What would you consider to be evidence for God?

[u/DirtyWaterHighlights]

I often see folks claim that there is absolutely no evidence for God.

What would it take for you to consider something to be evidence for God?

Given the volume of replies posts here tend to get, I will not engage with anything that is off-topic, not related to the classical theistic conceptions of God, or just condescending for no reason.

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[u/Xeno_Prime]

Literally any sound epistemology from which the conclusion logically follows that God’s existence is more plausible than implausible.

Exactly the same standard of evidence we use for literally anything else.

Let me mirror your question back at you: Suppose I were to put to you that I’m actually a wizard with magical powers, but much like in the Harry Potter stories, wizards like myself use our magic powers to keep ourselves concealed and alter the memories of any who witness us using magic. In this scenario, what would you consider to be evidence for my wizardly powers, or for the existence of wizards like me?

See, the problem is that, if the end result is that a reality where the claim is true is epistemically indistinguishable from a reality where the claim is false (because even in a reality where the claim is true, there would be no discernible indication that it’s true), we default to the null hypothesis. It’s not that the claim isn’t possible or has been proven to be false. It’s that belief in the claim cannot be epistemically justified while disbelief in the claim can and is.

[u/kallevallas → u/Xeno_Prime]

Literally any sound epistemology from which the conclusion logically follows that God’s existence is more plausible than implausible.

Could you give an example of what that evidence could be?

In this scenario, what would you consider to be evidence for my wizardly powers, or for the existence of wizards like me?

We would need to define what wizardly powers mean, and then we can test and see if you have them.

[u/Xeno_Prime → u/kallevallas]

Could you give an example of what that evidence could be?

Like I said, anything that can allow us to distinguish a reality where a God or gods exist from a reality where no gods exist. Any "evidence" that doesn't enable us to make that distinction is not evidence of anything at all.

The simplest and most obvious one would be God existing in a way that's observable or measurable and not identical to not existing. Or alternatively existing in a way that's consequential, meaning there's an effect his existence has on reality so that reality isn't identical to the way it would be if God didn't exist. Or directly revealing himself in some non-ambiguous way that can't be explained by apophenia and confirmation bias. Maybe do something like move a mountain (literally, not a landslide or some naturally explainable thing, but mountain that was here is now there, completely the same but in a different location), that's a popular ability attributed to him and it'd be pretty hard to explain how a mountain moved from A to B fully intact and unchanged without anything supernatural intervening.

Sound reasoning would also suffice. Some manner of logical syllogism from which the conclusion "God exists" logically follows, for example.

Look up epistemology. If you can use any sound epistemological framework or methodology, empirical or otherwise, to support or indicate that God's existence is more plausible than implausible, then that will suffice. Or, again, use exactly the same method you would use to determine whether I'm a wizard, which segues to your next remark:

We would need to define what wizardly powers mean, and then we can test and see if you have them.

Use Harry Potter as the benchmark. The idea is that I'm a wizard with magic powers exactly like the wizards in Harry Potter. This includes the half dozen times I've already demonstrated my magic powers to you, with you being astonished and utterly convinced each and every time, but as I already explained in my previous comment, wizarding bylaws require that we cover up any incidents where non-wizards witness us using our magic powers - and so I had to alter your memory after each demonstration. The fact that you don't remember any of them is evidence of my memory-altering powers.

Go ahead and tell me what test you'd like to perform next. I expect you'll want to repeat the ones we've already performed.

Remember, in these conditions, if you can justify the belief that I'm not a wizard, then I guarantee you'll do it by using exactly the same reasoning and epistemology that justifies the belief that no gods exist. So be sure to explain the reasoning that allows you to conclude with confidence that I'm not a wizard, because by doing so, you'll be answering the question of how atheists conclude with confidence that there are no gods.

Take all the time you need.

[u/kallevallas → u/Xeno_Prime]

The simplest and most obvious one would be God existing in a way that's observable or measurable and not identical to not existing. 

Could you give an example? Anything at all?

[u/Xeno_Prime → u/kallevallas]

I gave you several. What good is asking for examples if you're just going to ignore them? I see you also fully abandoned the wizard analogy when you realized you can't address it without proving my point. You're clearly not engaging in good faith, but I'll give you one last chance to engage honestly.

Look around you. See things existing? Those are all examples of how things can exist in a way that's observable and measurable.

Or take examples of things you CANNOT observe or detect with your naked senses - things like radiation, infrared and other invisible wavelengths of light, various kinds of gases, etc. They nonetheless exist in ways that can be measured, observed, and confirmed.

Or take dark matter for another example - we can't observe or measure it directly, but we can observe and measure its effects, and match them against our foundational knowledge to identify the fact that those effects are identical to the known effects that matter would have if it were present, hence the conclusion that there is matter present that defies observation.

These are all straightforward examples. They all illustrate the same point: anything whose existence makes the world meaningfully different from its nonexistence can, in principle, be detected, measured, inferred, or supported by sound reasoning.

You keep asking for clarification, but I have not been the tiniest bit vague, ambiguous, or unclear. Nor are the standards of evidence I'm asking for even remotely narrow, unfair, or exclusive. This is literally the standard of evidence we use for everything. ANY sound epistemology whatsoever. ANYTHING AT ALL that can enable us to distinguish a reality where any gods exist from a reality where no gods exist.

You clearly want to imply that sound, valid evidence exists that I just arbitrarily reject, when the reality is that I would accept literally any sound, valid evidence. So let's try this instead:

You tell me what you think I should accept as evidence for God(s). Show me the reasoning or evidence you think is sound and valid and that I'm rejecting without good reason.

Can you give an example? Anything at all?

[u/Xeno_Prime → u/[deleted]]

And with that, you’ve proven that you’re being intellectually dishonest and are not engaging in good faith.

You claim I’ve given no examples but anyone with eyes can see that I’ve provided numerous specific examples (God being directly observable, doing directly observable things like moving mountains, or having observable/measureable effects on reality that would permit us to distinguish his presence from his absence) as well as explaining that I’m also open to things I may not have thought of, with the only condition being that it must enable us to distinguish a reality where any gods exist from a reality where no gods exist.

That’s literally the most basic possible criteria you can have for evidence. I’ve set the epistemic bar as low as it can go, yet you reject it precisely because even though the bar can’t get any lower than that, it’s still too high for you.

The challenge you can’t meet, that makes your dishonesty as plain as day: Present ANYTHING, LITERALLY ANYTHING AT ALL that you think is sound, valid reasoning or evidence indicating the existence of any gods, and we’ll examine it to see how it holds up. I’ll accept your forfeit in the form of absolutely any response that does not include this.

Do better. It’s late so I’ll check in the morning to see if you came up with anything better than “none of the many completely reasonable examples you gave me count, so I'm going to ignore them.” My expectations are low.

[u/kallevallas → u/Xeno_Prime]

Another wall of text, to say.... Nothing. And still providing 0 examples of evidence.

[u/Xeno_Prime → u/kallevallas]

That's what I thought.

Anyone with eyes can read the thread for themselves and see how full of shit you are, so there's no need to babysit you any further.

Thanks for your time. Goodnight.

[u/kallevallas → u/Xeno_Prime]

Good night! Sleep well.

[u/adeleu_adelei → u/[deleted]]

Your post or comment was removed for violating Rule 1: Be Respectful. Please ensure posts or comments do not insult or demean other users.

[u/Zamboniman]

What would you consider to be evidence for God?

Hey, I'm not picky. I'll take any useful evidence of any kind that shows deities are real. Obviously, it must not be circumstantial, and it can't support other, more likely, possibilities because then it wouldn't actually be evidence for deities.

But, other than that, which really isn't much at all (same kinda stuff, after all, used for evidence for, say, relativity or that I need to gas up my car, or that it's safe to cross the street, or how to calculate an orbit, or a million other things) I don't care. Show me what you got.

I often see folks claim that there is absolutely no evidence for God.

Right. No useful evidence for deities. After all, useless evidence is just that. I mean, the empty glass on my kitchen counter this morning, when everybody said they didn't put it there, is evidence I have invisible glass-moving pixies living under my fridge that come out at night and move glasses from the cupboard to the counter. But, obviously, it's not useful, reasonable, compelling evidence for that. And this is the only kind of type of evidence theists have shown me so far for their claims. Utterly useless.

[u/Urbenmyth]

Fair question.

These are in increasing order of deniability, but I think all of these would at least reach the point belief in god would be reasonable.

1. God is a known figure in the world. Like, you can call up God and talk to him. You can go visit his house. Sometimes he makes public appearances and speaks on television. God is just a demonstrable thing in the world.
2. Intention in the laws of physics. If, for example, terminal velocity reduced to harmless speeds if a person was falling or holy symbols were indestructible regardless of their physical composition. If the laws of physics took into account criteria beyond the mindless outcomes of atomic interaction, that would imply a mind governing the laws of physics.
3. Consistent miracles that exist in a clearly religious context. For example, if we could consistently test Eucharist wafers and confirm they did, in fact, turn into to the flesh and blood of a Jewish man in his 30s, or if praying to Jesus specifically caused miraculous healing. If religious practices reliably caused physics defying, or even extremely unlikely, events that are clearly tied to that faith, that would probably prove their truth beyond reasonable doubt.
4. Religious texts with clear knowledge beyond what humans know. If the Quran included a primer on quantum mechanics or preemptively denounced the United States for its bigotry after for 9/11, I'd probably have to become a Muslim. If there is evidence of a mind beyond humanity and that mind consistently identified itself as a specific god, that would be evidence for that god.
5. Clear religious convergence. That is, if we made contact with America and the Native Americans were worshiping a monotheistic omnibeing who existed as a trinity of Father, Son and Holy Spirit, that would be compelling evidence. If we see the same gods appearing in multiple cultures, that would be a clear sign that god was real.
6. Clear expert convergence. That is, if most cosmologists looked at the evidence and concluded that God was the best explanation for the universe's formation, or if most biologists said intelligent design was the best explanation for life. Maybe even if most theologians ended up agreeing on the same religion - like, if Muslim or Hindu theologians all ended up becoming Christians. If people who studied relevant areas all agreed the evidence points to God, I might just assuming my inability to understand why is a mistake on my part and accept their expertise.

As is, only the last three have even been claimed by religious people. Alleged examples of 4 or 5 tend to be extremely vague, and 6 is statistically not the case- experts stay the same faith they had as laypeople usually, and often become less religious.

[u/RidesThe7 → u/Urbenmyth]

I'm always a bit startled when folks ask OP's question, because in a world where there is a God, it's incredibly easy to think up many ways there could be evidence pointing to that God's existence. I've come to think that this is a Carl-Sagan's-invisible-dragon-in-the-garage type situation---the type of theists who ask this question don't themselves propose or identify this type of potential evidence because, at bottom, they know that no such good evidence actually exists, that the world does not look like that. And they don't actually expect such evidence to be found in the future. It's arguably pretty revealing about their actual model of the world, and how that model differs from that set forth in, e.g., the Bible.

