What is your favorite proof for God?

[needimprovement]

The following was posted on another thread and I was so intrigued by it that I felt is was worth its own thread.

 

"Just because something isn't proven (rationally) does not mean it isn't true" is fine, but how do you distinguish between things that are "unproven and true" and "unproven and false?"

 

Agreed. However, in the absence of proof we must go with what is reasonable.

However, here are a few of my favorite proofs:

 

Miracle of the Sun- could 70,000 people be lying or insane?

Saint's (e.g. Padre Pio) bodies which have not decayed

Eucharistic Miracle of Lanciano along with Shroud of Turin- both have AB blood, an uncommon type (but it is not super uncommon in Palestine) just a coincidence?

And Finally:

The fact that atheists always say that God cannot be proven despite these proofs (+many many more) AND the fact that St. Anslem's ontological argument was proven mathematically!

 

I believe that the above is more reasonable and thus it is more reasonable to make the leap of faith that it is true versus the leap of faith that a purely physical, but unproven and flawed..

 

Yes - I cannot prove God's existence using the scientific method - for God is not subject to measurement. In the end, we must all make a choice to trust.

 

You are free to choose to trust in the existence of no God. Certainly I cannot "compel" you otherwise by logic or scientific proof. For me, though, in the absence of scientific proof that there is no God, I don't care to go down that nihilistic road. I'll take the "high way"

 

So how about you? What is your favorite proof for God?

Edited August 22, 2010 by needimprovement

[John]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p5mWQFGF7w8

Just saying.

[Zolar V]

lols, that babal fish was great. What about monarch butterflies? They travel thousands of miles to a singular destination every year in which they migrate for the winter yet have never been there before?

Could that be a guidance from some all(everything) god? or rather is it just a evolution of a species to travel following the magnetic lines of force to a destination based upon how the sun interacts with the ionosphere during the seasons.

[ydoaPs]

Shroud of Turin.....lol

You know that is an OBVIOUS forgery, right? Mooeypoo even has a video demonstrating the principle.

FFXW1ijmHE4

[Sisyphus]

All the major religions claim proven miracles. Christians, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists. Therefore they must all be true, right? It's the only possible explanation!

 

the fact that St. Anslem's ontological argument was proven mathematically!

 

 

Several religious people I've talked with have said they find the idea of "proof" of religious truth to be laughable, and contrary to whole idea of faith. Faith is when you decide to believe something is true. But then, I guess there are many different interpretations.

[ydoaPs]

 

Miracle of the Sun- could 70,000 people be lying or insane?

False dichotomy AND irrelevant to whether or not one or more deities exist.

 

 

Saint's (e.g. Padre Pio) bodies which have not decayed

Mummification is well-understood.

 

the fact that St. Anslem's ontological argument was proven mathematically!

Really? Citation please.

[jcarlson]

None of these are proofs. At best they are supporting arguments but really they are just non-sequiturs.

[Mr Skeptic]

...

And Finally:

The fact that atheists always say that God cannot be proven despite these proofs (+many many more) AND the fact that St. Anslem's ontological argument was proven mathematically!

 

...

 

Yes - I cannot prove God's existence using the scientific method - for God is not subject to measurement. In the end, we must all make a choice to trust.

 

You are free to choose to trust in the existence of no God. Certainly I cannot "compel" you otherwise by logic or scientific proof. For me, though, in the absence of scientific proof that there is no God, I don't care to go down that nihilistic road. I'll take the "high way"

 

So atheists say that god cannot be proven despite these "proofs", and you entirely agree with them. Sounds about right.

 

So how about you? What is your favorite proof for God?

 

My favorite is the inclusion of the deity's sacred text in the DNA of all living creatures and particularly humans, so that no one can doubt the authenticity of said text. Or at least that's what I would do if I were God rather than be a total asshole and expect people to believe something they have no evidence for.

