What specific evidence would people require to believe in God's existence?

You know, I'm begining to think that you could never have a proof for a gods' existance as you define it.I (for one) would always wonder: "Is this god fellow really a technologically advanced alien doing a number on me?"Mesopotamian gods were supposed to have come from the planet Nibiru and they lorded it over us for (if you accept the King List) 450,000 yrs).You could never really tell if the second coming was in fact a clever visitor form anothe world with a 2nd class degree in xenosocial-psychology.Millions believe in gods without any proof, just imagine what some sort of proof would do!

Larni writes

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You could never really tell if the second coming was in fact a clever visitor form anothe world with a 2nd class degree in xenosocial-psychology.

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Millions believe in gods without any proof, just imagine what some sort of proof would do!

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This is a scenario I've been dreading over for years now. Throughout history, we've seen many magicians, prophets, soothsayers, magic healers, christian missionaries, etc. that primarily targeted the more vulnerable people, people with less education and less means to tell that something is funny there.Just less than a decade ago, hundreds of thousands (possibly millions) of third world people believed in scam artists that claimed they could remove the bad parts of your body without making incisions. All the scammers did was spill some red liquid on the stomach of the sick, pretend like his fingers are going into the body, and then pretend like he was removing little pieces of stuff. Naturally, noone was allowed to come in contact with those bad little pieces of stuff from that person's stomach.This scam attracted crowds of hundreds of thousands and millions and millions of dollars poured in.If an alien race is advance enough to travel the distances in space to get to us, they would be seen by many as gods.Science fiction writers have used this concept in just about every scifi show. The Goa'uld system lords, Asgards, Ancients, Q, Vorlon, Shadow, Lorient, and even Picard have all been praised as gods. It's an entertaining concept on tv, but I'm not sure I want to see an actual technologically advance alien coming down from "heaven".ABEThis reminds me of an Outer Limit episode I saw years ago that somewhat resembled an experience I had while in college.A group of college students decide to go on a "faith" trip to the wilderness with Brother "so and so" (can't remember his name). They stayed in cabins and listened to his teachings about Christ and all of that. Eventually, one by one they renounced all modern knowledge to follow Christ. A couple saw something was funny so they began to investigate. It turned out that the monk was actually an alien merchant and the group was no longer on Earth. The alien explained that they were on their way to a distant place where the decendants of this group, who by that time would be subservient servants who will believe that their alien captors are gods, will be sold as slaves. The twist of the story was that at the end, the alien ordered this young man who have discovered his secret to be burned alive by his peers. Because FAITH in the Almighty was unquestionable, his peers tied him up and burned him alive, watching him scream in agony. Indeed, their descendants were destined to be slaves.Sounds familiar? (ahem... people of the Americas and those damn christian missionaries)Edited by rgb, : No reason given.

The best example i could think of is Cthulhu and friends, i mean they were as old if not older than our universe able to bend time and space
and do things we would consider gods able to do, but they had little use for us other than snacks
how would mankind differ between a god and something close to a god? its kind of a fine line, mind reading? ability to reserect the dead?, creation?

Rev, you are touching on a subject near and dear to my heart. It is curious to me that neither believers nor atheists are willing to discuss the idea of a less than omnipotent god. This seems strange to me--our world offers no exemplars of omnipotence.Our history of religion, on the other hand, is replete with superhuman-sized gods. It almost seems as though we've evolved (culturally!) to the point where anything less than omnipotence is not worth the candle, though I see no necessary reason to conclude that a god must be omnipotent.Maybe a god birthed the universe and then let it unfold because that was the best He/She could do. It seems to me such necessity is the only real reply to questions about the slaughter of the innocents, etc. It only bears bearing if there was no other choice; no other choice does not equate to omnipotence.For example, the god that made us doesn't have to be the god that made the universe.

That would be Power Creep.With every new edition or source book you get things with greater powers. Thats what I like about Sumerian gods. I believe it was Enki who created humans (as workers) and had dominion over water and knowledge (among other things), but he did not create the world. In fact none of the Sumerain gods did. They came from the planet Nibiru.Much better class of gods I reckon, than the handfull of buggers we have to choose between now.Edited by Larni, : Interactive menus.