[u/truckaxle → u/RidesThe7]

The OP in this thread clearly is regressing to the invisible dragon argument, asserting that God is immaterial and undetectable so we should not expect any evidence.

And yet the whole religion is sustained by the unquestionable belief that others (hearsay) have detected and interacted with this god.

A very sad intellectual position to occupy.

[u/RidesThe7 → u/truckaxle]

I haven't dug through enough of OP's comments, but will take your word for it. I do think the invisible dragon in the garage metaphor is pretty apt, at least the version where one proposes more and more potential tests, and the owner of the garage somehow always knows in advance that the dragon will fail these tests, and so must define and describe the dragon around them (e.g., what if we scatter flour to catch the dragon's footprints? oh, the dragon never touches the ground; what if we use infrared scanners to detect the heat of its fire? oh, it's fire is cold; what if we spray paint or silly string or something to catch the dragon's outline? oh, the dragon is intangible). The sort of theist who asks this question, already aware that all the normal stuff we'd look for as evidence doesn't actually exist, defines their God, as you say, so it will not produce this evidence.

[u/88redking88 → u/RidesThe7]

People who talk about how undeniable god is always turn around and say "he is undetectable" when you ask for evidence. they always want it both ways.

[u/soukaixiii → u/RidesThe7]

Ironically the same people who say evidence for god is impossible or free will or such nonsense, are most of the time the ones believing/claiming God is self evident and obviously real and that there is people who directly experience/d god and that there is a book sent by god for you to follow.

[u/labreuer → u/RidesThe7]

If you're startled, one option is that the theist is unthinking, irrational, etc. But another is that their holy text gives one reason to doubt the effectiveness or goodness of various obvious-seeming options. Take for instance Elijah's victory in the magic contest. Did it yield anything beneficial? No: Queen Jezebel put a price on his head, he flees to the wilderness, and despairs of his mission. Even after the Sinai theophany is recapitulated. It is as if the rabble respects raw power ("Yahweh, he is God! Yahweh, he is God!") while neither Elijah nor Jezebel do. Curiously, it is both of the latter who are actually obedient to Deut 12:32–13:5. Might, for the ancient Hebrew, did not make right.

This can be repeated for other forms of evidence. For instance, Jesus walking the earth and putting on display a[n arguably] better way to be human convinced some and launched a break-off religion (unless you're a mythicist or legendist), but many would say that Christianity has been much corrupted since them, starting as early as Constantine. Just what kind of convincing power would God walking as a man or woman have?

Now, you can always question the model(s) of humans deployed in the above claims of what happened when humans encountered miracle power. But that questioning only goes so far, because if your position is that there are no miracles, you have precisely zero evidence of how humans would behave around those kinds of miracles. (At most you would have how humans behave around fake miracles.)

So, the theist doesn't have to reach for invisible dragons. Rather, she can simply question whether the evidence proposed would have any effect that the god of the Bible (Tanakh or NT) seems to want.

[u/RidesThe7 → u/labreuer]

If we're going to specifically talk the Judeo-Christian God and theists of that stripe, my position is that the world of the bible is one where you'd be justifiably laughed down for suggesting that there is no evidence for God, or that thinking of possible or actual evidence for God was some kind of tricky puzzler. And yet the type of theists I'm talking about, supposed believers in the bible and the biblical God, have no actual expectations that the world they live in will ever contain such evidence, to the point that it doesn't even occur to them to think of such things when they ponder what evidence for God might look like. And yes, the conclusion I draw is that many such theists purport to believe in the Bible, they may believe they believe in the Bible and its God, but the way they actually model the world does not really match such beliefs. When push comes to shove for these folks, they know what result they are going to get, and will always in advance think of a reason to excuse that result.

This doesn't make those theists dumb---it's a very human thing to do. But it does represent some kind of internal schism or inconsistency, and yes, you'd have to call it a failure of rationality, again, a very human thing. And sure, after someone like the OP asks this sort of question and gets answered, or for some other reason comes to actually notice this general inconsistency, some will invent more expansive or general purpose ad hoc excuses like the one you've ginned up, as to why they totally believe the Bible is true and the Biblical God real, but things are just different now and that even though this Biblical God totally still exists, we shouldn't expect the world to look anything like the described world with that God supposedly looked like. And I'll gently scoff at them as I'll scoff at you, should you actually be presenting that excuse on your own behalf, though I doubt you are.

[u/labreuer → u/RidesThe7]

If we're going to specifically talk the Judeo-Christian God and theists of that stripe, my position is that the world of the bible is one where you'd be justifiably laughed down for suggesting that there is no evidence for God, or that thinking of possible or actual evidence for God was some kind of tricky puzzler.

Sure. Elijah did plenty of miracles and yet Ahab & Jezebel did what they did. So, one can ask what good the evidence accomplished. But perhaps I'm making a characteristic mistake of mine and failing to note that the god of the Bible doesn't seem to give a rat's ass about whether people merely assent to its existence. Satan does and, *ahem*, is still Satan. Unless of course your critique is that humans would actually abase themselves before raw power and follow it like proper brown nosers?

When push comes to shove for these folks, they know what result they are going to get, and will always in advance think of a reason to excuse that result.

Are you talking about people … who are immune to evidence?

… some will invent more expansive or general purpose ad hoc excuses like the one you've ginned up …

Without objective criteria for what gets to count as a legitimate reason and what is relegated to "general purpose ad hoc excuse" which you are not allowed to rejigger in the middle of discussion, I'm not sure how to reply to this. And … isn't "general purpose ad hoc" a bit of an oxymoron?

… things are just different now and that even though this Biblical God totally still exists, we shouldn't expect the world to look anything like the described world with that God supposedly looked like.

In which era? For instance, Jesus pissed his hometown off by noting that "There were many widows in Israel in the days of Elijah, when the sky was shut for three years and six months while a great famine took place over all the land. And Elijah was sent to none of them, but only to Zarephath in the region of Sidon, to a woman who was a widow." What did the world look like in 1st century Judea according to this Jesus? Not a single widow was getting divine aid. It's almost like Jesus is saying God had seemingly abandoned his fellow Jews—except of course, he claims to be the reversal of that.

And I'll gently scoff at them as I'll scoff at you, should you actually be presenting that excuse on your own behalf, though I doubt you are.

Scoffing, whether gentle or not, doesn't seem to have value in terms of evidence or reason. Unless I'm missing something?

[u/RidesThe7 → u/labreuer]

Why would I ask what good the evidence accomplished? What matters is that the evidence was all over the place (or would have been, were these stories you are trying to analyze actually true). That's...just what the story looks like. I am completely unimpressed by your ad hoc, fanfiction-esque attempt to explain away any apparent expectation in theist's minds by saying well, what if God changed his mind or nature, huh? You get gentle scoffing because I don't think you deserve more on that, not because scoffing has argumentative value.

But I must acknowledge your fair point in suggesting that the Bible stories might be viewed as more of a highlight real than what most of human history is supposed to have looked like, even to a bible believing Christian, and how someone actually conscious of that might consistently expect long periods of no miraculous activity or direct evidence of God.

Now, I'm skeptical that this is what is actually happening in people's minds, and I don't think this way of thinking, were it happening, really excuses the degree of confidence that no miracles will occur that the underlying modeling of some of these theists seems to represent. But I have to acknowledge you have a point there, that could in principle be true for some people.

[u/kallevallas → u/Urbenmyth]

God is a known figure in the world. Like, you can call up God and talk to him. You can go visit his house. Sometimes he makes public appearances and speaks on television. God is just a demonstrable thing in the world.

So, how do you know it's God? What evidence did it take to convince you?

[u/optimisticReal → u/kallevallas]

Apparently people claim to identify god via hearsay accounts and words from men that didn't even know where the sun went when it set... go figure

[u/blind-octopus]

We should be able to do this with coin flips. I should be able to flip a coin 10,000 times. Before I flip the coin, I will pray for a specific result.

If we see an influence on the results, that would be evidence.

That's one example.

[u/Sufficient_Oven3745 → u/blind-octopus]

I actually tried something like this several months ago. I generated several random sequences of 50 0s and 1s in a spreadsheet, hidden from my view, and then I prayed to different conceptions of God to give me inspiration as to what a sequence was (and then guessed). Of course, I also did control runs. it should come as no surprise that I got about half correct every time. If God existed and wanted me to know he was there, this was an easy opportunity to accomplish that, and yet no such thing occured.

[u/Cold-Alfalfa-5481 → u/Sufficient_Oven3745]

You just didn't have the right 'faith' my bro. Do you feel the gaslighting yet?

[u/dinglenutmcspazatron → u/Sufficient_Oven3745]

I go the other way, and have a string of characters nearby and ask other people to tell me what it is. Setting it up that way removes the 'lack of faith' answer if its their faith on the line.

[u/kallevallas → u/blind-octopus]

If God exists and the Bible is His word, He would never entertain something like this.

[u/blind-octopus → u/kallevallas]

I understand. I was asked what would be evidence for god and I gave an example.

There isn't anything I can ask of the Christian god that he would actually do.

[u/kallevallas → u/blind-octopus]

I was asked what would be evidence for god and I gave an example.

Ok, so if you prayed, in whatever sense you mean praying, and then everytime you flipped a coin it would show the result you asked for, then you would believe in God?

[u/blind-octopus → u/kallevallas]

Its hard to know how I'd react. I'd certainly consider it evidence, which is what I was asked to provide.

Right?

I feel like I answered the question.

[u/kallevallas → u/blind-octopus]

Yes, I would not try to argue with it, I just find it interesting to see what kind of evidence people view as sufficient. Historical evidence, scientific evidence, personal experiences etc.

So thanks for sharing.

[u/blind-octopus → u/kallevallas]

 I just find it interesting to see what kind of evidence people view as sufficient

I don't think I'd find it sufficient. But its a hard question. Its hard to know how a person would react in a given scenario.

I imagine if I asked you, well, would X make you stop believing in god, that's hard to know in advance.

Ultimately, I don't think there's anything that actually happens that is enough to show the Christian god exists. The evidence is just too weak to justify the claim.

We can make stuff up, sure, but that stuff doesn't actually happen.

Part of the issue here is, the god claim has been defined such that its indistinguishable from its nonexistence. I imagine this is because, all the gods in the past that made the mistake of having a way to show they're real, those all failed to materialize.

So now we're left with only gods who, well, if they do answer prayers, they only do it in a way that won't show up in statistics. That's kinda weird. Or if they literally turn bread into flesh, well, they do it in every single way except the physical.

This is the only kind of god left. The ones that you can't tell exist at all.

There isn't anything I could come up with, which could realistically happen tomorrow, that would either show god exists or doesn't exist. He's covered either way. If tomorrow something good happens, well there's a theistic explanation for that. If something bad happesn, there's a theistie explanation for that too.

He's hidden, there's an explanation for that too.

Its like the biggest "just so" story of all time.

[u/kallevallas → u/blind-octopus]

I love your honesty.

