It's a recognition thing. What are the marks of recognition? The mind of the Church and the countless millions who have gone before me knowing the same person .... and being prepared to die for Him.

That's how I know.

Whether God is falsifiable or not is a matter for your world view and the questions it generates. I propose, (as I have done before), that God is not just another phenomenon; not just another object; not just another observable reality; not just another "being." (If this sounds crazy to you then you need to factor in the Eastern Church's commitment to apophatic theology .... somewhat weak in the west).

On the problem of evil, could we say that Christians talk too vaguely about God and don't get down to the Easter specifics of our faith? If the cross is reduced to the status of a cosmic transaction how can God himself participate in the process? It's as external to Him as it isn't to us.

On many occasions at a funeral I have talked in the most realistic terms about the Cross being the place of resolution. I just don't think many Christians think of it in these terms; never mind atheists and agnostics!

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The billions of universes are one possible answer to the problem of Quantum Mechanics and is in principle (in theory at the moment) falsifiable.

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Interesting concept! At the moment the universe we are in is the only one we can observe by definition.

To postulate the existence of multiple universes in order to explain the fact that the constants that determine the nature of this universe are exactly those needed to support life is a great leap of faith which is not even theoretically falsifiable.

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I do not claim to be objective. I only claim to have a reasonable world-view. All that stuff about Occams razor is showing the justification for my world-view.

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Originally posted by The sceptical Atheist:

The fact that if something exists then it does exist is self-evident. The fact that something cannot both 'be' and 'not be' is self-evident. The fact that something is either true or false is also self-evident.

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In fact the "true or false" fails on Russell's Paradox, "'be' and 'not be'" leads us to Schrodinger's Cat. Existence itself I do not believe to be necessarily self-evident in all cases.

Sure, Fr. Gregory, we can find good theological explanations. I don't think I could be a theist if I didn't also believe that, in some real sense, God suffers with us through the Cross. But that doesn't explain why evil exists. But neither can I explain why goodness exists.

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The fact that if something exists then it does exist is self-evident.
The fact that something cannot both 'be' and 'not be' is self-evident.
The fact that something is either true or false is also self-evident.

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This is true of scientific truth. I wonder if it is true of all truth?

Just a few thoughts:

1) I had always thought that an atheist was committed to the proposition that God does not exist. Whereas you seem to be saying only that you have not yet encountered evidence that He/She does. Which would make you a sceptical agnostic ?

2) Would you consider as evidence the stories of people whose lives have been transformed by a conversion experience ? Genuinely criminal types who have become altruistic overnight, "The Cross & the Switchblade" sort of stuff ? Even if the theology of the converted is sometimes dubious, the existence of a power that changes lives seems pretty much a matter of recorded fact...

3) What's all this nonsense about statements being either true or false ? It's like this; reality is complicated. We humans far too often describe it in very simple language. To demand of reality that it be either perfectly like or perfectly unlike the language we use is ridiculous.

Regards,

First of all, the questions raised by the Sceptical Atheist have been very important and interesting. I would probably put myself in the "Sceptical Christian" camp as well as others here. I certainly have no "objective falsifiable" evidence for the existance of God; there is however evidence, some of it similar in nature to the evidence for cosmology (for example).

Cosmologists are faced with a body of evidence that requires explanation. This includes things like the red shift of galaxies (the expansion of the universe), the cosmic radiation background, abundances of helium ....

Cosmologists have developed a number of theories to explain the origins of these observations. However, these theories are not subject to experimentation in the way that (for example) other branches of physics are (unless you know a way of creating a universe in the lab). The theories are still somewhat "falsifiable" in that they can be tested against the observations, and may predict how future observations (eg the precise structure of the cosmic background) will look.

However, the evidence that the theories explain or are tested against is by its' nature incomplete (limited by available instruments and time to make observations) and potentially incorrect (was the instrument recording a particular observation working properly?).

