult fundamentalists do, as though it were a physical PLACE, with pearly gates and streets of gold. That may be pablum fit for the dimwitted masses, but no serious, intelligent seeker after truth believes that. It's like autistic kids who take metaphors literally. To imagine that the creator of the universe lives in cloud city, sitting on a throne, growing a long white beard and watching for sinners to spank is just stupid, just as the extremists who believe that the same Creator of all Men wants them to murder their brothers and sisters for not belonging to the correct cult, and they'll be rewarded for this fratricide with 72 virgins. What they ought to ask is "Virgin what"?

If you want to understand what the concept of "God" actually means, you need to study Quantum Physics and String Theory - because all the mysteries unfolding in those fields of study today are the very things that the wisest and most insightful explorers of inner space have been telling us for centuries - but you can't begin to grok what they're telling you, until you start to grasp just what spacetime dimensionality really implies - until you wrap your head around the fact that all matter is vibrating energy and that the world you think you live in is just 4 dimensions out of at least ten and possibly an infinity.

Your five senses can only comprehend width, breadth, height and time. There may be entire universes full of life passing by at the tip of your nose, that you simply don't have the physical ability to perceive. Could "God" or "gods" (or unicorns and fairies) be in one of them? Even more likely, could all those worlds (including this one) be inside of God? Are we characters in God's imagination? Is the multiverse a hologram, conscious unto itself? If God is pure conscious energy, maybe all the physical universes and the life forms in them are simply God's way of gaining experience and learning about itself, by engaging in role playing games.

Now, that said, let's turn to your questions about why God might sit by and allow bad things to happen. First, define "bad." If God is all, then both positive and negative, light and dark, good and evil, pleasure and pain - all of these are parts of God and yet, none of them are real, they are only conceptual constructs. You cannot perceive light without darkness as contrast. If you never felt sad, how would you know when you were happy? If you never experienced rain, why would you care about another sunny day?

Black and white are just opposite sides of the same circle. The world of experiences could not exist without both. Without the choice of good or evil, creation and destruction, we could not have free will - we would all be mindless puppets with only ONE course to follow. To be truly free, you have to have a choice, even if that means one of those choices is a negative one. Any creator who constantly interfered in our choices and forced us to go in a specific direction would not be a loving creator, but a dictator tyrant and we would be toys, not thinking, growing individuals.

I don't believe God "hides" from humanity, I think people often choose to be blind - look at the complexity of the universe we can see (and remember its only one of many), from the orbits of electrons, to living microbes, to visceral, breathing nature, to solar systems, galaxies, black holes and a universe so vast we can't even see the edges of it. As much as pessimistic materialists might like to insist that its all a cosmic accident and we're just bags of chemicals who wink out like a TV screen and disappear when we die, I don't believe that (and there's plenty of evidence to the contrary). I have had experiences that have shown me glimpses of what lies beyond the usually closed doors of our normal perception - and if you think this universe is a big place - you ain't seen nothin' yet.

The truth is, your brain is not the source of your consciousness - your brain is like a radio receiver, and the you that lives in this world is just a tiny fragment of the whole you (like the voice that comes through the microphone), a fragment that's being channeled through that brain and expressing itself as your current personality. When the body shuts down, the ego that goes by your current name may be discarded, that was just your character in the role playing game to begin with - but the totality of conscious energy that was operating the controller will still exist. This world is an amusement park ride and the first rule of admittance is: You must forget what you really are until the game ends, in order to fully commit to your character. As you work through the levels, you'll eventually figure out that its just a game, and begin to regain your memory. You may go through several character roles before you get that advanced.

Now, I don't expect you to believe any of that just because I said it. You owe it to yourself to seek your own answers. The truth is out there. Actually, its in there, but just start looking, you'll figure it out. Start by reading. A lot. And never assume you have ALL the answers, there's always more to learn. Mostly, avoid anyone who's so arrogant that they're absolutely sure they're right and nobody knows any more than they do - those people are always wrong, not to mention unpleasant to be around.

Hope that at least gave you a little insight into some of the things you were pondering and sets you off in a direction where some of your answers lie.

The Truth of the Matter is, GOD is way too big for most folks who are speaking in this thread to wrap around one hemisphere of the brain to the exclusion of the interpreting BRAIN, rather than a synergy WITH THE describing brain.
And yes, that's a loose metaphor still but IT 'describes' the general gist of the problem here, per 'hemispheral' limitations.

Yes for all we know there may be a higher "lifeform" that created us after terra-forming earth.