[AzurePhoenix]

Miracle of the Sun- could 70,000 people be lying or insane?

Or, they could have looked at the sun a really long time because they were waiting on a prophecy and ended up seeing a range of different things that people tend to typically see when they stare at the sun a long time. It's happened a few times. Either of us could take ten thousand followers out to the desert and in a few hours spark similar visions en mass.

 

Saint's (e.g. Padre Pio) bodies which have not decayed

Plenty of those existing "uncorrupted" saints look plenty withered, or have been maintained under very particular conditions, are the results of perfectly normal natural processes, and/or often undergo cosmetic treatments. Take any of those you like and lay it out in the sun in Florida for a coupla days and see just how incorruptible they really are.

 

Eucharistic Miracle of Lanciano along with Shroud of Turin- both have AB blood, an uncommon type (but it is not super uncommon in Palestine) just a coincidence?

Investigators have discovered how to make a shroud of their own using ancient techniques; the shroud itself seems likely to be only 700ish years old (people say maybe not, but unless we're allowed to test it more often we can never double-check, but the one check we DO have does say 700 years and that's the best we've got) oh, and also, most importantly, some research suggests that the AB blood type might not have even come into existence until as recently as 700 AD, when more disparate populations and their blood groups began to start mixing on a more massive scale.

 

The fact that atheists always say that God cannot be proven

Some atheists say it sure, but to say always is a ridiculous stretch, and plenty will happily suggest that if this or that definition of God we should easily be able to show some sort of evidence for its existence, or lack thereof.

 

despite these proofs (+many many more)

none of these are proof of anything except human stupidity as well as the human capacity for cunning deceit. No proofs exist whatsoever.

 

AND the fact that St. Anslem's ontological argument was proven mathematically!

The ontological argument is full of more holes than Augustus Caesar. For instance, if you hold with the premise that greatest thing you can imagine has to exist, the most reasonable answer is that the greatest thing you can imagine is that which you already know to exist. This is inherently subjective, leading me to accept Keira Knightley or Will Smith as the greatest entities in existence, with different persons depending on your taste in movies or regard for actors over any other kind of person of note in modern society. Anyhow, existence being better than non-existence does not mean that whatever it is in question HAS to exist.

 

-------------

 

As for what my favorite would be, I've also often considered Skeptic's suggestion of a "testament" written into the DNA, particularly if that testament existed in all known lifeforms and proved inexplicably necessary to a lifeform's... livingness. ESPECIALLY if it offered a series of very specifically detailed predictions that regularly came to pass.

Edited August 15, 2010 by AzurePhoenix

[Moontanman]

There is a code buried in the value of pi, it tells the name of the true creator of the universe, of course you have to have the key to understand it and only I have the key and I'm not telling!

[ydoaPs]

There is a code buried in the value of pi, it tells the name of the true creator of the universe, of course you have to have the key to understand it and only I have the key and I'm not telling!

Translate Pi into binary, and you have every work ever written or ever to be written. You have every computer program-including the viruses.

[needimprovement]

Proofs:

 

- Shroud of Turin. One of the cool things is the bruise under the one eye, it just makes the Shroud feel really real!

 

- The love revealed by Jesus in His teaching, life, death and Resurrection...

 

- Life

 

- The second law of thermodynamics, Entropy law. That says in short, that the world tends to entropy. Every system will degrate, go to entropy, to chaos, if there is no any Ruler, to put the order. Looking carefully to the world processes, we see many proves of the world going to bad, but never collapsing. SOMEBODY takes care, that not to happen!

 

- Historical proof: he entered time and space and left the marks of his passage.

 

 

And to those befuddled atheists who don’t accept that reason alone can prove the existence of God, have not used their reason reasonably:

Antony Flew, the most notorious atheist, now attests to reason and is now a deist.

"I now believe that the universe was brought into existence by an infinite Intelligence," he affirms. "I believe that this universe's intricate laws manifest what scientists have called the Mind of God. I believe that life and reproduction originate in a divine Source.