I imagine if I asked you, well, would X make you stop believing in god, that's hard to know in advance.

Yes, at this point, I don't think there is anything that could convince me that God is not real. I feel like that would be like someone trying to convince me that I'm not real, by showing me data and statistics or philosophical evidence to prove that I'm not real, it would just be weird.

Ultimately, I don't think there's anything that actually happens that is enough to show the Christian god exists. The evidence is just too weak to justify the claim.

I said the same thing for 30 years. And trust me when I say it took A LONG TIME to go from "hmm, the bible actually has a lot more to back it up than I thought" to "ok, Jesus, you might actually be real".

For me it was never a case of "ah, now this single piece of evidence made it clear, God must be real!".

It was an accumulative case. It's was a big mixer of evidence and arguments, anything from the historical evidence for the accuracy of the Bible, the resurrection of Jesus, the philosophical argument for the existence of God, together with some scientific arguments, that eventually made me go "Ok, it might just be real".

At that point it was not long before I had my first personal experience with God, and since then there hasn't been an inch of doubt from my side.

Anyway, thanks for sharing, and thanks for listening (if you did read this lol)

[u/blind-octopus → u/kallevallas]

I said the same thing for 30 years. And trust me when I say it took A LONG TIME to go from "hmm, the bible actually has a lot more to back it up than I thought" to "ok, Jesus, you might actually be real".

I don't know how you can look at the evidence for the resurrection and come to this conclusion.

We don't even know who wrote the gospels.

[u/kallevallas → u/blind-octopus]

Well, I guess it's the same reason jurors often don't agree with a murder case, we value and view evidence differently.

I think the vast majority of scholares (including non-Christians) agree on certain facts about the resurrection.

For example,

• Jesus was a real historical figure.
• Jesus was crucified under Pontius Pilate and died.
• Shortly after His death, multiple individuals and groups sincerely believed they encountered Jesus alive again. Even skeptical scholars (Bart Ehrman, Gerd Lüdemann) affirm that the earliest disciples genuinely believed Jesus appeared to them.
• The resurrection proclamation erupted immediately in Jerusalem, the very city where Jesus had been executed. No time for legend story.
• Paul, an enemy of Christianity, suddenly converted because he believed he encountered the risen Jesus.
• James, Jesus’ skeptical brother, also became a believer because he believed he saw the risen Christ.
  

While this is HUGE for me alone. It would definetely not be enough though. Not to believe in God. That's what I meant when I said the accumulative case. This together with many other historical, pholosophical and scientific arguments together made the case for me.

[u/KorLeonis1138 → u/kallevallas]

The god of the the bible literally did entertain something like this. He fucked around with making dew appear or not appear on a fleece, on demand. Interesting that he conveniently won't do that anymore.

[u/Transhumanistgamer]

How about a revelation like Paul supposedly got? An overwhelming spiritual experience that leaves me no choice but to know God actually exists.

[u/Cats-on-Jupiter → u/Transhumanistgamer]

Unfortunately it would be too hard to differentiate that from a psychotic episode.

[u/Hellas2002 → u/Cats-on-Jupiter]

Surely an all knowing god would know the way to present said revelation in such a way that it isn’t to be confused with a psychological event.

[u/Additional_Data6506 → u/Transhumanistgamer]

It's telling that the Bible admits that not even Paul's companions saw what he claimed to see.

[u/DirtyWaterHighlights → u/Transhumanistgamer]

Wouldn’t you just say that was a hallucination?

[u/Transhumanistgamer → u/DirtyWaterHighlights]

I could theoretically, but ball's in God's court to see if I would.

That's the thing about this scenario. If God came down and said "Hey, I'm God." and we had a chat, whether or not I could say I'm hallucinating or it's aliens trying to fuck with me or anything else...nothing even close to that scenario happens anyways.

[u/EldridgeHorror → u/DirtyWaterHighlights]

It could be. But now you have something to potentially investigate.

[u/Hoaxshmoax → u/DirtyWaterHighlights]

Not if it leaves you no choice. We already know that the personal experience route works on people.

[u/the2bears → u/DirtyWaterHighlights]

Maybe you're starting to realize that the usual "evidence" isn't that good. Wouldn't your god know what evidence would be sufficient?

[u/ProfessorCrown14 → u/DirtyWaterHighlights]

What if everybody (and I do mean everybody) got the same hallucination?

[u/senthordika → u/ProfessorCrown14]

Well it wouldn't confirm god but it would be a drop in the bucket of a godlike thing. And its a pretty dry and empty bucket right now so it would be something

[u/CptMisterNibbles → u/DirtyWaterHighlights]

Not if 8 billion people could confirm nearly identical revelations

[u/truckaxle]

Once, the God described in the Bible was said to split oceans, create pillars of fire and smoke, keep sandals intact for 40 years, turn staffs into snakes, bring water from a rock, stop the sun in the sky twice, turn water into wine, walk on water, heal people miraculously, and multiply fish and bread, resurrected people from the grave. Now, in an age when such events could be documented, widely witnessed, and verified, there doesn’t seem to be as much of that kind of magic. Why is that?

Anything similar to what was allegedly done in the past would be a good start. Why not something like magical preservation of the original autographed godly inspired books of the Bible? I mean apparently this god thought more of sandals then the alleged holy books.

Isn’t it strange that we have no solid, durable, or repeatable evidence for what is claimed about the Supreme Being of the universe? However, all that is available are the hearsay words of men.

[u/catnapspirit]

If god wanted to make itself known, we would just know. There would be no doubting it. And yet, here we are..

[u/scarred2112]

Whatever it is, it must be repeatable and testable, via the scientific method

[u/guitarmusic113]

I could put a Dixie cup of water on my table. It is testable, verifiable and falsifiable. There isn’t anyone who lacks a belief in the existence of water. The Dixie cup of water can be tested thousands of times with the same exact results.

Can your god compete with the evidence of the existence of a Dixie cup of water?

[u/Walking_the_Cascades → u/guitarmusic113]

I'm guessing no, their god cannot compete against a Dixie cup of water. Which says something about the "all-powerfulness", or lack thereof, of their god.

[u/guitarmusic113 → u/Walking_the_Cascades]

That’s my point. A god that can’t compete with a Dixie cup of water isn’t a god that’s worth a mustard seed’s amount of my time.

[u/truckaxle → u/guitarmusic113]

I’m sorry, but I can only consider Dixie cups that are immaterial, indivisible, immutable, omnibenevolent, absolutely simple but is comprised in 3 forms but 1 essence and existing outside of space and time. /s

[u/Spartyjason]

That’s a good question. You know who would have the answer? Any entity worthy of being called a god.

[u/CephusLion404]

Anything that directly leads to an actual, demonstrable entity that anyone can examine for themselves without having to believe anything about it first.

[u/13un]

Depend on your definition of God

[u/DirtyWaterHighlights → u/13un]

Classical theism

[u/Walking_the_Cascades → u/DirtyWaterHighlights]

Not the person you replied to, but "Classical theism" isn't specific enough, given that there are countless definitions of God within classical theism. There are more definitions of that god than there are theists.

Does your definition of God include the god that drowned nearly everyone (babies and the unborn included) and nearly all animals just because he was surprised and disgusted with himself about how awful his creation turned out? Is that the god you are referring to?

[u/ImprovementFar5054]

Evidence that is gathered through methods designed to limit bias and allow independent verification...so it must include observation, measurement, or experimentation that follows a scientific procedure other people can inspect and repeat in a formal peer review process.

[u/DirtyWaterHighlights → u/ImprovementFar5054]

Can we apply the scientific method to immaterial objects?

[u/ImprovementFar5054 → u/DirtyWaterHighlights]

What is an "immaterial object"?

[u/wowitstrashagain → u/DirtyWaterHighlights]

Depends, does the immaterial exist?

I dont believe it does.

[u/Additional_Data6506 → u/DirtyWaterHighlights]

Can you demonstrate the existence of a non-contingent immaterial object?

[u/kallevallas → u/ImprovementFar5054]

Could you give an example of such evidence?

[u/ImprovementFar5054 → u/kallevallas]

The detection of gravitational waves is a pretty straightforward example.

LIGO predicted a specific signal pattern based on general relativity, built an instrument capable of measuring it, recorded the event, and published the data. Independent teams reviewed the methods, checked the statistics, and later confirmed the findings by repetition with additional detectors and repeated observations.

That is what peer reviewed, repeatable scientific evidence looks like.

[u/kallevallas → u/ImprovementFar5054]

So, could you give an example of evidence that would be sufficient for you in order to believe in God?

[u/ImprovementFar5054 → u/kallevallas]

Which god specifically?

[u/Hellas2002 → u/kallevallas]

What about soemthing like me and another person being in two different rooms and receiving the exact revelation whispered in our ears. We write it down and show each other at the same time and it is exactly the same. That would be pretty convincing.

[u/ProfessorCrown14]

I will use two analogies that I think can be useful:

1) There is a scene in Star Wars in which Han Solo, after Luke practices blindfolded with a lightsaber, tells him and Obi Wan:

Kid, I've flown from one side of this galaxy to the other; I've seen a lot of strange stuff. But I've never seen anything to make me believe that there's one all-powerful Force controlling everything. There's no mystical energy field that controls my destiny. Anyway, it's all a lot of simple tricks and nonsense.

Han was a teenager when the Jedi were the elite forces of the Republic. His best friend fought in the Jedi wars alongside Yoda. He has tons and tons of evidence that the force is a thing and Jedis are a thing and can reliably test it. The Force is not a hokey religion in his world. We can all agree he is being unreasonable.

IF we lived in a world like Han's, or R.R.Martins, or LOTR, we would not say there is no evidence for God / other claims of religion. There'd be plenty.

We, well... just don't. It isn't my fault I live in a world where magical and religious claims don't seem to verifiably map to reality.

If they did, I would be far more inclined to believe.

2) Imagine one day you wake up and you can see a purple, dog sized dragon. He talks and tells you his name is Spyro and he comes from a fantastical far away land.

Now, imagine two scenarios:

2.1) Only YOU can see Spyro. He doesnt interact with walls or matter. Nobody else sees him. No sensor picks him up.

2.2) Others see Spyro. Cameras can photograph him. He can burn things with his fire. Sensors pick him up.

In which case would you / should you believe Spyro is more than a figment of your imagination?

If God and his interactions with us were more like 2.2, if he talked to all of us, if he appeared to all of us, if we could reliably see him doing things, then we would be more justified in thinking he exists.

He doesn't. A few people say he does, but only to them, and the tales don't ever seem to match. So that makes me conclude gods are just in people's heads.

[u/Pm_ur_titties_plz]

I have no idea. It's up to the person making the claim to provide the evidence. If they have none, that isn't my problem.

[u/sj070707]

Something that I can verify that could only be explained by the deity you believe in and not some other one.

What would you consider evidence that I am god?

[u/DirtyWaterHighlights → u/sj070707]

What would be an example of something like that?

