On Proving God

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Warning/Disclaimer: The potential for this thread to jump the tracks is extremely high.

I am a Christian. I believe in God. However, I think that trying to prove God's existence is not only impossible logically and scientifically, but is theologically inconsistent with the nature of faith as exemplified by Abraham and Mary. Vehemently attempting to prove God's existence seems to me a symptom of extreme doubt.

I voted no, since the attempts end up so embarassing, trying to make anything an argument in favour of God's existence. I despise beliefs like "since there is love in the world, God has to exist", neglecting the fact that it does have some use in nature. I also believe that our existence here is to test our righteousness under the belief that we will get away with anything we do - if it was possible to prove God's existence, this test would be blown.

The existence of God can't be proved, nor can it be disproved. Philosophers have tried to prove and disprove this for thousands of years.

"Again it is written," replied Jesus, "'Thou shalt not put the Lord thy God to the proof.'"

"Jesus said to him, Again it is in the Writings, You may not put the Lord your God to the test."

I wish there was a third option.
I don't think it matters whether or not Christians try to prove G-d's existance.
I don't think G-d's existance can be logically or scientifically proven, but I don't think it's wrong to try to prove G-d's existance.

Proving the existence of a God to everyone is not possible with the current amount of evidence, there will always be that degree of uncertainty for either view. Unless you're a fundamentalist atheist ignorant of every pro-religious argument and shred of proof there is, then you're probably open to the possibility of a God or something else.
I'm Agnostic. I'm open to the possibility that a God, does, indeed exist, whilst not having any strong religious convictions or strong atheist convictions.
Whilst you can deny the existence of a God purely through lack of proof, it is foolish to deny the remote or not-so-remote possibility of such with convictions akin to that of religious fundamentalists.

i dont think you can prove god. even if he was proven you'd have alot of angry people on your hands because it might not confirm what there religion sais about god

Personally, I know God exists. For argument's sake, let's say I'm right. Then when He created everything it was made from His essence because Creation Depot didn't exist (yet). None of us have the ability to create our own universes in the same way, so the most basic elements of our world are a subset of Him. A set cannot prove the existence of a superset unless they are the same set. Otherwise the superset has elements that are not in the set and that are independent of the elements in the set. There is no way to deduce (by derivation) these extra elements given only the elements of the set. This means we cannot prove God exists given only Creation to work with. It also means we cannot deduce His extra elements, i.e. we cannot judge Him.

It also means we cannot prove He doesn't exist because His extra elements cannot be defined in order to be disproved.

If you could prove God's existence it would be nearly impossible, not only because of the various number of evidences that don't point to there being a God (ie, the argument that God is redundant, and according to Occam's Razor, probably doesn't exist), but because proving such a thing that would require much of evidence outside of a mathematical context is nearly impossible. Which is why scientists are content with supported evidences (ie, probabilistic methods over proving indefinintely) and disproving.

no, not only because impossible, but because god being unreal it is absolutely irrelevant to belief in god, in fact risks damaging/weakening/compromising the word "god", as has already happened over last few centuries of people misguidedly trying to prove that god exists, arguing gods existence etc as if was something real. The word's credibility has been much reduced after all those silly "logical" "rational" steps to proof etc. Societys infatuation with reality the last few hundred years managed to lead even some "true believers" astray.

Imagine if we had a time machine to go back and see if all things that are said to be true are actually true or whatever it is, could that change things a lot?