Now, to me, there isn't that much difference to the way I came to accept the theory that God (as described in the Bible and Christian tradition) exists. I looked at incomplete and potentially incorrect evidence (the recorded testimony of Jews and Christians in the Bible, the testimony in words and actions of Christians I knew, my own personal experiences etc) and tested them against the possible theories (God exists, He doesn't exist, there is a supernatural impersonal force...). I came to the decision that the Christian understanding of God best fitted the available evidence.

I also found that I could make a certain amount of "predictive observations", albeit subjective. It was clear that the Christian religion was demanding more than just an intellectual acceptance that God exists, there is a call to personal relationship with him. Now, entering a personal relationship changes both people (OK the change in God is probably insignificant), and I could therefore expect that by making the decision (a "step of faith") to enter such a relationship would result in some form of perceptable change in myself and my interactions with others.

Now, I've no idea if that addresses any questions/comments raised on this thread, but it is the best I can give in response to a request for "objective falsifiable" evidence for Gods' existance.

There was (is?) a mathematician called Godel who has a theorem. My book has gone walkies so I will have to do the best I can from memory, but it deals with the availibility of proof and can be summed up as:

"You cannot prove everything about a system from within the system."

As an example, if you are living in a one-dimensional world, you can only experience the line you live on. You can't imagine a line unless you could see it from above - which is another dimension which you don't have - it's outside your system.

So, there are four kinds of things:

• Things that you can prove are true.
• Things that you can prove are false
• Things that are true, but you (or anyone else) cannot prove it
• Things that are false, but you (or anyone else) cannot prove otherwise

Gill said

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Personally I believe that God (if there is one!) honours seekers after truth far more than people who manipulate and control others in the name of religion, of whom sadly there are many in the Churches.

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Well said, I agree. It is better to honestly doubt than believe because you are told to.

Dear Sceptical Atheist,
I have a great deal of sympathy for your position. I think that the evidence is profoundly ambiguous, and I do sometimes wonder whether I am deceiving myself by continuing to try and live my life as if God exists. On balance, however, I think that such a strategy makes my life more fulfilling (and bearable) and I feel that there are enough grounds for it to satisfy me that I am not being intellectually irresponsible for so believing. (I gave up fundamentalism when I came to the conclusion that I could only remain in it if I compromised on intellectual integrity).

I think that the nature of the universe and its "not quite inscrutability"; some of the religious experience of humankind down the ages (not just Christianity); personal experience of love and kindness; are consonant with there being a God (but one who is rather less anthropomorphic and more supra-personal than the popular christian version).

As has been said the biggest challenge to this is the problem of evil and i find the cross of jesus a partial but not sufficient answer to this. (It is sometimes said that Jesus bore all the world's pain on the cross, if so why do i still have this toothache?)

I have not had an experience of God compelling enough to be indubitable (and would be able to doubt it soon after anyway!) And I prefer to regard experience of God as being found in experience of beauty, truth, kindness,justice, in the day to day than in extaordinary experiences.

I have given you a testable way of showing me that God exists.

Do any of you have a testable way of showing that God doesn't exist?

From Archimandrite Sophrony (His Life is Mine: Part 2, Chapter 2; SVS Press
pg. 117):

For my part all the evidence I have of the existence of God comes from experience. The problem in convincing anyone else is that generally these experiences require the eyes of faith in order to be accepted as evidence . . . which leads into a bit of a circle.

I have also found that trying to apply logic usually doesn't work very well. The big problem I have found is that God can simultaneously be and not be a given attribute.

For example from a hymn:

Ever old and ever new

Does this mean 'Ever not new and ever new'? It sums up the sort of appraoch I think is necessary.

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I have given you a testable way of showing me that God exists

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No, you haven't.

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Originally posted by seasick:
The problem with the approach would seem to stem from 'Do not put the Lord your God to the test'. However, I would appreciate that this isn't terribly helpful in this situation.

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Actually, that is the crux of this whole thing. The temptations of Christ center on opportunities to test God, to do an unquestionably fantastic supernatural thing which would prove undoubtably that God existed (the angels turning up to catch you temptation). This is something we are told not to do, to test God. So I cannot produce an OF test for you as it is (in a mild way) offensive to my belief system.

