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Evidence for God

F1fan

Veteran Member
Or:
You can't understand God if you are insincere. I understand this about God, therefore I am not insincere.
How can anyone understand anything about a god? You are vocal about how limited science is, so what other means and method is available AND RELIABLE to any of us that we can detect a god and understand things about it?
 

Trailblazer

Veteran Member
How can anyone understand anything about a god? You are vocal about how limited science is, so what other means and method is available AND RELIABLE to any of us that we can detect a god and understand things about it?
The only way we can know anything about God is from what the Messengers of God reveal about God, which are God's will and God's attributes.
We can also know some of God's attributes because they are manifested in the Person of the Messenger.
We can never know the Essence of God, not even the Messengers knew that.
We can never detect God since God dwells in unapproachable Light.
 

mikkel_the_dane

My own religion
How can anyone understand anything about a god? You are vocal about how limited science is, so what other means and method is available AND RELIABLE to any of us that we can detect a god and understand things about it?

None, as far as I can tell.
 

Trailblazer

Veteran Member
Perhaps that is precisely what has happened. The suffering free realm is heaven? And the souls get bored there? Many people speculate that heaven would be a boring place, and they would prefer to be in hell with the sinners who are much more fun than the saints.
The suffering-free realm is heaven, but nobody will be bored there since they will still have God's work to do, just like here, only without a physical body and physical needs to worry about.....

I have heard atheists say they would rather go to hell, since it will be so much more fun, because they imagine they will be able to have the physical things they enjoy here, eating, drinking and having sex, but there will be nothing physical in hell, so it will be hell thinking about what they used to have but can no longer have, for all of eternity.... I cannot imagine anything worse than that.

Meanwhile, the believers will be with God up in heaven. If I get to heaven, I won't just be sitting around doing nothing or singing praises to God, I will want to be doing actual work, so I will want to go down and rescue souls who are in hell..... That is what I try to do here so it will just be a continuation of my work.
 

PearlSeeker

Well-Known Member
Nothing shows it in the sense of proving it as a fact. We can only ever prove it to ourselves and then we know it is true.

His Character -- That can be determined by reading about Him on books such as the following: The Revelation of Bahá'u'lláh, Volumes 1-4

His Works -- This is what He accomplished (His Mission on earth/ the history of His Cause)
That can be determined by reading about His mission on books such as the following:

God Passes By (1844-1944)
The Revelation of Bahá'u'lláh, Volumes 1-4, which cover the 40 years of His Mission, from 1853-1892.

His Words -- What He wrote can be found in books that are posted online: The Works of Bahá'u'lláh
Can you you name a few concrete examples? What in his character? What accomplishments? What from his words?
 

danieldemol

Veteran Member
Premium Member
Perhaps that is precisely what has happened. The suffering free realm is heaven?
It didn't happen to me, i haven't been to heaven.
And the souls get bored there? Many people speculate that heaven would be a boring place, and they would prefer to be in hell with the sinners who are much more fun than the saints.
I think you have misunderstood why they would prefer to be in hell if you think it is because they are bored of not suffering.
In my opinion.
 

danieldemol

Veteran Member
Premium Member
Perhaps that is precisely what has happened. The suffering free realm is heaven?
It didn't happen to me, i haven't been to heaven.
And the souls get bored there? Many people speculate that heaven would be a boring place, and they would prefer to be in hell with the sinners who are much more fun than the saints.
I think you have misunderstood why they would prefer to be in hell if you think it is because they are bored of not suffering.
In my opinion.
 

danieldemol

Veteran Member
Premium Member
God has His own kind of logic, and it is not the same as human-devised logic. Humans cannot know how God thinks and reasons since the mind of God is unknowable.
If humans can't know how God thinks then your claim to know that God's logic is different to human logic is something you can't know since the mind of God is just as unknown to you as it is to the non-believer in your God in my view.
 

Trailblazer

Veteran Member
What? There is a post of you explaining how you thought up the analogy of natives not knowing what airplanes are.
Fair enough.
All I did was explain how your analogy wasn't accurate, as your intent was that atheists are like the natives who are ignorant of some reality. Except planes are known to exist, gods are not, and that is how your analogy fails.
My intent was not that atheists are like the natives who are ignorant of some reality. That has nothing to do with my analogy.

