Evidence for God

So essentially the proof that god exists is because believers say He exists?

AMCrenshaw said:

I dunno. The mysticism I talk about is the acknowledgment of being beyond what we can give a name.

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I think that's true, but to me that's mystery and not mysticism. Not knowing what's in the box doesn't make it magical. If we look harder or longer we simply find out more. Sometimes what we find is wonderful, sometimes appalling, and often it's a bit of both. As social creatures we're disposed toward finding one another fascinating (and what writer is unexcited by character?), but we're far from the only fascinating things in existence.

when I read Thomas Merton, Daniel Berrigan, or TS Eliot's 4Q, I find, alongside 'reasons' why I should live my life, a desire to learn "how" to live my life. Poetry doesn't speak to this?

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I understand why poetry can grip people and even transform them. In some ways that's exactly what the artist wants.

It's personal preference now, but as a writer/teacher/consultant/friend I'm delighted when someone tells me: you really made me stop and think, and now I'm doing things differently. I get very concerned though when people say: I'm doing exactly as you told me.

For many people I think that mysticism is not a gateway to truth but stagnation because poetry is great at catching our existing feelings and thus telling us exactly what we most want to hear. For some, I agree that it's a gateway to change -- even beneficial change, but I think that's because it's a source of challenge and not answers.

Past that, I think there are some very few folk for whom mysticism is a gateway to deep, shared insight but I don't think they're the sorts of people who take every whimsical thought at face value. Some of my favourite scientific heroes were also mystics, but they weren't mystics alone -- they were also skilled and discerning sceptics with vast domain knowledge built from intensive observation and experience. So for them I think mysticism offered short-hand insights into stuff they already knew well. But that doesn't make mysticism a good short-cut for folk without that experience.

Actually, perhaps that's the core of my point: poetry can help us change but I don't think it's a short-cut to better living because I don't believe that there are any short-cuts.

zornhau said:

Well, this is a writing forum. I'm dropped by to explain my position so it can be better represented in fiction, and to learn how the theists think, so I can write them more effectively - almost all my heroes were pious men.

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This would make a good 'why are you here' thread. It's odd that we haven't done such a thing here before. Someone want to kick it off?

ETA: Oh silly Ruv. We have one. I even posted to it. I just fergot. (I had to go back and read what I wrote to recall what I'm doing here. )

Religion for me is a humanist concern -- it relates to what we think of ourselves, how we live, how we treat one another. I'm also a bit of a geek about episto.. pis.... about truth and knowledge as studies in themselves. I'm fascinated at how we make sense of things. It's perhaps that truth and knowledge aspect which is perhaps my strongest writerly interest. There's a lot of drama in being confronted with the unknown, the unthought-of and the unthinkable, in seeing ourselves in ways we're not used to, in losing the little stories that keep us fat, dumb and happy. (Oh look, it's sitting above my avatar: 'Heresies that Bite'.)

The original topic of evidence has become one of "proof". Proof of anything is difficult, if not impossible. Evidence is much easier.

However, I've long noticed that theists describe this or that experience or phenomenon as evidence of a god. This is a mistaken correlation. An unlikely healing from disease is not evidence of gods. It's merely evidence of an unlikely healing from disease.

To put it another way, if you have a life-threatening illness and you pray to Yahweh or Allah or Odin for a cure, and you do get well, that is not evidence that they in fact exist. For if you accepted that premise, then if you prayed with all your might for a cure and WEREN'T cured, you would have to accept the event as evidence that gods don't exist.

fullbookjacket said:

The original topic of evidence has become one of "proof". Proof of anything is difficult, if not impossible. Evidence is much easier.

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I noticed the same, but anything can be considered evidence of of God, so limiting it a little makes sense.

Actually, proving most things is fairly easy.

Ruv Draba said:

This would make a good 'why are you here' thread. It's odd that we haven't done such a thing here before. Someone want to kick it off?

ETA: Oh silly Ruv. We have one. I even posted to it. I just fergot. (I had to go back and read what I wrote to recall what I'm doing here. )

Religion for me is a humanist concern -- it relates to what we think of ourselves, how we live, how we treat one another. I'm also a bit of a geek about episto.. pis.... about truth and knowledge as studies in themselves. I'm fascinated at how we make sense of things. It's perhaps that truth and knowledge aspect which is perhaps my strongest writerly interest. There's a lot of drama in being confronted with the unknown, the unthought-of and the unthinkable, in seeing ourselves in ways we're not used to, in losing the little stories that keep us fat, dumb and happy. (Oh look, it's sitting above my avatar: 'Heresies that Bite'.)