"Why do I believe this, given that I expounded and defended atheism for more than half a century? The short answer is this: this is the world picture, as I see it that has emerged from modern science. Science spotlights three dimensions of nature that point to God. The first is the fact that nature obeys laws. The second is the dimension of life, of intelligently organized and purpose-driven beings, which arose from matter. The third is the very existence of nature." (There Is a God, 2007, pp. 88-89).

Edited August 15, 2010 by needimprovement

[Sisyphus]

Proofs:

 

You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.

 

- The second law of thermodynamics, Entropy law. That says in short, that the world tends to entropy. Every system will degrate, go to entropy, to chaos, if there is no any Ruler, to put the order. Looking carefully to the world processes, we see many proves of the world going to bad, but never collapsing. SOMEBODY takes care, that not to happen!

 

We do observe entropy always increasing in every system. So I guess there's no ruler?

 

Antony Flew, the most notorious atheist,

 

Who?

 

One person becoming a Christian is proof that God exists? What about people who stop being Christians? Is that proof the God does not exist?

[John Cuthber]

My favourite proof of God's existence popped up about 10 years ago when a mathematician "proved" the existence of God. He looked at various miracles and calculated some probabilities and proved that it was more than 50:50 that God existed.

What I particularly liked about this proof was that one of it's assumptions (albeit, not a declared one) was that miracles exist.

If you assume that miracles exist then, for most sensible definitions of the word "miracle" you have implicitly accepted that some sort of God exists.

 

Since the guy calculated a probability of less than 100% for the existence of God, even though he had tacitly assumed it, not only was his maths illogical (you can't assume God's existence when trying to show the existence of God) but he got the arithmetic wrong too.

 

Incidentally, while I was trying to look up a reference to that bad mathematician, I found this page which lists 666 "proofs" for the existence of God.

http://www.godlessgeeks.com/LINKS/GodProof.htm

 

I particularly like number 582

[Moontanman]

Everyone needs to believe something, I believe I'll have another beer...

[Marat]

My favorite proof of God's existence is the fact that in Hutchinson's Disease, a genetic condition which causes rapid aging and results in its sufferers dying of old age when they are in their twenties, the intellect of these patients also develops extremely quickly so they can savor the full horror of what is happening to them. If they had retained the limited intellect of children, then they would have missed out on much of the tragedy of their lives, but with better intelligence they can suffer more. Now how could such a perfectly designed horror have occurred just by biological coincidence? Obviously, there must be an Intelligent Designer behind all of this coming out so perfectly wrong.

 

Similarly, 40% of those now on dialysis are diabetics, whose main disease symptom is extreme thirst from hyperglycemia, which is only imperfectly controllable because of the danger of hypoglycemia from over-control. But dialysis requires that patients severely restrict their fluid intake, so the match of sufferers to the suffering caused by the treatment they require is perfect, which again could hardly have happened just by biological coincidence rather than by the intelligent planning of a perfectly evil Mind.

 

No doubt you too can think of similar examples of the perfect design of the world to be a hideous as possible. Just as seventeenth century theorists used to use theodicy/the cosmological argument to try to prove the existence of a good God by the goodness of the design of the world, we can use the evil of the world to prove the existence of an evil God. While the horrors of the world not caused by human action are logically inconsistent with the existence of a good God and destroy that hypothesis, the rare good things about the world do not similarly destroy the hypothesis of an evil God, since like any skilled torturer, He may well understand that to keep the feelings of his victims sensitive to the full horror of what is going wrong, He needs to reawaken and refresh their sensitivities now and then by letting a few good things happen now and then.

[jimmydasaint]

The following was posted on another thread and I was so intrigued by it that I felt is was worth its own thread.

