What would you have God do?

If it's God, won't he know already?

Come to think of it, why wouldn't God just make me convinced? That would be evidence that it's God - the fact that I wouldn't even consider that it wasn't God.

In that case, I'd say something like "If you're God, don't you have something better to do than fuck around trying to convince me? If you're the God of Love and Goodness why don't you act like it? Serious shit is going down and quite frankly, you don't have time for these burning bush games."I'm not liable to be impressed by little token gestures. If it's really God lets see him get to doing the Lord's work. You know what I mean? I'll believe that it's God when I see results.

The problem is that there's no way to distinguish between that happening and you fooling yourself. I imagine that's what prompted the thread...

I don't think it's unreasonable to assume that God's powers are restricted to only those things that are not self-contradictory.

No, because as you said, he can just make you convinced. I think perhaps what you meant is that there is nothing that this entity could do that you could prove to other people is convincing.

I totally disagree.If God appeared to me, the only way he could convince me would be by making me convinced.But once he's done that, I'm going to tell him "For God's sake, God, what the fuck are you wasting your time here for? Shit's going down, man, and you're messing around with my head! Get to work, already!"God could convince me he was Him, but that's not going to make me like him. God's got a lot to do and it's gonna piss me off if he wastes his time playing games with me when folks are really suffering somewhere else.Once we've tackled the existence of God, I need to see some evidence that he's actually a good guy. That's gonna take actions, not words.

Maybe, but since none of us know what he said or did, we'll never know, will we? Well, we'll never know.I know that you think that I disbelieve in God just to be an ass, or something, but that's far from the truth. I'm amienable to the existence of God. It's just that God doesn't exist. Sure he could. What he would have to do is start acting like God. That is, fix what's broken in the world. If life were perfect, I imagine that the presence of God would be irrefutable - not just because things were perfect, but because God's presence would be just as substantial as my wife's, or any person that I observe exists.I'm only an atheist because, as far as I can tell, God doesn't exist. It's pretty simple, Mike.

According to the State of Minnesota and the Nicollet County records office. Perfection would = God, yes. But the mere presence of some good things happening, sometimes, to good people, is not enough to establish that perfection exists.The existence of any suffering whatsoever is enough to prove that an all-powerful, benevolent entity doesn't exist. The realization that God doesn't exist. Like I said, it's pretty simple.

Well, that's been my point all along. The existence of your God = no misery or suffering. I don't understand why you think you've trapped me in an inconsistency by pointing out something I've been saying all along.In the world we live in, pain and suffering exist. This is logically inconsistent with the existence of your God. Therefore, your God does not exist.If pain and suffering did not exist anywhere, there would be no barriers to the logical existence of your God.(Oh, and you need to check your basic logic. Just because "If P, then Q" is true, doesn't make "If not-P, then not Q" (the inverse) true. Nor does it make "If Q, then P" (the converse) true. The only thing you know that is true is "If not-Q, then not-P" (the contrapositive). This is elementary symbolic logic, but people make this mistake a lot, like you just did.)

Not at all. How do you come to that conclusion? In a world of chance, with no God, we would expect some good and some bad, just from randomness. Which is exactly what we find.The presence of some good is insufficient to substantiate God's existence, because we would expect some good to just happen by itself, at random. They just stand for statements that can be true for false, like "it is raining" or "I am holding an umbrella." They're just symbols - it doesn't matter what they mean, because it's the relationship that we were looking at.I'll explain with words, then. Presume that this statement is true:If it is raining, then I will take an umbrella.From that statement, without knowing anything else, which of the following can we know to be true?1) It is not raining, therefore I will not take an umbrella. (the inverse)2) I took an umbrella, therefore it must be raining. (the converse.)3) I did not take an umbrella, therefore it is not raining. (the contrapositive.)The answer is 3. That's the only one we know to be true, because dependancy only works one way in logic. If you answered 1, you committed the Fallacy of Denying the Antecedent. If you answered 2, you committed the Fallacy of Affirming the Consequent.Now, if I had said that "If and only if it is raining, then I will take an umbrella", then all 3 derivatives would be true.

No, I do very much want God to exist. Why wouldn't I? It would mean an end to suffering and pain for the entire universe.After all, I only came to the conclusion that God doesn't exist while I was a Christian. So it's ludicrous to say that I didn't want God to exist - I very much do.The problem is that God doesn't exist, regardless of my wants. Reminds me of a joke: "The optimist believes this to be the best of all possible worlds. The pessimist fears this is so."

Right. You're taking the inverse of my statement, which is logically fallacious, as I tried to show you. (Good job following along on the rain examples, though.) I assumed that was obvious. A benevolent, all-powerful God would never allow misery to occur, by definition of the words "benevolent" and "all-powerful."Misery occurs. This is inconsistent with the existence of a benevolent, all-powerful God. Therefore we conclude that such a God does not exist. It's really very simple, Mike, no matter how you persist in trying to make it complicated. There's no "my" logic and "your" logic here, just logic.

Not in the least. Misery cannot exist in the universe where your God dwells. In this universe, there is misery. Therefore there is no God here.I just don't understand why you think the presence of joy refutes that. The presence of joy doesn't mean that misery doesn't exist. If misery exists, there is no God. Joy has nothing to do with that.

Yes, because "completely joyful" is another way of saying "completely without misery."It's not joy we're talking about, Mike. It's misery. The presence of joy doesn't prove God exists. But the presence of misery proves that God doesn't exist. Joy has nothing at all to do with it. Again, no. You're taking the inverse of my statement, which is fallacious. Why do you keep doing that? Moreover, full joy and some joy are totally different things. Full joy implies the absence of misery. Some joy is joy and misery both.The presence of some joy doesn't mean misery doesn't exist, and as long as misery exists, God doesn't. That's the consequence of assuming that God is benevolent and all-powerful. Mike, don't make me repeat myself. You can do better than this.It's not an assumption. It's the logical consequence of the purported nature of God: benevolent and all-powerful. It's not me who says God is these things; it's you. The Bible, having been authored by men and not by God, is irrelevant. The blue statement is a tautology, and therefore tells us nothing. It's unfalsifiable; there's no condition under which it could be false.