The problem of an OF test to prove that God is I believe yours to solve.

Incidentally, were God to take you up on your lottery challenge, would you not merely change philosophical enquiries to why God does not intervene in other specified situations. You'd drop the argument for the existence only to pick up the problem of evil.

If Jesus had thrown himself from the pinnacle of the temple, angels would have caught him, because he was God.

If any of us were to jump off anything equally high, we would go splat. We are not God.

The demand that God do something to prove himself has an underlying assumption. That is that we are God's equal or superior. Since that's not the case, those tests never work.

God sometimes does something to show his existence to a person who is sincerely and humbly seeking. Anyone who poses a test does not qualify.

I would like to add that I can't see why any all-powerful being should obey a human individual.

God responds to intercessory prayer, not automatically, but thoughtfully, considering the welfare of the one being prayed for.

I have given you a system of evidence that would show me that your God exists, but you say I should look in a different way.

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Steve_R
In fact the "true or false" fails on Russell's Paradox, "'be' and 'not be'" leads us to Schrodinger's Cat. Existence itself I do not believe to be necessarily self-evident in all cases.

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The law of excluded middle is a fundamental way of how we all decide on the truth. If a statement is made, it cannot both be true and false at the same time. There are the caveats about when is something 'red' and when is it 'orange'. Schrodingers Cat, which is of course an impossible situation highlighting the paradox in sub atomic particles, shows that when we are discussing things such as electrons we cannot know if it is a particle or a wave. It depends on the way we examine it. Any statement about the electron, though can be seen as true or false (within the fundamental limits imposed by Heisenbergs uncertainty). I can say that I measured an electron that had X GeV amount of energy. That is either true or false. It cannot be both.

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The fact that if something exists then it does exist is self-evident.
The fact that something cannot both 'be' and 'not be' is self-evident.
The fact that something is either true or false is also self-evident.
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This is true of scientific truth. I wonder if it is true of all truth?

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This is a statement about Truth. They are called the laws of thought. They are self evident. They come into our consciousness as innate ideas before we start examining the truth of particular circumstances. Science is subservient to these points.

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Take the statement 'God is our Father'. Is it true or false? Can it be both?

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Let us consider this.
1) The statement 'God is our Father' is either True or False
If this is True, then we have a True statement. If it is false, we get the secondary point:
2) The statement "'God is our Father' may be true" is either True or False.

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Alan:
Cosmologists are faced with a body of evidence that requires explanation. This includes things like the red shift of galaxies (the expansion of the universe), the cosmic radiation background, abundance of helium ....

Cosmologists have developed a number of theories to explain the origins of these observations. However, these theories are not subject to experimentation in the way that (for example) other branches of physics are (unless you know a way of creating a universe in the lab).

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This is wrong. There are ways of testing the Big Bang (BB) theory. The cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation was about to be looked for, because it should have been there according to theory, when it was discovered anyway by accident.

The red shift makes predictions about where the galaxies would have been in the past. Pushing matter together increases the temperature, which is why the CMB should have been there. If it wasn't there, then the BB theory would have been falsified.

By using particle accelerators we can for tiny fractions of a second attain temperatures close to BB temperatures, and from this we can confirm that the particle physics (PP) theories are correct.

Using the PP theories, quantum mechanics (QM) and relativity, we can calculate what the Helium content should be. We can then observe the Helium content and see if that ties in. It does.

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The theories are still somewhat "falsifiable" in that they can be tested against the observations, and may predict how future observations (e.g. the precise structure of the cosmic background) will look.

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This is a strange comment. If they can be tested against observation, then they are falsifiable. If they can predict how future observations will look, then they are falsifiable too. The criteria you state here are proper science, so you are confirming the fact that what the scientists are saying is good science. I detect a little confusion here.

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However, the evidence that the theories explain or are tested against is by its' nature incomplete (limited by available instruments and time to make observations) and potentially incorrect (was the instrument recording a particular observation working properly?).