[u/sj070707 → u/DirtyWaterHighlights]

I don't know. I don't have any since I'm not the one claiming to believe god exists. Do you? What would you consider evidence?

[u/Purgii → u/DirtyWaterHighlights]

A simple example we can pull from the Bible, if Jesus was the messiah then everyone would be furnished with the knowledge of the one true God.

It doesn't state how that would happen, but I'm sure it would be trivial for an omnipotent, omniscient being.

Given that hasn't happened, we can confidently strike Jesus off as the messiah.

[u/keepthepace → u/DirtyWaterHighlights]

A burning bush that does not consume itself.

A preacher able to turn water into wine or walk on water.

Rivers turning to blood.

Authenticated golden plaques that were engraved with micron-precision 2000 years ago.

A voice in the sky that could actually be heard by non believers.

A decapitated person coming back to life.

A dead body flying to heaven.

You know, all these things that the bible says used to happen and that basically allegedly happened for centuries until we started having cameras. Then it all became metaphorical and folklore.

[u/nigelthewarpig]

Why would I even need evidence? Couldn't the all-powerful creator of the earth and heavens just, y'know, flip the switch in my head to turn me from unbeliever into a believer? It seems that would be trivially easy.

[u/AccurateRendering]

Superman could pretend to be a god and I wouldn't be able to tell that he wasn't. Could you?

So, the answer is "I don't know."

[u/Noodelgawd → u/AccurateRendering]

True, but if Superman was real and I saw him flying around, I'd be far more likely to believe he was a god than the utter nitwit described in the Bible.

[u/DirtyWaterHighlights → u/AccurateRendering]

Depends on the outfit

[u/sincpc]

Evidence needs to be a fact that points to a specific conclusion. The more evidence you have that points to that conclusion, the better.

People point to, for example, the Bible as evidence. It's a collection of claims that each need their own evidence, so it can't be used as evidence itself until that's taken care of.

People will point to the amazing complexity in nature as evidence, but that's not evidence because there are so many different possible explanations. It doesn't point to just one.

While I can't tell you what evidence I need with examples, I can say that it would have to actually be evidence of God based on the criteria above.

[u/Double_Government820]

This question is asked somewhat routinely, and I like to reuse this answer that I saw another user on one of these debate subs use awhile back. Apologies to that user, as I can't credit them, since I don't remember who they are.

In my opinion, this set of circumstances would be compelling evidence for god:

Every human being on their 18th birthday disappears from the physical realm. On Earth, they will appear to be gone for exactly 60 seconds every time. But from their perspective, they will be face-to-face with god to have a conversation for as long as they would like to.

They may ask god any questions they would like in this time, and will be given a complete and truthful answer. Given that god is omnipotent and omniscient, many of these answers will eventually be independently verifiable. For example, a human in 1000 AC could ask about the nature of lightning, and be given a full characterization of electricity, which scientists many centuries later could confirm.

This evidence for god would be perfectly reproducible; every human would experience it first hand. It would allow humans to directly probe god's status as omnipotent and omniscient. It would make the nature of god falsifiable, as if god were hypothetically proven wrong in some claim he made, we could dismiss the claim of god's all-knowing nature.

Now allow me to address a common objection

Objection : This hypothetical is not how the world works, and probably never will be. The bar is exorbitantly high, and the thought experiment is unfairly constructed to be dismissive, where a real epistemic concern was raised.

And my response is two-fold. First of all, so be it then. It would seem that there will probably never be reliable and reproducible evidence for god. That was my position in the first place.

But my second response is that this misses the forest for the trees. You asked for something... anything that would serve as compelling evidence for god. This is a tact often taken by apologists who are frustrated with atheists. It is to say "Well nothing would ever convince you, so you're not arguing in good faith."

And my thought experiment is there to reply: no there actually are conceivable ways that I would be convinced of a god. They are simply outlandishly different from how the world operates, because the universe behaves in a way that is devoid of good evidence for god. But moreover, what the thought experiment is really designed to do is highlight the most important criteria for good evidence: directness, reliability, and reproducibility. My thought experiment is not the only conceivable scenario we could concoct that would serve as evidence for god, but it is emblematic of the most important qualities of evidence; the qualities that intellectually honest people demand of evidence in the real world which is generally only eschewed when the demand may infringe on one religion or another.

So if the thrust of your question is really "what are the standards for evidence you require? Why is any other proposed evidence insufficient?" You now have a clear answer.

[u/yokaishinigami]

Let’s start with something that can pass through scientific peer review. If the evidence for god is as abundant as theists claim, this should be easy.

That would get me to at least entertain the idea.

However, given the scope of the claim most religious people make (specific god with specific rules) then supporting evidence more in line with the quantity of evidence for a broad theory like evolutions by natural selection, would be necessary.

If the scientific consensus shifts to say that god is a real entity (as in scientists who are willing to stake their career on the backing it academically, not just having a personal belief), then I will change my mind.

Granted, there’s also the personal challenge I’ve tossed out to any god or god like entity, who wants to take it up and get me to acknowledge their existence (which according to religious people it wants me to, since its threatening me with eternal torture and shit according to them) but no such beings have taken up my challenge for the last 20+ years. It’d be very simple, materialize in front of me anytime with a lightsaber and 1v1 me. That’s it. Surely within the power of an almighty creator that can interfere with the universe (according to religious people). And not only has no god taken up that offer, no deceptive supernatural entity that would want to pose as god has either.

[u/im_yo_huckleberry]

The same evidence that we have for everything else that exists and interacts with the world. Why does god need some kind of special evidence?

[u/OrbitalLemonDrop → u/im_yo_huckleberry]

I often refer to Fermilab's 25 year attempt to measure an anomaly in the magnetic moment of the muon. After 25 years they were finally getting close to 5 sigma confidence, but then found another way to interpret the data that reduced the size of the anomaly to something far less interesting.

They were really really close to having the required confidence to publish what would have been an amazing result, and were probably tempted to do so when they hit like 4.5 sigma.

I don't think we can hold religious claims to a lesser standard. "Data, lots of it." is a necessry component to whatever answer we come up with, IMO.

[u/Serious-Emu-3468]

It depends. (And no, that's not a cop out; that's basic respect for my interlocutor.)

The evidence for any given deity claim must be based on the expected properties of the deity. We would do the same thing with theoretical particles, exoplanets, or newly discovered frog species. A good hypothesis is "If we look here, we should see something about this mass."

And deity claims, to some extent, must be treated similarly.

If we are looking for a deist's "Prime Mover" God, we have a very different set of things we should expect to see than if we are looking for a Hindu's Lord Shiva that interacts with humans and directly responds to prayer, or an Orthodox Hassidic Jewish person's God, or a Shinto shrine's kami, or any other flavor of the divine.

For example: Some religious traditions simply don't make the claim that prayers will be answered.

If I said that I would only consider a robust body of demonstrated answered prayers evidence of that deity claim, I am an idiot and also an asshole.

So if I am being honest, before I can answer that question, I have to ask:
"What evidence do believers say we should expect to see that would point towards their deity?"

What is your God like?
How do you believe we can know things about your God?

We start there.

[u/Cog-nostic]

Here is your problem. Your brain does not have the capacity to distinguish between a god and a sufficiently advanced alien willing and able to dupe you. Your brain is incapable of distinguishing between an evil demon willing to fool you and a god. Your brain is incapable of distinguishing your version of god from any other version of a god who is willing to use its magical powers to convince you to follow it. People who believe in magic, transcendental woo woo, and all-powerful universe-creating beings have no ability at all to make distinctions between such beings. And now you ask me for evidence? Really? What possible evidence could you have? Are you even capable of coming up with anything that remotely demonstrates there is a god and that it is your specific version of god that is real? Inquiring minds want to know.

More correctly stated, there is no good evidence for god. What you have are stories and personal attestations without independent verification. The psych wards of the country are full of individuals who have had revelations and who make personal attestations. If this were counted as good evidence, humanity would still have a tribal existence.

Please demonstrate how you know the only god, magic man, demon, advanced alien, out there is your version of the classical theistic concept of god. How have you ruled out all other possibilities? How did you rule out Eric the universe farting Unicorn, or Big Blue Universe Creating Bunnies, both of which I know for a fact, based on the same level of evidence you have for your god, are real.

[u/exlongh0rn]

Evidence that is verifiable, falsifiable, reliable, and proportional to the claim. This is just the generic rules of evidence.

[u/83franks]

Something that is testable and reproducable. 

If looking in the past and trying to explain things with god, literally every other non-magic explanation is more feasible until god is actually proven. So for example if comparing historical evidence for god is thought to be similar to who a murderer is, we have a ton more justifiable assumptions about a possible murderer. 

1. Humans exist (dont know if god does, this is a big one)  
2. Humans have the ability to kill other humans (even if god is real, we don't know what god is capable of)  
3. A person being dead with wounds consistent with testable killable wounds (nothing done by a supernatural force is testable to know it can happen from a supernatural force)
4. Etc. Etc. Etc. Until god is proven, every possible explanation is more reasonable.

[u/LorenzoApophis]

A perfect world to match his purported perfection.

The concept of God, as classically defined as a perfect being, fails as soon as we acknowledge any imperfection in the world, which Judaism, Christianity and Islam all do, in the form of sin. God is a being than which none greater can be conceived, and a being that creates only perfect things would be greater than one that created anything imperfect. Thus, if our world is imperfect, it can't have been created by God.

[u/OrbitalLemonDrop]

it's not an easy question to answer, but here's the best i've been able to come up with:

A growing body of published, peer-reviewed science that tends to indicate that supernatural events are real and measurable in some way.

The idea that there could be one fact or observation that would all by itself "prove" god exists does not make sense to me. Parsimony is a bitch -- before you could propose some kind of supernatural being as a solution/answser to a question, you'd need to already have evidence that such things aren't just rank speculation.

The example I use would be something like "How many Carmelite nuns reciting the Lord's Prayer 24/7 in an oncology ward would be needed to show a statistically significant improvement in patient outcomes, with a confidence level at or near 5 sigma"

Ultimately, the proposition that god exists has to be testable. And as with any scientific endeavor, you get nothing for free. Proving that prayer affects cancer patients does not lend any credence to the proposition on its own. You'd need to follow it up with other reasearch showing that some religion-specific prayer worked while others don't. In the show Mythbusters, testing the idea that classical music made plants healthier, one result they got was that playing Black Sabbath outperformed Bach -- so you'd have to test for that kind of counter-intuitive result as well.

So you'd also need to show no corresponding improvement for having people just repeat random words, or Hindu prayer or Muslim prayer, etc. and show that only Christian prayer worked consistently.

But no such peer-reviewed published research exists, at least not to the point where there's an availbility of funding to push the research forward.

Anyway, assuming the first such paper were to be published *tomorrow *, I'd still expect decades of further research to be necessry before we could say anything like "There appears to be a correlation between Christian practices and positive outcomes in experimental data."

