Not able to be seen.
Albeit subjective means I would suppose. Unless there's currently some omnipresentometer which I am unaware of.
I just think that... well... non-believers have a hard time believing in God for a lot of reasons, and one of the ones commonly spouted off is that there is no empirical evidence for a creator.
Not being able to be seen sounds, well, visual. But I'm taking that to mean as something observable in some way, no matter what that way is.
What I'm getting at is that by his very nature, there should be no empirical evidence except for what is plainly visible around us. I'll equate your ideas about math with what I'm trying to get at about God (I still am not entirely sure I agree with them though but it might be because I don't have the same understanding as you.) You cannot see math, you can only see its effects on things. It just does its thing, as you so put it. God is the same. He's omnimax, and if at any point he was quantifiable or measurable by some instruments, he would no longer be God. The needle would snap off... so to speak. So he cannot be measured, but we can see the effects of his existence around us clear as day IMO.
I can see that, in the case of a all encompassing "it". But it would be deterministic it. By that I mean it would follow some sort of laws, be it math, physics, the universal constant vibration, the raw matter of consciousness, or something I can see. Some sort of field or energy in the universe that is all around us such that measuring it wouldn't have meaning, or we aren't aware of it to measure it because it has always existed.
I don't think what you're saying is true of a conscious entity. If it is conscious, or has free will, rather than being a background radiation or energy it can direct itself, cause events, and do things outside of the deterministic laws. Which I suppose you would call supernatural things since they'd be outside these natural laws.
If a conscious entity wanted, it could make itself known, and could be observable. If God did/does create miracles, biblically those miracles were observed and reported.
If God did/does not create miracles, then it would be a more deterministic entity and wouldn't be observable because it would be following the same natural laws it is a part of, so we wouldn't know it existed.
A third option is, that God is a conscious God, but only effect consciousness. God has no effect on miracles or the natural rules of the universe, but can affect our consciousness so we can only observe such a God spiritually or emotionally, but God won't turn out water into wine or cause earthquakes, but may affect us down to our soul.
Others evidently draw a separate conclusion than me. And that is why discourse is awesome! I would really like to understand what direct empirical evidence would satisfy an atheists need to see God.
Technically I think nothing could satisfy an atheist unless that evidence was within themselves, like having a massive trip on LSD and having a massive realization about a God that their brains decide to believe. If you don't believe in something, especially something that is as ill defined as a God, then it would make more sense to assume you were become schizophrenic than absolutely knowing you were really observing God.
A study was done recently, in which they found religious people were more able to have "magical thinking" in the area of fantastical creatures. A religious person might see an angel or demon or believe something magical could exist, whereas someone without religion would assume more naturalistic or scientific explanations.
One might see a shaft of light from the heavens and something descend to Earth. A religious person might interpret that as God and think it's the second coming. An atheist may think it's a meteor or explain it as a UFO and aliens, or some other explanation. We tend to believe what it is we already believe, and it's very rare to change beliefs that you don't have doubts about in the first place.
So an atheist mind might interpret any empirical data as being everything but God, so I don't see how anything could change their mind, unless it was something changing their consciousness (like my third God example).
No. We've seen the physical laws of the universe in action. Math is the means by which we make sense of them.
Numbers did not exist until we made them.
You have a pretty cool take on things.
I think it's more like the neurons in your brain can be quantified isn't it?
The Universe occurs without us. Math makes sense of the Universe. I feel like we're personifying or deifying math again.
Aha okay I see where we differ here. Stats take place... you're right. But I'm the type of person who would just call it events, and that they're not statistics until they're laid out as such.
Math occurs regardless of our ability to measure it, count it, or formulate it. Which is why many things in science change all the time. We had a view of physics until we realized that the math we had was, in fact, wrong. Einstein needed special relativity to explain some things that weren't "adding up".
None of my points is about trying to anthropomorphize or deify math. I'm just saying that if you look at all the naturalistic sciences, at their base is math. Physics, chemistry, chaos theory, biology...are nothing without math.
Evolution is really just a study of math. The rate of mutation as balanced by the rate of selectivity with a dose of genetic drift causes a probability of change to take effect.
I was not clear in what I was saying before about math and statistics. It's not statistics, it's probabilities that are going on.
(note: going really off topic)
In my opinion, all science is a study of probabilities, and in trying to collapse down to the simplest level, a truth about something by understanding all the probabilities involved.
Now I don't mean "probably" or "picking lottery numbers" kind of probability. I'm meaning stochastic interactions, which is to say random, but not really random, interactions. And science is an attempt to explain all those stochastic interactions in a way that accounts for all of them to say something is a "fact".
Let's say you have two elements, A and B. In chemistry, you might say if you mix them you get a chemical change to C. But what you only really have is a probability of C happening. You mix A and B and nothing happens. It turns out, and A and B only seem to create C when the temperature is above 100 degrees. And only if there is darkness. In light, the reaction doesn't happen. And they have to be mixed in water which has input into it.
So I guess what I'm not saying very well is there are all these probabilities, all these interactions, and we don't always understand them, know how to measure them, or have factored in everything. Probabilities are like potential energy for change, when they get close to each other, things may change. Atoms might share an electron. A photon may be emitted. Sometimes energies come together that inhibit changes that would normally occur and alters the threshold of that change.
I see arguments against science often where the criticism is "See? Scientists say probably, or might, or may have, or we're not sure!"
This is interpreted to mean science is trying to have it "both ways" or they're lying, or they're covering something up. It's more of the fact that science has a very hard time saying something is definitively true, because you may have missed something, or maybe something hasn't been studied at a particular level, or maybe they made a math error. Maybe what they observed flies in the face of everything that is known so the chances of it being revolutionary is so low then they MUST have made a mistake.
I always feel it's a bit unfair to do that to them when they're just trying to understand the world and are admitting they don't know everything, but are making the best guess they can.
So in conclusion (lol) I'm not saying lets worship math
per se. I'm saying that the universe is full of interactions that may or may not happen, and when you have these different probabilities of energy coming together, amazing things can happen, even if it's just a flash of energy as a single photon of light, or two people coming together and falling in love for the first time in their lives.
Math IS omnipresent.
