Atheists: What would be evidence of God’s existence?

[Kfox]

If the voice was non-human why would it speak our language? And that is precisely the problem with God speaking to humans directly; God is non-human so does not speak our knowledge.

So your idea of God is unable to speak English or any other human language? Perhaps that is something he should learn.

There are two problems with this voice from the sky approach. First, you could never verify that the voice from the sky was not a hoax. Second, it would not be speaking to all of the 7.8 billion people in the world individually from the sky.

It depends on the God you are referring to. My reference was with a God like the one expressed in the Bible which would be capable of such a feat. It appears you do not worship a God like the one in the Bible. If God can create the Universe, addressing the entire world at the same time would be no problem at all.

That said, it is true that with a person you do not know if he is speaking for God, and that is why we have to investigate the Messenger of God to determine if He is really a Messenger or rather a deceiver or a delusional man. If we determine He is representing God then we can believe that what he reveals is what God truly wants.

Again; if your God is unable to speak to mankind in his language, that shortcoming is God’s fault and he should understand when people don’t believe those claiming to represent him.

How do you think it is possible for all of the 7.8 billion people in the world to hear the same thing at the same time?

Again; if this God can create the entire Universe out of nothing, speaking from the clouds should be a snap

Yes, I know that every religion has a different message and there is no agreement but there is no reason to believe that would be any different if they all heard the single voice form the sky, because no two people think alike.

You don’t have to think the same in order to hear the same message.

obvious solution is for everyone to recognize and believe in the latest Messenger from God, Baha'u'llah, but that is not going to happen for a long time because people have free will and most people choose to stay with the religion they have chosen, usually the religion they were raised in.

See; even you admit the current system doesn’t work! Time to try something else don’t cha think?

Independent investigation of truth mans that we investigate everything surrounding the Messenger we are investigating. It means do research on His life, including His character and what He did on his mission from God. We would also want to investigate the religion that was established by Him. It is called independent investigation because we are not to be influenced by the opinions of other people, we are to look with our own eyes and make our own determinations.

And what percentage of the worlds population accepts your God’s messenger? 5%, which would mean a 95% failure rate? Do you find such a system acceptable?

I’m gonna be going on vacation for a few days; I will be back in about a week. till then; Chao

 

[Trailblazer]

So your idea of God is unable to speak English or any other human language? Perhaps that is something he should learn.

I never said that God is unable to speak English, I said that God communicates in a language humans could never understand.

It depends on the God you are referring to. My reference was with a God like the one expressed in the Bible which would be capable of such a feat. It appears you do not worship a God like the one in the Bible. If God can create the Universe, addressing the entire world at the same time would be no problem at all.

Not another nonbeliever who believes that God actually did what the Bible says. Sorry, I do not believe in the anthropomorphic God. As I just told @CG Didymus that Bible is a good reason for atheism. It is also responsible for all the illogical and fanciful thinking people have about what God could do.

So if you believe in the God expressed in the Bible is real, why not believe in the Bible and be a Christian?

Again; if your God is unable to speak to mankind in his language, that shortcoming is God’s fault and he should understand when people don’t believe those claiming to represent him.

God does not care if people choose not to believe He exists and God needs nobody's belief since God is fully self-sustaining and fully self-sufficient. Moreover, it is not the place of humans to be telling God how He should reveal Himself, that is backwards logic. God is all-powerful and all-knowing and all-wise, so God knows more than any humans about the *best way* to reveal Himself.

Most people in the world do believe in those claiming to represent God.[/quote]
According to the statistics, 84 percent of the world population has a faith.

Because most faiths have a religious Founder or what I call a Messenger that means most people believe in God because of a Messenger. We know that Christians and Muslims believe in a Messenger and they comprise 55% of the world population. It does not matter if you call them a Messenger; they are holy men who founded the religions, so they are intermediaries between God and man. Sure, there are a few believers who believe in God but not a Messenger but that is not the norm. The point is that with no Messengers or holy men very few people would believe in God.

Again; if this God can create the entire Universe out of nothing, speaking from the clouds should be a snap.

