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A Simple Question of Evidence
During Richard Dawkins’ reading of The God Delusion at Randolph-Macon Woman’s College, a member of the audience posed a very interesting question: in effect, he asked Dawkins what evidence he would need to conclude that God exists.
Regretfully, Dawkins went on to address another part of the audience member’s question, and never got around to answering it.
So I put it to you, all you atheists and agnostics, heathens and humanists, unbelievers, nonbelievers, and disbelievers:
What evidence would you need to conclude that God exists?
I’ll give you my answer in a future post.
–Allen
on November 26th, 2006 at 9:54 am
I don’t discriminate when it comes to the existence of any creature. We should be able to prove the existence of God in the same way we prove the existence of a tiger or an elephant.
Failing conventional methods, I might be convinced if God actually appeared before me and broke a few universal constants.
But the original question asked of Dawkins wasn’t fair in the first place. No self-respecting Christian would actually require another Christian to have proof of God’s existence since the whole thing is based on faith, not evidence. But rather overtly or subconsciously, Christians more than often than not, tend to hold secular people to a different standard and expect us to have all the answers in place of their dogma which they don’t even fully understand in the first place.
on November 26th, 2006 at 10:49 am
All three faces of God appearing in the sky, with all the heavenly host proclaiming:
“Be excellent to each other!”
on November 26th, 2006 at 3:43 pm
I would need a diverse group of people who understand the basic fundamentals of science and logic (things like Ocham’s Razor) to provide overwhelming evidence to the scientific community.
God appearing in the clouds could just be some light reflecting off a weather balloon flying over swamp gas. Just as likely as some huge creature that created everything and is all-powerful and all that.
on November 26th, 2006 at 5:25 pm
Which god? If Zeus, he’d have to throw a lightining bolt that got by Lee Trevino’s one iron (but since I’m soft-hearted, it would only shock Lee a wee bit).
Jim
on November 26th, 2006 at 7:02 pm
Since god is supposedly all-powerful, I won’t accept anything less than the Great Pyramid of Giza hovering 20 feet above the ground, with a host of angels circling…
on November 26th, 2006 at 7:47 pm
Evidence of an “afterlife”. That would be a start. Though an afterlife in itself, wouldn’t prove the existence of any god.
on November 29th, 2006 at 6:51 am
And what evidence would you need to conclude that our Holiness The Flying Spaghetti Monster exixts and His noodely appendage is touching us all?
on November 29th, 2006 at 11:38 pm
I might be tempted, only tempted, mind you (for I am a contrary fellow), if, while gazing at the sky on a cold and clear winter night, probably looking at the Belt of Orion, I should suddenly see the stars vibrate, sashay and begin to dance, move from their normal dispositions and trace lovely arcs and swirls until they slowed, in perfect unison, to form the number 42.
on December 1st, 2006 at 12:41 am
For a true believing atheist no evidence would be enough to dissuade him or her from abandoning their belief. The mind of an atheist has made its decision and even a dramatic sign from the heavens could be explained away. I’m sure that the only evidence that can convince a true atheist is dying and seeing what happens next.
on December 4th, 2006 at 8:19 am
Well going by all religious texts it would seem that people in the past were often sceptical of the existance of a god as procalimed by his/her/its respective prophets/messengers. They were led to believe in the existance of the ‘god’ because he/she/it made his/her/its presence felt by executing wonders/miracles. The red sea parted for the semetic religions. A monkey god uproots a whole mountain and flies it across oceans in Hinduism. Is he/she/it (god) hibernating???
“Oh omnipotent, omnipresnet multi-tasking one.. if you exist you obviously know I’m typing this… get your friggin ass out here in the open and do something”!!!
I shall believe in your existance then :)
on December 6th, 2006 at 9:24 pm
Surprizing coincidences (even occsassional miracles) are an inevitable result of statistics on a massive scale. The only absolute proof of God that I can think of would be a day in which nothing unlikely happened. No strange coincidences, no faces on toast, no premonitions come true … every other flip of a coin would be heads, every potato looks like an ordinary potato, everything happens just as expected.
on December 7th, 2006 at 10:24 pm
How come my earlier comment has disappeared?
on December 8th, 2006 at 8:21 am
I’m sorry, Tommykey, I don’t know what happened to your comment. I notice that another comment from a different reader, also written on December 2, is also missing.