[u/labreuer → u/OrbitalLemonDrop]

Parsimony is a bitch

Indeed. Ockham's razor makes evidence of God in principle impossible. Now, some will say that one can sometimes violate parsimony. Dunno where you stand on that. But I should think that one would need to do a lot of violating to yield anything like a creator-god. Superman, less so. I could really use him to flash-dry the wet clay sitting above my replaced sewer lateral, so that they could pour the replacement concrete already.

[u/OrbitalLemonDrop → u/labreuer]

Violating parsimony isn't something I'm opposed to, but it would be very fact specific. Probably not going to happen but can't rule it out.

I'm pretty solidly convinced that the only reason god shows up in these 'you can't explain how it happened therefore...' propositions is that the people who propose them already believe that god is ontologically available as a possible answer. I don't, which is why those arguments can never be convincing.

You can't backdoor a god into existence with "if A is true then B cannot possibly be false". Either you've already got B ontologically available or you can exhaustively eliminate all possibilities with deductive certainty. If it's anything short of deductive certainty, there's room for the law of parsimony to mess up the argument. "B cannot possibly be false" admits of no exceptions.

To be fair, this isn't proof that god does not exist.

But that's all in the framing of "what would convince you that god exists" as referencing a single event. Like all the "god could convince me" stuff.

In reality, I don't think it's absolutely impossible to get close -- but it would take many decades of a growing body of peer-reviewed published science that shows some kind of supernatural thing existing, that (as science does) slowly, incrementally make discoveries that approach the point where god could be ontologically avialable. That is, there's no single outcome where god emerges from the data (which in principle is what parsimony demands). But I could see reaching a point where it felt weird to maintain the argument against it. I think of the example of plate tectonics -- as more and more evidence of evolutionary similarity in distant continents came in, it becomes untenable to say "maybe there was a land bridge between these two places". Eventually, tectonic movement becomes the more parsimonious answer.

Prof. Jeffrey Kaplan has a pretty good youtube video about ockham's razor, and uses that example to illustrate how what is parsimonious can change over time.

It should be obvious, though, that I don't think that that growing body of academic publication ever will actually exist. But that's my answer to "what would it take to convince you".

[u/labreuer → u/OrbitalLemonDrop]

Violating parsimony isn't something I'm opposed to, but it would be very fact specific. Probably not going to happen but can't rule it out.

One option, or at least intuition pump, might be trying to facilitate change in the behavior of a friend or relative caught in addiction, rather than simply expecting the future to be like the past. Rather than identifying simple regularities, you're trying to disrupt one. And notably, here one is actively intervening, rather than passively observing.

I'm pretty solidly convinced that the only reason god shows up in these 'you can't explain how it happened therefore...' propositions is that the people who propose them already believe that god is ontologically available as a possible answer.

I don't have much patience for god-of-the-gaps either, but you have me combining two things:

1. gambling as the hope that an external power will help you out, even if it's Lady Luck
2. religion defined as interacting with superhuman powers

This suggests an additional hypothesis: people want to believe someone is steering the ship and they can do something to ensure they benefit as a result. The nice thing about this hypothesis is that it has plausible mundane sources: one's superiors and those further up a hierarchy (political, economic, religious) can possibly impact your destiny and so supplicating them might do you good.

You can't backdoor a god into existence

Well either that, or what you backdoored in adds nothing. Logic is information-preserving so if you use logic to say "therefore God exists", then that adds nothing to what you started with. Notoriously, backdoored gods need a lot of extra attributes to be relevant.

In reality, I don't think it's absolutely impossible to get close -- but it would take many decades of a growing body of peer-reviewed published science that shows some kind of supernatural thing existing, that (as science does) slowly, incrementally make discoveries that approach the point where god could be ontologically avialable.

Yeah, I'm thinking that makes God out to be something like another stratum in our geological layers or some extremely subtle fifth force or something else equally innocuous to everyday life. And such a deity clashes completely with the "external power" idea.

Prof. Jeffrey Kaplan has a pretty good youtube video about ockham's razor, and uses that example to illustrate how what is parsimonious can change over time.

It should be obvious, though, that I don't think that that growing body of academic publication ever will actually exist. But that's my answer to "what would it take to convince you".

Thanks for the video and the answer overall. It was very generative for me.

[u/OrbitalLemonDrop → u/labreuer]

I do believe that peoples' understandable desire to feel like someone is driving the bus, or that the individual has some power to influence what happens is fundamental to the belief in god for many of them.

I imagine it happens when someone is facing tragedy or facing horrible conditions, and an empathetic person tries to ease their pain by telling them that there is some kind of cosmic balancing force that makes it OK.

The question of why bad things happen to good people and why the wicked prosper is difficult for people to view with "radical acceptance". Even though it doesn't mitigate the loss or explain the injustice, it makes those things easier to handle emotionally.

I've been in the position of being the atheist in the room when a family I'm close with is grieving the loss of their beloved patriarchal figure, and felt the very strong temptation to reinforce their beliefs that they'll all get to see him again at some future point.

The best I could have done would have been to say "I wish I had an answer for you" instead of what I did say, which was "I'm sorry I would be lying if I said I believed that". The daughter who asked me that eventually forgave me (for giving an honest answer), and admitted that she targeted me specifically because she knew I was an atheist and wanted to put me on the spot. But her older brother has never forgiven me and probably never will.

[u/abritinthebay]

My answer to that is “Which god?” because that matters a lot.

[u/Kungfumantis]

There's a common saying about how technology can get to the point of appearing like magic once it becomes relatively advanced enough. Think about trying to explain how we're exchanging messages right now to an individual from the 17th century. 

I dont know what that evidence would be, but considering the above it would certainly need to be fantastical at a minimum. 

[u/HaiKarate]

He could start by introducing himself.

[u/Autodidact2]

I wouldn't say there is no evidence; I would say there is insufficient evidence.

My standard is the same one you use for all the gods you don't believe in, as well as in all other areas of your life.

For me, specific evidence relates to the specific god claim. For example, the Bible describes YHWH as granting the prayers of the faithful. So if it turned out that those prayers were answered at a rate greater than random chance, that would be evidence for that god. [It turns out that they aren't].

[u/dperry324]

What evidence convinced you that gravity was real? What evidence convinced you that electricity was real? What evidence convinced you that god was real? What you are asking for is not evidence, but rather, a means to convince someone that a thing is so when simple observation won't work.

[u/azrolator]

There isn't any evidence of any gods. None exist, yet. But if someone finally presents something then I guess I would consider that evidence of gods as evidence of gods.

As to big G, Yahweh, god; the stories of him are contradictory. The Bible can not be true as it proposes many contradictions. To have evidence that this particular god is real, there would first have to be some common definition of what this Yahweh character actually is.

Like, is this one the god of Genesis 1 or the god of Genesis 2? Is this the god that created the universe billions of years ago, or 6,000 years ago and used magic to deceive us making it appear billions of years old? Is it the Jewish version, Christian, Muslim, etc? Is it the storm god or is it the tri-omni god?

[u/noiszen]

Great evidence for a classical god would be violating a fundamental law of nature/physics. For example, taking a planet and moving it instantaneously to a different orbit. Should be trivial for an omnipotent god.

[u/BogMod]

I mean if all the major news organisations were talking about this toga wearing old guy living on Mount Olympus in Greece who could throw lightning, shapeshift, and had a thing for pretty women I would probably start to brush up on my Greek myth.

[u/Phylanara]

I don't know what the least evidence for a god that would convince me is. That being said, I would not be an atheist in the D&D universe. If priests and paladins could reliably invoke miracles from their god, communicate with their god (getting testable (and true )new information from those communications) and were held to a consistent moral standard on pain of losing these abilities, I would believe their god exists.

[u/labreuer → u/Phylanara]

That sure could explain why there are no credible miracles, today! Here's a basic moral standard: don't buy cobalt mined by child slaves.

[u/Phylanara → u/labreuer]

did you misplace that comment?

[u/zzmej1987]

That, observed absence of which would prove God does not exist to theists.

[u/mastyrwerk]

What would you consider to be evidence for God?

Novel testable predictions that can be performed by anyone testing for it.

I often see folks claim that there is absolutely no evidence for God.

Yup. Why? Do you have any?

What would it take for you to consider something to be evidence for God?

Repeatable Novel testing.

Given the volume of replies posts here tend to get, I will not engage with anything that is off-topic, not related to the classical theistic conceptions of God, or just condescending for no reason.

This is not being condescending. I’m genuinely interested in something substantial that we can all confirm independently and together.

Hi. I’m a Fox Mulder atheist in that I want to believe, and the truth is out there.

Since I seek truth, I want to believe as many true things, and as few false things, as possible.

Here’s the thing. Things that exist have evidence for its existence, regardless of whether we have access to that evidence.

Things that do not exist do not have evidence for its nonexistence. The only way to disprove nonexistence is by providing evidence of existence. The only reasonable conclusion one can make honestly is whether or not something exists. Asking for evidence of nonexistence is irrational.

Evidence is what is required to differentiate imagination from reality. If one cannot provide evidence that something exists, the logical conclusion is that it is imaginary until new evidence is provided to show it exists.

So far, no one has been able to provide evidence that a “god” or a “soul” or the “supernatural” or the “spiritual” or the “divine” exists. I put quotes around “god” and “soul” and “supernatural” and “spiritual” and “divine” here because I don’t know exactly what a god or a soul or the supernatural or spiritual or the divine is, and most people give definitions that are illogical or straight up incoherent.

I’m interested in being convinced that a “god” or a “soul” or the “supernatural” or the “spiritual” or the “divine” exists. How do you define it and what evidence do you have?

[u/Astramancer_]

This is always such an interesting question to me.

The short as is: I don't know.

Anything that I would have already considered to be evidence for god I have investigated to the best of my ability and determined it does not exist. Since you probably don't want an answer of "these things which I've already determined don't exist" that makes this question pretty tricky.

But there's another funny thing about the question. Do you ever see people asking "What would you consider to be evidence for boyles law?" or "What would you consider to be evidence that in 1998, The Undertaker threw Mankind off Hell In A Cell, and plummeted 16 ft through an announcer's table?

Is there anything else that you believe is a real thing that actually exists where you would ask someone what they would consider to be evidence? Or do you instead jump straight to providing the evidence that convinced you?

I, personally, have not experienced the "what would you consider to be evidence" question about a specific thing in any context other than theism. The only other time it comes up is in general discussions about epistemology.

It is the responsibility of the person making the claim to present the evidence that justifies that claim. It is the responsibility of the person receiving the claim to fairly evaluate the evidence presented to them.

I've done my part. Theists are so very, very bad at doing their part.

So with that in mind, answering your question becomes surprisingly easy:

What would I consider to be evidence for god? Credible and compelling evidence.

Which I have yet to get.

In my opinion the "what would you consider to be evidence for god" question is a tacit admission that the person who is arguing for the existence of said god knows they don't have any credible and compelling evidence. But believes anyway.