I did not say God could not speak from the clouds. The logical mistake that nonbelievers make is thinking that just because God can do anything that means God should do everything they want God to do. That is drop dead illogical because an omnipotent God only does what He chooses to do, NOT what humans want Him to do.

You don’t have to think the same in order to hear the same message.

But you have to think the same to understand and interpret the same message the same way.

See; even you admit the current system doesn’t work! Time to try something else don’t cha think?

The current system does work, and that is why most people in the world believe in God (see above). Why should God overhaul His whole system just for a few nonbelievers?

And what percentage of the worlds population accepts your God’s messenger? 5%, which would mean a 95% failure rate? Do you find such a system acceptable?

The failure to recognize the latest Messenger is a failure on the past of humans, not a failure on the part of God, since God gave humans free will to accept or reject the Messenger.

Whether my Messenger was from God or not has nothing to so with how many people believe He was. that would be the fallacy of Argumentum ad populum.

In argumentation theory, an argumentum ad populum (Latin for "appeal to the people") is a fallacious argument that concludes that a proposition is true because many or most people believe it: "If many believe so, it is so." Argumentum ad populum - Wikipedia

The converse of this is that if many or most people do not believe it, it cannot be so, and that is fallacious. For example, there was a time in history when most people did not believe in Jesus but now look. All new religions are rejected by most people for a very long time after the Messenger appears.

Matthew 7:13-14 Enter through the narrow gate. For wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction, and many enter through it. But small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life, and only a few find it.

I’m gonna be going on vacation for a few days; I will be back in about a week. till then; Chao

Have fun. I am on vacation but it is a stay-cation since I never go anywhere anymore.
I see you are from Washington state. I live in the Puget Sound area.

 

[muhammad_isa]

No, each religion has a different message; there is no agreement. With a single voice from the sky, everybody agrees..

You've got to be joking..
Why should anybody accept its authority if what "the voice" says doesn't suit them?
eg. it demotes them from their current worldly status

There is no compulsion to believe in spiritual truth. That is the whole point.

 

[samtonga43]

It would be more believable to you and maybe other atheists, but not necessarily more believable to everyone. Religious believers who constitute about 84% of the world population would know it was not God because we know that God does not speak from the sky.

God is all the omnis.
Therefore He can do anything.

 

[It Aint Necessarily So]

How would it be evidence of God's existence if the voice was not from God?
It would not bother you that an alien was making a false claim to be God?

This is the question you have been asked when claiming that the life and words of a Messenger is evidence of a God as you claim it is. How would those words be evidence of God's existence if the words were not from God. You've never addressed that. You just say that they are evidence for you. Apparently, that standard only applies to written words.

The answer to that question is obvious. They would not be evidence of God's existence if the words were not from God.

We are not using the same definition for evidence. My definition of evidence is that which makes a proposition more or less likely to be correct. You like crime solving TV shows. If a suspect's cell phone pinged off a tower far from the scene of the crime at the time of the crime, that makes the owner of that phone less likely to be guilty, whereas if it pings off the cell tower nearest the scene of the crime, it is evidence that he did commit the crime. Neither of these rises to the level of proof. They are just circumstantial evidence, but they each make the likelihood the "Bob is guilty" more or less likely to be true.

Consider other findings such as that Bob had a birthday that day as well. Unless this is known to be relevant to the case, it is neither evidence for or against Bob's guilt, because it doesn't make him more or less likely to be guilty. And if Bob claimed that it did exonerate him, he would be required to explain or demonstrate how that fact established his innocence. If he could not do so, the claim that it was his birthday is evidence of his innocence would be rejected.

That's where you are with what you call evidence of a God in the words and deeds of Baha'u'llah. You simply claim that they indicate the presence of a God, and despite being asked repeatedly how those facts make the presence of a God more likely, have failed to address that. I've told you, for example, that any number of people can and have written prose indistinguishable from what you offer as evidence of a God. Such words are what we would expect if there were no deity choosing them. For you to keep insisting that certain words indicate the presence of a God without explaining how is essentially the same as insisting that Bob is innocent because of a fact that doesn't affect the likelihood of his innocence at all.