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Yeah, I consider religion to be a natural part of evolution, at least once a higher intelligence begins to evolve. Since I write fantasy and sci-fi and have to do world building, I need to consider all elements of evolution incuding religion. Religion may be a rather silly part of evolution, but I really doubt a race could evolve higher intelligence without going through some sort of religious phase.

fullbookjacket said:

. . . then if you prayed with all your might for a cure and WEREN'T cured, you would have to accept the event as evidence that gods don't exist.

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Or that the god(s) don't give a rat's ass about you.

--Ken

PeterL said:

Actually, proving most things is fairly easy.

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I disagree. I really have no proof that anything even exists at all, outside my own consciousness.

But that's an extreme outlook. For concrete examples, look at the US criminal justice system. Our prisons are rife with innocent persons that were "proven" guilty.

"Proof" is incontrovertibly correct evidence. Aside from some mathematical constructs, what can reasonably be proven?

If I gave you a tape measure and instructed you to measure the distance from the door of building 'A' to a point across the yard, and you measure it to 89.46 feet, is that proof of the distance? Even if you measured it on five successive days and found the same measurement? No, because measurement ALWAYS contains error. You could measure the same distance on the sixth day and find it to be 89.48 feet, because maybe the sun is now out and the tape has warmed and expanded. Furthermore, the theoretical exact distance could be carried out to an infinite number of decimal digits, so your initial 89.46 is simply a rounding of the exact number. Good measurements are simply an effort to minimize error which, as I said, always occurs.

ResearchGuy said:

Or that the god(s) don't give a rat's ass about you.

--Ken

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Correct, which I think most would find even more disturbing than there being no gods at all.

When I was a Christian kid, growing up in an abusive home, I assumed God hated me.

fullbookjacket said:

Correct, which I think most would find even more disturbing than there being no gods at all.

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Depends. Not so from a deist point of view, if one merely sees god as a non-interfering clock-maker.

RainyDayNinja said:

For the "believers": What evidence do you accept for the existence of God? How would you differentiate between possibly legitimate visions, miracles, etc., and hoaxes or misunderstandings?

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This comes from a Torah-observant Jew. And before I answer, let me just say this: I don't need evidence. A soul has a natural connection to God as it is part of God. It is only when this connection gets clouded and plugged up that we need to "prove" the existence of something our souls know already. When people find something that proves a "story" in Tanakh or something, they have it backwards. That part of the Torah isn't true because they found some evidence; rather, that evidence had to be there because the Torah is true.


Three parts to the answer: what would I accept for evidence or what do I accept, differentiating between stuff, and your specific example.

Evidence I accept or would accept:

1. Prophecies in Tanakh. There are numerous prophecies all over Tanakh that have come to fruition, many of which are either discussing specific dates and people or things that seem to go against what would make logical sense. Nonetheless, they have come true.

I won't get into the details unless someone wants me to, but a few of them are the connection between Jews and the Land of Israel; the destruction of the First Holy Temple, the Exile in Bavel, and the construction and destruction of the Second Holy Temple; the miraculous fall of Sancheriv's army by an overnight plague; and the preservation and sanctification of the Jewish people and the prophecies regarding our population and punishments.

2. Extra-Biblical evidence and accounts of events in Tanakh. Recently, there was found a piece of writing from approximately the time of the Judges. The Hebrew writing not only points to widespread literacy in the Land of Israel in the 10th century BCE, but discusses the Judges which occurred during that time period. About a hundred years ago, several inscriptions in the Sinai desert were found discussing various events found in the Torah during the Exodus (kriath yam suf, the plague following the golden calf, alters for bringing offerings with names on them). The language was clearly Hebrew, but the script was very proto-Hebrew and from about the same time as the piece of writing just found last year--which would put it at around the same time the Exodus is supposed to have happened. Interestingly, the description of the parting of the Sea of Reeds does not quote Biblical passages and is written in a completely different style essentially from the point of view of a first-hand witness.

There have also been numerous artifacts found in Egypt that discuss Hebrew slaves not meeting their quotas and either attempting to escape or generally being unruly. There have been clay tablets with Biblical names from Genesis that date to that time period, as well as a very famous sculpture of a ram caught in a bush (from the story of the Binding of Isaac) that dates to the 20th century BCE--around the time it would have happened. This is not to mention the numerous things that have been found in the Land of Israel that confirm later events in Tanakh.

3. Modern events. If I were an atheist, the miracles of the Six-Day War and the Yom Kippur War would be enough to convince me of the existence of God, or at least that there is a Higher Power watching out for the Jews. Reading about a small nation being brought so close to utter annihilation and then experiencing miraculous victory after miraculous victory against multiple nations from all sides gives me chills.

