Hello @Faizal_Ali. According to NDR research, NDEs occur during clinical death (brain death included) or general anesthesia, which means that there should be no brain activity whatsoever. Yet they are having lucid, organized experiences.
NDE-EvidenceBigelow.pdf (449.1 KB)
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@Puck_Mendelssohn Great post! The issue, though, is that if God was unambiguous, objective, measurable, and testable by the tools of physics, then that āGodā would be some sort of physical creature. How could such a creature be the Creator? No one would believe such a creature to be God. In order for the Creator to have the ability to create this universe we are in, I would imagine that Creator to be beyond the tools of physics and outside/beyond the limitations of matter.
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@Tim Thanks for your reply. However, even if those things have evolutionary advantages, the question is still begged of how these things created themselves, right?
Yes, I believe the origin of the universe is intelligent and relational, and Volkswagens and Yorkies both involve intelligence and/or some purpose for our lives as relational creatures. As for Covid variants, that requires an explanation of why our world has evil and/or suffering, which is a topic that is different, though related, to God.
@Meerkat_SK5 Thank you! You have given me a lot of great resources here! 
I really appreciate it. I have opened them up and will bookmark them and check them all out!
Iām afraid that the term ānothingā is quite ambiguous. But here it means nothing we could have detected as particles, including photons.
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No. If these attributes have evolutionary advantages, then Natural Selection will work to develop them. There is no need to posit that they were contained at āthe origin of the universeā, particularly as there is no evidence that these attributes existed until billions of years after its origin.
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No, I wouldnāt assume so. To do what it does, it must interact with the physical world, however. If itās beyond scrutiny, it cannot have done that.
I donāt know. But I donāt know how something with no existence, physical or otherwise, that can be verified could, either. The latter problem seems much worse than the former to me.
I would add that not all of the gods are said to be āthe creator,ā and it would be rash to assume the god we are looking for evidence of was āthe creator,ā whatever that means, before we identify it, confirm its existence, and then study its characteristics.
Ah. Well, that is the sad way these things usually end: withdrawal of the object from scrutiny, just as the Flurpidurpians often do. I think that I am not alone in the view that that which is inscrutable is irrelevant, and unworthy of further consideration by anyone.
I am curious, though: given your statement quoted above, why on earth would you ever suppose that any scientific evidence for or against the existence of such a thing could exist? Plainly, by your terms, it cannot, and your solution to its existence being negated only creates the problem that its existence can never be in any way confirmed or even corroborated. That makes the subject of the thread a bit of a nonstarter.
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It would be helpful in assessing the value added by your comment for you to define evidence.
@Puck_Mendelssohn These are good questions you are asking. I asked the question on this thread because I was curious to get responses from educated folks of various opinions. It has been helpful. I also asked it because, even though I believe the presence or absence of God cannot be detected by the tools of science, I believe that what science shows us about the physical universe can still LEND itself either to believe in God, or a lack of belief in God. I was curious what people had to say about this.
Science also cannot measure āloveā itself, but we donāt say that love doesnāt exist. Even when neuroscience finds neural correlates of consciousness for specific things, that doesnāt mean it has found consciousness itself or the things we experience in it like love, logic, etc.
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21 (!) new comments waiting for approval this morning, only eight of them here! 
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I think that three possibilities exist:
- The universe could be fine-tuned for life
- The universe could be compatible with life
- The universe could be incompatible with life
If we found ourselves in a fine-tuned universe, that would be interesting. If we found ourselves in an incompatible universe, that would be really interesting. But weāre not. Weāre in a universe that is compatible, but barely. Exactly as weād expect given natural causes.
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Thatās a different question.
Some folk see reasons to believe in God, perhaps because of scientific discoveries. Other folk to not see that this leads to any reason for belief. Most scientists do not see this leading to reasons for belief, but there are some scientists with the other view.
Science cannot detect love, because love is a subjective and ill-defined quality, whereas science is the realm of objective and rigorous observation.
If you are willing to admit that God is likewise subjective and ill-defined, then Iām sure the scientific community would be happy to leave the question of Godās existence entirely alone as being explicitly outside their remit. However Iām sure quite a few theologians would be unhappy with you.
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To define such evidence we would need to understand how a universe without a God would be different from a universe with a God, but one who wants to remain hidden. Can you help with that?
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āLoveā is an abstraction, a label that we humans assign to a particular set of feelings and behaviours. If you want to say that God is a similar abstraction I would agree, but you probably mean more by it than that?
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Ok, but that wasnāt what I asked.
Does the fact that the universe contains Volkswagens now mean that the origin of the universe included Volkswagens? If it does not, why wouldnāt that also apply to rationality, intelligence of relationships?
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Be warned: @Meerkat_SK5 frequently cites things he hasnāt read. Donāt expect them to match his description.
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Can it? Thatās not a loan whose terms anyone should ever accept, if one has already made the gods inscrutable. Once the gods are inscrutable, there is NO way that evidence, of any character, can bear on their existence at all.
In practice, what this sort of thing tends to mean is that people donāt actually believe the gods to be inscrutable. They merely want to wall their own gods off from hostile scrutiny, while basking in the warm fuzzy feelings that come from McCainesque āwhen I see the glory of a sunset, I know there are godsā sort of line of thought. While nobody can be denied the right to get warm fuzzies wherever they can be got, itās obvious that such notions are worse than worthless. If the gods are scrutable, then the only thing worth doing is to explore them by scrutiny. If they are not, there is nothing anyone can say about them at all. But putting a one-way valve in it, so that the gods are the subject only of glowing and positive scrutiny but are immune from so much as a bad Yelp review, is indefensible.
Why do people like this statement so much? I see it constantly. It makes no actual sense as an analogy. The difficulty is that the concept āloveā is only a descriptive tool for various phenomena which are known to exist: the experiential aspects, and their neural underpinnings. āLove,ā the concept, does not exist as such, but can be a useful descriptive tool because, by the nature of language, it is helpful to be able to categorize similar phenomena together for the sake of discussion. But it is a gross error to think that because āloveā is a useful descriptive term, āloveā as some sort of reified essence also exists.
In the case of the gods, itās entirely different. When the very issue is whether there is any āthereā there, one cannot say that the idea of āgodā is real even in the limited sense of being a useful descriptive term for some class of known entities. At best, if the gods are inscrutable, itās a descriptive term for a hypothetical class of unknown and utterly unknowable entities. āLove,ā while not real as an entity itself, has the merit of being a term usefully describing things already known. One cannot reify love, assert that it is now āreal,ā and then bootstrap the gods in similar fashion, because the difference is that the term āloveā describes an underlying, real substrate: a class of neural and experiential phenomena with undoubted existence. No such thing can be said of any of the gods, without the very evidence which you assert cannot exist.
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Such evidence?
That seems to me to reflect what I see as the problem.
Do we need to fabricate a unique definition when talking about God? Do we want to do this to either easily rule God out, or to easily see him allowed to fit within the scope of evidence?
Can we not just use an overarching definition? One that would be used in everyday, but nevertheless with some rigor usage. Some rigor as in not sloppy. But not refined as to exclude a priori what one want to see excluded.
Yesterday I listened to (watched) a podcast where the terms hypothesis and theory were at one point used interchangeably. The one guy corrected himself when he found himself having used the word theory when what he was actually doing was meaning hypothesis. He put his usage down to using the word theory colloquially.
Iām probably rambling here, but Iām not looking for some crazily worked-over definition, (for evidence) but just something that gives us a clue as to whether the standard of evidence has been met.
It seems to me entirely reasonable to ask the guy that used the word, what he meant by it. No?
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