A lot of theists seem to think that people of science could never accept a God because the only proof God could give would be something that violates the rules of science. But scientists make new discoveries of things they thought they understood all the time. Scientists are the most open minded people in the world, they have to be.

100 years ago people would have thought it is impossible to walk on the moon. Some men of science may have agreed but were surely open to the possibility. As a man of science I have to be open to the possibility of a God. Nobody is contesting this. What we are contesting is that to date there has been no evidence of God, so for now we will continue to believe he doesnt exist until something proves he does.

The issue of God is not something as cut and dry as say, experiencing light speed travel, whereby maybe it's possible and we just havent figured it out yet. Scientifically unproven theories like black holes and teleportation are at least based on other science that has been proven in the past which lends credit to these theories being possibilities. However the entire premise of God from start to finish is entirely based on faith. There has never been proof, and God theories are just based on other God theories, not some previously provable result, so there is not credibility at all to the claim.

+1

Of course I could be wrong, I don't claim to be infallible. Of course, I could also be right.

You are contradicting yourself though. You first explain my belief in God to be nothing more than a product of my brain, that of misfiring neurons, or something I was born with, but then you claim that I must be egotistical to believe in God. You can't have it both ways, if I was born with this innate dualism, then it's out of my control.

So you're saying that if a man did show up and claim to be your father, that you would need to do all these things to verify it, or are you pretty sure that your father is who he says he is?

A one time appearance of a man claiming to be your dad and never resurfacing is curious, but more likely a prankster or a mistake. Whereas a man who shows up to claim to be your father and insists on it day after day, would surely spring you into more immediate action and concern, than a one-time claim. That's all I'm saying. Your hypothetical while disconcerting, is not necessarily a game-changer - key word being necessarily.

My problem is not with the methods, per se, and I don't fault atheists for not being theists, but to paraphrase John Lennox, there is also faith in presupposing that the universe is intelligible, and that our logic is logical.

IF God does exist and communicates through spiritual means, then there are those who will never accept God, even though he exists.

Id suggest that the vast majority of atheists don't even consider whether the universe is intelligible etc. On forums like this they may but that is because we have an interest in philosophy but almost everyone I know in everyday life has no interest in such things but just doesn't believe in god.

If there were any coherent shared experience of this then those who never feel it could still accept that it happens. Lets pretend for a second that some small percentage of the population are psychic, and that their powers are attributed to God. Most of us will never know this, and thus we are more or less just taking their word for it. But then perform a series of tests proving their psychic ability, and they all agree with each other that it comes from the same origin, God. In that case, the rest of us will have to accept that we will never know God but he surely exists through these people.

But until this happens, there's no reason to give wildly contradicting claims about peoples relationship with God any credit. It's merely coincidence so many people think they know God, since none of their experiences are similar enough to be considered the same thing, or provable for that matter.

I mean seriously, when someone says God spoke to them, this is like a metaphor right? They didnt literally hear a voice in their head did they?

Uhh wot? The story was a few fishes turning into many fishes, and a few loaves of bread turning into many loaves of bread. And the reason it's linked to the Christian God is because it was Jesus producing the fish sandwiches. But no fish-to-bread or bread-to-fish.

Or he's simply providing more than one explanation. But given what we both know about cognitive biases, it's a very likely possibility that personal experiences are the products of us being hardwired to make incorrect interpretations because by happy coincidence, they offer a survival benefit. Conviction in the 'spiritual' (or imaginary) might simply be a byproduct of an evolutionary adaptive behaviour.

Which of course includes you too. You may consider that you are 'spiritual' but perhaps you're not, or you are but simply made the wrong choice. I don't believe that any of the gods named in our histories are real, I think they're all just human constructs. But even if I accepted that at least one of them were real, I simply wouldn't know which one to choose, so in a way I think that it is very egotistical to imagine that one has made the right choice and 'knows' oneself to be correct. Or, if there is doubt, that it's self deceptive to overcome doubt with 'faith'.

Clearly I am talking about a hypothetical modern day confirmable miracle, which is the only thing that many atheists believe will make them consider a Christian like God.

What is described in an old legend is not much evidence of anything.

If I watched a man take more food out of a bag than it was physically possible for it to contain and trickery of some kind simply wasn't a possibility, I still wouldn't think 'Ah, such and such god does exist'.

Even if you defaulted immediately to a divine explanation, instead of the many other possible explanations (e.g actual magic, food elves, spontaneous appearance of food stuff due to some strange quirk of quantum mechanics, or that the bag used to belong to Mary Poppins), of the 4000+ gods humans have named, how could you possibly choose which one made the food appear?