My analogy was not intended to compare things that can be known and proven to exist (airplanes) to things that cannot be known or proven to exist (God). My analogy was using airplanes as something that the natives have never seen or heard of. The question is: How the natives know what evidence for an airplane looked like if they have no idea what an airplane is? Similarly, how would an atheist know what evidence for God looked like if they have no idea what God is? That was my analogy.

Atheists cannot go by what theists claim that God is and say there is no evidence for such a God, since theists have a God that reveals Himself through the messengers. When I say the messengers are the evidence for God, atheists say "that's not evidence " so I want to know what atheists think the evidence would be if God existed.
It's 100% relevant that in a thread about evidence for God that there is a disagreement about what God is.
This thread was intended to be about what God is according to theists. This thread was about what atheists would accept as evidence for God, not about what theists believe God is or what theists believe the evidence for God is.

I said: Atheists say I have no evidence but how would they know that what I have is ‘not evidence’ if they don’t even know what evidence for God would look like if it existed?
Again, you have your own rules that deviate from the norm, and you can't dictate how others think and contribute. You know full well that your belief about "evidence for God" is contentious, and you should have thought ahead about the responses this thread would invite.
As always threads do get off track, I was only attempting to reel it in.
People are free to think and contribute however they want to, but I am also free not to discuss what I don't want to discuss.

Of course I know full well that my belief about "evidence for God" is contentious and I don't care what responses are posted. However, I am free not to engage in a discussion about my evidence for God since that has been amply covered in the past
More of your switch-a-roo. Atheists are often the target for questions by believers, and we are named.
Atheists might be a target of some believers but they are not in my crosshairs. I am the one who is always defending atheists when other believers attack them.
It is a natural reflex since atheists are considered a sort of threat. I remember talking to one of my Catholic cousins some years ago and she asked me what religion I was. Being Christmas I didn't want to create controvercy and admit to being an atheist I said I was Buddhist. And she said "Well, at least you believe in something." The meaning I took from this was that not having some sort of ideological belief means a sort of meaninglessness and emptiness, which is far from true. There is a habit of belief that many theists don't realize they use and rely on, and anything that threatens their "operating software" is frightening.
Atheists are not a threat to me and I don't think they are a threat to believers in general. Why would atheists be a threat? What can atheists do to believers to harm them? Only if a believer was not firm in their faith would an atheist pose a threat.

So you are a Buddhist who does not believe in God. I had a good friend who was a Buddhist and he believed in God.
Sorry, "evidence for God" opens the door to the many versions of God, and the lack of evidence for any of the many different gods. If you actually had evidence you could rebut these problems, but instead you complain that it is brought up.
If you actually had evidence you could rebut the evidence believers say they have. That was the point of this thread.
Believers don't know and can't answer these either. But they do have their adopted dogmas, just like you do, and they don't align. You think God doesn't interact with ordinary people, but other religious views claim God does. That's a pretty big disagreement, and it affects your beliefs/claims.
It is only a difference in belief, and it does not affect my belief system. People are free to 'believe' whatever they want to, but I go by the evidence.
This is persecution complex, claiming that your debate opponents are lashing out.
It was not me who complained about lashing out, it was you.
You said: You are frustrated that you aren't trusted, and you lash out against those who show the best skill at thinking.
Yet you have no evidence of me lashing out. I am as cool as a cucumber.
They didn't have absolutist rules like Baha'i, so I wouldn't consider them a cult.
Cults might have rules, but true religions have Laws and these Laws come from God.
As we know religion is a wide open landscape and a believer can find whatever they are looking for. You found Baha'i, but is it truth? Is your version of God accurate? The evidence is not convincing. The advantage of faith is that the believer can fill in the gaps where evidence is missing.
Whether my evidence convinces you or anyone else is not what would make the Baha'i Faith a true religion. It is either true or not, regardless of what anyone believes, since how many people believe in a religion does not make any religion true.

