Wednesday, April 2, 2014

"Prove the existence of God without the Bible"

Sometimes some skeptics seem to be a bit off track when demanding evidence for the existence of a god. While not extremely common, it's not extremely unusual to see something like this:

"Prove the existence of God without referencing anything in the Bible."

There may be good intent in this, but imposing that restriction is completely unnecessary, really. If someone wants to try to prove the existence of a god using the Bible, then they can go right ahead. Using the Bible to do that is one of the weakest possible ways of proving that. It's completely useless.

The existence of something is not proven by reading some words in a book, no matter what those words are. You can literally write anything you want, and it proves absolutely nothing. Existence of something is demonstrated via direct observation, measurement and testing, not by the words of some book.

Every single argument that could be made from the Bible, even if they were true, would still not prove the existence of a god. For example, a common argument is that the Bible presents some information that was impossible for the people of the time to know. While that's demonstrably untrue, even if we granted that claim for the sake of argument, it would still not prove the existence of a god. Why? Because we don't know the source of that information. Even if it was indeed impossibly advanced knowledge, we would have to first determine where they got that knowledge before jumping to a god. Jumping to a god would be a non-sequitur, an argument from ignorance.

2 comments:

  1. The biblical explanation of a creator & ruler God is 2,000 years out of date. We learned that there is no unambiguous evidence supporting anything supernatural to be true, everything has an all natural explanation, especially God. The natural sciences and reason document that the real big bang creator, the genuine evolver of humanity the Darwinian way, the measurable maintainer, and law of nature ruler of the universe is God composed of the fundamental & emergent laws of nature integrated with the forces of physics.

    God is the reason that everything exists rather than nothing. The verifiable laws of nature integrated with forces of physics AKA God does actualize the reality that enlightens, informs, inspires, corrects & at times falsifies the knowledge that the natural sciences depend on. The source of all absolute truth is God; the Godliest messengers of soon to be obsolete, partial truth are the natural sciences & reason. Atheists keep looking to outdated books like the bible or koran for their definition of God, they are horribly mistaken.

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    Replies
    1. You just described the universe. Why call it "God"? We already have a good name for it.

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