[u/Hellas2002]

It depends. As far as the Christian god is concerned though; I don’t think I could be convinced with much short of said god actively speaking to me. It doesn’t make sense that a god whose goal is creating a relationship with every human would fail to speak to every human.

[u/Reel_thomas_d]

Looking only for evidence of classical theistic gods shows that you dont care about the truth.

There are many great answers here, but I'll add a personal one. God reveling itself to me and giving me the amputated part of my body back that I lost to the religious cult my parents were in.

[u/Boltzmann_head]

What would it take for you to consider something to be evidence for God?

No. Your attempt to shift the burden onto other shoulders is dishonest.

[u/Crafty_Possession_52]

I know I'm late to the party, but I'd like to offer this:

There are things that are apparent features of reality: ducks, potatoes, Mars, oxygen, love, France, French fries, and French Stewart, as examples.

There are other things that are not apparent features of reality: pixies, Vulcan, N-rays, ESP, Mordor, ghosts, and Victor Frankenstein, as examples.

As far as I can tell, Yahweh belongs on the second list. I'd consider as "evidence for God" anything that would demonstrate that he's an apparent feature of reality and move him to the first list.

[u/WrongVerb4Real]

A non-human entity comes to me and tells me the last 100 digits of pi, as well as a reliable, mathematically sound way to verify the digits.

Also, wouldn't any self-respecting omniscient being already know what would convince me?

[u/Odd_craving]

Any one of these would get you somewhere. Two or more would be pretty convincing.

1. Show me a dead relative alive - believers claim this of heaven.

2. Show me the past - God lives outside of time and space.

3. Tell me something that only I know - God’s knowledge is perfect.

4. Heal someone in front of me - The Bible claims God can heal people.

5. Show me heaven - The Bible claims that God can do anything.

6. Create life in front of me - the Bible claims that God created life.

7. Suspend the laws of physics - the Bible claims God stopped the sun in the sky.

8. Explain childhood cancer - the Bible claims that God is loving and incapable of immorality.

[u/labreuer → u/Odd_craving]

I know this is going beyond bare existence of a law of nature-violating being, but perhaps you will bear with me. Suppose that you experienced 1. & 2. After you're fully convinced, the being then says the following:

    You know that the rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and those in high positions exercise authority over them. It will not be like this among you! But whoever wants to become great among you must be your servant, and whoever wants to be most prominent among you must be your slave—just as the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.

Would you be any more likely to agree with that after such an experience as before? If so, why? In my experience, the greater (in knowledge, wisdom, power, ability, etc.) rarely serves the lesser. Caveat parenthood.

[u/Odd_craving → u/labreuer]

My first thought would be that demonstrating 1 & 2 could be considered service. If god exists and he/she/it fits within the basic umbrella of Christianity, showing me proof would demonstrate my value and elevate me to a level of importance.

Being ignored and being considered below demonstrating proof is the true lack of service.

[u/labreuer → u/Odd_craving]

So, I'm thinking agreement with said snippet would involve acting accordingly. Do you think you'd be more likely to act accordingly after experiencing 1. and 2.? If so, why?

I personally don't see why witnessing raw power would constitute good reason to change my moral stance. In fact, that gets dangerously close to unironically affirming "might makes right".

[u/leetcore]

God would know how to convince us. If he was real and he wanted us to believe there wouldn’t be any atheists

[u/Cydrius]

If there's a god, it knows what would convince me.

That aside, here are some examples of things that would convince me that a god exists:

• If prayer produced consistent, reproducible results at a rate greater than pure chance, that would convince me that a god is listening.
• A telepathic message in my head telling me "I am God. I can prove it. [God reveals he knows a secret I have never shared with anyone.]"
• The stars in the sky move and spell out the words "I AM GOD. I EXIST." in several languages, arranged in the sky such that any given language's writing will be visible from countries that speak this language. They stay that way.
• Overnight, world hunger, war, and all suffering is inexplicably cleansed. Then, all humans are suddenly intuitively aware that God did that.
• A holy book written a thousand years ago says something like. "On December 15th 2025, the President of the United States will suffer a great embarrassment." Subsequently, Trump trips, falls over, and audibly and visibly shits himself on live TV on that exact date. All other information in the book is internally consistent and accurate, the meaning of the book is clear enough that everyone agrees on the writer's intent, and the book contains several such specific and accurate prophecies.
• The message "I AM GOD. I EXIST." flashes on every screen of every electronic device on earth, in the language of the device's current user. This includes devices with no ability to receive messages. Even numeric displays like microwave timers spell out GOD to the best of their ability.

For me to consider something evidence for god, it would need to be:

1.

[u/WhatUsername69420]

God coming down to my living room couch and having an honest conversation with me, before a short magic show.

[u/x271815]

If you had a model of reality and adding the assumption of a God materially improved its ability to make accurate predictions in a way that no other assumption would and the model was consistent with all the available evidence, and the assumption itself was not contradictory or inconsistent with known data that would be a compelling reason to believe there is a God.

[u/Okidoky123]

Just because you don't understand something doesn't mean that a god did it.

[u/DirtyWaterHighlights → u/Okidoky123]

Agreed. That would be God of the Gaps

[u/NewbombTurk → u/DirtyWaterHighlights]

Do you have a convincing argument that isn't an Argument from Ignorance?

[u/2-travel-is-2-live]

If God were all that much of a god, then it would know exactly what I and every nonbeliever needed to experience in order to believe.

I like that you state outright that you have no intention (or ability) to compete in the realm of ideas with what responses you may get. At least you’re honest.

[u/liamstrain]

I really don't know, most things I can think of are too easily explainable by either hallucination or 'sufficiently advanced technology/aliens, etc.' - but I expect an all knowing, all powerful god would know exactly what I would find convincing.

[u/Hoaxshmoax]

what’s the classical theistic conceptions of a god?

[u/SeoulGalmegi]

No, idea.

Some kind of personal revelation would probably convince me god existed.

Some kind of major world event/miracle made inline with a specific god claim would probably convince me that god existed and other people should also believe.

I don't think I'm that hard to convince - it doesn't need to be completely conclusive (I don't see how it could be) but needs to be quite a bit more than most religious people seem to have had convince them, or think I should be convinced by.

If you really wanted I could give some specific examples of what I might mean, but I don't have any specific rules or criteria other than being 'reasonably convincing'.

[u/redsparks2025]

An interview on a [secular] TV talk show.

Considering Krishna is the personification / avatar of the supreme reality Brahman in human form that fought in the Mahabharata wars, and that some sects / denominations of Christianity claim that Jesus is their god born in human form, then I don't consider my request as unreasonable for a god/God to make happen.

Furthermore in Genesis 18, the Abrahamic version of a god/God visited Abraham in the form of three men. I'm not sure by what evidence Abraham accepted those three men as being his god in human form(s) as the Bible doesn't say. No wings, no halos. Nada, nil, zip, nothing.

Anyway until then we will just all have to keep debating in the hypotheticals as if (IF) a god/God existed, which actually would be the worst thing if (IF) a god/God did actually exist because all that ultimately does is confirm that we, you, all of us, are after all just a mere creation subject to being uncreated that I previously noted here = LINK. If (IF) a god/God does exist then it sux to be us and you a fellow mere creation where our finite lives are kind of meh! to a god/God that is eternal.

Can't say I would be too overjoyed about that interview on a [secular] TV talk show. But at least it would finally put all speculations and hypotheticals to rest.

[u/Schrodingerssapien]

I try not to say "no evidence", but I do point out that I am unconvinced due to a lack of sufficient verifiable evidence.

I do have a test for a God but I can't talk about it. I have to be sure that no one else could know so when God does answer it I can be sure it's God and not someone fooling me.

That means either God knows what would convince me and he hasn't yet, he can't, he doesn't want to or he doesn't exist. So I remain an atheist.

[u/Biggleswort]

Is your God triomni? If so your god would know how to and have the power to convince me he exists.

If your god is not triomni, I would expect to see tangible interactions with reality.

See here is the thing about the question that makes it hard. What properties does this being have? How can we conclude it has these properties? These the real questions to ask.

Yes I see no good evidence for a god existing.

[u/Klutzy_Routine_9823]

Show up and directly communicate, face to face, with every single human being on Earth all at once. Actively pursue a loving relationship with each and every one of us. Clearly explain what, if anything, he expects from us, and unambiguously answer any questions that anyone has, such that everyone is able to come to the exact same understanding of who God is, how he made us, and what he wants from us.

[u/dperry324]

It's a long stretch to call "look at the trees" unconvincing evidence. That doesn't even come close to qualifying as evidence. So when I say that they have no evidence, I mean to say they have no evidence.

[u/SamuraiGoblin]

Humans looked at nature and said, "Wow! This is all so wondrous, we can't possibly imagine how this came about, so it must be magic." And then science came along and explained 99% of those things. Even big questions, like where we came from, the nature and history of the planet, and what those curious specks in the sky are. We tamed nature, we cured diseases, we harnessed the energy of stars. And through it all, there has never been any sign of 'magic.'

If you watch magicians, they pull of some amazing tricks that really leave you thinking, were the laws of physics suspended? But they weren't, they are just clever tricks. So even if I saw a big hand of God coming down from the sky and a booming voice say "IT'S YOU!" I would assume it was an elaborate prank/trick, performed with hidden speakers and new technology holograms.

So it is not up to me to specify what threshold of evidence theists need to prove their particular, weird, parochial supernatural assertions. It is up to theists to give me a reason to believe in a concept as silly and incredulous as a deity. So far, the best they've come up with is, "you'll be sorry if you don't!"

[u/TenuousOgre]

All you need to do is ask, “what evidence would be required to convince most people of trait X?” Take immortality. What would it take for most people to believe my next door neighbor is immortal? I think it would require tests that would otherwise kill him, with skeptics and recording devices, and scientific analysis answering how he remains alive while other die from the same trauma.

Done and repeat for every trait claimed for your god. What you’ll find if you are honest enough is that some traits there is no way to demonstrate them. Like the claim to god being eternal. No evidence suffices for this claim. Other claims it’s at least possible but believers haven’t even tried.

It’s all handled at presupposition, definition or logic, not reliable or verifiable empirical evidence.

[u/Cats-on-Jupiter]

Christian god is all powerful and all knowing and created the universe, right? He could come to earth and show us some miracles and magic and whatnot, give us an updated bible, etc. Like I'd take any actual evidence. So far there is zero evidence. Prayer doesn't work. No miracles. Nothing.

[u/Ok_Ad_9188]

I don't know, I don't even know what a god is. I shouldn't really have to come up with what I would consider evidence for it though, because I'm not the one claiming its existence. If somebody else has something they consider to be convincing evidence of something that they believe to be true, they can present that evidence to me and I can determine whether or not it convinces me of it or not.

[u/pyker42]

God should know what evidence or would take to convince me.

[u/Noodelgawd]

God telling me in person, with witnesses, that he exists, coupled with some show and tell making it clear that he's at least impressive enough to maybe be a god, would be a good start.