Wrt to the inexplicable, 'goddidit' is only one of many possibilities and I think people default to goddidit for many more reasons than that it's simply one of the possibilities. So a miracle on it's own is not evidence.

Personally I think the whole miracle thing is a red herring.

This is what is required. No miracle involved just enough solid empiric evidence, such that the all our best predictive models involve the presumed existence of an object with so many traits in common with the Christian God that it becomes difficult to not use that term for it.

Our models breaking == miracles, only leads to confusion not to conclusions.

Such as?

I don't know, but that is what would be needed.

NASA claims to have found ice on Mercury, the closest planet to the sun. Prove it.

I'm pretty sure that the evidence for ice on Mercury is much better (i.e. verifiable by intelligent people with expertise in the field) than any evidence of god.

Right, it was simply an example of how we prove things, since there's seems to be this huge mystery as to how God could ever be proven. Show some EVIDENCE, and I mean actual EVIDENCE, and any atheist will snap convert.

Well the surface temperataure of Mercury varies from around -183C to 427C (from random web site).

All it needs is for some Oxygen and Hydrogen to bump into themselve the right way on the Mercury's dark side, amazing coincdence if its never happened!

I think we could use this phenomenon as proof that psychics exist and that they believe in God, not that God exists.

I don't think it's this simple. It's not a stretch for me to imagine water ice on Mercury, I already know that both things exist and that they are explained.

What evidence of gods could be so easy to accept?

I am an atheist, out and out. It took me a long time to say it. I've been an atheist for years and years, but somehow I felt it was intellectually unrespectable to say one was an atheist, because it assumed knowledge that one didn't have. Somehow, it was better to say one was a humanist or an agnostic. I finally decided that I'm a creature of emotion as well as of reason. Emotionally, I am an atheist. I don't have the evidence to prove that God doesn't exist, but I so strongly suspect he doesn't that I don't want to waste my time.”

“He - and if there is a God, I am convinced he is a he, because no woman could or would ever **** things up this badly.”
― George Carlin

“God has no religion.”
― Mahatma Gandhi

[E]xceptional claims demand exceptional evidence

“If you think God’s there, He is. If you don’t, He isn’t. And if that’s what God’s like, I wouldn’t worry about it.”
― Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore

“Religion is still useful among the herd - that it helps their orderly conduct as nothing else could. The crude human animal is in-eradicably superstitious, and there is every biological reason why they should be.
Take away his Christian god and saints, and he will worship something else"

“For those who believe, no proof is necessary. For those who don't believe, no proof is possible.”
― Stuart Chase

“There were a lot of gods. Gods always come in handy, they justify almost anything.”

“I have too much respect for the idea of God to make it responsible for such an absurd world.”
― Georges Duhamel

If God exists, I hope he has a good excuse.”
― Woody Allen

“Eskimo: "If I did not know about God and sin, would I go to hell?" Priest: "No, not if you did not know." Eskimo: "Then why did you tell me?”
― Annie Dillard

God's only excuse is that he does not exist”
― Stendhal

And if a god would have existed all those different religions would have killed him/it thousands of years ago.

And by the way i don't need proof for something that can not exist, sorry!

all i need is just 1 "miracle" (not a miracle river) to happen in front of me where i can use my senses to experience it

Sure, it's not worth considering in day-to-day life, but do you agree that there is some doubt as to whether it is a given that the universe is intelligible?

What's the difference if it's a voice in their head or not, it still wouldn't pass as evidence to the outside observer.

I accept that I could be wrong about God, I admit it in most of my posts, so when a poster begins to throw reasons at me about how I could be wrong, including that I must be egotistical, it strikes me as odd. Seems like a personal attack instead of a genuine conversation, no better than throwing out the statement "you don't believe in God because you don't want to give up your sin", it's worthless here.

Not sure I agree here. In the paradigm that God communicates through the supernatural and the spiritual, I would not reject God if he reveals himself through these means. This means that I wouldn't just immediately discount any experience as being some cognitive process in my brain and so forth, while those who reject the spiritual, would by necessity need to discount God for another reason.

While this is an honest claim, if this happened to you, you would be sitting where I am currently sitting. People would have to take your word for it, that you experienced a miracle with your senses, and would likely assume that you are mistaken, and fooled by some cognitive process. So while this may stand as proof to you personally, its not absolute proof.