I don't have any gaps to fill in since there is no evidence missing. I certainly don't know everything about God but I know enough to know that God exists and I know what I need to know to fulfill the purpose of my existence.
I have read a lot of what you all have posted and it actually had the opposite effect. The writing are not well written, offer little guidance, and could have been created by any clever conman. And look at other people on RF, anyone else blown away by the texts? No.
How many people are blown away by the texts has no bearing whatsoever on whether the Baha'i Faith is true or not. You still don't get it so you keep repeating the same mantra which equates to the fallacy of 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.
If you see a Ford pinto in a parking lot most everyone is going to see a piece of junk. Do you know who won't? It would be any member of the Ford pinto fan club. Meaning is in the eye of beholder.
I know, because I have 1986 Honda Prelude and most people would think it is a piece of junk, but I love it.
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder when it come to 'what people like', but what people like has nothing to do with what is actually true or false.
Odd that the same God has different revelations that are inconsistent. This sounds like an excuse, not an explanation.
The revelations are not inconsistent although they are different. Why would a new messenger come just to reveal exactly the same thing that the previous messengers revealed? What is inconsistent is what people believe but that is because they don't understand the real meaning of the scriptures.
Why? Why would a God reveal conflicting things? Unless the God was evolving to, it makes no sense. And if God does evolvee, then there's no truth, as all that is subject to change.
God does not reveal any conflicting things, God only reveals different things in every age, because humanity needs different things in every age.
There is a reason why there are basic moral impulses in human development. These morals formed many hundreds of thousands of years ago, well before Gods came along. These moral evolved with the impulse to survive, and this was the basis for tribalism as language and meaning evolved.
According to my beliefs, there was no time when man was without religion or God, since God has sent messengers ever since man evolved to be man. The reason there is no record of these messengers or the religions in prehistoric times is because the art of writing did not exist that long ago.
 

Trailblazer

Veteran Member
If humans can't know how God thinks then your claim to know that God's logic is different to human logic is something you can't know since the mind of God is just as unknown to you as it is to the non-believer in your God in my view.
I can't know about God's logic, but I reason that God's logic has to be different from human logic since God is not a human.
 

danieldemol

Veteran Member
Premium Member
The idea is, we don't remember anything that happened before we were born. But, it's just a theory.
So your God wipes the slate clean so we have no recollection of our objection to living without suffering just to take a portion of us back to heaven in spite of our objections?
Sure. But that's not what I said.
Sure, because in my view what you said was irrelevant to our whole discussion on choosing suffering.

In my opinion.
 

Treasure Hunter

Well-Known Member
The only way we can know anything about God is from what the Messengers of God reveal about God, which are God's will and God's attributes.
We can also know some of God's attributes because they are manifested in the Person of the Messenger.
We can never know the Essence of God, not even the Messengers knew that.
We can never detect God since God dwells in unapproachable Light.

None, as far as I can tell.

OK, so there is no basis for any rational human to decide a god of some sort exists?
In Christianity, you know the Father through relationship with the Son, and you know the Son through relationship with the least (the victim). This is how it works.

How do you relate to the least / victim? I describe that here:
 

dybmh

דניאל יוסף בן מאיר הירש
So your God wipes the slate clean so we have no recollection of our objection to living without suffering just to take a portion of us back to heaven in spite of our objections?

It's just a theory, and yes. It's not a permanent gig.

Sure, because in my view what you said was irrelevant to our whole discussion on choosing suffering.

Ok.
 

F1fan

Veteran Member
In Christianity, you know the Father through relationship with the Son,
We can only confirm that these are characters in the New Testament. Even this is fuzzy given how Christians don't agree abut this relationship. So not helpful.
and you know the Son through relationship with the least (the victim). This is how it works.
What victim?
How do you relate to the least / victim? I describe that here:
This looks to be little more than ideological nonsense. Reading the thread you started it has a lot of religious and right wing code words, and these are not fact based. I can't accept any of you wrote there because it is so heavily biased and inaccurate.
 

Treasure Hunter

Well-Known Member
We can only confirm that these are characters in the New Testament. Even this is fuzzy given how Christians don't agree abut this relationship. So not helpful.

