@ Fraser
I don't believe in God. I am an atheist. For now. But
I would throw away my beliefs tomorrow if someone showed me some decent evidence that they were wrong, and had something supported by more evidence to replace them with.
That is what I mean by keeping an open mind.
I don't mean that I will continue to believe what ever sounds the most comfortable to me because it was told to me by someone who I like, despite evidence staring me in the face that points to it being nonsense.
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If a study could prove that a society who followed the ten commandments indeed lead to the most happy way of life, then I would embrace those commandments, and reject any other way of living.
If a study could prove that a society who followed something other than the ten commandments lead to the most happy way of life, then I wonder how many of its followers would reject them?
Believing in something basically, for the sake of it, is not having an open mind.
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So let's assume that God is hiding from us in outer space somewhere (hence the observatories ?), or in some other dimension, or in the teeming quantum nothingness.
How do people communicate with God? What is the agent of communication? If you are proposing that it is something other than the known forces then you had better come up with something to support that claim which not only incorporates the whole phenomena of already explained observations but also accurately and predicts some new and unexplained ones. Or maybe God communicates through one of the known forces?, then we should be able to detect it eventually through our equipment.... or perhaps people are special and they are made of particles that don't behave in the same way as non-people particles? Maybe the brain cells are made up electrons with a God-communicating spin? Well, sure, say what you want, but just put it down for the rest of us to see so that we can check if it's correct or not.
What is the speed of Prayer? Is it as fast as light? as fast as quantum tunnelling? is it slowed down by a strong gravitational field? Can you pray from within a black hole?
Is a prayer cancelled out by an anti-prayer? or a prayer travelling backwards in time?
does a prayer need to travel anywhere at all, or is it heard instantaneously? does god see across all of time? if so then do we need to pray in sequence or can we pray tomorrow for something that happened yesterday?
etc, etc.
What is your theory? I am open to hearing a plausible well treated theory of God.
The problem for religion is that as scientific theories become more and more advanced, and more and more accurate, they leave less and less room for alternative theories because the alternative theory has to explain everything already explained, or simply reject it. I'm sure there are plenty of people at Intel and AMD that can tell you that current theories work very well in terms of predictable phenomena and are as close to being provable as you can get.
Maybe we can extract a small sample of some of these God particles from a willing priests brain, and use them to develop faster processors, or maybe compile them into a great big autonomous praying machine that would take the work load off all the busy priests?
I'm open to suggestions.