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It is remarkably complete. Thousands of tests in particle accelerators at least and many more tests of the CMB all done with a multitude of instruments getting better and more sensitive all the time. This claim is fallacious.

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Now, to me, there isn't that much difference to the way I came to accept the theory that God (as described in the Bible and Christian tradition) exists. I looked at incomplete and potentially incorrect evidence (the recorded testimony of Jews and Christians in the Bible, the testimony in words and actions of Christians I knew, my own personal experiences etc) and tested them against the possible theories (God exists, He doesn't exist, there is a supernatural impersonal force...). I came to the decision that the Christian understanding of God best fitted the available evidence.

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But it is not the same on one fundamental point. I hate to sound repetitive, but your claims are non-falsifiable. I am not saying that they are wrong because of this, but you are not comparing like with like. Science and religion may be compatible, but they are not the same as you seem to be implying.

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I also found that I could make a certain amount of "predictive observations", albeit subjective. It was clear that the Christian religion was demanding more than just an intellectual acceptance that God exists, there is a call to personal relationship with him. Now, entering a personal relationship changes both people (OK the change in God is probably insignificant), and I could therefore expect that by making the decision (a "step of faith") to enter such a relationship would result in some form of perceptible change in myself and my interactions with others.

Now, I've no idea if that addresses any questions/comments raised on this thread, but it is the best I can give in response to a request for "objective falsifiable" evidence for Gods' existence.

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Posted by Ann:

Trying to prove God by 'objective falsifiable' could be mathematically impossible.
There was (is?) a mathematician called Godel who has a theorem. My book has gone walkies so I will have to do the best I can from memory, but it deals with the availability of proof and can be summed up as:

"You cannot prove everything about a system from within the system."

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Hmmm. Does that mean we can know nothing about our universe because we are within it?

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As an example, if you are living in a one-dimensional world, you can only experience the line you live on. You can't imagine a line unless you could see it from above - which is another dimension which you don't have - it's outside your system.

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We can imagine a four dimensional cube (I am talking about four geometric dimensions, not having time as the fourth). It is called a hypercube. Specifically, a four dimensional cube is a tesseract. A search on the Web will show three dimensional representations of them. In fact, for a rather striking image of a hypercube unfolded into three dimensions, see Salvador Dali's Corpus Hypercubus.

Dali is trying to say in this painting that the resurrection cannot be fully known from our dimension. Notice the checkerboard pattern at the bottom, showing that Christ rises up above the flat world of our geometry into another plane, and that the resurrection is only seen in our eyes as a shadow of its totality. (I am trying to remember what I read in a mathematics book about it, I am not an art expert. Hey, I don't know everything….yet ). In fact, I have just remembered, last year I calculated the internal diagonal of a tesseract It was remarkably simple, the length of one side multiplied by the square root of four. We have the square root, the cube root and now the tesseract root.

A short story written by Robert A Heinlein on the subject is on-line here And he built a crooked house and well worth a read.

Back on the subject, I think we can know things about a system whether we are in it or out of it. Just the fact that we have names for and methods of calculating things in dimensions higher than the ones we live in says something.

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So, there are four kinds of things:

Things that you can prove are true.
Things that you can prove are false
Things that are true, but you (or anyone else) cannot prove it
Things that are false, but you (or anyone else) cannot prove otherwise
I'm not sure if those paragraphs hang together there; I know they both went towards explaining the theorem and I think that it could apply here.

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Stephen
I have followed this thread for a while now and remain absolutely fascinated by it. One thought that came into my mind was this. It's obvious that Sceptical Atheist has posted on sites with shall we say a more militant Christian bias (I'm being polite!!) and is probably surprised by our response, I hope pleasantly. In my time I have peered into atheism but strange to say find it more a leap of faith than to remain a Christian. I can understand people being agnostics but atheism seems to require that little bit more than I can give. It's possible that by posting here SA may be closer to God than some of us realise or indeed are....and I'm not stirring here!

