I will not prove God exists

[Anfauglir]

TGYF, administrative action will shortly be taken for your trolling, which will likely result in your removal from the forum.

Thank you for playing - I hope you enjoyed the game and that you don't feel your time has been wasted.  However, you may wish to consider - if you ARE a person of faith - that your actions here have done nothing to improve the view the non-religious will have of believers....and, by extension, the view non-believers will have of your faith or your god.

Or or you, since you apparently think you ARE a god.  All I can say is that if you are a god, you are a childish and deliberately obfuscatory one, which are hardly the qualities I would think of as divine.

[One Above All]

You're a puny god from one single religion. I'm the supreme ruler of the multiverse. I outrank you. Live with it.

[LoriPinkAngel]

That in itself is contradictory, how is anyone means of 'knowing' compatible with a different means of 'knowing'?

Sometimes a woman "just knows" she"s pregnant...  no missed period, no signs & symptoms, no positive test result yet; she "just knows".  Any women out there with me on this??

[Kimberly]

^Afraid not. I suffered from the opposite phenomenon. "Not knowing" I was around 6-8[1] weeks pregnant with both of my girls before I found out. But I do understand what you are talking about. The context of "knowing" you are describing is what I describe as intuition or instinctive knowledge VS actual knowing by way of factual knowledge. I was trying for a baby for about 2 years so there were several times I just "knew" I was pregnant and wasn't. I really don't pay much attention to that type of "knowing". When I was religious I mislabeled that type of "knowing" as a psychic type phenomenon. The problem was when I was wrong I dismissed it as a fluke, but when I was right I was giving credit where there was none to be had.

For instance. About a week before my 16th birthday my ex boyfriend died in a car crash. We had been separated for something like 8 months. He was always one my favorite exs. While he may have cheated on me and broke my heart I sincerely felt he was a good guy with a "tortured soul". Nevertheless about a week or two before he died I was overcome with desire to call him. Ya know something inside just said, "Hey you should really call him.". Then I realized if he wanted to talk to me he would contact me and we were exs for a reason. Well long story short when I found out he had died in a car accident I felt guilty. I sincerely believed that I was "called upon" to save his life. That if I had called him he'd still be alive today. That guilt and pain stayed with me for a really long time.

I mourned his loss on the anniversary of his death for many years. Most of the time it would trigger a depressive episode. It wasn't until I met my now fiance that I was able to let go of that guilt. He showed me how my thought process wasn't logical and how I should not hold myself accountable for his death. I'm sure there are several logical fallacies in that story but the easiest for me to understand was the causality dilemma. I was placing a cause on his death that didn't exist. (Had he not died I would have never thought twice about the "feeling" I had.)

So any ways, that's my story on why I don't put much weight in to that type of "knowing".

1.	This is a guesstimate I think it was a little later with my first but I'm taking an average cause I don't feel like looking it up in the baby book.

[The Gawd]

That in itself is contradictory, how is anyone means of 'knowing' compatible with a different means of 'knowing'?

Sometimes a woman "just knows" she"s pregnant...  no missed period, no signs & symptoms, no positive test result yet; she "just knows".  Any women out there with me on this??

I understand where you are coming from, but I must counter with the couple times women "knew" they were preggers and I had to go to Wal-Mart to get a preggy test that came back negative. Its kinda like we never hear from the people in the war that prayed but were still killed.

[lectricpharaoh]

Apologies if these points have already been addressed; I came late to the party and haven't yet read all the posts.

So, this is an important point. Do you think there could be any different method for finding out about the world other than in controlled experiments?

Of course.  The 'scientific method' is not just controlled experiments.  In a nutshell, it is a) making an observation, b) coming up with a hypothesis to explain this observation, and c) testing the hypothesis.  Controlled experiments generally take place in the third stage, though sometimes they are used to precipitate a phenomenon for observation.

In any event, when testing a hypothesis, note that it is never proven.  It may be falsified, if the observed results of an experiment do not match the outcome that the hypothesis predicts.  However, if a hypothesis 'passes' the test (ie, is not falsified), then our confidence in it grows accordingly.  Controlled testing is how we (try to) prevent the results from being influenced by factors beyond the scope of the hypothesis.

A theory (in the scientific sense, not layman's sense) is a collection of well-supported hypotheses used to explain a set of phenomena.

Note also that we may use this approach in our day-to-day lives.  You can notice things, draw conclusions, and test those conclusions.  If you refuse to discard or adjust your conclusions despite evidence they're incorrect, that is 'unscientific' thinking.  Put another way, beliefs held in the face of contradictory evidence are irrational beliefs.  For example, if you think the cute girl at work who smiles a lot is flirting with you, and you test this belief by asking her out, then it would be irrational to persist in this belief if she tells you to fuck off. 

Back on topic, you have made the argument that a hidden god can be internally consistent.  In your first post, you use the bible to define faith as 'the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen'.  You go on to say that faith is a mechanism to 'spiritually strengthen' ourselves (whatever that even means, hence other posters' frustration with you).  You also say that if we can see something, we cannot have faith in it.  However, you completely failed to address the problem of God appearing to numerous people, according to the bible.  Was their faith unnecessary?  Your first post claims that we need faith in God, yet those people God appeared to couldn't have faith.  This includes every prophet who communicated directly with God, not to mention anyone who saw Jesus perform miracles, including everyone who saw him after the resurrection.

This mess of self-contradiction hardly sounds internally consistent, does it?