Personal events also take a hand in this, as I have experienced a bunch of "hidden" miracles myself (when things just seem to go right when the odds are against it) and a couple of "open" ones (when something happens that seems to defy logic and/or nature in an obvious way). Additionally, there are daily personal experiences that are difficult to understand, such as feeling the Presence of God during prayer, having prayers responded to and answered in one way or another, etc.

4. Logic. While parts of our faith defy logic, the basic story and belief system is completely logical. There is a non-physical entity Who was the impetus for the creation of the universe. We could spend a whole thread just on the logic of believing in God.


Differentiating between possibly legitimate visions, miracles, etc., and hoaxes or misunderstandings:

1. Possibly legitimate visions. There is a difference between having a psychic vision and having a prophecy. A psychic vision is something that comes from a natural God-given talent. However, because they are derived from the human brain or senses, they are fallible and frequently at least partially--if not completely--wrong. Prophecy, on the other hand, comes directly from God and is never wrong.

There is no more prophecy. We have not had it for over 2,000 years. The book of Malachi ends with the following verses:

Malachi 3:23-24 said:

הִנֵּה אָנֹכִי שֹׁלֵחַ לָכֶם, אֵת אֵלִיָּה הַנָּבִיא--לִפְנֵי, בּוֹא יוֹם יְהוָה, הַגָּדוֹל, וְהַנּוֹרָא​

Behold, I will send to you Eliyahu the Prophet--before the coming of the Day of the LORD, the Great and the Awesome.

וְהֵשִׁיב לֵב-אָבוֹת עַל-בָּנִים, וְלֵב בָּנִים עַל-אֲבוֹתָם--פֶּן-אָבוֹא, וְהִכֵּיתִי אֶת-הָאָרֶץ חֵרֶם​

And he shall turn the hearts of fathers unto their children, and the hearts of children unto their fathers--lest I come and strike down the land to excommunication.

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Anyone claiming to have prophecy at this time is first considered to be either lying or have a psychiatric disorder. That said, we do believe that there are bits of prophecy still given to people in times of need or in certain situations that warrant it; however, there are no visions from God that have national and future consequences.

2. Miracles. This one is easy. If something happens and is miraculous, it's a miracle. A miracle does not have to be something huge like the splitting of the Sea. The Book of Esther is all about how God performs miracles every day using the natural world He created. These hidden miracles happen all the time: when you just happen to be in the right place at the right time, or an unlikely serious of events occurs to your benefit, etc. That is just as much the Hand of God as 18 Egyptian soldiers being frozen in their boots and unable to fire on 2 helpless Jewish reservists during the 1967 war.

Of course, if someone is using the term miracle as hyperbole like we tend to do nowadays, that may not be such a miracle. But common sense is pretty good at discerning when someone is being dramatic or not.

3. Hoaxes or misunderstandings. I'm not quite sure what you're talking about here. Do you mean when someone does something and claims it to be the work of God even though he did it himself? When a Jew tells me a story, I just assume he's telling the truth. If I find out he was, God-forbid, lying to me, that doesn't shake my faith in God. I just wonder why he felt he had to lie about something stupid like that.


Your specific example:

It could be an open miracle, and it could not be. I wasn't there. The story could be exaggerated, the illness could have been non-life threatening and self-limiting, etc. Regardless, someone who was ill and got better experienced a miracle. God could easily just have let that person die.

Our problem is we are unable to see the miracle in just waking up each day. The fact that we go to sleep and God allows us to live another day is nothing short of a miracle. This spiritual separation from God is why we have so many problems in this world. There is a great video on G4 about how in the near future, everything is basically going to be in the format of some sort of game or points system. The speaker goes through a day in that kind of life, and at the end explains how being constantly recorded and tracked can inadvertently cause us to be better people for the sole reason that we don't want our offspring to be embarrassed when they look at what we did with our lives. The fact that we need all this technology to be good people just shows us how far away we are from God. He gave us a book about how to be a good person if we only follow His example, but we're so far from Him that we aren't even able to see it.

semilargeintestine said:

It is only when this connection gets clouded and plugged up that we need to "prove" the existence of something our souls know already.

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Semi, what causes clouding and plugging, and what evidence is there that this occurs?

Ruv Draba said:

Semi, what causes clouding and plugging, and what evidence is there that this occurs?

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So I'm going to give a big disclaimer here and say that this explanation is almost entirely metaphorical. It is easiest to explain this concept in metaphorical terms, so I will. After, I'll try to explain the actual understanding of this concept.