Do you care if your beliefs are correct? If you are wrong, would you want to know that? I suspect that most people wouldn't. Critical thinking is for those who want to be as correct about how the world is and works as possible. He wants to admit no wrong ideas into his mental map of reality, the set of beliefs that will inform his decisions while navigating life. He doesn't want a deity on his map if there isn't one out there that it purports to map.

If what he wants is comforting beliefs, he will choose what to believe according to what comforts him. If he believes as I do that comfort in the long run comes from a proper understanding of how things are, he has different standards for belief - empirical. Religious beliefs, for example may be comforting, but can lead to disruption in ones life if they are incorrect. Perhaps that it is by faith that one invests his savings with somebody in the church because they believe by faith that he must be good and that God is watching them both, and get's robbed - something unlikely to happen to a competent critical thinker. And then you give $10,000 to the church to do the Lord's work because you believe that there is a Lord and these people will be honest stewards of your gift, but alas, yacht payment.

This is the price one can pay for having wrong internal maps. They have accepted wrong ideas as right, and have gone off the road where the map wrongly showed another road was. Perhaps the ride was very comfortable until one drove off a cliff where it was thought that there was a road.

This is not to say that your faith-based belief (and yes, with what you offer as evidence for your belief rejected as being such, the belief becomes faith-based) will necessarily harm you. I don't see where they have. In that, you are fortunate. Look at the troubled souls populating RF starting thread after thread trying to validate their beliefs in vain to an audience that plays by different rules, never understanding why they are judged the way they are. They end up in a situation where they are alone defending some flawed idea against a sea of people they don't understand and can't answer satisfactorily. They often get emotional and angry. Some need to take time-outs.

You do the same, but it doesn't seem to faze you. I suspect that you enjoy it, as I do rebutting it.

But not everybody does. Not always, but often, there is a price to pay for being wrong, for holding false beliefs. One really is better off with a method of deciding what is true that minimizes accepting false beliefs, and there is only one: critical thinking. A critical thinker will reject your claim that what you offer as evidence for a God is that. Your map will have that God on it. His won't.

 

[Sheldon]

Kfox said: ↑
..sincerity and effort leads most people to the wrong God.

How do you know that?

There is no theistic belief that isn't a minority among all the others together, it's simple maths, unless you are suggesting only those who share your belief are sincere in their effort to believe ion a real deity? Which of course would be a no true Scotsman fallacy.

 

[Sheldon]

A true God is the God that actually exists in reality.
An imaginary god is a god someone only imagines exists.
According to my beliefs there is only one true God.

There is no objective difference between the deity you imagine is real, and all the others. You have failed to demonstrate any objective evidence.

 

[Sheldon]

That's right, we would have the same problem, although it would be easier to verify a man claiming to speak for God than it would be to verify that a voice in the sky was actually God speaking.

That makes no sense at all, we know for an objective fact that people are capable of duplicity, especially about deities. A deity speaking from the sky might be something we could not explain at all, and so not necessarily objective evidence for a deity, but it would demonstrably be more compelling than an unevidenced claim from a human.

It would be impossible to verify the voice in the sky because there would be no evidence, let alone proof, that it was God speaking.

I agree, but this doesn't seem to have been a barrier for all theistic belief, including yours, as none of them can demonstrate any objective evidence. A human claiming to be a messenger from a deity, is not objective evidence for a deity. Claims that prophesies have been fulfilled, are not objective evidence that they have been fulfilled. Claims that an unexplained and extremely unlikely event, must therefore have a divine origin, are not objective evidence they had a divine origin, and this last one is the very definition for argumentum ad ignorantiam fallacy.

 

[Sheldon]

I never said that God is unable to speak English, I said that God communicates in a language humans could never understand.

Well this is yet another unevidenced claim of course, but even were you able to demonstrated any objective evidence that a deity communicates anything at all, if you couldn't understand then you have no epistemological justification for claiming it is a language.

 

[muhammad_isa]

it's simple maths..

..so you can decide who is sincere with simple maths?
That is nonsensical.

 

[Trailblazer]

God is all the omnis.
Therefore He can do anything.

