Journalist: According to you, the term "proof" does not apply to God. You prefer the term "sign". Why? God is not an entity of the same order as an atom or a galaxy. The existence of the atom is corroborated by theoretical schemes and experimental evidence. Almost the entire scientific community recognizes its existence. God, at least from my Christian point of view, is not a matter of demonstration. He is a personal God with whom we can establish a relationship. This is an act of faith and freedom. The word "proof" does not apply to the existence of God, because proof is a matter of logical reasoning, not of personal choice. When faced with a mathematical proof, we do not have the freedom to accept or reject the result. Even in physics, where there is no absolute certainty, scientists reach situations of consensus. The theory of general relativity, for example, is accepted by almost all scientists. But this is far from the case with the existence of God! A sign, however, requires interpretation. And interpretation refers to the freedom of the interpreter. If we have a pleasant encounter on the street, we can see it as a sign of God's benevolence or simply as a result of chance. It is a question of freedom of interpretation. No demonstration can conclude that we should have met that person on that day and at that time. The believer can be free to find signs of divine action in the structure of the universe. Isn't it a sign of something that the universe is so coherent? There is room for debate here. But this is not proof.

God is an hypothesis, and, as such, stands in need of proof: the onus probandi rests on the theist.

Faith requires no proof. No evidence. No explanation. Faith is entirely a matter of trust and belief. We cannot know, we can only believe.

"What is not so generally recognized is that there can be no way of proving that the existence of a god, such as the God of Christianity, is even probable. Yet this also is easily shown. For if the existence of such a god were probable, then the proposition that he existed would be an empirical hypothesis. And in that case it would be possible to deduce from it, and other empirical hypotheses, certain experiential propositions which were not deducible from those other hypotheses alone. But in fact this is not possible. It is sometimes claimed, indeed, that the existence of a certain sort of regularity in nature constitutes sufficient evidence for the existence of a god. But if the sentence "God exists" entails no more than that certain types of phenomena occur in certain sequences, then to assert the existence of a god will be simply equivalent to asserting that there is the requisite regularity in nature; and no religious man would admit that this was all he intended to assert in asserting the existence of a god. He would say that in talking about God, he was talking about a transcendent being who might be known through certain empirical manifestations, but certainly could not be defined in terms of those manifestations. But in that case the term "god" is a metaphysical term. And if "god" is a metaphysical term, then it cannot be even probable that a god exists. For to say that "God exists" is to make a metaphysical utterance which cannot be either true or false. And by the same criterion, no sentence which purports to describe the nature of a transcendent god can possess any literal significance."

"The argument goes something like this: "I refuse to prove that I exist," says God, "for proof denies faith, and without faith I am nothing.

Reason alone cannot prove the existence of God. Faith is reason plus revelation, and the revelation part requires one to think with the spirit as well as with the mind. You have to hear the music, not just read the notes on the page.

If our opponent believes nothing of divine revelation, there is no longer any means of proving the articles of faith by reasoning, but only of answering his objections — if he has any — against faith. Since faith rests upon infallible truth, and since the contrary of a truth can never be demonstrated, it is clear that the arguments brought against faith cannot be demonstrations, but are difficulties that can be answered.

I am assuming that God exists and I am glad that there is no way to prove this. [Because] I would run through the proof once, and then I'd forget it, and I would never speculate about spiritual things and mysteries otherwise. And, I think, my life would be very incomplete.

Belief doesn't rest on proof or existence...it rests on faith...without faith there is nothing

It is now generally admitted, at any rate by philosophers, that the existence of a being having the attributes which define the god of any non-animistic religion cannot be demonstratively proved... [A]ll utterances about the nature of God are nonsensical.

When people say they are atheists they don’t mean they can’t prove that there are no gods. Strictly speaking, it’s impossible to prove that something does not exist. We don’t positively know there are no gods, just as we can’t prove that there are no fairies or pixies or elves or hobgoblins or leprechauns or pink unicorns; just as we can’t prove that Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny or the Tooth Fairy don’t exist. There’s a billion things you can imagine and nobody can disprove.

I mean the word proof not in the sense of the lawyers, who set two half proofs equal to a whole one, but in the sense of a mathematician, where ½ proof = 0, and it is demanded for proof that every doubt becomes impossible.

What would have to occur or to have occurred to constitute for you a disproof of the love of, or the existence of, God?

Your position is ... one where there is a god who has an important message for mankind, and somehow he only reveals it to certain individuals who then write this down and thousands of years after this initial revelation, we have to rely on copies of copies of translations of copies by anonymous authors with no originals, and the textual testimony to a miracle, for example the loaves and fishes; there’s no amount of reports - anecdotal testimonial reports - that could be sufficient to justify that this event actually happened as reported. No amount. And anything that would qualify as a god would clearly understand this, and if it wanted to convey this information to people in a way that was believable, would not be relying on text to do so, and this for me is the nail in the coffin for Christianity. The god that Christians believe in is amazingly stupid if it wants to actually achieve its goal of spreading this information to humanity by relying on text; by relying on languages that die out; by relying on anecdotal testimony. That's not a pathway to truth! And anything that would qualify for a god should know this, which means either that God doesn’t exist or it doesn't care enough about those people who understand the nature of evidence to actually present it. Now which of those possibilities do you think is accurate?" ... "Why would you believe anything on faith? Faith isn't a pathway to truth. Every religion has some sort of faith, people take things on, you know, - if faith is your pathway, you can't distinguish between Christianity, Hinduism, Judaism, any of these others. How is it that you use reason as a path to truth in every endeavor of your life, and then when it comes to the ‘ultimate truth’ - the most important truth - you're saying that faith is required. And how does that reflect on a god (who supposedly exists and wants you to have this information); what kind of god requires faith instead of evidence? ... I have reasonable expectations based on evidence. I have trust that has been earned. I will grant trust tentatively. I don't have faith. Faith is the excuse people give for believing something when they don't have evidence.