 

Brave and up-front so I guess it deserves a straight answer 'n-i'. Firstly, as you acknowledged, there is no generic scientific proof of the existence of God. So the premise of the O.P. then has to be modified. The title should be: ' What indirect and generic supporting statements can you make to indicate the existence of God? I will take it as granted that the Abrahamic God is the same for Jews, Christians and Muslims.

 

[1] IMHO, the development of conscousness in humans to the point that it can think about thought and can approach a higher reasoning and understanding than other species (so far) would be one of my choices as an unlikely evolutionary event

 

[2] IMHO the development of language in humans is a complex event which linguists cannot agree upon, let alone scientists

 

[3] IMHO the development of a living baby from a single cell with gene interactions that would make a supercomputer puzzled is a difficult phenomenon to explain except in a piecemeal manner by developmental biologists

 

[4] IMHO the fact that all living things die, but especially that all humans will die, and that religions tell us that the point of a death is for a trial of deeds committed whilst on Earth during our time as causative agents

 

[5] IMHO the puzzle about why the values are as they are for fundamental forces of nature and why the masses of protons, neutrons and electrons are as they are.

 

In short, these are not proofs. They are puzzles for a person who is drawn to reflection and drawn to faith. They will be meaningless to people who reject faith because the scientific process is still gathering evidence for past events and that process is not yet complete. Does it satisfy me personally? Yes it does. There are question marks and every scientific process I investigated as a past research scientist some 20 years ago, ended in a question mark - a mystery. I still have doubts about the existence of God, but I choose to live with them in hope for the future, and in fear of a bad future after death. But a bit of hope is better than none.

Edited August 16, 2010 by jimmydasaint

[needimprovement]

You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.

I think you have hit upon a very important issue, and one that truly underlies much of the problem in communicating between theists and atheists.

 

Atheists look for evidence to provide proof in either a scientific or philosophical way before accepting belief. In so doing certain parameters, walls, are established based on the governing rules of science and/or philosophy. This necessarily limits the ability of an atheist to accept what doesn't neatly fit those parameters.

 

Theists work to a different standard. That standard is a simple one. First comes the acceptance of the possibility, even probability of a higher intelligence. Perhaps this is based largely on a desire to believe, but it allows for a much wider interpretation of evidence.

Belief, or at least a genuine openness comes before evidence.

 

With your stand, I assume that you find the evidence weak and unconvincing. I know that a man of science leave the door open to new evidence. Now, here is the question: Are you willing to consider new evidence of the same type? By that I mean, does quantity of evidence make any impression upon your consideration?

 

What I see in your post is that you require God to prove himself to you, and that he must do it in a way that is acceptable to parameters that you define. You are unwilling to accept that Science is limited in a.) what it can consieve and b.) what it can measure and c) what it can repeat and that God just might exist outside of those parameters.

 

If you leave the door open, it seems you have two options.

1) Accept that God may very well exist because you don't know everything.

2) Reject that God exists because you don't know everything.

 

It is this predisposition, one way or the other, it seems to me, that determines whether one can truly come to understand the real and true existence of God.

Edited August 16, 2010 by needimprovement

[padren]

Theists work to a different standard. That standard is a simple one. First comes the acceptance of the possibility, even probability of a higher intelligence. Perhaps this is based largely on a desire to believe, but it allows for a much wider interpretation of evidence.

 

If someone is skeptical to use a wider interpretation of evidence, it may be because "evidence" isn't something you can just "feel differently about" without repercussions. The evidence of fraud by an employee has to be evaluated, but at the end of the day the truth is either they committed fraud or they didn't. How you approach evidence determines your best chances of determining what really happened. You can't control the evidence or the incident... the employee may be innocent and yet they look guilty, or they may be guilty and there isn't enough evidence to prove it - but one thing you can be sure about is the more seriously and more exactly you evaluate the evidence, the better the chances you'll have at finding the truth.

