My point here is not to trot out specific proofs for or against God, but to show that someone who uses the above argument is engaging in creative deception. No proof is sufficient for them, who for the sake of convenience I will refer to as "no-proofers":
- The testimony of a witness or twenty is insufficient because a no-proofer can and will assert that the witness or twenty is unreliable/biased. What is the proof that the witness is unreliable? Because he claimed to see God, of course!
- A miracle or just a curiously providential coincidence is insufficient because a no-proofer can and will assert that the occurence was dumb luck or that it has an underlying natural cause (like a mirage) or that it's a piece of evidence that existing theories happen to not yet be broad enough to handle - such as explaining consciousness by theorizing that it somehow "emerges" from the multiplied actions of neurons.
- A no-proofer may assert that "Deity X" must not exist because a ritual didn't have the intended effect. But one cannot test the existence of a sentient being the way one might test the existence of charge in a battery. A sentient being must cooperate by responding, but for any number of reasons that being may elect not to. This is doubly true if the responding being is more intelligent and/or informed than the requesting being. To take a purely illustrative (not metaphorical) example, if person A phones person B, person B might refuse to say anything because person B is under surveillance that person A knows nothing about. A sentient being's lack of response doesn't imply that sentient being doesn't exist.
- In a deeper sense, even the "clouds breaking to reveal the face of God" isn't sufficient to convince some people that the apparition in question is Deity X. There's a principle often referred to as Occam's Razor which states that the less a statement assumes, the more likely it is to be true (because there's less for it to possibly be wrong about). Practically speaking, an omniscient/omnipotent/omnipresent God would almost never fit the Occam's Razor criterion for explaining anything. It's assuming a lot to state that any entity is just omniscient, or just omnipotent, or just omnipresent, not to mention stating that the entity is all three. Someone who's dogmatic about Occam's Razor would explain that the apparition in the clouds was some being with sufficient powers to move clouds and project a large image. No more, no less. One of the reasons Jesus' contemporaries kept accusing him of blasphemy is because according to Occam's Razor a blasphemous human is a far less assuming explanation than God Incarnated. So sooner or later, faith must be taken on faith. On the other hand, those who wish to consistently apply Occam's Razor can't admit the existence of a large class of intangibles; they're too busy trying to justify to themselves why Right is Right and Wrong is Wrong to work on the God question.
- No-proofers may comment that since others aren't believing based on proof, others are believing based on convenience. This comment has no bite for two reasons: first, beliefs that people hold to in the face of persecution/hardship/unpopularity hardly count as "convenient", and second, opposite beliefs can be convenient too. No God, no supernatural, no afterlife, all can sometimes be terribly convenient for no-proofers. They can think and do whatever they want. They can care about what they choose to. (Of course, conscience, responsibility, love, and duty won't be smothered or denied, so freedom isn't absolute even for no-proofers no matter how they try.)
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