Why There is No Proof of God

Faith & Science Conversation
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Thanks for sharing your thoughts, Shaun. I always appreciate reading an alternative perspective. I’m willing to acknowledge that on occasion there could be spiritual factors influencing a person’s mental health. However, I do have a few questions.

  • The devil, it seems, is in the details, how would one know that a person is being affected by a ‘lost soul’? How does one diagnose it?
  • You say the majority of mental health issues are spiritual, but what about the ones that aren’t, how does one tell the difference?
  • What exactly is a lost soul and what do you mean by them being in a patients life?

Hey @mitchellmckain, thanks for bringing your science background to the conversation. Always, helpful.

I don’t disagree. However, I would suggest that ‘the best we’ve got’ is better than ‘nothing at all’. I don’t think a lack of understanding is a reason to discourage folk from getting professional help. But then again, I’m not sure you are saying that medical mental health care should be avoided either, is that fair?.

@Shawn_Murphy and @mitchellmckain, you both made several comments that I’d like to unpack a bit more if that is ok:

(I’m so sorry to hear that. Really, I am).

There are bad mental health practitioners as there are bad doctors, dentists, scientists, and church leaders. But I wonder if there is also an important context here that I am missing. So a couple of questions, if that is OK:

  • Please, could you tell me a little about what mental health care looks like where you/your family are from?
  • what does the general approach to treatment look like?
  • Also, please could you indicate if the health care system is nationalised or privatised? In your opinion, how does this impact mainstream mental health care?

Thanks.

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122

everyone would be wise to notice the sleight of hand

Human science has no scientific evidence for the existence of (reported) supra-terrestrial God in heaven

However, numerous people around the world, throughout human history, have reported receiving meaningful intelligible cogent articulate communications (e.g. Voices, Visions & Dreams) from heavenly powers

Thousands of years of pan-planetary reports of “Contact” like events constitutes a mountain of direct witness testimony evidence – in the top tier of evidence at Law

Thus, the truth is, humans have a library’s worth of “police reports” of direct witness testimony evidence of “Contact” like events from heavenly realms

None of those “witness statements” has yet been corroborated, we have no tangible scientific physical forensic evidence

But witness testimony by credible mature adults cannot be dismissed lightly. And we do have Prophesies (Daniel, Ezekiel, Revelation) whose ability to forecast human affairs hundreds & thousands of years ahead of time certainly seems supra-human, supra-terrestrial

humans have lots of evidence, direct firsthand witness testimony evidence, albeit no “hard” physical scientific forensic evidence

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You bring up some good questions, and points out that mental health in the USA is problematic. Public mental health is underfunded, which means you usually get to see the professional via telemedicine on a screen and get a prescription. For some things that works (meds can give a schizophrenic a life when in past years they would have been institutionalized), and for some it is only a bandaid. Of course, the underfunding and poor compliance contributes to a lot of homelessness in today’s society, not that all homeless are mentally ill, but a lot are, including a cousin and nephew of mine.

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124

Dear Liam,
You ask some important questions and I would like to address them properly, so please bear with me. Let me start with an illustrative personal account. 2 1/2 years ago my 20-year old daughter suffered a stroke in the left frontal cortex. She was initially treated at Penn State Hershey and did her in-patient rehab there. She the went to MGH for out-patient neurology and Spaulding Rehab. The neurologist at MGH shared the 4 CT’s and 7 MRI’s with her network of 32 colleagues. 16 diagnosed arterial thrombosis and 16 venous thrombosis. 1 1/2 years later, after follow up visits to MGH and additional visits to comprehensive medical facilities, no one had a diagnosis for her chronic fatigue, dizziness and headaches. (How can you have a headache when you are taking 325 mg of aspirin everyday?)

We finally took her to functional neurologist. Dr. Schmoe had reviewed all her scans and her history prior to our visit. He personally performed every exam during her stay. After two hours, this is what he told us. She is suffering from dysautonomia irritated by damage to her basal ganglia. Her fatigue is from POTS, with a resting, standing heart rate of 140 bpm and headaches caused unregulated, rapid eye movements (forcing the neck muscles to constantly compensate). Dr. Schmoe took no scans, did no blood work, and prescribed no drugs. All he did was what Hippocrates prescribed - listen to your patient, don’t see more than six per day, and do no harm. In ten hours of office visits with therapy, she was a changed person.

I use this concrete example to demonstrate the complexities that exist in our world of specialized medicine, in a purely neurological case. When you add the spiritual variable, it can seem overwhelming in modern medicine. Dr. Edith Fiore understood the overwhelming obstacles and wrote a challenge in her book to modern medicine - she said: “We (psychiatrists) are the only doctors who spend time with our patients and we need to use that time to discover the underlying cause of (mental) illness.”

From Dr. Fiore’s work, I will give one relatively simple explore example of how lost souls can cause mental illness. She speak of a patient suffering from schizophrenic symptoms who has lost her twin sister in an auto accident a number of years ago. As the patient recalled the death of her sister, Fiore found an important clue. As her sister was dying, the patient had prayed, “Dear God, I will do anything to help my sister.”

