It would depend on what you consider "evidence", which will inevitably come back to personal experience as opposed to a formal experiment conducted with suitable controls.
We have a book that talks about God (if other religions are included we have many books that talk about all sorts of deities).
We can read a book like, say, Lord Of The Rings and read about Frodo Baggins and Gandalf and all that. But since the book makes no claim about being anything other than fiction we don't need to consider whether it is factual.
Then we can read a book like the Bible or the Qu'ran, books that claim to be factual. Since they claim to be factual we need to decide for ourselves which, if any, of them are accurate. The Bible describes a person named God and attributes all sorts of aspects and activities to him. That alone could form the basis of what might loosely be called a hypothesis (I say loosely because of the known issues with using the scientific process). So when something unexpected happens we might look at it and think "did God do it?", we might think "One day science will explain that", or a whole host of other things.
Yes, and the Bible fails miserably when you test it.
Like Jesus being crucified on entirely different days of the week when comparing John to the other gospels. Or, Jesus being born around 4 BC in Matthew and 6 AD in Luke. Or, Jesus going to Jerusalem every year for the first 12 years in Luke, and avoiding Jerusalem because of Archelaus in Matthew. Or, the failed prophecy of Tyre. Or the irreconcilable Easter story when comparing all the gospels. And on, and on.
Or how about the fact that tens of thousands of denominations can't agree on what the Bible even teaches, often getting major tenets of doctrine completely incongruent with each other, and yet they all claim to be led by the Holy Spirit in its interpretation. If they were really being led by God, why so many different conclusions about major plots in the Bible?
The life of Jesus as described in the gospels is not corroborated by ANY
contemporary source, despite the fact that it is claimed that he gained a fair amount of fame in a time for which we have a relatively substantial amount of history records from multiple sources.
We know that Christian scribes who copied ancient manuscripts were not above forging documents (including parts of the Bible) to try to push their beliefs, and we don't have any copies of manuscripts of the gospels earlier than 150AD, and that one is just a small fragment. The earliest full gospel is not until 200AD. So who knows what the original manuscripts said, much less the original stories which were passed down orally for a few decades before ever being written down.
The laundry list is huge. I know, because I tried to reconcile it for myself during that fight for faith I talked about.
To take a silly example, we know that the laws of gravity mean that if I hold a ball up and let go, it will fall to the ground. If one day I hold a ball up and let go only to find it floads upwards before falling to the ground I would be surprised, to say the least. If I try it again and it falls as expected then clearly the time it floated is an anomaly - something unusual has happened regardless of whether I can repeat the process in a laboratory.
In this case it is impossible for science to prove or disprove anything because all it has is a single eyewitness account, but to just claim "it can't have done" is a bit lame.
I don't think I ever claimed it
couldn't be supernatural . I said that we should lean toward the more parsimonious explanation, and the track record of human civilization has shown us time and again that inexplicable things eventually get explained.
Now, if God raised the entire ocean and let it hover a mile over the dry sea bed while fish, boats, and plants continued on their normal path, and was witnessed and videotaped by lots of people...well, THAT would be something to consider supernatural. But we never see anything to that extreme. It's ALWAYS ambiguous. ALWAYS something that is reasonable to think that science could some day figure out what it is.
Not possible, Cuba doesn't exist, remember? Seriously, if I landed on a patch of land and people told me it was Cuba how could I tell whether I'd really landed in Cuba and was wrong about it not existing, or landed in some obscure part of Spain that I didn't recognise and which was used to fool gullible tourists into believing there was a place called Cuba?
Sure, but the whole "lacking evidence" idea is the point of my comments about Cuba. I've seen virtually no evidence that this place actually exists so therefore I have no reason to postulate its existence, and therefore have no reason to even consider that it exists.
Alternatively since a guy I know claims to be Cuban American and talks about his homeland I might consider that maybe, just maybe, there really is a place called Cuba
I'm sorry, but I don't know where you are going with this example. We have plenty of evidence for Cuba's existence. Maps, GPS coordinates, pictures, documents, videos, eyewitnesses, and many examples of each that you could cross check against each other.
Let me turn it around on you, though. Let's say there is one last spot in the Pacific Ocean that has not been explored yet. For some reason it is a blind spot to satellites. We don't know anything about this spot, yet, except the size of it is 100 square miles.
Should we send all the world's navies armed to the teeth because it's reasonable to speculate that there is a potentially hostile alien civilization living there that stretches from the ocean floor to 10,000 feet above sea level, complete with inhabitants who look like walruses and speak Latin, but turn out to be really nice once you get to know them, and who eventually will teach us to fly cloaked spaceships through a space/time fold to trade with their home world?
Of course not, such a scenario should not be postulated, because we have no evidence to believe that such a thing is anything but a figment of someone's [bad] imagination. Nor should we continue to consider it a possibility once we go to the unexplored area and fail to meet up with any president of the alien race named ZeusosirisRavishnu.
On the other hand, we
could postulate that there might be a body of land there...not Cuba, but maybe something LIKE Cuba, since we have evidence that islands exist...
In the same way you may have seen no evidence for god (small g intentional) but when others describe things that are very unusual, things that may appear to defy the laws of nature as we know them, and attribute them to prayer or other interaction with supernatural beings, the explanations may be worthy of at least consideration.
Sorry, no. Like I said, personal experiences are demonstrably biased and deceptive, and what's more, your personal experiences mean nothing to me. I didn't experience them.
And no matter how intimately I may know and trust someone who is making such a claim, it's not going to mean the same thing to me as it does to the person who had the experience.
My best friend of 30 years swears that he was physically touched on the shoulder by God. It's not that I don't believe him, but I don't know what kind of emotions he was feeling at the time, how his health was, I didn't see the environment he was in, and I also know that your own mind can cause you think something is happening that is really not. I'm sure he believes it is real and is not lying, but it's not enough to convince anyone else that it was God, as opposed to something natural. At least it shouldn't be.
This goes back to the one-off event like the ball floating that I described before. Some of the things I've seen during the time I was involved in the occult, and some of the things I've seen during the time I've been a Christian, don't fit into neat scientific pigeonholes. They were very much detectable in the sense that they were observed, but unlikely to be detectable in the sense that I can't necessarily go back and repeat them for the benefit of scientific analysis.
Was that a faith that you had concluded for yourself was real, or a faith that you grew up with and assumed was real? I hope that doesn't sound belittling, it's a genuine question because I've known a lot of people who just assumed they must be Christian because they always went to church, they never doubted because that's just the way things were, but when challenged they either didn't know answers to questions or just fudged them with platitudes like "I'm sure God knows what he's doing". It's no great surprise that sooner or later their faith crumbled. I spent a good 15 years away from God and actively hostile to God, largely as a result of getting sick of being tied up in all sorts of man-made regulations under the banner of "Christianity".
Well, I think the fact that I
fought to keep my faith for over a decade kind of precludes me from the group who accepted things at face value. I only got to where I am because I didn't satisfy myself with the platitudes.