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I am not surprised by the response I have got (I lurked before I posted) but I am very glad I chose to raise the question. When debating the Fundies, the arguments don't touch me in the slightest. They quote the scripture as if just that will convince me, and when I question what I think it says, they cannot respond effectively IMHO. Here there has been intelligent responses that have challenged my position and made me question where I stand and why. This is totally different to the ways that the Fundies just 'put your back up' and move one into a more hard-line stance.

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But in general the universe is fine tuned to an incredible degree eg the resonance in the carbon atom that has to be just so. Of course there may be many other universe (the multiverse theory) and it just so happens that we're sitting in the one that is not too hostile to life
I'd agree that you can't prove the existence of God from this. But it doesn't seem to be incompatible with God. The problem Christianity has - and it's a big one - is the problem of evil especially if one maintains that God intervenes....and I don't know the answer to this one.

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The existence of humans in this universe is only because this universe is fitted to life. The chances of that happening if this is the only universe is immense. If there are as many as the multiverse interpretation of QM says there will be, the chances are almost certain that in at least one will be set up in favour of life. And, of course, if one is then that will mean many more will be because each time a quantum event occurs, another universe is started.

I have only recently taken the multiverse concept more seriously. A good book by a physicist ("The Fabric of Reality" by David Deutsch) explains why it shouldn't be just dismissed.

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Anyway keep posting Sceptical Atheist....I can't pretend your posts aren't thought-provoking, and if they're not answered it's not because you're being ignored....some of us have work to do as well!!

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I could never accuse any of you of ignoring posts. I am too busy firefighting as many as I can to see if my points are beeing answered.

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The billions of universes are one possible answer to the problem of Quantum Mechanics and is in principle (in theory at the moment) falsifiable.
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Interesting concept! At the moment the universe we are in is the only one we can observe by definition.

To postulate the existence of multiple universes in order to explain the fact that the constants that determine the nature of this universe are exactly those needed to support life is a great leap of faith which is not even theoretically falsifiable.

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Actually, if you can explain to me how QM is explainable in simple terms without the use of other universes, then I would like to know. We have mathematical tools, such as the collapsing wave function, for predicting what will happen, but they don't explain it.

Remember, the Nobel prize winning Physicist Richard Feynham said "If you think you understand QM then you don't".

I have mentioned a book in an earlier post, "The Fabric of Reality", and the author discusses in there exactly what the possibilities of the multiverse being there are. The field of quantum computing is one area which could soon be providing us with interesting results on the multiverse idea.

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That is why scientists are forced to use your favourite razor to remove the other universes and are left with a universe "designed" for life. Interestingly, a very old book we all know describes the creation of the heavens and the earth in exactly those terms. A massive creation for the purpose of sustaining life.

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Fr Gregory:
"How do I know that this "thing" I have a relationship with is God?"
It's a recognition thing. What are the marks of recognition? The mind of the Church and the countless millions who have gone before me knowing the same person .... and being prepared to die for Him.

That's how I know.

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So, you accept the Truth of Allah, because of the mind of the Moslem world and the countless millions who know Allah and are prepared to die for him?

You can't have it both ways. If you accept the Truth of your God on those grounds, then you must, to be consistent, accept the Truth of all those other people who have the same claim to make. Unless there is a way of seperating them.

There is an argument used amongst atheists, where an atheist asks a Christian if they believe in Zeus, Wotan, all the Hindu pantheon etc. They obviously say they don't.
"Aha! Says the atheist, so of all the thousands of Gods that there are, you disbelieve in all but one. I just disbelieve in one more than you. You are nearly an atheist yourself"

I understand the aim of this argument, even if it is a little simplistic. Christainity is only one amongst many, and most religions make the same basic claims about access to God, answered prayers etc. If you accept the conviction of bellievers as evidence of its truthfulness, then you must do that for all beliefs, not just the one you happen to believe in.

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Whether God is falsifiable or not is a matter for your world view and the questions it generates. I propose, (as I have done before), that God is not just another phenomenon; not just another object; not just another observable reality; not just another "being." (If this sounds crazy to you then you need to factor in the Eastern Church's commitment to apophatic theology .... somewhat weak in the west).

