Someone had to do it.

There may or may not be a god. We won't find out until we die, if then. Please let's not discuss it.

"Hurrrr, god's not real and everyone who thinks he is is stupid. Now that everyone is going to spend the next few pages yelling at me I"m never going to post again."

My impersonation of what several posts in this thread often turned out to be.

Touchy subjects Ant, you don't like it, you could just leave, as implied by the main thread description.

On topic: I've had this argument with people plenty of times, and it's come to the same conclusion:
Science is evil, and so is religion.

^At this point in history though I think religion is more evil. Religion has cause tons of wars, I don't know many wars about science.

And thus it began.

I'd just rather discuss something non-useless. Why bother creating a thread that will only go around in circles?

This isn't a science vs religion thread.

It could be. This is an immovable subject. You cannot provide facts; only opinion, and ultimately, faith. You can neither prove nor disprove the existence of God.

I disagree with this to an extent. I believe that one cannot prove the existence of God to the world, due to differing views.

Which is what "You cannot provide facts; only opinion, and ultimately, faith. You can neither prove nor disprove the existence of God." means.

Yeah, but I believe his existence can still be proven. Just not to everybody, which is not what his says.

You have my interest, explain.

Not to be impolite, but what is the response to miracles? Just to cite a few: Our Lady of Fatima, the account of Padre Pio in two places or his stigmata; the "incorruptible" bodies of saints who haven't decomposed. Or more recently, the "scientifically unexplainable" cure of a French sister after praying to John Paul II?

I've never actually asked. Might as well.

It's personal. What one calls fact is what another may call an opinion. What one calls real, one may call fake. It goes a lot deeper than that, though. I wish I could think of a real life example to compare it to, but I can't this time.

Edit: to what Max said, that is interesting. I've always accounted miracles to chance, since that seems to be the most probable. Then, some things I've seen that I don't consider miracles but really incredible (hard to believe to impossible to believe, not really awesome) I wouldn't account to chance because there is no way it could happen without it being meant to.

Really, I think the world is to complex and wondrous for there not to be something out there, but I don't believe in a single God. Thee worlds a little too fucked up for one figure to be pulling the strings.

I'm not entirely sure about the whole God thing, although in recent weeks I've been leaning towards that idea that god does not exists, at least not in the traditional sense.

The thing is, even if there is no god, religion still does wonderful things for the world (well, sometimes), and provides the basis for most of our moral systems.

Who says that if there's a God, you WILL know about it at death?
There can easily be some kind of God without an afterlife existing.

"There may or may not be a God. We'll never find out."

Eh, there's explanations for everything. You give a very well-documented case with many witnesses, evidence, etc. and then you'd most likely be able to provide a reasonable explanation, without resorting to magic. It might take 200 years, it might take 5.

It's just that this 'evidence' is just as unexplainable as people claiming they were probed by aliens and that aliens came to Earth thousands of years ago and started up the first civilizations. You don't take those reports seriously, do you?
I mean, sure, some have some good ideas and things that connect, but most people would take their word with a bucket, not a grain, of salt. Except, when it comes to miracles, they're ready to believe it without any doubt with just the tiniest bit of evidence.

Oh and I took a quick look at an article about the french nun being cured.
"Last year, there were some questions about whether the nun's original diagnosis was correct. But in a statement Friday, the Congregation for the Causes of Saints said Vatican-appointed doctors had "scrupulously" studied the case and determined that her cure had no scientific explanation."

While it does seem a bit of a stretch that Vatican doctors would lie about her disease just to setup a miracle, it was Vatican doctors, not normal not-related-to-the-church doctors, who claimed the miracle was scientifically unexplainable. The 'evidence' already starts to fall apart with a little bit of scrutiny.

Just remember, when it comes to conspiracies and miracles and people attributing things to the unexplainable/not-sure-if-it-exists, take it with a grain of salt.

Of course. If I might add, I'm not sure how familiar you are with the Vatican, but the informal title of "The Devil's Advocate" is exactly that. The office looks for literally anything that would make the person not a saint. Anything.

Anyways, what about something such as the Fatima Miracle of the Dancing Sun?

It is irrelavent whether we believe in god, because it does not matter until we die.
In my opinion, if you have to be afraid of eternal damnation in order to be a moral person, you are being a moral person for the wrong reason.

Well I did a quick google search and opened up a couple articles to take a look at it, but the first one I read brought up some sound points and some more evidence to the table that really changed the playing field.

http://skeptoid.com/episodes/4110

Her own mother said that Lucia, the girl who claimed the miracle was "Nothing but a fake who is leading half the world astray." Friar Mario de Oliveira, who knew her well, described her as living in a "delirious world of infantile fantasies" and suffering from "religious hallucinations". There are alternate explanations for the children's stories, imagination and boredom being chief among them."

"Most of what's popularly reported about the sun incident, such as the colors and the spinning, comes from Father John de Marchi, a Catholic priest who spent years interviewing eyewitnesses to build evidence supporting the miraculous event. But more objective assessments of the eyewitness accounts have found very little evidence of a single shared experience. Author Kevin McClure, who also compiled eyewitness accounts, reported that he had "never seen such a collection of contradictory accounts in any of the research I have done in the past 10 years." If you were there, as a devout Catholic (otherwise you wouldn't be there), you fully believed in a miracle happening that day (otherwise you wouldn't be there), whether you personally saw anything or not you'd support the majority opinion, and probably go to your grave insisting that a miracle happened there. There's no surprise that Father de Marchi was able to form a consensus description of a spinning color wheel of a sun, and no need for any actual event to justify his consensus."

If you take a look at the article, it provides some explanations for what he thinks might've happened, they're a bit long so I didn't think I should quote them.
Of course, they're also speculation, either could be true, the important thing is that there are other fairly reasonable explanations than just contributing it to a miracle, which should always be a last resort.

Also, interesting, I didn't know that's where the term Devil's Advocate came from. But I think it's worth pointing out that most miracles pertaining to medical conditions are hard to disprove or prove because of the whole Doctor-Patient confidentiality thing.

Edit: Actually, wikipedia provides a nice summary of the arguments against it:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miracle_of_the_Sun#Critical_evaluation_of_the_event

Seems like the common theory is that it was caused by staring into the sun and seeing spots. Seems a bit silly for so many people to fall for, but "Meessen observes that Sun Miracles have been witnessed in many places where religiously charged pilgrims have been encouraged to stare at the sun. He cites the apparitions at Heroldsbach, Germany (1949) as an example, where similar observations as at Fatima were witnessed by more than 10,000 people."

I think you should read Ant's post again.
Ant's post allows:

• both the existence and nonexistence of a god
• both us finding out at death and not finding out at death

Your 'corrected' post allows:

• both the existence and nonexistence of a god
• not finding out at death

This isn't about a belief in a god though, it's about his existence. Those are two different things. For example, Pascal's Wager is an argument for a belief in God. It has nothing to do with a god's existence.

If we're only talking about the existence of God rather than belief in God, then this discussion is probably not going to go anywhere. "God exists" is not a decidable proposition. It's not even well-defined.