Why There is No Proof of God

Faith & Science Conversation
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Romans 1:20 ?

There have already occurred, on planet earth in human recorded history, just the past 5,000 years… just the last one part in one million of earth’s 5,000,000,000 year history

In one-one-millionth of earth’s geologic history, there have already occurred so many super-conspicuous, super-anomalous “miracles”…

  • this “crazy” guy Noah building a boat hundreds of miles inland, claiming God in heaven was warning him to do so… everybody else (on earth) laughs at his “escape pod”… and then some sort of super-storm super-monsoon-season inundates Mesopotamia for weeks on end, and he’s (basically) the only survivor
  • Moses leads the Israelites straight towards some “rising volcanic ash plume” on the horizon, leaving them trapped on the shore of the Red Sea, until just at that time some sort of “tsunami” draws the water back for them to cross, and then returns in a tidal wave(s) to drown the Egyptians
  • Jordan river getting dammed up by an earthquake induced landslide, just as Joshua and the Israelites arrive
  • audio-visual messages from heaven (Voices, Visions, Dreams) accurately & precisely forecasting future earth weather, climate & socio-political changes

all of these “WOW!” signals recorded dutifully and transmitted with maximum human accuracy over the millennia…

God in heaven has already “proved” His Existence to the hu-mans of earth so many times over the hu-mans have lost count, but even in what records they have managed to keep, the number of anomalous conspicuous “miracles” is mountainous

Romans 1:20

Q.E.D.
(subject only to unfounded bigoted denials)

Q: Why do humans have no scientific evidence of God? IOW, why is it that human-level science cannot detect Godlike influences on earth?

A: B/c hu-man level science is not Godlike

Who seriously thinks that humans on earth can compete with God in heaven?? Despite Hollywood movies like Transformers, human-level science is not actually omniscient, or even all that good, in heavenly terms. Non-detection is not equivalent to actively detecting & demonstrating nothing.

they cannot listen to the highest assembly [of angels]
they cannot eavesdrop on the Higher Assembly
they cannot listen to the Upper Realm
Surah 37:8

this is not a challenge concept. Humans aren’t godlike, and aren’t going to detect godlike. Way it goes. The only hard part is (apparently) the humility of acknowledging humanity’s humble heavenly “situational awareness”

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Your answer was so laced with irony and incredulity I could not decide whether you are serious or not. Sorry

Richard

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Since there is no actual “FBI X-Files department” to seriously investigate these matters, you & I get to play “volunteer patrol” (so to speak)

On our desks are veritable mountains of (written) “police reports” of conspicuously-timed, super-anomalous, “miraculous” events on earth in human history (past 5000-6000 years or so)…

There might have even once been older “police reports”, which have since crumbled into dust on the floor, so we don’t know about them…

but even in just the past 5K years, already the number of filed “police reports” is ceiling-high

Our annual $0.00 “volunteer patrol” budget has afforded us 0 ability to investigate any of that direct firsthand witness evidence scientifically, so we have 0 corroborating hard forensic scientific evidence

Here’s what our “earth volunteer patrol” has, as of this moment:

LOTS – direct witness evidence of non-human, non-terrestrial, other-worldly interference in earth events
ZERO – hard forensic scientific evidence (one way or another)

The preponderance of present evidence weighs (inconclusively) in favor of the existence of non-human, non-terrestrial, other-worldly heavenly powers actively interfering in earth history, worldwide, for thousands & thousands of years

Nay-sayers, apparently choosing to quote innumerable (repetitious) verses straight out of the Qu’ran, come along and say “nothing but the mythical fables of the ancients!” They say all humans everywhere else, and everywhen else, besides them right here right now, have all been crazy & insane and untrustworthy…

of all ten billion humans who have ever lived ever, anywhere or when, only they are mature, rational, reasonable, trustworthy…

since they, insulting the entire human species for its entire history (everybody everywhere’s grandparents & great grandparents were all primitive illiterate crazies), are now chosen by humans as their preferred spokespersons (“yeah, just like they said, exactly!”), “volunteer patrol” is dismissed (until further notice)

Fact remains, as far as “volunteer patrol” was allowed to (preliminarily) investigate the matter…

The preponderance of present evidence weighs (inconclusively) in favor of the existence of non-human, non-terrestrial, other-worldly heavenly powers actively interfering in earth history, worldwide, for thousands & thousands of years

Meanwhile, on the theory side of things, Epicurus, Bruno, Fermi & Drake warned us we should have expected as much

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Hello World,
This is my first post on this site, or any other site for that matter. I joined Biologos because it perfectly fits my current quest in life. I’m a retired electrical engineer who has spent the last decade thinking about and studying many of the theological topics in this site. I’m am still learning the rules, so I hope to avoid breaking any of them. I love this topic as I see it pivotal to what G-d is doing in the universe. I type G-d unusually which is a habit I picked up from a Jewish friend of mine which he uses to show reverence for G-d. I like it.