So what?

 

[Trailblazer]

There is no objective difference between the deity you imagine is real, and all the others. You have failed to demonstrate any objective evidence.

I already said that there is no objective evidence for any deity....
How many times do I have to say that, 100, 1000, 1,000,000?

 

[Trailblazer]

That makes no sense at all, we know for an objective fact that people are capable of duplicity, especially about deities. A deity speaking from the sky might be something we could not explain at all, and so not necessarily objective evidence for a deity, but it would demonstrably be more compelling than an unevidenced claim from a human.

More compelling to who? The Messengers of God and religions they establish are compelling to most people since 84 percent of the world population has a faith.

I agree, but this doesn't seem to have been a barrier for all theistic belief, including yours, as none of them can demonstrate any objective evidence. A human claiming to be a messenger from a deity, is not objective evidence for a deity.

There is not and never will be any direct objective evidence for a deity. Case closed.

 

[samtonga43]

So what?

So he can speak from the sky.

 

[Sheldon]

..so you can decide who is sincere with simple maths?
That is nonsensical.

Ah, you're back to dishonestly editing my posts to misrepresent what I have said. The claim was yours not mine, I merely pointed out the obvious inference of your claim.

I'll go slowly for you then. Firstly here is my post verbatim:

There is no theistic belief that isn't a minority among all the others together, it's simple maths, unless you are suggesting only those who share your belief are sincere in their effort to believe ion a real deity? Which of course would be a no true Scotsman fallacy.

So firstly we can note it as you who made a claim about sincerity, and I merely pointed out the mathematical inference of your claim. Now here is your claim:

G-d does not require anything more than sincerity, and effort.

The obvious inference is that anyone who does not share your belief is insincere and or has not made enough effort. Since the majority of humans do not share your beliefs, the maths is pretty simple.

I shan't even feign surprise you ignored your use of yet another logical fallacy.

 

[Sheldon]

I already said that there is no objective evidence for any deity....
How many times do I have to say that, 100, 1000, 1,000,000?

Duly noted again, so as I said:

There is no objective difference between the deity you imagine is real, and all the others.

Thus your claim here:

According to my beliefs there is only one true God.

Is meaningless, as you have just admitted.

 

[Sheldon]

So he can speak from the sky.

If omnipotent a deity could communicate it's existence in an instant to every living human, by will alone, and in a way none of them could doubt. The problem is the claim of omnipotence contains innate contradictions.

 

[Sheldon]

More compelling to who?

Those who understand that we have objective evidence of that people are capable of making up duplicity to create a religion, whereas we haven't any objective evidence of deities speaking to us from the sky.

There is not and never will be any direct objective evidence for a deity. Case closed.

Obviously not, as people are still making claims deities are real, thus the request is reasonable in a debate forum.

 

[Trailblazer]

We are not using the same definition for evidence. My definition of evidence is that which makes a proposition more or less likely to be correct.

Makes a proposition more or less likely to be correct according to whom and by what criteria?

As I have told you in the past it is only evidence that would make a proposition more or less likely to be correct according to what YOU would expect to see, so it is necessarily biased because it is only what YOU would expect to see. Someone else might expect to see something completely different if a Messenger was from God or if God existed.

That's where you are with what you call evidence of a God in the words and deeds of Baha'u'llah. You simply claim that they indicate the presence of a God, and despite being asked repeatedly how those facts make the presence of a God more likely, have failed to address that.

Those words and deeds of Baha'u'llah make the presence of a God more likely to ME and others who interpret them to mean that Baha’u’llah was a Messenger of God, but they don’t make the presence of a God more likely to YOU or to others who do not see what we see. Hopefully you can at least understand the point I am making even if you do not agree about what is more or less likely.

I've told you, for example, that any number of people can and have written prose indistinguishable from what you offer as evidence of a God. Such words are what we would expect if there were no deity choosing them.

Please do not say “we” because it is not “we.” Since you cannot speak for anyone except yourself -- it is YOU.