The the sister died, she had an open invitation to stay with her sister who had promised to do anything for her. Instead of “going into the light”, she stayed with her sister, exerting her will on the patient’s life which grew stronger over time. This made the patient indecisive at times and doing things she would normally not have done when her sister’s will was strong. Once Fiore realized the invitation that her patient had offered, it was straight forward to remind the invitation and ask God to take this lost soul to Him.

Doing no harm, in my opinion, would be first eliminate the environmental variables from the patient’s life, including the spiritual ones, before suspecting a chemical imbalance in the brain and administering a pharmaceutical regiment with known potential side effects.

Thanks for listening!

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125

Hello again, Dale,

I would like to add a few more things regarding Job’s trial that I spoke of in my last post. He passed the test on the grounds of his statement, "

“For I know that my redeemer liveth, and that he shall stand at the latter day upon the earth (Job 29:25):”

The core of life’s meaning and purpose is to realize and to know above all things that Jesus is our personal redeemer.

ELD

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I might rephrase that to say “to know Jesus, our personal redeemer.” He is knowable as our best Friend and Elder brother.

C.H. Spurgeon’s ‘mere professors’, my ‘believists’ (both of whom would say “our personal redeemer”) and the adversary know that he is a personal redeemer.

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This exchange between T_aquaticus and Dale perfectly captures something very important.

What T_aquaticus has done is equated meaning with pleasure. But as Viktor Frankl discovered at Auschwitz, while people can live with suffering, pain, and the lack of pleasure, they cannot live without a purpose and meaning to their lives.

Mathematically, anything you do in your short lifetime (even if nanotech can extend it to thousands of years) is just the tiniest spark in the lifetime of the universe, much less eternity. This is why your meaning must be bigger than you. A lot bigger, if it is going to be significant Otherwise, as the Criminologist pointed out in Rocky Horror Picture Show (a sacred text in some eyes), “And crawling on the planet’s face, some insects called the human race. Lost in time, and lost in space… and meaning.”

If it’s any consolation, Ecclesiastes did the same thing, when he was young.

“All is vanity… I became great and surpassed all who were before me in Jerusalem. Also my wisdom remained with me. And whatever my eyes desired I did not keep from them. I kept my heart from no pleasure, for my heart found pleasure in all my toil, and this was my reward for all my toil. Then I considered all that my hands had done and the toil I had expended in doing it, and behold, all was vanity and a striving after wind, and there was nothing to be gained under the sun.”

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  Well said.

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Meaning and purpose can come from helping your fellow humans through rough times, improving society, gaining knowledge that can be passed on to future generations, and leaving the world a better place than you found it. It isn’t simply about pleasure.

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I think some Christians sometimes forget that the eternal meaning they hope for is aspirational. Most of the reasonable ones like the mods and regulars here are able to acknowledge that and would choose their faith even without the eternal. The pride of certainty never recognizes the frailties inherent in their own human epistemic position.

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Randal Rauser is great at agreeing with you here. Living forever is not necessarily meaningful - Randal Rauser

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I think all unbelievers all the time don’t realize that Christianity is true.

Your pride in your declared uncertainty never recognizes the frailties inherent in your own epistemic position.

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Thank you Randy. This second post on Randal’s blog is the more in depth one and very relevant. Once again I agree with a Randal blog you cite.

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Once again I find I can’t answer your provocative posts within the guideline calling for gracious dialogue. I’m happy to have my beliefs challenged by those capable of clear, polite communication. I hope those on this site you don’t start off assuming are instruments of the devil will help you find a more compassionate, humbler stance as a Christian. Best wishes but I don’t think I can offer you anything that will help you.

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That is true. We have the freedom to accept God and worship God or try to ignore God. On the other hand that is true of every thing. We can accept science or we can try to ignore science.

Science has “proven” that the universe has a Beginning and was created ex nihilo. Logically the universe cannot create itself ex nihilo. Logically only God could have created the universe ex nihilo. Since the universe exists, then God must have created it, and thus God must exist. The universe and humanity are the hard evidence for God as per the anthropic principle.

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I used the same language that you did.

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Personal certainty is one thing. A declaration such as this goes beyond that.

At the end of the day we all have faith and belief. To insist that it must be true is beyond that remit.

Richard

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138

You are saying that knowing God is impossible. It is not.

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From a human perspective, if Christianity is true then, logically, there are at least five reasons why a person would not consider it to be true:

  1. They are not convinced by the evidence/arguments in favour of it being true
  2. They are convinced but, irrationally, refuse to accept the truth
  3. They are misinformed or have been given substandard information about Christianity and its claims
  4. They are unaware, perhaps through a lack of contact, that Christianity is true.
  5. They have, for any number of reasons, some kind of irrational animosity towards Christianity’s adherents or the claims it is making.

Yet, even though I would say I am firmly convinced Christian, I also recognise that in all five of those points the word Christianity could be replaced with ‘Atheism’ or ‘Islam’ or any number of competing truth claims and the arguments still hold up. So whilst I am confident in my beliefs, I recognise that I could still be wrong. That, there but by the grace of God goes I, as Paul said. I’m also reminded that the Christian project and the scientific method share a similar goal - to follow the truth wherever it takes us.

Dunno, what do you think, Dale? Others?

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(That is tantamount to saying that you cannot know your earthly father.)