But unironically, “having faith” implies that you do not need proof but you are trusting your belief. So they are kind of correct
Yep, bible has a lot of sections about having the faith of a child. Believing without needing proof.
The way faith is treated in the First Century doesn’t translate well to modern audiences. Having faith of a child isn’t an analogy to a child being gullible. It’s an analogy to the way a child trusts in and depends on his parents. Trust, arguably, would be a better translation than faith in many instances.
Faith for ancient religious peoples wasn’t about believing without proof. That would be as ridiculous for a First Century Jew as it is for us. Faith is being persuaded to a conclusion by the evidence.
If you believe in God and science empirically proved God didn’t exist, would you still believe?
If you don’t believe in God, and science empirically proved God exists, would you start to worship it?
I don’t believe God exists. But if he was proven to exist, I would believe. I would not, however, worship him. Dude’s a prick.
God’s existence, by definition, cannot be proven or disproven. That’s the nature of faith and free will (in the theological sense). And that’s why there are scientists who believe in God. This American idea that religion and science are opposites makes no sense.
Of course it can be proven to exist, as long as evidence of its existence exists.
And what would be the evidence for God’s existence? I don’t think there’ll ever be scientific evidence for God because all events can be explained by science as having occurred naturally, but what if the natural part is made by God?
In science, anything you can measure is real.
If this god affects nothing measurable on the universe, it might as well not exist
If “God” is indistinguishable from the natural world, unable to be differentiated from it, to formulate or express thoughts or to influence existence in any way, it is a redundant idea, a zero to the left, and something so alienated from what the vast majority of people consider God is, that the meaning of the concept has already been twisted. It doesn’t deserve epistemological effort, because our understanding of the world wouldn’t change one bit: rather than it being a wilful intelligence, it would be a carcass over which we happen to live in, which the Universe already is. Even if you were to prove the existence of such a devoid concept, it would be equal to asserting “The Universe exists”.
