Question of the Day #58: Can you prove God's existence?
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I already essentially asked this question on my own blog, but my blog apparently sucks, as not nearly so many people visit there as here. So I ask the question again here:I have had people ask me, "If God really exists, and wants people to believe in Him, then why doesn't He just prove His existence to us?" I think this question is an unreasonable one. I think that no matter what God hypothetically might do to encourage belief (without taking away free will) a person may always choose to deny evidence.
My question: How could a hypothetically existent God prove its existence?
On a related note, do you think the original question or my counter-question are useful in any way with respect to the dialogue between theists and atheists?
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7 Comments:
"My question: How could a hypothetically existent God prove its existence?"
As an ignostic (i.e. someone who holds that the term "God" is meaningless because non-falsifiable), I would answer that your question is meaningless. But furthermore I would also answer that it is quite impossible for us to know that any given event is non-natural, making the question 100% moot even if one is not an ignostic.
"On a related note, do you think the original question or my counter-question are useful in any way with respect to the dialogue between theists and atheists?"
No, because any atheist can just say "God knows what it would take for me to believe." It is a non-issue.
Furthermore, your reasoning implies that we have the will to decide to accept the "evidence" or not, which is spurious. If you believe that God can exist to begin with, then there's no grounds to know anything, and God could be controlling your will at this very moment, making any question dependent on our will irrelevant. Christianity is a sterile worldview, which leads only to nihilism.
I'll chime in with agreement. A god as defined by Christianity is outside of our experience, and thus completely incoherent.
But the earlier mythological representations of the deity in early Hebrew stories present a characterization more in line with other contemporary deities, i.e., nothing more than souped-up humans. A deity that can "walk" through the Garden of Eden is surely one that can be observed naturally.
I think if, today, the Christian god were to manifest itself naturally (as it has in the past) and demonstrate its power, although I may not be able to fully conclude that it is omnimax, it would certainly be more powerful than me, and so I would be forced to at least give it my consideration. (I still doubt that I could worship a being so immoral)
"How could a hypothetically existent God prove its existence?"
The way it was done in Carl Sagon's "Contact" - the book not the movie. The ending of the book and the ending of the movie are drastically different, almost all references to religion having been expunged from the movie - except for the negative references of course.
Obviously non-random information would have to be hidden in various computations. The digits of pi, when expanded to some large number of digits would be seen to contain certain messages, and so on for other non-rational real number representations.
You know, it's funny, but after I posted this, I realized that I really think the second question is the more important one.
Francois' response in particular seems to illustrate that for me. (Well, maybe because he's the only one who really answered the second question, unless I missed it elsewhere.) If an omnipotent God exists, then the shortcut answer is for God to override our wills and make us believe, even though I ruled that out in the question, just because He supposedly could.
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Zach,
Zach said, "A god as defined by Christianity is outside of our experience, and thus completely incoherent."
Maybe you could expound on this.
I think that if a giant Mecha-Jesus descended from the sky and destroyed Tokyo, I would be convinced of the existence of the Christian God.
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