Please know that I didn’t remove them, and I will try to find out what happened.
Allen
on December 15th, 2006 at 5:20 am
Define what you mean by “God”, and I will tell what it would take.
There may be a universal conciousness. I believe it’s all one big organism. Just as the Earth is one. People and science break it down to satisfy curiosity and solve practical problems. The term God carries alot of religious baggage. And, I think it’s also crutch. What could God create which could not conceivably exist without God?
Religion seems to attempt to impose a purpose for suffering. An alternate explanation for suffering is that it is a byproduct of expanding consciousness. I know it often hurts when I think about this stuff.
I stumbled on this page after searching for some relief from the holyday blitzkrieg.
I live in Columbus too (far east side). Good to know yer out there.
My immediate relations are all agnostics and atheists who are obsessed to varying degrees with CHRISTMAS!!!!! I can’t get out of it. And it’s making me a basket case.
-Robert
on December 17th, 2006 at 3:18 pm
Speaking of evidence, let’s take a good look at something else that a LOT of Americans believe not just with lack of evidence but with actual evidence that disproves it staring them in the face if they would only have the psychological gumption to accept it.
One thing that struck me as odd in the days after 9/11 was Bush saying “We will not tolerate conspiracy theories [regarding 9/11]”. Sure enough there have been some wacky conspiracy theories surrounding the events of that day. The most far-fetched and patently ridiculous one that I’ve ever heard goes like this: Nineteen hijackers who claimed to be devout Muslims but yet were so un-Muslim as to be getting drunk all the time, doing cocaine and frequenting strip clubs decided to hijack four airliners and fly them into buildings in the northeastern U.S., the area of the country that is the most thick with fighter bases. After leaving a Koran on a barstool at a strip bar after getting shitfaced drunk on the night before, then writing a suicide note/inspirational letter that sounded like it was written by someone with next to no knowledge of Islam, they went to bed and got up the next morning hung over and carried out their devious plan. Nevermind the fact that of the four “pilots” among them there was not a one that could handle a Cessna or a Piper Cub let alone fly a jumbo jet, and the one assigned the most difficult task of all, Hani Hanjour, was so laughably incompetent that he was the worst fake “pilot” of the bunch, with someone who was there when he was attempting to fly a small airplane saying that Hanjour was so clumsy that he was unsure if he had driven a car before. Nevermind the fact that they received very rudimentary flight training at Pensacola Naval Air Station, making them more likely to have been C.I.A. assets than Islamic fundamentalist terrorists. So on to the airports after Mohammed Atta supposedly leaves two rental cars at two impossibly far-removed locations. So they hijack all four airliners and at this time passengers on United 93 start making a bunch of cell phone calls from 35,000 feet in the air to tell people what was going on. Nevermind the fact that cell phones wouldn’t work very well above 4,000 feet, and wouldn’t work at ALL above 8,000 feet. But the conspiracy theorists won’t let that fact get in the way of a good fantasy. That is one of the little things you “aren’t supposed to think about”. Nevermind that one of the callers called his mom and said his first and last name (”Hi mom, this is Mark Bingham”), more like he was reading from a list than calling his own mom. Anyway, when these airliners each deviated from their flight plan and didn’t respond to ground control, NORAD would any other time have followed standard operating procedure (and did NOT have to be told by F.A.A. that there were hijackings because they were watching the same events unfold on their own radar) which means fighter jets would be scrambled from the nearest base where they were available on standby within a few minutes, just like every other time when airliners stray off course. But of course on 9/11 this didn’t happen, not even close. Somehow these “hijackers” must have used magical powers to cause NORAD to stand down, as ridiculous as this sounds because total inaction from the most high-tech and professional Air Force in the world would be necessary to carry out their tasks. So on the most important day in its history the Air Force was totally worthless. Then they had to make one of the airliners look like a smaller plane, because unknown to them the Naudet brothers had a videocamera to capture the only known footage of the North Tower crash, and this footage shows something that doesn’t look like a jumbo jet, but didn’t have to bother with the South Tower jet disguising itself because that was the one we were “supposed to see”. Anyway, as for the Pentagon they had to have Hani Hanjour fly his airliner like it was a fighter plane, making a high G-force corkscrew turn that no real airliner can do, in making its descent to strike the Pentagon. But these “hijackers” wanted to make sure Rumsfeld survived so they went out of their way to hit the farthest point in the building from where Rumsfeld and the top brass are located. And this worked out rather well for the military personnel in the Pentagon, since the side that was hit was the part that was under renovation at the time with few military personnel present compared to construction