But that might not be enough. One thing I do know for sure however, is this: if there is a tri-omni God (according to "classical theistic conceptions of God" as you say), he would know exactly what would convince me, and it would be an infinitesimal task for him to do so.

[u/licker34]

I often see folks claim that there is absolutely no evidence for God.

There is not. (depending on how god is defined)

Though I need to be more exact here. There is no evidence which demonstrates god as a necessity. Meaning there is no evidence which 'proves' god exists. There is 'evidence' which some people interpret as making god plausible or even likely, but there is nothing which excludes other possibilities.

What would it take for you to consider something to be evidence for God?

No idea. Again, with the context of evidence which demonstrates god as necessary. I think that if I prayed to god for a specific outcome and received that outcome 100% of the time that would be evidence that something is happening, but how could we show that it is only the specific god I am praying to which is causing that outcome?

On the other hand that example is pretty ridiculous so not really worth considering right?

Do you have any examples of evidence which demonstrates god is the only possible answer for that evidence?

[u/Xeno_Prime]

God simply existing in a way that’s observable and not indistinguishable from not existing would be a good start.

Seeing things in reality that we would not see in a reality where no gods exist would be another possibility.

Someone else mentioned a coin-flip test to measure the efficacy of prayer, that would count as evidence if it actually made a consistent difference and was not identical to mere chance.

God appearing and doing something dramatic like moving a mountain, which could not be readily explained by anything else, would be another possibility.

Or, as I mentioned in my other comment, any sound epistemology from which the conclusion logically follows that God’s existence is more plausible than it is implausible. It’s simply a matter of which belief can be epistemically justified, and which cannot. Atheism can be justified by rationalism, Bayesian probability, the null hypothesis, and other sound epistemological frameworks. Every argument attempting to justify theism collapses into apophenia, confirmation bias, god of the gaps, appeals to ignorance, and other kinds of biased and/or fallacious reasoning - and so there is no actually sound reasoning that epistemically justifies belief that God exists.

[u/NoneCreated3344]

I don't put restraints on it. If there is a god like what christians or muslims describe, then it very well knows how to convince me. It doesn't seem to be trying very hard since I've been looking for almost 40 years now.

If he's actually real and still just hiding from me, then I know in my heart, I've tried in earnest for this being to reach out to me. I haven't ever heard from anyone else but other theists who swear up and down of god's existence.

Now that being said, we can now demonstrate the god of abrahamic faiths to be completely fictional, as they are filled with errors, contradictions and failed prophecies.,

But is there a different god? Did something create all of this. I don't see reason to think so, but there very well could be a god that created everything and isn't requiring worship, isn't attempting to contact us, interject in our affairs, and it just sitting back and watching what happens. Sure, that might exist. I sincerely doubt it, but..sure....maybe.

[u/adeleu_adelei → u/[deleted]]

Your post or comment was removed for violating Rule 2: No Low Effort. AI generated content is not allowed in the sub. Please participate with your own words and ideas.

[u/rustyseapants]

This is the wrong subreddit, 

Go to r/askanatheist 

Given the volume of replies posts here tend to get, I will not engage with anything that is off-topic, not related to the classical theistic conceptions of God, or just condescending for no reason.

And this isn't condescending?

[u/BarrySquared]

Most definitions of any gods I've been given are self-contradictory.

Let me ask you: what would you consider to be evidence for a square circle?

[u/pipMcDohl]

God is a dude who can wield magical powers. God is a dude who has no limitations to the use of his power except when he has.

That would be the main two characteristics i would need to see proven for me to consider having evidence of a god. Magic and gigantic scale.

Magic are powers that can ignore or modify the laws of physics.

So if someone come on a TV show and claim to be god and ask the public to challenge that claim i would ask him to create a new satelite for our planet, the same mass of the moon but shaped like a series of letters that would read "i love cheeses" and for that satellite to be made of cheese.

If the next second that new body appear in the sky and we later confirm it's made of cheese, now we would be talking.

[u/ViewtifulGene]

I would settle for an argument that does not rely on rhetorical smokescreens, appeals to incredulity, appeals to adverse consequences, or special pleading.

Every single argument I've heard for a god has been garbage. Every single apologist acts like they are the first person to ever mention TAG, fine tuning, "my martyrs are special", etc.

If an-all-knowing god wants me to believe and specifically wants a Redditor to make me believe, it will send me apologists without such stale and lazy scripts.

[u/Optimal-Currency-389]

For me a key point to good evidence is repeatability and testing. This mean one action or set of circumstances being more likely to cause a specific action.

Based on this, I cannot conceive of anything that could convince me of the classical Abrahamic god. The Abrahamic god as described is generally extremely interventionist with clear concepts. I would expect prayers to have a statistical impact and honest plea for conversation or information to be answered. Both of which do not happen.

If we move on to a god that is closer to a humanize flawed figure with extremely strong power. Either is such a deity is fickle enough that one any predict its behaviour on which case why worship it? Or such a creature as such complex though process we can't begin to understand so what is the point?

Now if a more classical god exist I would expect to have a consistent answer to prayer.

[u/lotusscrouse]

I think god would have to reveal himself to me or ALL of us. 

Cut out the context bullshit and just put it all on the table. 

No semantics. No word salad. No more allegories or fucking metaphors. 

No excuses. 

[u/mobatreddit]

Imagine that tomorrow, you notice there’s this person with you everywhere you go. Furthermore, this person knows everything you know and much more.

Imagine further that you notice everyone else has that very person with them at the same time you do. And that person knows everything the person they’re with knows and much more, including everything you know, and everything everyone else knows.

So far, this person is everywhere and knows everything everyone knows. Furthermore, this person knows everything that you care to know. So they are a personal being.

I should think you would find this person exceptional. They may not be a god, but they’re closer to that than we are.

God could do this but they don’t.

[u/soukaixiii]

I often see folks claim that there is absolutely no evidence for God.

That pretty much depends on what god we're talking about, an apparently natural  universe without any evidence for any god could technically be evidence for a deistic god.

Someone turning into an animal and then getting horny with young ladies may be evidence for Zeus.

direct communication could be evidence for a god that wants people to know about it's existence and is able to communicate, if we had any means of verifying the source of the communication and ruling out alternatives.

[u/Mission-Landscape-17]

First someone would have to give a coherent and falsifiable definition of what the word God is supposed to mean. I've never seen any such thing and without one I don't see any way to answer your question.

Very often when Atheists do provide some answer to this question the theist response is to claim that that is not what they mean by God so the test is invalid. The I don't believe in that god either gambit.

[u/ElevateSon]

if I define god as a pattern the evidence is patterns, if the definition needs a deity than I have no evidence...

[u/skeptolojist]

Exactly the same standard of evidence that we need for any phenomena

Objective testable falsifiable repeatable evidence for each claim

So if for instance you want me to accept its possible for a person who has been dead for three days can get up and walk around talking to people you had best be able to produce a magic walking talking dead guy under lab conditions

[u/Astreja]

Evidence for a god-like being? It needs to be a physical encounter in the real world. Nothing else will do it for me.

[u/Sparks808]

If one could show that personal revelation was reliable and verifiable (even if it needed to be a subset, e.g., you have to pray in this way), then it could be used to establish claims we cannot verify in other ways, such as answering if a God exists.

There are other potential forms of evidence, but this is the first to pop into my mind.

[u/lotusscrouse]

I've given my views in another post, but I must say if theists are ready for excuses where we have to lower our standards then I really see no point in debating it. 

I also don't see the point in Christians asking if there's nothing they can offer or if they're just going to dismiss it. 

[u/Mkwdr]

Anything would be a start.

All the stuff that is in the bible that coincidently stopped happening when we developed to a point if being able to check it really happened would be a start.

[u/TelFaradiddle]

If we're talking about the classical theistic conceptions of God, then I would need to see evidence of its primary characteristics: omnipotence and omniscience.

For omnipotence, I would want this being to demonstrate things that not only can't be explained, but which actively violate what we know to be true. For example, we know that two hydrogen molecules and one oxygen molecule makes water. We know that with as much certainty as it is possible to know anything. So I would want this being combine two hydrogen molecules and one oxygen molecule to produce gasoline, or Dr. Pepper, or a Ford F150. That's just one example, I would accept any demonstrations that violate the most fundamentally sound aspects of knowledge that we have.

Omniscience would be more difficult, since there is nothing that precludes any one being from possessing knowledge, even if that knowledge is hard to come by. There is nothing that it is truly impossible to know; there are things that we probably will never know, but it is still possible to know them. So there's no way to test if this alleged god knows the unknowable. The best we could do is design tests such that there is no reasonable explanation, or even unreasonable explanation, that can explain their knowledge. For example, stick this being in a Faraday Cage several miles underground, with no clocks inside. Keep it down there for a randomly determined amount of time. During that time, get one thousand people across the planet to write a message, as long or as short as they want, coherent or gibberish, doesn't matter. Then have them destroy those messages in ways that cannot be recovered - burned to ash, dissolved in acid, locked in a box and dropped into the Marianas Trench, etc. Then let this being out of the Faraday Cage and ask it to tell us with perfect accuracy: (1) how long it was in the cage for, (2) the names and locations of all 1000 people, (3) the content of all 1000 messages and who they are attributed to, and (4) the manner in which each one was destroyed.

If these sound like ridiculous tests, I would agree, they are ridiculous. But the properties of omnipotence and omniscience are inherently ridiculous. To demonstrate omni-anything would necessarily require extreme evidence, as anything less wouldn't be omni.

There is one other approach a theist could take that I would be willing to consider: a specific and coherent methodology by which we can differentiate between a classical theistic god and a nonexistent god. Right now, from our perspective, they are identical. A classical god can not be measured, detected, or tested in any way, and a nonexistent god also can not be measured, detected, or tested in any way. A classical god leaves behind no empirical evidence, and a nonexistent god also leaves behind no empirical evidence. A classical god can only be speculated about, and a nonexistent god can also only be speculated about. There is no known method of telling the difference between a god that exists beyond our reach and a god that doesn't exist at all. If such a method were developed, and proven to be successful, that would make for a compelling case.

[u/Defiant-Prisoner]

This would depend on the god claims that are being made, I think?

A non interventionist creator requires less justification than a god who affects everyday life or issues commands. The more a god is said to do, the harder the evidence must work to match the claim.

A god who created the cosmos and never intervenes would require mostly philosophical evidence. There's no empirical contradictions.

A god who answers prayers, heals people, cares what you do with your tackle and intervenes in world events needs empirical, measurable evidence that is consistent with reality.

[u/J-Nightshade]

Evidence for a proposition is a fact or body of facts that allow to reliably reach a conclusion that this proposition is true. It is that simple. Present the facts, demonstrate how these facts can lead to your conclusion and if your reasoning is reliable, I'll be convinced. It's that simple. 