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No. God is either falsifiable or non-falsifiable. I am not a Post Modernist that says that truth is in the eye of the beholder. I do think that 'the Truth is out there'.
If God has an effect on the world, then why is that effect not measurable? I am not talking about the people who believe in God having an effect, or the Church having an effect, but God Himself.

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So, I suppose, that's the end of our common ground. I don't want it to be, but I can't see where we go from here.

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You missed answering this:

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Incidentally, were God to take you up on your lottery challenge, would you not merely change philosophical enquiries to why God does not intervene in other specified situations? You'd drop the argument for the existence only to pick up the problem of evil.

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Originally posted by The sceptical Atheist:
You didn't answer my question. I did not ask you for a test for God, or for you to test God, but I asked you what would ever convince you that there was no God.

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Reciprocally, I missed this one. I cannot think of an evidence which would show me a non-existence of God. Proof will come at the time of Judgement (I didn't enjoy typing that) but if there isn't a God I won't be around to find that out.

I've never doubted that Christianity fails the acid test of any scientific theory -- that is, it is inherently unfalsifiable. But isn't the point that at the very end of all discussions about how Quantum Mechanics demonstrates that there's more to matter than we can currently know, and whether we can understand the Resurrection or not, the answer is finally a (gosh, I hate to use such a trite phrase) leap of faith. We either are capable of believing something that seems to many absurd, or we are not.

I was raised in the ECUSA, and I find from time to time in my life that I cannot believe, that it is too hard to accept -- I reach deep inside, and sometimes it just isn't there, though all the knowledge of scripture and tradition remains, and a supportive community. So I sympathize deeply with the inability to believe.

A mans wife died and before she did, he promised that he would never live with another woman. He later fell in love again and married somebody else. Then every night his wife appeared to him as a Ghost accusing him of infidelity and betrayal. The Ghost knew all of the intimate details of what had happened and what had been said between the man and his new wife, So, he went to a Zen priest because he was so frightened.

"Next time the Ghost appears, take a handful of beans and ask the Ghost how many you have got. If the Ghost knows the answer, then she is powerful. If she doesn't then you know she is just a figment of your imagination."

The next night the ghost appeared, and the man took a handful of beans and asked her how many he had in his hand. The ghost didn't know, disapeared and never returned.

[fixed code]

You don't believe in God, and you are asking him to prove that he exists.

In the Bible verses you cite, people who believed in God asked for a sign to make sure they knew what God wanted them to do.

Since God wants people to do his will, he has no problem with people asking to have it made very clear.

The two situations are completely different.

I am not looking for proof, I am looking for evidence.

I quoted the scriptures (in that badly spelled post) to point out to those who won't answer my questions because they say "You shall not test the Lord thy God"

Ah! I hear you say. How do you know it isn't the tooth fairy? Because as a believer I share more in common with, say, a Hindu, than an atheist? We present different beliefs in the particular but we are united in our appreciation of the divine. The evidence we submit is never going to satisfy you because we are agree that all realities are not subject to the falsifiable / non-falsifiable criteria. In short, yours is not the only game on the pitch. It doesn't matter to me that you are unimpressed, (this is not intended to be rude ... just honest). We are working from radically different premises.

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I have given you a testable way of showing me that God exists.

Do any of you have a testable way of showing that God doesn't exist?

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what you have done using Occams Razor is pitted God starting it all agianst a pile of unknown chemicals that reacted in an unknown way to start the ball rolling.

there is no objective intellectual way of
testing the existence of God.

What skeptical atheist would you say to the the statement that we are all the simply the dreams of god (Berkeley) you could neither find conclusive evidence against or for it.

He is willing to be tested by a believer who wants to do his will and needs a clear indication of what that will is.

He does not do things to gratify people's curiosity.

And now I've forgotten what I was going to say... oh, someone on about page 4 said they gave up being a Fundamentalist when they realized it would mean compromising their intellectual integrity. Me too.