The easiest way to think of it is to picture the spiritual connection between a person and God as like a telephone line (the old, hard line--not cellular). Just imagine that Mordecai is down here on earth and God is up there in heaven (I told you it was metaphorical). Imagine now that there is a telephone line that directly connects the two. At first, the signal is completely clear and there is a direct flow between the two parties.

However, not long after we push play, Mordecai does something wrong. The thing he does wrong isn't like a mistake that he makes unknowingly, he just did something that he knows is wrong but was too tempted to do the right thing. Most of the commentators would say that a sin like this is due to Mordecai temporarily forgetting that God is always there (because if that was always on Mordecai's mind, he would never sin). This temporary pull of Mordecai's soul away from the spiritual and into the physical creates a tiny bit of static in the connection.

This is because there are three levels the soul can be at: the purely spiritual, the purely physical, and a combination of both. We know that life in this world is never purely spiritual or physical except at death when it is both (soul becomes purely spiritual and body becomes purely physical), but rather a combination of the two. It is the balance that is important, and when we are pulled to the physical side, we bring back a little bit of static when we move back to equilibrium.

The more times we sway over to the physical, and the further we sway, more static appears on the signal. The signal gets fuzzier and fuzzier until it is completely unrecognizable. The connection is still there, but we have no idea who is on the other end. Luckily, God knew this could happen and set up ways to remove this static.

There are many verses in Tanakh that describe this. They do not use specifically those terms, but rather speak in terms of blemishes or of distance from God. The principle is the same. They also talk of ways to eliminate the blemishes, or static. Extra-Biblically, we see that as the connection has gotten fuzzier and fuzzier over the centuries, we have had to compensate in more physical ways.

People like to say that people lived much shorter lives historically. This is true for certain groups of people and countries where they were forced to work hard at manual labour every day for 30 years; however, we also know that people regularly lived into their 50s, 60s, and 70s and beyond even as far back as Plato (who I think it is estimated lived into his 80s). These people had not the sophisticated medical establishment we have with all of our medical technology, and yet their lives were just as long as ours.

But, as the fuzziness increased and we shifted from the balance of spiritual and physical to a more physical world, we needed to invent things in the physical world to compensate for a lack of spirituality. The video I mentioned on G4 is a great example. Interestingly, Jews statistically live longer than non-Jews. For example, statistics compiled by the Office for National Statistics in 2008 showed that Jews are 3 times more likely to live to 100 and 2 times as likely to live to 90 as the rest of England and Wales. The gedolim (very holy and learned rabbis) regularly live into their 90s. This may be because Jews as a nation are naturally closer to God because of our covenant with Him and our innate connection to Him through this covenant.


To get back to the plugging, the actual story is quite a bit more abstract and complicated than the example I gave. In reality, God is completely non-physical and is everywhere. Therefore, any discussion of closeness or of a connection to Him is, by definition, metaphorical. What we are really talking about is the level of spirituality on which our consciousness resides. The more naturally focused on God and Torah that a person is, the closer he is to God. This is why studying Torah on the Sabbath (the holiest day of the week) is considered to be the holiest thing one can do.

Knowing that we are not perfect and have free choice, God set up a system to compensate for the inevitable sway to the physical. There is a very straightforward system to effectively erase sins and "static." In fact, there is a very famous line in the Gemara that states that someone who sins and returns to God stands in a place that not even the perfectly righteous man cannot stand. This is because in returning to God, the person who sinned must focus his mind in the spiritual and learn the intricacies of the sin he committed. This brings him to a level of spirituality that someone who has never sinned will never reach.

The fuzziness of a person can also be removed on the merit of others, as is the case with many Jews who become religious later in life (most likely including myself). Sometimes God will cause something to happen to bring us back as well. It's up to us to decide if we want to listen or not.

Thanks, Semi. Then longevity is a sign of spiritual purity? And does the reverse suggest impurity?

I have a soul? What's that?

(Kind of kidding. Kind of not.)

fullbookjacket said:

I disagree. I really have no proof that anything even exists at all, outside my own consciousness.

But that's an extreme outlook. For concrete examples, look at the US criminal justice system. Our prisons are rife with innocent persons that were "proven" guilty.

"Proof" is incontrovertibly correct evidence. Aside from some mathematical constructs, what can reasonably be proven?

If I gave you a tape measure and instructed you to measure the distance from the door of building 'A' to a point across the yard, and you measure it to 89.46 feet, is that proof of the distance? Even if you measured it on five successive days and found the same measurement? No, because measurement ALWAYS contains error. You could measure the same distance on the sixth day and find it to be 89.48 feet, because maybe the sun is now out and the tape has warmed and expanded. Furthermore, the theoretical exact distance could be carried out to an infinite number of decimal digits, so your initial 89.46 is simply a rounding of the exact number. Good measurements are simply an effort to minimize error which, as I said, always occurs.