YOU believe that any number of people could have written what Baha’u’llah wrote, but I and other Baha'is do not believe that. No, such words are what YOU would expect to see if there was no deity choosing them, but they are exactly what I would expect to see if they were Words revealed by God.

For you to keep insisting that certain words indicate the presence of a God without explaining how is essentially the same as insisting that Bob is innocent because of a fact that doesn't affect the likelihood of his innocence at all.

Please show me where I ever ‘insisted’ on anything. I only ever said that I believe x. I cannot explain how the Writings of Baha’u’llah indicate to ME that they were revealed by God because that is subjective, not objective. Thus not everyone will ever see what I see because we are different people with different brains and experiences in life that lead us to be who we are and see what we see.

Moreover, I have not always viewed the Writings of Baha’u’llah the way I do now. There was a time when they were just words on a page as I did not understand them at all. Before I came to understand them, I needed to understand something about God and Baha’u’llah from other sources.

Do you care if your beliefs are correct? If you are wrong, would you want to know that? I suspect that most people wouldn't.

Of course I would want to know if I was wrong! Do you really think I would want to follow a false religion and believe in a nonexistent God? I guess there are people who do not think of such things but I certainly do. I think about it all the time and I have turned over every stone, but I keep coming up with the same answer.

Would you want to know if you are wrong and Baha’u’llah was a Messenger from God and God exists? How do you think that you could determine if you were wrong?

If what he wants is comforting beliefs, he will choose what to believe according to what comforts him. If he believes as I do that comfort in the long run comes from a proper understanding of how things are, he has different standards for belief - empirical. Religious beliefs, for example may be comforting, but can lead to disruption in ones life if they are incorrect.

There is no empirical proof that God exists, but that does not mean God does not exist because there is no reason to think there would be empirical proof of God if God existed.

Comforting? What comfort do you think I derive from in sacrificing the enjoyment I could be having in this material world for what I believe to be the truth from God? Do you think I feel loved by God? Do you think I look forward to a distant afterlife? Think again. I do not need God’s Love like other believers and I do not look forward to heaven like other believers because I do not look forward to living ‘forever’ in some strange realm of existence with a God I do not love.

I just thought I needed to set the record straight. It is the fallacy is hasty generalization to think all believers find ‘comfort’ in their beliefs. There is a big difference between comfort and satisfaction. I find satisfaction in doing what I believe is right, and that means being a Baha’i even though I would much rather be off on a vacation enjoying myself or maybe retiring to a place I would really prefer to live. I could do these things as a Baha’i but I don’t need to because I am content to ‘just be’ and live one day at a time. True happiness is spiritual, not anything physical.

Did it ever even occur to you that you could be wrong and my religious beliefs are correct?

This is the price one can pay for having wrong internal maps. They have accepted wrong ideas as right, and have gone off the road where the map wrongly showed another road was.

Did it ever occur to you that you could be on the wrong road and there will be a price to pay?

Not always, but often, there is a price to pay for being wrong, for holding false beliefs. One really is better off with a method of deciding what is true that minimizes accepting false beliefs, and there is only one: critical thinking. A critical thinker will reject your claim that what you offer as evidence for a God is that. Your map will have that God on it. His won't.

Surely some religious beliefs are false and there might be a price to pay for being wrong and for holding false beliefs, especially if the believer rejects the true belief.

Evidence for God’s existence abounds, it was revealed in every true religion. An atheist will reject any and all evidence that there is for God, not only my evidence, because they reject all religions, which is so illogical I can barely type this post. Atheists have some dreamy notion that if God existed there would be objective evidence for God or that God would prove He exists. There is no basis for such ridiculous ideas, they are ONLY based upon what these atheists want, so it is not critical thinking, it is emotional thinking – I want.

A critical thinker is not always an atheist, some critical thinkers are believers.

 

[Sheldon]

Those words and deeds of Baha'u'llah make the presence of a God more likely to ME and others who interpret them to mean that Baha’u’llah was a Messenger of God, but they don’t make the presence of a God more likely to YOU or to others who do not see what we see.

Your claim is reiterated by theists who arrive at the conclusions an entirely different deity exists, you cannot all be right, and there is no objective difference by your own admission.