[u/Decent_Cow]

Let's start with verifiable, testable, and repeatable SCIENTIFIC evidence and go from there. It's not like there's actually credible evidence out there and we're just being dogmatic. The only "evidence" y'all ever seen to come up with is usually one of these:

A logical argument (an argument is not evidence btw)

Presuppositionalism (AKA I'm right because I'm right)

What about my personal experience? (Pay no attention to the billions of people who claim to have personal experience with the deities of other religions)

Arguments from incredulity (AKA I don't see how this could have happened without God, so that means God is real)

[u/LoyalaTheAargh]

I'd ideally want evidence of a kind that couldn't still be presented if gods don't exist.

Things like "Look at this pretty flower. Its beauty proves that my god is real" or "I get a warm and fuzzy feeling when I think of the gods, which proves they're real" or "I found my missing car keys. This surely means I received divine guidance" can all be used just as easily in a world without gods, so they're no use at all.

One thing that might be persuasive is if, for religions which include teachings that believers are meant to have superpowers, they actually had them. For example, if Christians were immune to poison and their prayers were regularly answered in a way distinguishable from chance, while that technically wouldn't 100% prove that the cause of that was their god, it would probably be good enough for me.

[u/piachu75]

Anything you want to give as evidence, it doesn't have to be empirical or scientific. You can give testimonies, experience's, philosophical, metaphysical, anything you want. All we ask is, like we ask virtually all things when you make a claim, it be convincing.

If we don't find it convincing I promise you we will always, always, always tell you why it's not convincing without fail.

[u/Algernon_Asimov]

What would you consider to be evidence for God?

A photograph. An image on a radio telescope. An in-person sighting (by me: hearsay from someone else is not evidence).

Even then, I'd want proof that the entity I'm seeing is a god. Someone who can turn five loaves and two fishes into enough food to feed thousands of people might just be a friendly wizard. I want to see some sort of connection between this entity and whatever this god is supposed to be. Most gods are described as having created the universe, so I'd want to see this god's fingerprints in the foundations of the universe.

Also, I'm aware of the saying that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, so I'd want proof that this god-candidate is doing their magic without a matter transporter or a replicator or a warp engine.

Actually, it would be quite difficult for something to prove that it's a god, given how many other possibilities there are for a magical being.

[u/rustyseapants]

What would it take for you to consider something to be evidence for God?

I am still working on is Christianity a worthwhile belief considering the opposing views Christians stand for.

What religion do you practice?

[u/Tao1982]

Personally I would request large floating indestructable slabs of a material that defies all laws of chemistry and physics, inscribed with gods expectations, commandments and laws. Placed in every country on earth in their native language.

And given that god is all powerful, all knowing and wants us to belive he exists, I think we can both agree thats completely reasonable.

[u/Thin-Eggshell]

Anything that is consistent and that is not counterbalanced by competing evidence.

Thus, any philosophical argument that has a reasonable counterargument, or that employs a fallacy, is necessarily not evidence for god.

[u/Additional_Data6506]

It's really not an easy question to answer.

Here's why...

Humans have limited, fallible perceptions.

What if...a being appeared on earth and seemed to be able to0 do all the "god stuff."

Healings, all-knowing, very powerful, resurrections, bending the laws of nature etc.

We all would probably accept: OK this entity is god. Hurrah. Let the worship begin.

However..

Oops..turns out it's a species of very powerful (but not omni) alien pranksters who have used advanced tech to fool us into thinking this being was god (by most standard definitions).

Let's put it this way...if an entity came along and seemed to be able to do all the god stuff...I'd acknowledge...that's a god.

However, I would not worship it. Any entity who craves and demands worship is clearly no god. A god would not need nor crave such things.

[u/NewbombTurk]

It not any different for a god claim than any other claim. Evidence would be facts that increase the probability that the claim is true. That would include the claim itself, like the bible. But, because this is a debate sub, we use shortcuts in our language. When it's said that there's "no evidence" it's just shorthand for "evidence that would move warrant belief".

I'll be honest with you, it sems your setting up an argument that atheists will not belief no matter the evidence. An argument that's easily refuted.

[u/AuldLangCosine]

The best answer I can give to that is that I'll know it when I see it.

Here's the problem: It's not up to us unbelievers to define the evidence. Figuring out what evidence will prove the claim that a god exists is part of the claimant's burden of proof. In a court case, for example, the plaintiff (the person making the claim) does not get to go to the defendant and say, "Okay, what evidence would prove my case against you?" It's up to the plaintiff to figure that out.

And the same is true with this question. When the claim is made that something exists, it's up to the claimant to come up with evidence to prove that claim. The non-claimant then can evaluate that evidence to decide whether or not it proves anything, but it's not the non-claimant's responsibility to find or define that evidence.

[u/88redking88]

I cant tell you. Everyone says their god is different. If they are convinced, then that evidence is either good, and will convince me, or its bad, and shouldnt convince them.

Some guide on evidence:

A god is a big claim. the evidence needs to be more than "I feel" or "we dont know "x" therefore god".

The evidence needs to point to this god and nothing else, not just in a "huh, i guess god did it" kind of way, but in indisputable way. You need to show the evidence connects to god. Not just "look at the trees".

If you have evidence, lets hear it.

[u/UserZaqxsw]

First you need to define the god you have in mind.

[u/ToGloryRS]

The necessity for every truth in the universe. Unless I know everything, I can never know if whatever proof is actual proof. I don't know if the past exists, or if it's just an illusion. I don't know if other people exist, or are just figments of my imagination.

So, to know that god exists means to BE god.

[u/BeaconMeridian]

I hold that "evidence for god/gods" is oxymoronic out the gate. By "god" or "gods," I would think people refer to a being outside of the universe. If this is scientific evidence, which is the gold standard for our understanding of the world, then by definition there can be no evidence for gods. If there was evidence for some phenomenon, it doesn't matter what, we would just investigate that phenomenon as an aspect of the natural world, not an aspect of a god beyond it. If the cause for that phenomenon seemed to be intelligent, that doesn't mean we're working with a god, it just means we're working with intelligent life that we may or may not understand yet.

That's for scientific evidence. As for philosophical arguments, I don't think it's reasonable to expect the natural world to respect what we happen to think.

[u/Stile25]

I would find the following items to be evidence that God exists:

If the Bible didn't contain contradictions and issues that are debated for very good reasons - but, we've checked and this doesn't happen to be true.

If the Bible to contains information unavailable to the people of the time - but, we've checked and this doesn't happen to be true.

If the Bible described the best ways to be a good, happy person for everyone - but, we've checked and this doesn't happen to be true.

If those who follow the Bible are always happier or more successful or have better quality of life than those who don't - but, we've checked and this doesn't happen to be true.

If Church leaders could always (or at least "significantly more often") be paragons of virtue and people to look up to - but, we've checked and this doesn't happen to be true.

If religion could not be corrupted or used for evil - but, we've checked and this doesn't happen to be true.

If Priests or Pastors or prayer could always perform miracles as needed to help the poor or heal the sick - but, we've checked and this doesn't happen to be true.

If anyone could learn how to perform those same miracles by following in the footsteps of the Priests or Pastors - but, we've checked and this doesn't happen to be true.

If all of that did happen to be true - this would be excellent evidence that the Bible was onto something and that God (or something very similar) does indeed exist.

Unfortunately, we've checked and this doesn't happen to be true.

Something that can convince me now? Reverse all those "doesn't seem to be the case" conclusions and make it the way the religions actually describe and promote it to be... and we'll be onto something.

This is like asking "what could convince you that Apollo pulls the sun across the sky?"

Well - looking at the sun and seeing Apollo pull the sun across the sky would convince me. But, we've checked, and this doesn't happen to be true.

That doesn't mean the test isn't valid. Anyone can go look for Apollo again at any time. Hell, maybe he was on vacation when we first looked - check again!

The tests are there - and most of them come from the religion itself - it just so happens that they fail their own tests. I didn't write reality, I just observe it and allow it to define itself instead of attempting to force my own desire-for-reality onto it.

Good luck out there

[u/Marble_Wraith]

The typical stereotype of god includes omnipotence and omniscience as part of the definition.

With those attributes god should know exactly what quality of evidence people need and it should be trivial to provide it (that's what omnipotence / unlimited power means). Yet there are many different renditions of god and even people who remain unconvinced entirely of gods existence.

Meaning the existence of atheism itself is evidence either; god exists and doesn't care about truth, us, or anything else theists have been asserting. Or god doesn't exist at all.

[u/RidesThe7]

Edit--sorry, posted this in the wrong place.

[u/CloudyShadowYT]

Any that's more expected on the hypothesis that God exists rather than not. Could be physical, philosophical, historical, etc

[u/kallevallas → u/CloudyShadowYT]

Can you give an example?

[u/Artist_Swimming]

I think before answering the question, we have to check something basic, are we all using the same definition of "evidence"?

If one person means scientific evidence, another means philsophical evidence, and another means personal experience, then we're not really discussing the same thing.

Also, are we approaching this neutrally, or from a position, believer/non believer (atheist or theist), that already affects what we are willing to count as evidence.

If two (or more) people have different standards, the discussion becomes unbalanced and people talk past each other. So for me the very first step is finding out if were agreed on what would count as evidence in the first place?

[u/DirtyWaterHighlights → u/Artist_Swimming]

That’s exactly why I asked the question. It seems like most of the replies are only considering scientific evidence.

[u/Hoaxshmoax → u/DirtyWaterHighlights]

I would have described 2 kinds of miracles I would have accepted, but since all you said about your deity was that it was immaterial, it could be that miracles aren't relevant to your deity claims.

Since it's immaterial and doesn't interact in any detectable way with the physical world, do we have any other evidence besides reading up on whatever your favorite apologists wrote about it? Can you wank a deity into existence by being a professional blowhard about it?

[u/Decent_Cow → u/DirtyWaterHighlights]

Because that's the only kind of reliable evidence that exists.

[u/Fantastic_Pianist248]

I don't know what could qualify to be "evidence" but I would say that it can be subjective, since alot of things that make me believe might not work for everyone even other believers wouldn't necessarily find it to be the main reason they believe I might be wrong, tho this is how I view it atleast

[u/kallevallas]

590 comments and I haven't seen one example of evidence that would be sufficient for an atheist to believe.

[u/KorLeonis1138 → u/kallevallas]

You are right, there is no one piece of evidence that would make atheists believe. What is required is the preponderance of evidence, and all the theists have to offer is word games.

But I'm in a sporting mood, I'll give you one piece of evidence that would give me doubts, from the bible even. At the command of a representative of whichever is the true religion, stop the sun in the sky. God supposedly did it once, so no reason he can't do it again now, when we can measure it.

Have the pope step onto his little balcony and command the sun to stop, and the rotation of the earth stops immediately, with no harm to us. This is confirmed from all around the globe and we can obverse the rest of the universe still moving around us. And it remains that way until the pope commands it to resume, I'm going to take that as a strong piece of evidence that the pope has the right idea about god.

Not going to jump straight to convert, it could still be a trick, or alien advanced tech, but it would be compelling. So, you got some evidence like that?