An argument for God's existence

Hi guys, I thought of this argument. It would be interesting to see people’s thoughts on it.

Introduction
The fact that we cannot prove or disprove God’s existence empirically or otherwise, could be because we are not supposed to. Since it would not be congruent with his New Covenant. If the faculty of choice were removed by demonstrating God’s or Jesus Christ’s existence and there was evidence of his miracles, the New Covenant would be void. The New Covenant expressly states, “anyone who believes in God’s Son has eternal life (John 3:36 NLT)”, which is the core tenet. The nature of proof is that it removes the requirement for belief, therefore why would God void his own New Covenant by allowing us to prove his existence empirically or otherwise. That would cause belief in Jesus Christ to be unnecessary and would result in God contradicting himself.

Discussion
On this basis, which seems logical, it can be reasonably argued that God will not allow his existence to be demonstrated nor refuted, empirically or otherwise, which is why his existence cannot be proved nor disproved. He is honouring the choice that the New Covenant presents, which is a characteristic of God that can be recognized in the Bible, viz Christ’s sacrifice for the lives of people. Given the consensus is that God’s existence cannot be proved or disproved. It is necessary for God’s plan of salvation, that the New Covenant remains valid. Necessity implies agency. I do not believe that chance or coincidence could constitute a valid refutation because there is to my perception, no remit for chance or coincidence within my argument. Therefore, his agency would seem to be the only logical answer. Thus, I propose that God’s existence cannot be proved or disproved, because he wants the choice of belief in Jesus Christ to remain.

Conclusion
This would demonstrate that God upholds his New Covenant. Which is congruent with the way that he is portrayed in the Bible. Thus, I believe I have established that there is a valid reason for God not allowing us to prove or disprove his existence. That he is justified in doing so for the retention of choice and belief in Jesus Christ. He also has a cause for doing so; he wants people to believe in Jesus Christ. So it seems there are the grounds of validity, justification and cause supporting my argument. Therefore, I believe that my argument is logical. In conclusion, although is it inconsistent with what I have argued in terms of his existence not being able to be proved or disproved, if God did not want us to do something, in this case, prove or disprove his existence, it would follow that because of his prevention, his existence would be demonstrated.


Hopefully, this argument stimulates productive discussion. I will not be responding to each post. Rather, I’d like to read what people think and the counter-arguments, and respond where I’d like to.

Thanks, guys :slight_smile:

the problem with this argument is that it starts with a
basic assumption, god exists… and moves from there…
god is already a given in this argument…

Kropotkin

If God wants us to know the truth, he wouldn’t hide it from us.
It seems to me that God wants to be known, if we take the bible literally.

Here, take this literally:

salon.com/2014/05/31/11_kin … e_partner/
ffrf.org/publications/freethoug … ent-verses
news24.com/news24/MyNews24/ … s-20121224

This isn’t a thread about ancient cruelty.
It’s about a specific doctrine, in modern times.

I agree. The whole point of creating a Bible would seem to be because God wants to be known by people - that he wants us to know the truth.

But if God exists, it seems to me that if he wanted us to believe in Jesus via faith (and Jesus propounded on people having faith), he could not also make his presence demonstrable.

Maybe its an inconsistency in the Bible or maybe more than that I don’t know. It’s just something I picked up on really.

biblegateway.com/passage/?s … n=NKJV;NLT

14 What does it profit, my brethren, if someone says he has faith but does not have works? Can faith save him? 15 If a brother or sister is naked and destitute of daily food, 16 and one of you says to them, “Depart in peace, be warmed and filled,” but you do not give them the things which are needed for the body, what does it profit? 17 Thus also faith by itself, if it does not have works, is dead.

18 But someone will say, “You have faith, and I have works.” Show me your faith without [a]your works, and I will show you my faith by [b]my works. 19 You believe that there is one God. You do well. Even the demons believe—and tremble! 20 But do you want to know, O foolish man, that faith without works is [c]dead? 21 Was not Abraham our father justified by works when he offered Isaac his son on the altar? 22 Do you see that faith was working together with his works, and by works faith was made [d]perfect? 23 And the Scripture was fulfilled which says, “Abraham believed God, and it was [e]accounted to him for righteousness.” And he was called the friend of God. 24 You see then that a man is justified by works, and not by faith only.

The problem compounds itself. The Bible is well known to be an anthology of religious texts, composed to give meaning, history, and identity to Israel. You can even find the comparable texts elsewhere. That means that human beings, not God, put the Bible together – perhaps under inspiration, but even then, other people are inspired too.