However, the god of Abraham was was believed to have created the earth in 7 days according to a desert dwelling nomadic people thousands of years ago who (like everyone else at the time) tried to make sense of why we are here and what (if any) purpose was their in existence or in the world.

We know holy books purported to be written by god (i.e. Talmud, Torah, Bible, Quran) are full of man made crap because they make fairly obvious scientific mistakes that to a scientist are cringeworthy i.e. Plants are "made" on the third day of creation before there was a sun to drive their photosynthetic processes (1:14-19). 1:11

God makes two lights: "the greater light [the sun] to rule the day, and the lesser light [the moon] to rule the night." But the moon is not a light, but only reflects light from the sun. And why, if God made the moon to "rule the night", does it spend half of its time moving through the daytime sky? 1:16

All animals were originally herbivores. Tapeworms, vampire bats, mosquitoes, and barracudas -- all were strict vegetarians, as they were created by God. 1:30

In Genesis 1 the entire creation takes 6 days, but the universe is 13.7 billion years old, with new stars constantly being formed. 1:31

God fashions a woman out of one of Adam's ribs.
Because of this story, it was commonly believed (and sometimes it is still said today) that males have one less rib than females. When Vesalius showed in 1543 that the number of ribs was the same in males and females, it created a storm of controversy. 2:19

There are so many of these that it makes me cry why 63% of Americans "believe" in the literal meaning of the bible

You give me evidence of nothing turning itself into something then I will show you God himself.

If you can come up with some ad hoc "no verification required" while everything else, including my own beliefs, DO require verification and give science a free pass, it's only fair and equally intellectually (dis)honest (depending on how you look at it) that my faith get the same fair shake as science.

I completely agree. I'm not anti-science. I'm not trying to steer the discussion into useless solipsism here. I don't have an issue with the method or the artifacts of it. I don't have a problem with accepting that the senses are sufficient for adequate perception.

Then by all means externally verify it WITHOUT using any kind of empirical observation. Demonstrate that science is pure reasoning and completely non-circular.

To anyone else "observing" this, note the inherent trap here. Dent is making the assertion--unsubstantiated, I might add--that the scientific method is not logically flawed. This presupposes a few things. For one, it's the baseless assumption that science is rational. Science in and of itself is NOT rational. Not in the sense that Dent is describing it, anyway. Science demands a standard of falsification.

Seriously, there are only maybe 2 true scientists on this forum. The rest of us do the best we can with what we know and the journey we've made. Only a true brain surgeon can tell you ALL of the ins and outs of brain surgery. In the same way, there are few if any true theologians here. I studied theology for a year - it gives me a big step up from your average "Bible study" class, but it doesn't make me an expert.

Ihave learned thatgetting things done myself has led to better results than praying and faith in a make believe god he has never done anything therefore he doesnt exist!The onlyothercop out like fort he many disasters and deaths of innocent people "oh god works in mysterious ways!."

Rho. For the last time the scientific method is not a law nor is a theory, it is simply a tool to help us enquire about the natural world.

The Scientific Method is not a law,

it is not the only way to discover after all guessing works as does blind chance, but is is a very successful tool, and for the last time, this is its verification,

And for the LAST time I do not assert that the scientific method requires NO Verification, that would be an example of faith,

faith being defined as believing in something without evidence is plain dumb. Its success in bringing us this far in our knowledge, in such a short time after so long a stagnation without it, is the verification that it works.

Anyhow I am done with this, I have answered your questions repeatedly,

God is also very successful

Actually prayer has a placebo effect in relation to aiding mental/physical healing.

Seriously, there are only maybe 2 true scientists on this forum. The rest of us do the best we can with what we know and the journey we've made. Only a true brain surgeon can tell you ALL of the ins and outs of brain surgery.

In the same way, there are few if any true theologians here. I studied theology for a year - it gives me a big step up from your average "Bible study" class, but it doesn't make me an expert.

The requirement for proof here in this forum is almost laughable. Have a conversation with a true scientist and you'll get lost in 5 seconds. I visit and ask questions at a forum called physicsforums, and my head hurts after just 5 minutes. Here's a sample: "Entropy has a precise definition. It is a constant times the logarithm of the number of microstates corresponding to a given macrostate." Is your head hurting yet?

Just like in any trade, people use jargon and shorthand that makes sense to anyone else in that trade. Now... if you think we're having some evidentiary discussions here about real science or true theology, I invite you all to think again and be a little more tolerant of where each of us truly is at, regardless of what we believe.

And let's all learn some critical thinking together: http://web.randi.org/home/new-ebook-mag ... -classroom