I think thats the thing really, when you start asking what constitutes a god you start asking quesions like "how can I possibly draw the line between god and not god?"Is a god just someone who can juggle vast amounts of energy?I'm getting to that point you get to when you say a word over and over and it loses its' meaning.Divine has lost it's meaning for me.

Snacks huh?Is that what God wants to use for our souls.Could you say that it is 'soul food'?

That works--I've been thinking of it as oneupsmanship, where cultures raise their conception of the divine to exceed that of their neighbors or new subjects. It is interesting that there are no new gods, and no longer miracles from the old ones. Maybe the delusion is running its course.

Never thought of it like that. I assumed it was just a natural exageration effect with each telling of the tale, but it makes perfect sense that one would big up one's god to keep it the biggest bad ass on the block.Reminds me of a song from an old satire show called 'Spitting Image' called 'Our god is bigger than your god'.

It's this credulous attitude by religious types that confuses me so much.You have to wonder why people don't do more thinking.

I'm not sure why you find that confusing.I'll use the term "gullibility" for what you are calling "credulous attitude."It is to be expected that the degree of gullibility will vary from person to person. If you could quantify it, then it would probably fit a normal distribution. (By the way, have psychometricians defined and developed as scale for gullibility quotient?)Assuming that there is a range of gullibility it seems entirely expected, at least to me, that religions would tend to be adopted by the most gullible. Thus we would expect religious people, on average, to be significantly more gullible than the population as a whole.Note that I am not denying that some people may adopt a religion on an essentially rational basis. I don't presume that gullibility is a prerequisite. But I do suggest that gullible people are more likely to become religious, much as gullible people are more likely to be taken in by scam artists.

nwr writes

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But I do suggest that gullible people are more likely to become religious, much as gullible people are more likely to be taken in by scam artists.

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What about science? If what you say is true about gullibility, how come the only groups that seem to be able to exploit this gullible crowd are religious zealots, politicians, and scam artists? How come the academic communities have always had trouble tapping into this vast ocean of resources?

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How come the academic communities have always had trouble tapping into this vast ocean of resources?

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Most academic research is done in a manner that precludes the systematic exploitation of the gullible. Academic research consists of the acquisition of data and facts, the interpretation of those facts within accepted theoretical frameworks, and the logical inferences that can be made from these facts and interpretations. The results are communicated to the academic discipline and the world at large, where people then critique the methodologies of the data acquisition, the interpretations, and the logic in the arguments. As a result, in most cases weakly supported conclusions are usually discovered and rejected.That said, I have no doubt that a lot of academic research, valid as it may be, is accepted by the gullible who do not really understand the science behind it. In other words, academic communities do (unwittingly) tap into the vast ocean of the gullible -- it is generally not recognized, however, since in these cases the gullible are often accepting results that just happen to be valid. It is usually when the results are clearly bogus, like those propounded by religious zealots, politicians, and scam artists, that the gullibility of those accepting the ideas are obvious.

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"These monkeys are at once the ugliest and the most beautiful creatures on the planet./ And the monkeys don't want to be monkeys; they want to be something else./ But they're not."
-- Ernie Cline

I wasn't talking about looking into the research. I was talking more along the line of, say, scientific concepts that are so certain we rarely question them anymore. For example, the Earth orbits the sun in an eliptical orbit with the sun as one of its foci. That versus the religious version (the sun goes around the earth in a perfect circle because everything in heaven is perfect and circle represents perfection... or something like that).Religion seems to be doing just fine advertising about how stars are proof of the creator and all of that. Why can't the academic community use the same tactic and advertise that the stars are huge nuclear powerplants?I'm not talking about scientific concepts that are up for debate. I'm talking about stuff we take for granted that the more gullible don't know.What I was thinking was more along the line of "the gospel of cellular mitosis..."

thats what it comes down to, is what we think of god really god? thats pretty much how people pre-science saw it, hell as many people have written, a person from our time might be taken for a god with all the stuff we have i've gone through that a number of times now divine might be conisidered prespective based