workers. Still more fortuitous for the Pentagon, the side that was hit had just before 9/11 been structurally reinforced to prevent a large fire there from spreading elsewhere in the building. Awful nice of them to pick that part to hit, huh? Then the airliner vaporized itself into nothing but tiny unidentifiable pieces most no bigger than a fist, unlike the crash of a real airliner when you will be able to see at least some identifiable parts, like crumpled wings, broken tail section etc. Why, Hani Hanjour the terrible pilot flew that airliner so good that even though he hit the Pentagon on the ground floor the engines didn’t even drag the ground!! Imagine that!! Though the airliner vaporized itself on impact it only made a tiny 16 foot hole in the building. Amazing. Meanwhile, though the planes hitting the Twin Towers caused fires small enough for the firefighters to be heard on their radios saying “We just need 2 hoses and we can knock this fire down” attesting to the small size of it, somehow they must have used magical powers from beyond the grave to make this morph into a raging inferno capable of making the steel on all forty-seven main support columns (not to mention the over 100 smaller support columns) soften and buckle, then all fail at once. Hmmm. Then still more magic was used to make the building totally defy physics as well as common sense in having the uppermost floors pass through the remainder of the building as quickly, meaning as effortlessly, as falling through air, a feat that without magic could only be done with explosives. Then exactly 30 minutes later the North Tower collapses in precisely the same freefall physics-defying manner. Incredible. Not to mention the fact that both collapsed at a uniform rate too, not slowing down, which also defies physics because as the uppermost floors crash into and through each successive floor beneath them they would shed more and more energy each time, thus slowing itself down. Common sense tells you this is not possible without either the hijackers’ magical powers or explosives. To emphasize their telekinetic prowess, later in the day they made a third building, WTC # 7, collapse also at freefall rate though no plane or any major debris hit it. Amazing guys these magical hijackers. But we know it had to be “Muslim hijackers” the conspiracy theorist will tell you because (now don’t laugh) one of their passports was “found” a couple days later near Ground Zero, miraculously “surviving” the fire that we were told incinerated planes, passengers and black boxes, and also “survived” the collapse of the building it was in. When common sense tells you if that were true then they should start making buildings and airliners out of heavy paper and plastic so as to be “indestructable” like that magic passport. The hijackers even used their magical powers to bring at least seven of their number back to life, to appear at american embassies outraged at being blamed for 9/11!! BBC reported on that and it is still online. Nevertheless, they also used magical powers to make the american government look like it was covering something up in the aftermath of this, what with the hasty removal of the steel debris and having it driven to ports in trucks with GPS locators on them, to be shipped overseas to China and India to be melted down. When common sense again tells you that this is paradoxical in that if the steel was so unimportant that they didn’t bother saving some for analysis but so important as to require GPS locators on the trucks with one driver losing his job because he stopped to get lunch. Hmmmm. Further making themselves look guilty, the Bush administration steadfastly refused for over a year to allow a commission to investigate 9/11 to even be formed, only agreeing to it on the conditions that they get to dictate its scope, meaning it was based on the false pretense of the “official story” being true with no other alternatives allowed to be considered, handpicked all its members making sure the ones picked had vested interests in the truth remaining buried, and with Bush and Cheney only “testifying” together, only for an hour, behind closed doors, with their attorneys present and with their “testimonies” not being recorded by tape or even written down in notes. Yes, this whole story smacks of the utmost idiocy and fantastic far-fetched lying, but it is amazingly enough what some people believe. Even now, five years later, the provably false fairy tale of the “nineteen hijackers” is heard repeated again and again, and is accepted without question by so many Americans. Which is itself a testament to the innate psychological cowardice of the American sheeple, i mean people, and their abject willingness to believe something, ANYTHING, no matter how ridiculous in order to avoid facing a scary uncomfortable truth. Time to wake up America.
on December 21st, 2006 at 12:22 pm
If someone appeared to me and proclaimed in one breath that he would take the pain of the world away, and did it. Then I’d beleive.
on January 5th, 2007 at 10:54 am
Hi, I just came across your blog today. I have to admit that I haven’t really ever met an atheist before. I have met many who don’t believe in God but are open to the possibility and not so self proclaimed as yourself. People have debated this for centuries and I am sure anything I say will make any difference because your mind is made up I am definitely not here to insult/argue or even try to prove anything to you….just to give you a heartfelt answer to your question on this post.