And, S.A., if I were ever to feel that the Christian faith per se were to compromise my intellectual integrity, then I suppose I would have to give it up. If 'God' ever stopped being a feasible counter to my many questions, for example (and like many here, I come close to that at times). And that is why I am valuing this discussion so much.

I write for my parish magazine every month and encourage people to face their doubts and examine them. I do that daily. And if ever I find a doubt within me which my faith cannot still, then why would I want to pursue that faith?

Note that I don't use the word 'answer'. my faith doesn't provide me with all the answers, but it gives me grounds to accept the fact that there isn't always an answer.

I just have one comment on something from way back--

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You have to believe that random chance threw everything together in exactly the right combinations at exactly the right time. From my point of view, the evidence for that is sorely lacking. I am curious how Occam's Razor leads you to this conclusion.

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I see on your profile you say your religion is 'militant atheist'. Possibly this is a joke, but your website doesn't seem to have much room for doubt about your position either.

Are you really interested in discussing you ideas or are you out to convert us?

I was a sceptical (and occasionally a militant) atheist for years. Therefore it is most unlikely you will persuade me to return to that worldview - 'been there, done that, got the T shirt'

However, I have no interest in persuading anyone to abandon beliefs that work for them. If atheism, sceptical or otherwise, works for you, that's fine by me.

SA, I did not say that

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Hmmm. Does that mean we can know nothing about our universe because we are within it?

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If the on-dimensional being is a bit lame, and I think that with the hypercube, we are just imagining it, we cannot see it, try my hash at this:

Euclid had a system of mathematical/geometrical axioms and proofs which served for centuries, but one of them was always a bit clumsy - the one about parallel lines. Many mathematicians have tried to restate that in a more elegant fasion, and failed. Now, mathematicians have said, 'What's the worst that can happen if this isn't as proved as we thought?' and created the branch of non-Euclidean geometry. Conceptually, it all boils down to living on a sphere, inside a bubble or on a flat surface (the last of which is Euclidean). Or to put it another way, do the angles of your triangle add up to more, less or exactly 180°.

Only if you are outside and can 'see' the curve or not of the surface can you use the last proof, you cannot from inside, but the rest of the axioms and proofs are there for the taking.

I can't objectively falsify God, but I can do it subjectively.

Here's how it works.

1. I know that when I forgive others, God also forgives me. He's always done it before, and it's something that I can rely on. If this were to cease, my worldview would disappear.

But how can this be tested? Quite simply, if I continually am able to maintain my objective relationship with God, it is because of God's acceptance of me via forgiveness.

But to you, that is subjective of course.

2. If my moral decisions are motivated by love and love only, God sees this and makes my actions based on these moral decision consonant with the motivation. Anything else has a tendency to rebound in some way.

Because my moral decisions are closed to anyone else, they are subjective from your perspective. But objective from mine. (And you can't trace back the physical effects to a spiritual causality, since your are not privy to my motivations).

3. And so it goes on - there are many more things that I know I can rely on. It's based on what I know of God, and this knowledge comes from a large number of things - my experience in this regard and others' experience in this regard are of the foremost importance.

Now the fact that God seems to be deliberately consistent in these activities is, to me, solid evidence. To you, it is simply a subjective report with no basis in fact.

I love what you said about...

quote:

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Knowledge of the divine does not come from abstract reasoning but from love.

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This is the essence of God. Not very helpful to a OF search but the essence of it all.

Some questions that should perhaps fill some other strings...

Why does God make Himself difficult to scrutinize? I am fully convinced that He exists, but what would be his motivation for making Himself difficult to find? It seems that sometimes He likes tests and sometimes He doesn't.
If God is the source of everything and God is Good, then why doesn't everything express His character? Why is there a devil? Does God have a split personality?

Hey Sceptic, I had long discussions with my Atheistic friends in Highschool and in the end one of them admitted that it takes faith to be an atheist. The other one converted, only to deconvert later on. I thought I was sick of hearing all the arguements, but this has been very thought provoking. I like the Dragon thing. I like the Zen thing. Thanks.

No intelligent answers to anything,