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The problem with atheists demanding "evidence" for God is that in assuming that evidence could prove something about God one is making the wrong assumption. That is one assumes that God is an empirical fact (if God exists God exits in the sense that objects in creation exists). So one is assuming we can just add a fact to the universe if God exist. The fact being being added is that in addition to all other existants there is also a thing called "God" which also exists.

This is a problem because God is not given in sense Data. God is the foundation of reality not just another thing in reality. God is not an object in creation along side mustard Jars and swizzle sticks, but is the basis upon which all things exist and cohere and can be known at all. God s not an empirical fact (since the divine is not an object of sense data). thus god is also beyond our understanding. This renders the chances of being able to muster evidence of God's existence pretty slim.

When we believe in God, when we come to believe, we are not merely adding a fact to the universe. we are actually discovering something new about our own being. So God is not just anther thing in the world but is actually the discovery of the truth about nature our own being, and of all being.

God is being itself. This is meant in three different ways:

(1) The nature of being in its most abstract since apart from anything else in particular

(2) the foundation of all that is.

(3) not an individual thing or a being but a class of existence by itself that cannot be compared to anything and has no actual "thing-hood."

What this means is that coming to believe in God is not merely adding a fact to the universe, it is a paradigm shift. It's a whole sea change, the ground upon which we understand reality shifts and we are in a whole universe. The theist an th atheist occupy totally different worlds.

coming to belief in God is coming to a realization about the nature of being; that there is a holy and eternal aspect of being that is worthy of our most serious devotion. More akin to eastern enlightenment than to just coming to hold a philosophical position.

All of this renders mere evidence pretty irrelevant. The idea that there is no evidence for God becomes very unimportant and is really what we should expect given the qualitatively different orientation of belief.

Belief in God is an existential and ontological paradigm shift that requires a phenomenological apprehension, not merely the accumulation of empirical facts and data.

what does this mean for rationality?

The atheist claims about the rationality of belief are irrelevant because that is based upon the assumption that there is only one kind of knowledge and that is empirical knowledge. believing a proposition with no empirical knowledge may or may not be irrational, but when the "proposition" is actually a phenomenological apprehension that is connected with a shifting of the ground upon which one understands the nature of being, it can hardly be held to the same evidential standards as empirical data.

There are different forms of knowledge. Not all knowledge is empirical and there are valid aspects of knowledge which are not empirical.

We don't have to comb the universe looking for square circle before we decide there aren't any. We can know a prior that there are no squire circles. Thus deductive knowledge is knowledge and it can tell us something.



What can one do about this?

That leads to the problem what can tell atheists if one can't just show the data?

(1) Tell them why we can't show data and why it's irrelevant

(2) focal points


There are aspects of phenomenological apprehension that can be discussed and listed. We can apply the prima facie standards to a case for a rationally warranted belief. We cant' prove the existence of God but we can point to ways that one might come to realize the reality of God.

Belief is an existential phenomenological matter. It's not something to be proven objectively in the first place.




Just a thought. What do you think?

Lorenzo,

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Gener,

Mo agree ko nimo in the statement of human stubbornness and rebelliousness; not just in the field of religion and theological debate, but in other fields and other agencies in society.

To give an example, per se in the scientific research community, even if a researcher finds an explanation to a theory, given grafts, proofs, years worth of experiments--and genetic analysis to concretely proove an existance of a particular start codon for a diseased gene (AUG, UAA, UAG, UGA etc), and even if evidence prooves the following in crystalline strucuture, still, there are those who will not believe. Even if all scientific research and data are antagonistic to opposition.

There will never be an exact mechanism we can use to 'proove' the existence of the Mighty Creator because human mechanisms in research can only proove/disproove of a hypothesis via scientific method. And that requires physically analyzing and utilizing machines to analyze the consistency, composition of such material. We cannot do that in regards to the Divine. As The Divine is not in the physical, beyond the tangency of this realm. We are Because of Him.

We may not be able to 'proove' his existence, but we can point out mechanisms that sing to His glory. Per se genetic transcription, translation, elongation, DNA repair, Replication, Chromosomal mechanisms, physiological processes etc.

The Human notion of existentialism, the thought of "Why Am I Alive? Who Made Me? How Did I Get Here?" is providential and in some regards a reason why there is A God.



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