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You are confusing gaining data from proving something. Proving is an exercise in logic not a matter of gaining data.

PeterL said:

You are confusing gaining data from proving something. Proving is an exercise in logic not a matter of gaining data.

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Nope. Not unless you're talking pure math.

Proof requires evidence, data, to support the logic.

String theory, the Higgs boson, supersymmetry: these are all mathematically rigorous theories with internally consistent logic, but at the moment there's no evidence to prove or refute them.

Ruv Draba said:

Well, Eastern Orthodoxy has managed to keep its Platonism all this time, while in the west the Deists seem to be holding out pretty well. I have no personal use for Platonism, but wouldn't see it gone from our world -- it spawns far too much genius.

I suppose it's the job of Aristotelians to apply the necessary Natural Selection to keep Platonic bloodlines pure.

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Don't know if you can link to articles here but:
Is Orthodoxy Neo-Platonic?

http://www.orthodoxinfo.com/inquirers/orth_plato.aspx



God bless

Hi Ephrem. I don't think I've seen you post here before, so welcome and thank you for the article!

Clicking it sunk me cheekbones-deep into what appeared to be a prolonged and veiled squabble between Latinate and Hellenic Christian tradition over possible pagan heresy.

I stopped reading in detail at about 75% and skipped to the last point which seemed to contain a counter-jab about the Latinate tradition being unable to keep its traditions in the fold.

A few disclaimers here, Ephrem. I'm an atheist, a humanist and a student of religion as a human activity. I can't really take a side on theological politics unless the thought or behaviour becomes inhumane, so I'm not qualified to comment on whether Orthodoxy might ever have become neo-Platonic. I certainly don't see modern Eastern Orthodoxy as remotely pagan in the general sense of polytheistic paganism, and when it becomes a squabble about the 'deifyiing the self', I think it's actually about power anyway -- how much are priests permitted to claim and how much must be wrested from the flock. That's a question over which I have some strong views and I doubt that patriarchs or primates would much like them.

I don't know (and probably don't care) whether Eastern Orthodoxy is neo-Platonic, but I think it certainly has a Platonic character because of the way it seeks knowledge and the way it identifies what is knowledge and what isn't. But I think that some Protestant thought does this too.

To the extent that I have an opinion, I don't personally trust Platonism as a source of truth because I consider the self -- and especially its feelings and personal insights -- deceitful and erratic. But I think that Platonic reflection is often a source of good ideas for experiments into what the truth might be. Hence my earlier (somewhat wry) suggestion that Aristotelianism is a sort of predator on Platonism meant to keep it agile and evolving (and I might say the same about heretics and the Latin tradition). But my metaphor does not extend to what I think relations between Eastern Orthodox and Latinate Christian traditions should be.

Very best, Ruv.

Hi Ephrem. I don't think I've seen you post here before, so welcome and thank you for the article!

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Thank you. I only meant to offer you the bits on the platonism and sort of hoped you'd turn a blind eye to the rest. It came with the article.

Words always get in the way.

St. John Chrysostom said something like, "the road to hell is paved with the skulls of the priests."

And St. Athanasius said something like, "the floor of hell is paved with the skulls of the bishops".

Anyway, it's hard trying to weed out true Orthodoxy from general Orthodoxy. You might find that your sentiments are shared on many levels by the very people you expect to take offense.

A devout Eastern Orthodox person with all the rites and rituals and religion can say in full confidence that in Christ is the end of all ritual, rite and religion. It's one of those things. Paradox.

As for evidence for God, I guess it's there. However, with what tool in the natural world do we have to measure such evidence? We might call it the nous but again, it's hard to differentiate between a nous and a noose.

There's good reason we call it a "faith". That the limitations of our cognitive minds are evident only points us beyond those limitations and that general movement alone is what makes us suspicious. Surely, we're smarter than rocks and surely something is more conscious than ourselves but beyond this, we can only shut our eyes and step out into the great unknown. If we are willing, anyway.

I think of proof being a disciplined story told step-by-step that takes the impartial listener from a place of knowledge A to a new place of knowledge B without sustained objection. Evidence is definitely an input to proof, but so is the listener's expectation. Also an input is agreement on what legal steps may be.

PeterL said:

You are confusing gaining data from proving something. Proving is an exercise in logic not a matter of gaining data.

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"Proof", "prove", and "proving" all have several definitions. "Proof" for most people is not simply a strong or even logical argument. One can make logical arguments for lots of things, even silly things.

My view of proof is that it requires incontrovertibility.

The person who posts a word with the most syllables wins...