Is There Proof of God?

One of the biggest pitfalls for many Christians and preachers is that they are obsessed with the idea of proving God's existence. Not inferences or ideas, but hard evidence. This is frankly nonsensical, and no evidence can truly prove God. But this doesn't necessarily discount God's existence.

What do I mean by this? Well, for example, let's say they find an ancient Greek tablet, describing an incantation that would "invoke Zeus" and causes lightning to strike nearby when a certain combination of ingredients are put together. Is this proof that Zeus exists? Not necessarily. Just because something is ascribed to God does not mean it actually comes from God. There could be a natural explanation, some law or cause that we simply do not know yet. If we went back in time and showed the power of an atomic bomb to ancient Greeks, and told them it was the power of Zeus, this would be very compelling evidence. After all, there's no natural explanation for this. What I am describing is essentially the 'God of the Gaps' problem, where people think "if there is no known natural explanation, there must be a supernatural cause". Much 'proof' of God falls into this category. There's no known explanation for how life can emerge, so God necessarily must have created life, as one example. The argument that no evidence could ever prove the existence of God, used by many atheists, is often decried as being just as dogmatic as organized religion. But in reality, it is really the only rational standpoint.

The plain truth is that God is an immaterial being. God doesn't exist literally up in the clouds, and the Bible never says such. How is the material supposed to prove the immaterial? It can not. Sure, there can be indications and such, what are the odds that all these guys went to their deaths proclaiming that they saw a guy risen from the dead? But even then, most of the evidence for their martyrdom, and many other miracles, have been mainly kept and recorded solely by the church, which obviously has an interest in the matter.

This doesn't mean that God can't exist. The existence of God is a perfectly rational explanation for why the universe happened, why the universe seems to follow laws, why logic functions, and so on. People may say that this is just a handwave, but when it comes to these fundamental issues, the more secular answers are just as handwave-y as the existence of God.

Moreover, for most people, they are not convinced of God's existence by mere arguments, but rather by experiences. People who say they died on the table and saw heaven, these sorts of phenomenon. People can make whatever arguments about the logical necessity of God, but a personal experience is always stronger. People don't change their lives because of abstract arguments and statistics. They change because of lived experience.

The existence of God is not predicated on physical evidence. A belief in God is not irrational. But the idea that God's existence can be supported by hard, material evidence is fundamentally contradictory and will only lead to crises of faith. Faith in God should not rest on material evidence.