A God that you say, if the Bible is not his “creation”, hides from us is quite simply the wrong concept to explain our existence and our consciousness. That this life we have is strange is obvious, but we have to have intelligent guesses, rather than assumptions.

The Bible is an attempt to make sense of everything, but the God of the Bible is too sacred to be named, can’t be seen and makes decisions that mankind can’t fathom. That means that to argue God’s existence is futile. Either you assume that there is purpose in this world or not. If you see purpose being worked out then you have your unnamed God.

Bob,

Your right, assumptions should be avoided, but where there is no evidence, only conjecture, we have no choice but to make assumptions based upon what information is available to us. There is no tangible evidence to support the concept of God, but because my argument for his existence is based on the New Covenant, I’ve had to assume that it is possibly more than something that people created. I don’t know if there is a God or not, I just thought of the argument based on the purported Biblical God.

I agree with what you say here. It is pretty futile, given that we have no verifiable concept to base our arguments upon, but it is interesting to discuss.

Well, do you take the Bible literally…or don’t you? Or, in regard to particular verses, do you pick and choose?

And what specific doctrine from the Bible – your own for example – given what specific set of circumstances in our “modern times”?

Okay, here we are as “mere mortals” on this side of the grave. We look around and note that many different people in many different communities in many different sets of circumstances down through the ages come to conclude that many different behaviors are right and wrong. We also look around and note that everyone seems to die.

So, one way in which to confront this is through God and religion. A God, the God, my God exists in order to command mere mortals to behave in a righteous manner in order to be deemed on Judgment Day as worthy of both immortality and salvation.

But: there are all these different religious denominations with all these different scriptures insisting that the one and the only righteous path is the one in their scripture.

With so much at stake, a God, the God doesn’t see fit to provide the faithful with a scripture that no one can doubt is the one true spiritual path?

Reasonable men and women are expected to believe that?

Hi Fanman,

The core of your argument reminds me of what I’ve heard clergymen holding to before, when debating theology - that belief is the whole point as opposed to certain knowledge. This of course concords with the wording of what you quote from the New Testament, and indeed the whole original punishment in Genesis for seeking knowledge.

I would also tie into this the primary role of Jesus in the New Testament - to die for our sins. Here he directly and literally insists that He be used as a scapegoat for everything that humans ought to feel guilty for doing, in attempting to follow his example. This brings to my mind the psychological need to think of oneself as a good person, and “ideology” that emerges to excuse the negative material consequences of any prevalent socio-economic model. I use the term “ideology” here in the Marxist sense, as a kind of political/cultural need to think of one’s society as a good society, thus allowing it to continue to function regardless of its problems (without excess guilt to arrest the whole thing out of sheer doubt). The term “fetish” applies here, which denotes the psychological attribution of “magical powers” to something, in this case Jesus’s sacrifice of martyring himself on our collective behalf. Obviously the act itself doesn’t literally do anything for anyone, but the ideology behind the act is where its power comes from. Thus the more literally that one treats the whole story, the more the ideology rises to the surface, losing the magic of its power, more broadly losing its successful functionality as ideology - and ultimately losing its effectiveness for people to psychologically feel better about their wrong-doings. Ideology requires fetishism to primarily function at the subconscious or at least passive level, whereas proof raises all layers of knowledge to the active conscious level (which goes not just for knowing, but knowing it in others, them knowing you know it and you knowing that they know it in you etc.) Direct conscious certainty can cause a psychological pain, via confrontation, facing us with our protective coping mechanisms to hide the negative feelings that these coping mechanisms emerged to protect our conscious mind from. So almost bizarrely, religion even explicitly instructs us that it is to be kept as ideology in order to maintain its psychological utility (and not known to be true for sure).

So even at this level, the notion that God is intended to be unprovable either way is what the whole point seems to be.

Your argument also reminds me of criminal investigation, attempting to establish “motive, means and opportunity” to “abduce” potential guilt. Though in this case, for the crime of God being guilty of existing haha. But this is strictly the only sense in which your argument can be called “logical” - through its abductive reasoning. To clarify, it would also be sufficient to say that God’s unprovability points equally to his non-existence, as much as to his existence according to your argument. The argument isn’t deductive, nor does it even suffice to be inductive. It simply lays out grounds that may be “sufficient” to indicate His existence, but not necessitate it. Any “necessity” here only works in one direction: that if God were to be consistent with the New Testament, he ought to be unprovable. In the other direction, it is not necessarily the case that because he is unprovable, he ought to be existent. Hence his existence on these grounds would instead be only “sufficient”.