What victim?

This looks to be little more than ideological nonsense. Reading the thread you started it has a lot of religious and right wing code words, and these are not fact based. I can't accept any of you wrote there because it is so heavily biased and inaccurate.
I believe you that you see a lot of noise, but I assure you that there is signal. You can focus on the noise if you want, but I am being sincere.
 
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It Aint Necessarily So

Veteran Member
Premium Member
What exactly shows he was really a Messenger? Can you name a few concrete things for each category (character, works, words)?
I knew how this would go before it unfolded. No, she cannot give you anything specific. It will always be broad, nonspecific generalities.
His Character -- That can be determined by reading about Him on books such as the following: The Revelation of Bahá'u'lláh, Volumes 1-4

His Works -- This is what He accomplished (His Mission on earth/ the history of His Cause)
That can be determined by reading about His mission on books such as the following:

God Passes By (1844-1944)
The Revelation of Bahá'u'lláh, Volumes 1-4, which cover the 40 years of His Mission, from 1853-1892.

His Words -- What He wrote can be found in books that are posted online: The Works of Bahá'u'lláh
And here they are. One might ask what aspect of his character (or works or word) was transhuman, but no answer will be offered beyond, "his character" followed by a link that doesn't support the claim, either.
That is meant figuratively, not literally.
Yeah, that's pretty much how I understand all scripture. This piece was, "with God all things are possible," which should be understood as only the things nature you can do are possible, which is pretty much the empiricist's view anyway. The whole god thing shouldn't be understood as there literally being a god. That's meant figuratively as well, and refers to the unconscious laws of nature, which is also pretty much what the humanist believes already. So, you can see that if we allow ourselves to take liberties with what words mean, no words have a definite meaning. That's the beauty of scripture, which is vague, ambiguous, self-contradictory, often gives bad advice, praises poor thinking and morality in its deity, and is full of error. But no worries. We can still work with that and call it divine if we fix a few parts.
I did not call you a coward. I said "Cowards don't like suffering so they think God should not allow it."
Of course you did, and in a backhand way which is why he was offended. So did whoever you're carrying water for. Your man chose that language to demean and intimidate people for blaming his god for gratuitous suffering.

Heroes also don't like suffering, but he chose to feature cowards. Now tell me how I can't know what he was thinking or why he wrote those words.

since God is not physical you won't be getting any such evidence.
You mean except messengers and their messages, right? Or is that metaphysical to you?

Unless there are real things that aren't physical, not physical and not real are synonymous, and nothing is known to be real that isn't also physical, so you have no basis for assuming otherwise. Moreover, you offer this as absence of evidence as justification for your belief, as if the lack of evidence is no problem because there is no evidence - exactly why critical thinkers reject such a belief.
The messengers do provide evidence of God
Not anything that just justifies belief in their extraordinary claims, which require extraordinary evidence, not the mundane musings of yet another religious reformer.
what would be the evidence that would support his claim to be a messenger of God?
I asked you that and never answered with anything more specific than his character, his work, and his words, which were all very human.
unless you could do something to convince me you were a messenger. Otherwise why would I believe you were speaking for God?
Exactly.
While I concede to the fact that suffering has to exist in a material world, and that there is some value to suffering, I question why there has to be so much suffering, and I especially question why suffering is so unequally distributed, such that some people suffer all throughout their lives while other people hardly suffer at all
I agree with you here, which is a large part of the argument that no tri-omni god rules our world. By the way, since you don't like suffering, does this make you a coward?
I never made atheists out to be the bad guy.
This lasted about six seconds ....
If anything, it is certain atheists trying to make theists out to be bad guys, by the derogatory things they say about us.
Bad atheist trying to make you out to be the bad guy!
 

F1fan

Veteran Member
I believe you that you see a lot of noise, but I assure you that there is signal.
Well, that's a claim, let's see the facts that inform us that you are correct, and not bluffing. I think you are bluffing since you haven't presented evidence that your fantastic claims are in any way true.
You can focus on the noise if you want, but I am being sincere.
Sincere people get conned and fooled, too. So show us what you have to indicate you aren't one of them.
 
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