One argument that theists sometimes bring up in arguments with atheists is \"What proof would convince you of the existence of God?\" the implication being that the existence of the universe and all the wonderful things in it is proof enough.<\/p>\n
Well, if you define God as just being the things we don't understand (currently the big bang and the mysteries of the human mind) then that's a valid argument, but the resulting God is just the \"God of the gaps\" who has been shrinking rapidly as science improves. Pretty much everything else in the universe (excepting only a few relatively minor details) we have good working scientific theories about. I think eventually we'll come to understand scientifically both the human mind and the big bang as well (in fact, I think<\/a> it will not be possible to understand either without the other).<\/p>\n Most theists don't seem to believe in just a God who created the universe at the beginning and then left it alone - they believe things like \"praying works\". This suggests a simple test involving praying for (for example) heads in a coin toss and then seeing if there is any statistically measurable effect. Once an effect is found, the experiment could be refined to determine which religion and sect has the most effective prayers. Theology would become a science. Theists will usually claim that prayers don't work that way, but ultimately they either work or they don't, and if they do work then that effect can be observed and experimented on. I understand some such experiments have been done, and have shown no statistically significant effects with the possible exception of medical patients who know they are being prayed for. This can be attributed to the placebo effect.<\/p>\n Another example of such a possible proof comes from the observation that \"if God is so great, why does he keep needing money to fix church roofs?\" I would find it a very compelling piece of evidence towards God's existence if consecrated buildings did not suffer the same kinds of wear and tear that unconsecrated buildings do.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" One argument that theists sometimes bring up in arguments with atheists is \"What proof would convince you of the existence of God?\" the implication being that the existence of the universe and all the wonderful things in it is proof enough. Well, if you define God as just being the things we don't understand (currently […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[47],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1055","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-atheism"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reenigne.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1055","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reenigne.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reenigne.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reenigne.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reenigne.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1055"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.reenigne.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1055\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1056,"href":"https:\/\/www.reenigne.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1055\/revisions\/1056"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reenigne.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1055"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reenigne.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1055"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reenigne.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1055"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}