When viewing the context (and after consulting some commentaries) these verses don't seem to be saying that God wishes to be hidden to us; in fact, they seem to say the opposite.

Gill's commentary of 1 John--along with the context--seems to be making a case for brotherly love, and one strategy of doing so is by comparing God's love for us with our love for each other. "... whereas God is invisible in his nature, and incomprehensible in his being and perfections, so that there is no coming to him... and so not of loving him as he is in himself, and ought to be loved, as one friend sees, converses with, and loves another, and finds his love increased by sight and conversation; then we ought to love the saints and people of God, who are visible, may be seen, come at ... for this clause stands among the arguments and reasons for brotherly love

Bible.org says vs 12 "may well be a polemic response to a direct claim of the opponents to have ‘seen’ God; other claims of the opponents are alluded to in 4:8a (to have ‘known’ God) and 4:10a (to have ‘loved’ God)." This seems to be addressing intimate knowledge of God, not His raw existence.

John 1:18 seems to me to be more about how Jesus has revealed God, not about how he has hidden himself.

Exodus is more sensitive to how literally one reads it, as an allegory or a historical event, but either way the message seems to be a statement about God's glory or, even if literal, of the impossibility of physically seeing God's face.

All in all, these verses seem to be more about how God reveals facets of himself than about a need or plan to keep his very existence hidden.

There's a couple of related points. First of all clearly none of the passages speak to God wishing to remain hidden, i.e they simply assert that God cannot be seen, regardless of intent, and I didn't mean to imply they directly supported the assertion that God intended to remain hidden. I should have clarified that

However, while it is also true that the passages speak of God wishing to be known, the fact that the inability to "see" God is expressed says something about what it means to know God. God wishes to be known, but for whatever reason, according to those passages at least, it's not possible to know God in the way that you know lots of other more mundane things. That is, bible.org notwithstanding, I think the simplest interpretation of sight as a metaphor for knowledge.

The distinction between mere existence and and intimate knowledge is interesting, and you could also point out that Paul at least thought that the existence of God could be inferred from the natural world (Romans 1:18-20).

In any case, I wasn't intending to suggest that there was some clear and direct biblical support for the proposition that God wishes to remain hidden, but there is a biblical idea (and an idea that persists in mysticism generally) that God is "hidden" and that the hiddenness or inability to "see" God is important in a bunch of theological ways. What I should have originally said is "there isn't any direct scriptural support, but I think these are about the closest ideas you'll find that are taken to be important in a lot of theological writing"

And I suppose another nuance in what RLK was saying is there's a distinction between the idea of God wishing to remain entirely hidden and God wishing that her existence not be provable

As an argument, "There's no statistical evidence for the miraculous because God doesn't want his existence to be provable" fails for a variety of reasons that are summed up rather well by "isn't that a little too convenient?", when evaluated from a neutral perspective wherein the existence of God is in doubt. I wouldn't try to argue that the idea of God wishing his existence to be unprovable is persuasive in that sense. It's more like if God exists, it seems it must be the case that the nature of that existence is not subject to those kinds of demonstrations, because otherwise you'd expect those demonstrations to have been made.

It's certainly something of a "retreat" for theists, considering that in ages past the existence of God was taken to be obvious. But even in the early centuries of Christianity or in biblical times there was always also an idea and understanding that God's existence was mysterious and transcendent, and that idea was what I was thinking of when I referenced those passages.

Hopefully that makes it a little clearer

I disagree completely with your bold comment. The interplay between God's intentions with respect to clear evidence of His existence and His capability is simply a characteristic of the problem. The "convenient" comment is completely without merit IMHO.

It is analogous to the situation around the creation of the universe. A theist might say that it was created by God. The counter is really that it may have come about by some entirely physical phenomenon that is currently not understood. Well, that is convenient for the atheist, but whether it is convenient or not is irrelevant. It is possible, so the existence of the universe cannot be taken as confirmation of the existence of God.

I should perhaps let someone more motivated argue that point with you. The question "isn't that too convenient?" succinctly expresses a bunch of judgements about the relative probabilities of various explanations given what is already observed and known. It's more or less an expression of occam's razor

And again, I don't mean it fails in the sense that it can't be true, I just mean it fails to be persuasive

There have been similar discussions of this type. I think I've proposed an analogy of a similar type than this, but I'm not entirely sure.

Suppose we have a long string of random 0s and 1s (let's say in the millions) where the probability of each is 50%. Now I go in and intentionally change some of the 0s to 1s and some of the 1s to 0s.

* Is it possible to detect whether I made any changes at all?
* If so, is it possible to determine which ones (and how many) I changed?

Now imagine how much harder of a task this would be if you didn't even know that the probability of 0s and 1s was even 50% in the first place. What if the probability were to change for each event? Maybe the first digit has a 20% chance of being a 0 but the second has a 75% chance. Now I go in and change some of the digits around.

* Is it possible to detect whether I made any changes at all?
* If so, is it possible to determine which ones (and how many) I changed?

The latter scenario is much closer to what we face when we try to find patterns in the randomness of people living and dying. I don't think that God even needs to try to hide himself to be hidden. Without making strong assumptions about the underlying behavior of the digits and the one changing them, detection is basically impossible.

I think that only holds when there is only one group or when you make random changes. We are talking about two groups (prayers and non-prayers) and elected changes for only a certain group, not random. If you were god and would want to remain undetected with saving a prayer, you should either also save a non-prayer or afflict a prayer. Otherwise I would be able to detect you.

