By definition, an all powerful, all knowing God would be able to
reach out to me if he wanted to. He would know what is my standard
of evidence and it would be trivial for him to meet it.
[/b]As long as your mind remains closed, no evidence will ever
satisfy or convince you that there is a God. Even in the example
given by Phaze where an amputee re-grew a limb, I'm quite sure you
would see it as some sort of David Copperfield trick and if
verified by a magician that it is no trick as suggested by Phaze,
you would probably think that the magician had been paid to lie. At
most, you would probably put it down to a scientific phenomenon
that we have yet to fully understand - maybe mankind has evolved to
such a state where one in a billion of us has attained the ability
to re-grow his limbs.[/b]
That might very well be true. Maybe the person is Wolverine with
mutant regenerative powers. :p
That aside, if someone happened to regrow a limb (something that we
believe is impossible right now), we would still have to seek more
plausible answers that automatically assuming a supernatural being
was the cause. If for example, one person regrew a limb, you would
have to ask why god would only restore one limb out of the many
tens of thousands of believers that pray for the same
healing.
If a limb just grew back over a period of a few years, I wouldn't
find that so convincing.
If someone stood over a person and said, "By the Grace of God, be
healed" and before our very eyes, the limb regrew in a matter of
minutes or hours, and it's verified to a reasonable degree that
it's not trickery. I do think most people would be convinced. I
mean c'mon, people are already convinced that god exists with no
evidence.
Or if someone discovered an old scroll in the Judean
desert with all the inscriptions as suggested by Phaze predicting a
mathematical formula, I'm sure you'll decry it as a fraud even if
it was carbon dated - perhaps the fraudster used real old ink on
real old parchment, etc etc etc.
And we should be skeptical. We know that tons of fraud occurs.
And it may be that old civilization was just very advanced
mathematically. In any case, in the example I used, I was talking
about revealed knowledge. Note I didn't say the description should
be about the formula for calculating Pi. It should be the digits of
Pi far far beyond the ability of people to calculate in those days.
Even if ancients discovered the formula for calculating the value
of Pi, there's no reason for them to calculate it to 10 million
decimal places for example. We only do it now because we have so
much computational power available.
Bottomline is that with a closed mind, no evidence,
however extraordinary, will ever convince you and like minded
atheists that there is a God, contrary to what Phaze might like to
believe in the other post.
I have problems with this argument. You use examples of
imaginary evidence and claim that we won't accept it even if it
existed. The fact is, it doesn't exist. Give us a real example,
please.