 

The "wider interpretation of evidence" you propose as how to deal with one of the most fundamental questions there is, would (imho) be disastrous if we applied it to everyday survival. It is unfit for scientific research, it's unfit in judicial matters, and it's just not a healthy view from a survival standpoint. As such I see no reason it's likely fit to address the question of God. Knowing what any given piece of evidence means - in terms of how reliable it is and what it suggests versus merely implies - is the single most important skill in building a usable understanding of the world we live in. It can be done well and it can be done badly. When it's done badly, things happen that you don't understand or see coming, and often that you wish didn't.

 

There's a reason why people have a reasonably strict definition of evidence.

[Sisyphus]

Atheists look for evidence to provide proof in either a scientific or philosophical way before accepting belief. In so doing certain parameters, walls, are established based on the governing rules of science and/or philosophy. This necessarily limits the ability of an atheist to accept what doesn't neatly fit those parameters.

 

Yes, I do require arguments not to be logically fallacious, if that's what you mean by within the parameters of philosophy.

 

Theists work to a different standard. That standard is a simple one. First comes the acceptance of the possibility, even probability of a higher intelligence. Perhaps this is based largely on a desire to believe, but it allows for a much wider interpretation of evidence.

Belief, or at least a genuine openness comes before evidence.

 

No, it does not allow for a wider interpretation of evidence. It demands a very specific, narrow interpretation of "evidence." It demands that you be incurious about possibilities that do not fit what you've already decided is true.

 

With your stand, I assume that you find the evidence weak and unconvincing.

 

Correct.

 

I know that a man of science leave the door open to new evidence. Now, here is the question: Are you willing to consider new evidence of the same type? By that I mean, does quantity of evidence make any impression upon your consideration?

 

No quantity of invalid evidence counts as valid evidence. In post #14, John Cuthber linked to a list of 666 "proofs" of the existence of god. They're all invalid, so it wouldn't make any difference if there were 666 million.

 

What I see in your post is that you require God to prove himself to you, and that he must do it in a way that is acceptable to parameters that you define.

 

No. I'm requiring that if someone is asking me to believe what they believe, that they make some reasonable argument that it is true.

 

You are unwilling to accept that Science is limited in a.) what it can consieve and b.) what it can measure and c) what it can repeat and that God just might exist outside of those parameters.

 

Not at all. But if you're going to call something evidence, let alone proof, it has to at least be rational. It's fine if you decide to believe something, but you can't possibly expect others to for the same reasons.

 

If you leave the door open, it seems you have two options.

1) Accept that God may very well exist because you don't know everything.

2) Reject that God exists because you don't know everything.

 

False dichotomy. I don't know everything, and what most people mean by "god" almost certainly does not exist. Saying "it may well exist" implies a reasonable probability.

[needimprovement]

Another proof:

 

Where do atoms came from? Please follow this link for in-depth discussion My link

[ydoaPs]

Another proof:

 

Where do atoms came from? Please follow this link for in-depth discussion My link

What does that have to do with God?

[rigney]

Another proof:

 

Where do atoms came from? Please follow this link for in-depth discussion My link

 

I watched the entire hour and found it simply fool proof. Believe what you want, but this guy has it together.

[John Cuthber]

I couldn't be bothered to watch. When I saw "Where do atoms came from? " put forward as "proof" of God I just wondered

Where did God come from?

 

In one case you have to say that something relatively simple came into being; in the other case you have to assume that something massively complicated just popped into existence.

 

One of those is vastly more plausible than the other.

[rigney]

I couldn't be bothered to watch. When I saw "Where do atoms came from? " put forward as "proof" of God I just wondered

Where did God come from?

 

In one case you have to say that something relatively simple came into being; in the other case you have to assume that something massively complicated just popped into existence.

 

One of those is vastly more plausible than the other.

 

I don't believe the dude implied God at all, it's just what your intrepurtation of massive, complicated or plausible happens to be? Unless you are one of those over achievers who range beyond knowledge, perhaps you should have watched the entire program?

Edited August 18, 2010 by rigney