I like to say that G-d has chosen to remain scientifically invisible. As an engineer, I relate well to designers and how they think. I believe there is an essential reason G-d chose to remain invisible in this way. To be clear, I also relate well with the comments above stating that the world is filled with people who have become convinced about the existence of G-d through personal experience, which brings us back to the point of invisibility, faith.

As we know, we live in the era of faith. This didn’t happen by accident, and if you think about it, it is not at all easy to design and build anything and erase all evidence that you built it. G-d has done this through the natural processes of physics, because G-d planned for physics to lead us back to the beginnings of things. Without the clever back story of natural processes in creation, physics would lead science directly to G-d. Nothing screams “G-d” more loudly than all the complexities of the universe appearing in six 24-hour days. Science is currently very happy to track back in time and find the consistency of physics all the way to the big bang. The picture of consistency. The day science finds G-d is the day that faith dies. There will be a day for that, but science will not spill the beans.

It is involved to explain the full intricacies I see regarding G-d’s purposes for the era of faith without overstaying my welcome with too many words. Put succinctly, I think G-d is engaged in a master plan to create a “suitable” eternally perfect soul mate, one made in the image of G-d. One key requirement of the image of G-d is the knowledge of good and evil. For us to have a knowledge of evil, we must experience it much like an inoculation is necessary to ward off a virus attack. For us to make a free-willed choice to serve good or to serve evil, we must be shielded from the intimidating presence of G-d. The era of faith is a protection mercy necessary to provide us with an unfettered opportunity to make that choice. This is the essential characteristic required before our transition into eternal purity.

I would like to suggest a slight change to the title of this thread.

Why There is No Scientific Proof of G-d :wink:

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Hi Weims,
Welcome to the forum, and thanks for sharing your thoughts. Also, feel free to start a thread if you have other questions or observations you’d like to discuss.

I think “scientifically invisible” is a good way of looking at it.

Based on your next paragraph, I take it that you see this as a good thing?

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Welcome Weims, nice post.

I agree with you the day will come science has to admit the Universe has a Creator.

The Creator is invisible for a purpose. There is no scientific way to find out His purpose. It’s where religion moves in.

Christianity demands faith.

The question is why.

Because we need faith in afterlife?

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ProDeo,
Something I left out of my previous post was the “why” behind the way G-d has chosen to create the Bride of Christ. Designers know that many problems can be solved a number of ways, but some problems have a very limited number solutions, or maybe only one. My view: I think it is not possible to create a being made in the image of G-d which will remain eternally pure and committed to G-d from within the context of perfection. I assume that the angels were most likely created in the realm of spirits to be perfect from within that context of total perfection. The trouble is this… How can a being, so created, possess a full knowledge of good and evil, having never seen or experienced evil? And How can they choose between good and evil when they are not free to sample both sides. The Bible tells us that some angels fell which suggests that eternal perfection was not possible with 100% certainty. Did this catch G-d by surprise? I doubt it. Based on these observations, I believe that a knowledge of sin is essential for anyone truly made in the image of G-d. G-d has the freedom to sin, but consciously chooses not to because of I-Am’s knowledge of sin’s inherent harm and ugliness.

I think G-d chose to suffer the existence of evil to achieve I-Am’s heart desire, which is to create an eternal companion of comparable intrinsic qualities and proclevities. I-Am chose to create the universe as the incubator and cradle for this new being. In the context of a designer, the presence of evil suggests its own necessity. Resident evil facilitates the moral dilemma we each must confront, and necessitates the need for redemption. Redemption satisfies the moral contract, but it also demonstrates the Suitor’s love which woos the hearts of I-Am’s beloved bride in waiting.

The era of faith was chosen for the previously stated reasons. I think that faith is the natural outgrowth of scientific invisibility. For existence of G-d to be questionable, I-AM must be unseen in a direct or concrete way. Romans 2 speaks of natural revelation and how people are either commended or accused by their own thoughts and actions. I believe this is the base level witness of G-d to mankind which has been available before oral tradition, or the law, or the Bible, and it still remains up to the present.