Sometimes the only reason I believe in God is because beauty can give me Goosebumps. Stupid, yes? There is most likely a scientific explanation for that phenomenon though, so if someone out there knows it, tell me please, and then I can be rid of all that. Beauty in the sunsets, a flower or the ocean is where I see God. I don’t see much beauty in humanity and have a hard time believing that this was all by chance. I couldn’t live in a world where there is no hope….and a world without God is hopeless. Where in everyone’s 80-100yrs of life their body will eventually turn into fertilizer. How pointless is that. Try to picture the world solely of Atheist’s.
I have always thought that if someone was so proclaimed as a true atheist then they wouldn’t be so “out there” in saying so. I smile when I hear about people calling themselves an atheist because in saying it, they are in fact referring to God, you are finding reasons not to believe and in doing so you have to be told otherwise. You must be quite educated in the whole matter now and consequently might know more about God than some do who keep it to themselves and those who do believe. Another reason I smile is because there must be some shred of hope of existence of God left in you because you are desperately seeking to hear what you want to hear and attract others who feel the same as you….or you enjoy a good debate. Ultimately, people choose to see what they want to see…and that goes both ways.
on January 11th, 2007 at 6:10 pm
I have had this discussion with believers and I usually say something like: “I will devote my entire life and afterlife to any deity that can materialize before me and walk across the lake that is by my house. I don’t care if it’s Allah, Jesus, Zeus, or any of the thousands of gods that have been worshiped over the centuries, or even Satan. If Satan appeared before me and proved that he did in fact exist, I would do whatever he wanted me to do.�
Now I can understand all these “good gods� not appearing before since, as every believer will tell you, they want you to believe in them on faith alone. But does Satan have that same ethical agreement with all the “good gods� about not giving absolute proof of existence? I mean, come on, its Satan, why would he not appear before me and prove that he exists when I have promised that I will follow him?
on January 16th, 2007 at 4:11 pm
There are so many ways to prove the existence of GOD. Today is January 16, 2007. Why? Because we show the difference between the birth of Jesus and death of Jesus. This has been accepted for 2 thousand years. It is so accepted that all nations and people recognize it. And who is Jesus? The Son of GOD!
That is just one example.
The next is creation. GOD always has been. He created the earth according to the book of Genesis in the Bible. A big bandg certainly did not cause the earth to begin. But for those who believe the big bang is the beginning, there had to be some mass to cause the big bang and where did that mass come from. Also, a big bang could not have caused the result called the human body with all of its intricate location of nerves, cardio-vascular system, the mind, the sinew, the muscle, all those organs, all those canals within the body. The human body form had to be made by somebody. I believe GOD did it.
on February 10th, 2007 at 11:24 pm
Ok, so the divine materializes out of whatever, stands in the middle of a Brazilian rain forest & every single person suffering from malaria & black water fever is summarily cured. The divine would then have to declare all religions bogus, cause the immediate disappearance of all religious & superstitionist buildings, monuments &c and promise to behave less like a petulant child & sociopathic compulsive & more like the caring, wise & judicious being that the divine is supposed to be, at least by human accounts.
All would be sweetness & light, Lenny Bruce would be back from the dead and the Lone Ranger would still be in the shit house, but at least we’d know damn well and for sure that there was a divine and that the divine could be forced into behaving like a god instead of a bratty kid havin’ a shit fit ’cause he didn’t get an extra ice cream for dessert.
And the divine would explain how time travel works. And let us in on it.
I think that would do it for me. Yeah, that might do it. Yeah.
Nils
on February 11th, 2007 at 1:36 am
If God would bring back David Ruffin, Dimebag, John Bonham, and Jaco Pastorius as a supergroup, that’d do the trick.
on August 3rd, 2007 at 3:20 pm
Christian Symbols and Christian Resources…
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on September 12th, 2007 at 11:20 pm
Ass Licking Videos…
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