I really enjoy this forum so far. Thank you everyone for your very kind and helpful responses.
Are any atheists up for answer the flip side of this question, which is: Do you believe there is scientific evidence that points to the absence of God? If so, what is it? I’m genuinely interested.
Thanks!!
Well not really (one can of course just speculate on possible answers), except in the sense that it’s much more challenging to find out whether the offered explanations are really true, since we can’t really travel back in time to a putative ultimate beginning, nor can we see outside the universe, or create them ourselves. That makes it very hard to determine whether any offered explanation is true, and that is certainly challenging. The same would go for fine tuning by God. It’s a speculative answer to why the world is the way it is.
I really don’t see why we should say theism has any more of a leg to stand on here than alternative explanations. You say to me God is the explanation for why the world is the way it is and I just want to know how you know that.
I prefer to just say the truth: I don’t know why the world is the way it is.
It is certainly true that it doesn’t follow from such historical retreats of the supernatural that there is no such thing as a supernatural Creator at all. Since there will probably always be unknowns that we can’t scientifically solve or determine the answers to, leaving us to have to speculate on what we can imagine could explain X in principle, we will never be able to completely rule out that God isn’t a candidate explanation for something.
But that’s also a rather high burden, isn’t it? - To completely rule something out. I can’t completely rule out someone in history wasn’t, in fact, possessed by a demon instead of having ingested something toxic or having an infection.
But to me the time to believe someone was possessed by a demon is when very good evidence for that is presented. Not to already believe it and wait for others to completely rule out the possibility.
I don’t think the mere fact that there is a universe that allows us to exist in it is evidence that should compel anyone to believe that a God exists. To me that’s just one among innumerable candidate explanations for existence, and I have no more reason to believe it’s the true explanation than any of the other we can imagine.
If you’re just looking for reinforcing arguments, I think there is plenty to see. Don’t get discouraged if some of the more pugnacious members give you a hard time. We’re just accustomed to people looking for science to ‘demonstrate’ rather than merely ‘support’.
Hello @Audrey , and welcome! 
You have gotten lots of answers, but I like the first one the best…
@structureoftruth nails it. You will find many claims of scientific evidence for the existence of God, but most are just philosophical questions in disguise. If you want to be a little skeptical, then understand that anyone claiming “slam dunk” scientific evidence for God is almost certainly making some sort of fallacious argument. Sorting out just what is wrong with those arguments can be a long and pointless task, but some people enjoy that sort of thing.
Understanding science doesn’t mean you have to give up your beliefs. In my agnostic opinion, if your beliefs are bringing real value to your life, for whatever it is you value, then you are just fine. If you value your beliefs only because you think science supports that position, then you might have lost the meaning of faith. You seem to be among the former and not the latter.
My personal interest is in promoting good science and science education, and I would be very happy if we could get rid of all the bad science arguments; they serve no good purpose for anyone.
The scientific view would be that we cannot prove a negative statement, but only seek positive evidence for the existence of something. Without getting into the “burden of proof” discussion, I want to note this can lead to some very silly theological arguments. In a nutshell, some people make the Bible subservient to scientific argument, rather than “properly understanding Scripture in its historical, cultural, and literary context”. (That’s a part of a quote from Conrad Hyers, but I don’t have a citation handy).
Worse, some people resort to Omphalism, but that’s for some other discussion.
Hi @Audrey, and welcome.
I don’t, and I’d be surprised if, baring oddly-specific hoops for God to jump through (like the previously mentioned “God exterminating all animals except those disembarking a boat in Turkey 4500 years ago”), such evidence might exist.
The scientific evidence might be said to provide some evidence for what God is like, if they exist – the most commonly cited example is that of an “inordinate fondness for beetles” – but I can’t think of any evidence that would even conceivably rule out the possibility of a more generic Creator God existing. As an atheist, what I would say is simply that we have no evidence for the existence of such a deity, and so no reason to accept their existence.
Yes, that’s exactly the sort of shifting I was referring to.
Hi Rum
Does this statement make you agnostic vs atheist? You agree that our existence is evidence but are unsure how compelling it is.
How could you argue that the world we live in is the result of an unplanned event?
You do realise it is possible to be both?
This subject was argued to death in this thread:
@colewd, the point is that God is no better an explanation of existence than anything else. All explanations of why life can exist in this universe are completely unfalsifiable (so far), so we have no reason to choose one over the other based on our existence alone. As far as I can tell, both P(Life|God) and P(Life|~God) are completely incalculable.
I speak as a theist, but pigeonholing is the problem with labels. I think all kinds of things to be true that cannot be proven; so do you. It seems to me that it is reasonable to allow that a person may hold the existence of God cannot be entirely disproven by evidence, but that he simply does not think there is a God. If one personally does not believe there is a God and identifies as an atheist, they are an atheist, whether or not they regard that such a view can be proven. Similarly, if one thinks God may or may not exist and are unsure either way, they are agnostic.
The statement doesn’t make me anything. It just describes the relationship between evidence and belief in theism. I think the evidence(meaning just observations of various facts about the universe) isn’t good enough to compel theism over and above alternative explanations for those same facts. For that reason it can’t be said to be evidence for theism. Not even weakly, as that would require it to be favoring theism even slightly. I don’t think it does.
I don’t. It isn’t.
Do I need to do that to be an atheist? Try to recognize that some times we just don’t have good evidence for the answers we can give to the questions we ask, even if we have a desire to know them. And I’m not sure the world really is the result of an “event”, whether planned or not. For all I know time could stretch infinitely and endlessly into the past.
In order to have scientific evidence, you would need to posit what the universe would look like if there was a god and what it would look like if there wasn’t, and then examine the expected differences. I can’t see a way of doing that. All past attempts at such a thing are either transparently non sequiturs or require strong assumptions about god’s nature. I think, for example, that we can establish the absence of a god who is omniscient, omnipotent, and omnibenevolent. But a simple creator being? No possible way to differentiate him from nothing.
5 posts were split to a new topic: Side Comments on Most Current Scientific Evidence for the Existence of God
This thread appears to be heading for multiple topic splits. Please help me out by starting your own new threads if you think a side topic is worth discussing. Some have already done so - thank you @Tim. This thread should focus on the OP question.
/fnord
That’s a really good question @Faizal_Ali . Thanks for the warm welcome. I tend to think evidence for certain things does exist, but some people don’t want to accept it. For example, Dr. Jeffrey Long compiled a 53-page document of all the best research on near-death experiences, proving that lucid consciousness continues during clinical death and during general anesthesia. Yet when I have told a couple of materialist friends about this and showed them the research, they would not believe it.
@Rumraket Thanks for sharing! What about the fact that there is rationality, intricate design, and relationships? Doesn’t it seem to follow from that, that the origin of the universe contains rationality, intelligence, and the ability to have and create relationships?
If God is defined as rational, intelligent, and relational, then wouldn’t “God” be the best explanation for why we have a universe with people who are rational and relational?
Isn’t “God” a much better explanation than “chance,” which I thought was statistically impossible?
As a statistician I must point out that a lot of those so called statistical arguments are based on very faulty math. As I noted before, such claims should be approached with skepticism. That doesn’t mean you should not have faith in your beliefs, only that you should avoid basing faith on faulty reasoning. 
We can’t differentiate “nothing” from One who has the power to create the universe? “Nothing” doesn’t have that power.
Your friends may not have, but (depending on what you mean by “lucid consciousness”) this is generally accepted by most medical practitioners and neuroscientists. Myself included.
I think the disagreements arise when supernaturalists misunderstand and misuse these findings to support the belief that the mind exists independent of the brain.