Natural revelation includes the observed universe which connotes a creator, but more concretely we experience the actions of others around us. Lying, stealing, murdering, and the like witness to us directly as does kindness, love, and self-sacrifice. The question we each answer through our actions is how we then choose to live. As we make this decision over the span of our life, this is an act of faith, faith in goodness or faith in evil. When we agree with G-d about goodness, we are choosing G-d even in ignorance. Of course when we are introduced to Jesus we are invited into a much more refined understanding of who G-d really is and what I-Am has done.

In the absence of direct knowledge, our trust in the unseen, be it goodness or be it Jesus, is the mysterious thing we call faith. It is only necessary now, because G-d wanted and needed to give us the ability to choose for ourselves of our own free will. When you choose an eternal partner, that partner must be totally sold on the goodness and good intensions of their suitor. Like a good marriage between two hearts longing to be joined together, there is no sense of compulsion or coercion. When we rejoin the realm of spirits and come face to face with G-d, faith will evaporate, but trust will remain forever.

I hope this sheds more light on the era of faith and its necessity and ending point.

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Laura,
Yes, I do see faith as essential and part of the master plan. Based on how I see the era of faith, I feel confident that science will never find proof of G-d until G-d chooses to erase all doubt about it. With pains taking work, G-d designed that out of the equations, literally. To me, it makes no sense for G-d to go to all this immense work to then give away the store in some way. :wink:

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Why There is No Proof of God

Either because there is no purposeful ground of being of infinite material from eternity.

Or it is impossible for there to be anything but autonomy in the material breeding ground of the transcendent (which can only be populated from the material; i.e. something has to transcend). Bar incarnation. And even then.

Any intervention above grounding being, and deep calling to deep by the Spirit, beyond incarnation, breaks the spell. Once you start, where do you stop? Creation hurts everybody concerned, there’s obviously no way round it. If God could avoid pain for us and Himself, He would. He can’t. Can not. Not will not. There’s no moral aspect to this whatsoever; for free will’s sake, whatever that could possibly be, whatever it is God doesn’t have it. We fill in the white space around existence with fear riven, ridden, riddled, raddled stories since the dawn of behavioural modernity.

So, we tiny privileged few writhe with random survivor guilt for a while longer than the vast majority who writhe no more. It can’t be helped. None of it is anyone’s fault. If He exists then it is God’s responsibility and even then, not. The end, transcendence, justifies the unavoidable means, physicality. The bridge, not over the gulf of our wicked, resurrection to eternal torture or execution and oblivion at best deserving sins, is incarnation; Jesus. The bridge between the physical and the sublime. Earth and paradise. If we need assuaging of our guilt and shame, so that we can start again 7, 70 times a day, and we all do if we get to first mental base, there He shockingly is. Crucified. By and with us. We are all the helpless, innocent, unfairly, meaninglessly suffering thief on the cross. But which one eh? It doesn’t matter. For all will be well for all. There is perfect justice in Heaven. Not absurd, inadequate, pointless punishment. Full equality of outcome for all. Those hard sayings are nothing to do with the resurrection, they are ancient morality tales to motivate the innocently hard hearted. Jesus saves. Jesus can actually save us from our disordered passions, now a little, then completely. He’s effectual, effective, efficacious. Omnipotent that way.

Later.

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Have you read @ThomasJayOord 's books, “God Can’t,” or “The Uncontrolling Love of God”?
I am intrigued by open theology. I’m not sure I agree fully. I tend to agree more with Dr Oord than most others. However, Randal Rauser critiques it here as well
The Questionable Comfort of Impotent Love: A Review of God Can't - Randal Rauser

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Believe it or not, I have to agree with Rauser! God Can’t eh? Well He did in Jesus. And love doesn’t coerce? I hope it does!

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I agree with you both, @Klax and @Randy. Why oh why must Christianity envision God as so powerful? Seems to me that one byproduct of doing so is to give His adherents a sense of entitlement to the best they can imagine and I doubt if that is healthy. We all know that even our human life gets complicated enough at times to present us with moral dilemmas for which no perfect solution is possible. Sometimes as good as possible is the absolute best one can do. If you conceive as God as a much more complicated being (or at least as coping with much more complicated dilemmas), then why shouldn’t even He need to sometimes make the best of a bad situation. Seeing everything God does as simple for Him is probably demeaning.

Okay, that is possibly more than you want to hear from someone that doubts God is even a separate being.

