Countless debates between theists and atheists revolve around one unanswerable question: proof of God. Many have claimed to possess evidence for God, but their interpretations are, at best, mere probable indications of a demiurge, which can’t pass the scrutiny of deduction.
I have made many hypotheses about a demiurge based only on my observations and my biased interpretations. So who knows?
What would proof of Good look like?
If you don’t believe in a god or a demiurge, then you are on the side of the default null hypothesis. Fair enough. We don’t experience a demiurge with any of our senses, so, until we receive sufficient evidence that is convincing, consistent, and replicable, we can’t invest emotionally in one based on faith alone.
Still, if you choose to believe in an iteration of “God”, that’s perfectly understandable too; we all need to attribute certain observations to things that science and scientism fail miserably to explain.
It’s logically safe to reject the idea of a demiurge who purposefully built this world since no god-creator has ever communicated to us. And no, badly written scribbled by illiterate desert dwellers thousands of years ago is a horrible way to communicate.
But wait.
What would constitute proof of God?
Any intellectually honest person should have an answer to the question “What would change your mind?” This means that an atheist, assuming he is genuinely interested in truth over emotionally invested bias, should be willing to believe in the existence of a god or demiurge if he is presented with sufficient evidence amounting to proof.
Yes, you want evidence.
What could logically be proof of God?
A vision or a dream or voices in your head? Your senses can easily be hijacked by psychedelics, drugs, insanity, mirages, or lately, invasive brain-computer interfaces. It would be a false attribution to deem any of that as proof.
How about a universally shared vision? Same, plus the addition of stage magic, drone performances, holograms, and again brain-computer interfaces. When we witness technology by which an amputee can remotely control his/her artificial limbs, then projecting images into someone’s mind doesn’t sound particularly otherworldly anymore.
How about a gut feeling, a powerful sense, and conviction that you know who god is and what it wants from you? Again, it could easily be insanity, and you’d have no way of deducing this scenario to arrive at a logically safe deduction.
What if you develop superpowers, and then a vision of god tells you that you are his chosen one? Well, it could all be insanity, again. Your superpowers could be real, but due to the god-complex psychological impact something like that would have on you, visions of divine purpose would not be too farfetched.
If you think about it, nothing we experience through our senses can serve as definitive proof of God, since we could never rule out the possibility that it might be an illusion or misinterpretation.
So, I’m asking you: What would constitute undeniable proof of God? What would remain true even after we deduce all possibilities saying otherwise?
And in defense of the religious out there, what if (and I’m hypothesising in light-year leaps here)… what if the impossibility of proving the demiurge is on purpose? What if all these confusing, disparate, self-contradictory, and mutually exclusive religions are a test to see what resonates with whom, to draw lines, to expose characters, to foster a philosophy of morality, and to perhaps help the demiurge expend its consciousness through data-generating experience?
You really like to step your foot in it, don't you?? haha
From what I've been learning by Biblical scholars, the Elohim (more than one entity) have been running the show and they are NOT benevolent, but that's who people are calling God and praying to them. The Anunnaki were forced to alter our DNA to shorter our life spans because the god, Enki, did not want us to be as smart as the gods. (I'd personally like to kick his butt.)
Something from the Bible, I feel is a scapegoat, Belief without seeing, have faith. Yeah, those don't work for me.
I have received visions and dreams from the Universal energy. I wouldn't claim they came from the Elohim because my mission would be shot down by malevolent entities.
However, I can't figure out how people still worship a 'god' who allow pedophilia, murders, plandemics to kill the masses, etc.
I think what you’re describing is what I personally call the sacred mystery. I don’t know if you’ve spent much time reading phenomenology, but one of my working theories is that every encounter in your life-world is necessarily open-ended.
For example, when I encounter a chair, I’m only ever perceiving and engaging with a slice of whatever it is that the chair actually is. This is just epistemic humility - an acknowledgment of the limits of the human mind. I can’t jump out of my own consciousness to grasp the ontological or metaphysical reality of the chair. I can only have an encounter with it. I can theorize, interpret, build predictive models - but whatever the chair is in itself remains fundamentally beyond me.
In the same way that the word chair merely points toward the object - like a finger pointing at the chair - the encounter itself gestures toward something beyond it. And whatever this beyond is, it lies outside the scope of conception. It’s not just unknown, it’s unknowable. That, to me, is the essence of the sacred mystery.
I think a lot of philosophers today misunderstand this. They treat mystery as a problem to be solved, rather than as an invitation to reverence and humility.