The bottom line is that God has to not answer prayers from those who he might otherwise answer solely because he wants to remain hidden.

No its not. He need only confound your measurement attempt.

I used to be religious (not very religious, but I would pray before meals and use God as piece of mind) and stopped being religious about 7 or 8 years ago.

I see this all the time from atheists, typically younger people who fancy themselves intelligent and see things from a narrow-minded rich persons point of view.

God can be used in many different ways that I feel a number of athiests don't understand.

Whether or not God is actually "real" in the sense of a deity existing in the sky or whatever was not the most important thing to me.

When I was religious and considered God an active part of my life as a means to be thankful for what I have and protect me (think protect from sports injuries as opposed to the devil). I used to pray multiple times daily and it helped me keep my head on straight.

So if praying for me was an act to sort of gather my thoughts and have a reason to be a good person, doesn't that make "God" real in a sense? Not in the form of an existing deity but as something that has an effect on me and my life that leads to a positive effect on my community and family members?

Is that not something that is real?

Prayer is a great way to calm yourself and sort of be in the moment free of your troubles. God as motivation for a better self that leads to a better environment is a good, positive thing.

Do you really think you can really control for who gets prayer and who doesn't? This isn't like a drug where you can control who receives it and who doesn't. Think about it.

In a theoretical sense when you have an unlimited number of observations and had the ability to control the parameters, yes. But practically, no. You don't actually have the strong controls you need in order to draw meaningful conclusions.

I understand that. I'm actually looking for the god in the form of an existing deity. You are saying that the possitive effect of praying could be caused by you. In that sense, im "praying" too, not to any powerfull god, but to me or by saying something positive to one someone else, to change their thoughts and influence the future outcome in a positive way. I however do not think that "god" did it, unless you define god as yourself and the people around you.

Some of those are bad for Jesus. If he is God.


Not to mention i could quote all the verses where Yahweh does give knowledge of his existence. Including the last one of yours. If its true.

Maybe its fair that he wants to be undetected now... Though i think a lot of believers would disagree he is undetected. Some of them and the bible tell me im a fool for not detecting him.

But i think the bible, if true, shows God had no issue being detected. At least at one time.



Ignore...you pretty much answered in your follow up posts.

I'm not sure what you mean by this. Give me an example.

OK.

Let's assume that you have decided to determine if prayer has any effect on the survival rate of cancer patients. Presumably you would have to survey a population of cancer patients on their prayer habits and compare that to the data on the progression of their disease.

But remember the premise. You are testing for the actions of a Being with a postulated complete control of your reality including potentially your memories and perceptions. Also, that Being may not want you to actually possess evidence of His action. Do you really assert that given that capability, He would have no alternatives to not acting or to inflicting cancers to balance out the statistics or some other crude action? Why would He not just manipulate your data and memories so that you fail to perceive His actions?

I am sure you recall from previous conversations that I do not necessarily believe that the purpose of prayer is to cause changes in physical outcomes like disease progression or the river card or whatever. But even if God did act in those ways, given His capability combined with an (apparent) desire to remain concealed, I do not see how I could detect it. I do not have sufficient capability to counter His attempts at concealment.

Thing is, you can "make up" reasons to explain almost anything. This seems to be on par with " god put aged dinosaur bones in the ground, in order to make it seem like earth is older than it is"

So ye,your rationalisation is possible, but so what? It doesnt get us anywhere that I can see.

Isn't the bolded a bit ironic?

Oh, I didn't mean to imply you were doing anything either particularly clever or deceptive. Only that you are constructing a massive rationalization in the form of special pleading to resolve the contradiction between the claimed existence of benevolent personal god who sometimes answers prayers, and that we have no evidence for it.

If your "reason" can be arbitrarily invoked to explain any set of possible observations (or lack thereof), it lacks all explanatory power and won't be convincing to those of us not indoctrinated into your faith.

Hm, where have I read that before? Oh, I know!

FSM Letter to the Kansas School Board

I see that you have conveniently chosen a disease which is so complex and still poorly understood, it sometimes follows trajectories inexplicable to medical science. This leaves a knowledge "gap" which you can fill with your god.

Mr. Sklansky's point I believe is that god's desire to remain hidden inevitably restricts the good works he can do. For example, he can never answer prayers to heal amputees, because that would be too obvious. Unless you want to claim some amputees regrow limbs we can't detect.

This. Methinks you're better off just saying god doesn't want to help people for reasons we can't fathom.

Phantom pain, hence God exists. That's brilliant imo - besides Gods existence you get a whole ontology of invisible objects and stuff on top. I need to slip this by some friends of mine...

Paging Dr Ramachandran...

...? A quick skimming of his wiki-page doesn't really have anything popping out?

Posting on the hoof so can't link but add "mirror box" to your search terms

Let's reset this discussion so it can make some sense.

My entire participation itt was a response to this comment:


So my comment does "get us somewhere". It gets us to the answer "No" to the question that he asked.

I will state the summation of all of this very clearly.

It is not possible to design an experiment that gives us useful information to guide us on the question of "Is there a God?"

If you post something as the OP did that seems to claim such an observation, I may point out the flaws. Eventually you will have to make a concession as you did. But it is always accompanied by a comment like "So what, that does not prove there is a God". Of course it doesn't. I have never claimed that I can prove there is a God.

The real problem that people should be discussing is:

There may be a God and an afterlife and I will always have incomplete or inadequate information to know for certain if it exists and the nature of that afterlife. Under that inevitable state of incomplete information, what is the optimum set of assumptions that I should make and how should those assumptions affect my life?