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Any time MarkD, any time. I might agree with Rauser’s critique but I suspect I won’t with him otherwise, an evangelical big on God’s Sovereignty, whatever that is.

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So KLAX,
Please tell me a bit about yourself. I have read your post a number of times and I remain puzzled about your perspectives. I see points of intersection and I’m not sure if we have many points of significant divergence. What is the main theme or themes you would like me to consider?

Please keep in mind that as an engineer, I am not classically trained in theology or philosophy. I had two years of Bible school training years ago, post engineering school. I am largely self-taught after that. For the majority of my adult years, I was quite conservative in my theology (6 day creationist), but certain observed deficiencies in conservative theology led me to rethink my understanding of the Bible and certain conservative themes. I still identify as conservative, but I have significantly departed from certain classic tenets of Biblical interpretation. I have a high view of Scripture, but a lower view of the classic assumptions which have led to our current theology. I think it is time to revisit theology in light of an old universe and the implications of G-d’s use of social evolution in the mentoring of humankind and in the writings of Scripture itself over time.

I identified certain theological conundrums that seem to threaten some sectors of modern Christianity. Let’s call it theological positions that threaten the good name of Christ and Christianity. These questions led me to embrace the truths of science and to meld them together with my altered theology. I worked as a systems engineer which means I looked at the top level of systems to make sure all things work together harmoniously. It is that perspective that I have applied to science and Christian theology with the base level assumption that all truth really is G-d’s truth. Every time I find an apparent mismatch I have been diving in to find the error in thinking. Because science is inherently self checking and self-correcting, I spend my time looking for the theological errors that have few if any self-checks.

It has been an interesting journey, and I writing about the results of my findings. Therefore, I would cherish your critiques offered up in good faith. At the end of the day, all of my assertions must stand up to analysis. This is the way of engineering, and of science, and of my perspectives.

Thanks

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Hi Weims. Me? I’m a mess. What would I like you to consider? Wow. That’s too much. I don’t have the skills and I don’t think anyone has apart from oneself. I’m shallow end. I was in accounts for 7 years after a couple in production control, segued in to IT for 26 mainly as an Oracle and other DBA and have done ALLLLLLL sorts else either end. Blast furnace operator, progress chaser, microbiology lab worker with the sniff of a Ph.D., carer, now just an accounts assistant working from home in lockdown. I got a mediocre biological sciences degree in '75 and most of an M.Sc. in Computing. Life intervened. I needed the money! I’m extroverted, lower middle class, an over the top underachiever; I chose the wrong parents. And religion. At 15 - half way… a third… a quarter… a… through a very febrile adolescence - I drew myself in to the world of Herbert W. Armstrong’s heterodox fundamentalist millennialism and came out nearly 30 years later when it deconstructed itself. That explains much of the mess but also kept me out of other trouble. That example of deconstruction carried on for 20 years. Here I am. All that’s left is rationality and desire - I want there to be a best case God - in a very cracked pot. In with the deconstruction is the reconstruction of C. Baxter Kruger, Rob Bell, Brian McLaren, Pete Rollins, Richard Rohr, Steve Chalke et al: the very mainly post-conservative emergent, and neo-orthodox. With a brief immersion in the ‘charismatic’, 7 years of limbo, in to evangelical Anglicanism in the very church building I was infantly baptized, with the elephant in the room of damnationism and out the other side.

I expand on all this in Penzu with military grade encryption. Perhaps I’ll link to extracts.

It’s not for me to tell you anything Weims. Despite my bull in a china shop way of handling myself with others here with my absolutism.

I go - via Facebook now - to a typical via media Anglican church here in Leicester where I can’t talk to anyone like this and if I could go anywhere it would be Oasis in Waterloo, London.

Your milage will vary : )

Thank you Weims, Martin

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Martin,
Thanks so much for the self disclosure. It’s good to bring our humanity into view as we interact. My wife and I just finished binge watching Downton Abbey, and so I once read your first post out loud with a British accent because it just seemed fitting. I guess it was. :slight_smile:

We share an engineering past. In my work, I interacted with software, mechanical, digital and “analogue” (my specialty) engineers. I spent 36+ years working for an automatic test equipment company where we designed and manufactured mixed-signal semiconductor test systems. I loved all of that work as it has been my life’s base level calling from the cradle. Theology has been and is becoming more so now a second calling.