As a sidenote, I have succeeding in being crude enough to prove that God necessarily cannot exist, but I don’t want to derail your thread by going into that proof.

Fanman— K sums up the problem with your argument succinctly above… It assumes what it claims to prove. And in the process it takes the inability to prove or disprove the existence of God as proof of the existence of God. A stupendous self-contradiction.

Silhouette,

Nice post, I enjoyed reading it. I don’t disagree with you. I have a tendency to reason in the manner you highlighted, possibly due to some of the work-related circumstances I’ve been in. There are just a couple of points that I would like you to elaborate on. You will have to forgive me if it feels as though I am conducting an investigation.

How so, I don’t see why?

I agree, my argument doesn’t necessitate God’s existence, at best it does as you say. But “logical” as arguments for God’s existence are, I would call that progress, haha.

This seems to make sense, but perhaps you could unpack it, as I’m not sure I precisely get what you are saying.

I don’t mind, by all means, put it up.

I don’t think that is entirely the case. With respect, you seem to have missed the point of the argument. I think that silhouettes’ post provides the most accurate analysis of my argument.

My claim is basically saying, that if the Biblical God is real, to be consistent with the New Covenant, he could not logically make his existence demonstrable. I then go on to say that based upon that notion, the reason that his existence cannot be proved or disproved is that he doesn’t want to make the New Covenant void. Of course, I cannot prove that. It’s just my logical conclusion based upon the assumption that God is consistent. With arguments for or against God’s existence, I think there will always be a degree of assumptions made one way or the other.

I don’t perceive a glaring contradiction, but if I have made one, it would help if you could be more specific in pointing it out.

You stated that the existence of God could not be proved and then you claimed to have proved it. How can I make the contradiction any clearer to you? Further, you stated that for the existence of God to be provable would be a violation of God’s New Covenant. Then you claimed you had proved the existence of God. Has God then allowed you to violate or find a loophole in his covenant?

Nothing to forgive, I’m happy to be interrogated - as seems to be the norm for this forum anyways :smiley:

From this I mean in the sense that unprovability tends to suggest non-existence to the same degree as it does for the “flying spaghetti monster”, if you’re familiar with the thought experiment. I only use the mild language of “suggest” because “absence of evidence isn’t evidence of absence” - there’s no hard proof of absence just from unprovability, only the critical issue of “unfalsifiability” that science necessitates for any acceptable line of inquiry towards legitimate knowledge. It’s still a significantly serious issue, but from the above quote I just mean that when something is unprovable, generally it’s as easily dismissable as anything that’s trivially posited - even if “it’s supposed to be unprovable”.

I just mean in the general sense that if something is unprovable, it doesn’t necessarily exist. Using modal logic terminology, at best this allows “possible” existence, and possibility is what’s known as “sufficient” for the property of existence. This is as opposed to necessitating existence, which is what’s needed for a full proof of something.

I’ll keep you in suspense until we’ve sufficiently covered your argument, but I can tell you I’ve mentioned and argued my proof on several occasions on this forum over the years. I’ll link to a thread that mentions this proof if you want.

felix dacat,

I stated:

“In conclusion, if God did not want us to do something, in this case, prove or disprove his existence, it would follow that because of his prevention, his existence would be demonstrated.”

It is not my or even a fault that this conversely is the or a logical conclusion of my argument. As I’ve stated, my argument is made upon the basis of Biblical consistency (or lack thereof). If in terms of logic, I identified a “loophole” or inconsistency, it doesn’t mean that God allowed me to, it just means that there is one, which is nothing new.

Perhaps the fault is mine, for not going into more detail regarding the apparently contradictory conclusion to my argument. I just took it as a given that I would be understood.

I have amended the conclusion of my argument, taking what you’ve said into consideration.

Silhouette,

Thanks for elaborating, that makes things much clearer. The points you make are valid, I have nothing to add to them.

Please provide the link to your argument.

People throughout the ages belonged to one community or another and these communities worked out what is right and wrong, based on past experience. They developed a mythic language to carry their meaning and people identified with it for centuries. There is no doubt that human beings can be hypocritical or evil, but that doesn’t have anything to do with religion per se. It is human behaviour.

If the various religious denominations differ as widely as you said, then we have to decide between them, but my observation is that there is no big difference between the wisdom traditions that value peace. The stories may differ, but the meaning is often very similar. Scripture is almost always stories, symbolically explaining the cosmology behind them, giving us lessons in the best way we have. The fact that we have lost that way of listening and wander through life without true orientation is something that these myths have warned against.