I have become disturbed about certain aspects of American Christian theological teachings which have fallen on the wrong side of particular critical issues of culture. I have developed a growing sense that a big part of the Apostles work was acting as shepherds of Christianity within their culture, balancing theological imperatives against cultural traditions and law. Especially in those early days, they needed to make the hard decisions about how to navigate the transition from Judaism to Christianity (Judaism 2.0) in the context of Roman law and tradition. I view much of what I will call 'the integration (math term) of cultural mores as natural revelation spoken by G-d through the maturing process of humanity. When those truths become self-evident, this provides a self-check of sorts for our theology. One such example case relates to the treatment of Women where many churches still restrict the roles of women based on an interpretation of Scriptural admonitions, yet western culture has voted for full female freedom and I see no retreat on the horizon.

Because I believe that culture is not wrong about this, I concluded that we have something wrong in our understanding of Scripture. I have spent years now searching for the answer to that cunundrum (engineers are often tenacious problem solvers). This is the wrong thread to discuss all that, but I now have a plausible explanation that satisfies my mind at least, allows us to agree with what the Bible says, and preserves a high view of Scripture. Sounds too good to be true, but I believe it offers all of that.

But I also feel a growing sense of calling to look for and join with other shepherds of Christianity to help highlight and align some of our theological blind spots. I wish to see Christianity standing on the loving side of these issues which I believe represents the heart of G-d. It may not seem like it, but I believe the future of Christianity is at stake. We must not freeze at the controls and drive the ship aground. Sears was once a huge powerful force in retail, but now they are ship wrecked on the ocean floor. Christianity was designed to adapt over time, but we haven’t fully appreciated that just yet. Blind spots. Loving your neighbor as yourself is as contemporary as we are.

I enjoyed hearing your story, and thanks for responding in kind,

Jack

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Funny how in reading N. T. Wright, I heard it in my mind with his voice and phrasing.

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You’re welcome Jack, we are on the same trajectory.

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I didn’t see any further responses to your posts about The Shroud, so just thought I’d mention that claims about creating a “fake Shroud” have always been about re-creating something that superficially looks like the Shroud… but none has ever come close to copying all of its more mysterious aspects, the types of things that seem virtually impossible for someone in another century to have been able to do…since we aren’t able to do so even in this century. For instance it’s pretty much proven now that the blood on the cloth is underneath the image and thus was there first, but Garlaschelli’s version does not recreate this aspect. Another defining aspect of The Shroud is its 3D encoding. Something that fakes, including Garlaschelli’s routinely fail on. More recently, it’s been discovered that there is a very faint, second image on the opposite side of the cloth, completely in line with the top image. Again, something exceeding difficult for a fake to accomplish. And that’s without explaining all the anatomical and medical information in the Shroud that would have been unknown at the time.

Basically, anyone that has done any serious study of the Shroud image finds the idea that it was created by a person completely absurd and ridiculous. However… that doesn’t necessarily mean it was created by miraculous means either. But there’s no doubt that what means did create it was very unusual given that nothing else like it exists.

The hypothesis for the image creation that seems to have the most support based on the scientific evidence is that the image is a result of an enzymatic reaction in the soap layer on the cloth. It is extremely thin (another very difficult aspect of the image for human fakes to achieve) and delicate, and has none of the normal aspects of a painting. While many people think of the Shroud as a photo-negative, it really has very few aspects of normal photography, there is no light source, and the 3D encoding suggests instead that the image creation was related in some way to the distance from the cloth (closer to the cloth, the more enzymatic reaction you get and thus the darker the image in that area would be). This also is why some aspects of the image do appear distorted in ways that you would not see in a normal photo.

The carbon-dating of course is often touted by atheists as well that discount the Shroud as any kind of evidence of the existence of Jesus, but while there is no reason to question the accuracy of the dating itself (taking each labs tests in isolation), there are serious issues with the samples that were taken. Unfortunately the original protocol for taking samples from different Shroud areas was NOT followed and the ones that were taken are believed to be from a section of the cloth that appears to have gone through a later repair, and thus contaminated with earlier fibers. Most recently, re-examination of the raw data from the 3 labs showed that they did not fall into the level of confidence reported, which puts further credence on the suspicion that the fibers were from a repair spot.

Ultimately the biggest challenge with the Shroud is unlike other relics of scientific curiosity, there is a decided lack of access to study it. The radiocarbon dating question could easily be addressed with a second test which the Catholic Church to this point has denied. But two things are for certain… there is NO definitive answer currently as to when and how it was created… and it is difficult to find even a single aspect in which the person depicted on the Shroud does not fit the Gospel description of Jesus, and the manner of his death.

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What does atheism have to do with C14? And there is no new evidence.