First off, thanks for responding to my question!

“If I am being completely honest, this is how I
handle these things- First I mock the notion. Second, I get angry.
Third, I mock the idea more. Then, I get angry again. Finally, I am able
to think clearly and put the new information into consideration.”

Lol. Awesome honesty.

“People don’t rise from the dead. That’s a scientific fact.”

Depends on how you define “dead”, because many, many people who were brain dead or had cardiac arrest have come back. Plus, many churches around the world will tell you that they regularly see people prayed for and come back to life (sometimes several days after “dying”). And these aren’t necessarily churches that seek publicity (or money).

Either way, “people don’t rise from the dead” is not a fact. It’s a hypothesis. Depending on how you define dead, and whether you believe the testimonies of hundreds of resurrections in the past several years alone, this hypothesis has been disproven.

“There is no empirical evidence for God. There never will be. But I
still believe that God exists. When you believe that there is a
spiritual reality, you have to believe in metaphysics- that which cannot
be practically proven.”

I disagree. I think research into near-death experiences demonstrates empirical evidence for God, but it sort of depends on if you think there is any objective way to define God. I say there is evidence of God primarily because some hundreds of reports (many described in peer-reviewed sources) from people of different backgrounds, religious affiliations, etc. after undergoing cardiac arrest (or being “dead” in some similar manner) describe a being of “light” who possesses indescribable love, acceptance, detailed intimate knowledge of a person and seems to possess authority over these individuals. Now, does this match the angry, capricious, etc. God of the OT and Qur’an? The humanoid gods of the Greeks and Romans? No, but it does seem consistent with many descriptions of God from various sources (including, I think, much of the OT and certainly how Jesus decribes Him in the NT).

Anyway, regardless if this is a source of information that you would put your trust in, to say that there will never be evidence for God is a scientifically untenable statement. Just like the description I mentioned in the previous paragraph hinted at, it may be difficult (=impossible) to objectively define God a priori and test the hypothesis of His existence, but I think we can (and have) discover and describe a being possessing transcendent qualities that many would acknowledge is equivalent to God (or more precisely, likely inspired descriptions of God in various religions).

But anyway, I do take issue (like the atheists/agnostics commenting on here) with your statement that you still believe in God despite there not being any evidence of God nor will there ever be. If you have no evidence (i.e. reason) to believe in God, why do you?

@jmallory - “

As far as my definition of “dead” is though,
my atheist religion professor said our class, “People have never been
scientifically recorded to have risen from the dead.” When we brought up
cases, he explained that just because the heart appears to have stopped
beating, it doesn’t necessarily mean it’s stopped beating

“Do you happen to know what your professor cited to claim that? Because many, many patients have been resuscitated after their heart has flat-lined. If there’s no electrical activity indicating a heart beat, to what did your professor look to claim that the heart is still beating?

“It’s just never been scientifically recorded,
and when it is, then we will actually have concrete evidence of God’s
working hand.”

Not necessarily. There could be all sorts of explanations for why a person resurrected. Would many of them be evidence based? No. More like conjecture. Regardless people raising from the dead would not necessarily imply evidence of God. If everyone who did raise from the dead, no matter their religious/spiritual beliefs, said, “This being, who identified Itself as God, told me after I died and was floating around that I was going to resurrect. Then I found myself in this body again, fully intact” then we would have evidence of something that may indicate God exists (or some powerful being on a different plane of existence).

“I don’t know if I would consider near-death
experiences to be evidence of God though. It’s evidence enough for me,
sure, but the scientific community wants something they can feel for
themselves. Something material… something besides the testimony of
others…”

Any scientist who says that has unrealistic expectations and is biased in regards to which data that they’ll be willing to believe. Do I want something concrete, some tool to measure spiritual planes, some way to reproduce NDEs? Heck yes! But at the moment this is the best data we have, and the majority of scientists rely on similar data for other sources of information.

For example, a huge chunk of historical research is based on testimonies. Without them, we would have archaeological data indicating civilizations and cultural differences but not any understanding of the context in beliefs, political system, etc. in which different peoples lived. Additionally, psychology relies heavily on testimony, particularly the testimony of what one’s thinking. Every single survey in social psychology, and many others like it, is assuming that people are reflecting what they actually think. Neuroscientists using fMRIs to measure cerebral blood flow rely on testimony of what a person is thinking or feeling in order to make neural correlates. There’s no objective way to estimate what a person is thinking or feeling, so testimony has to be used.

And almost all scholarly knowledge relies on testimony. You and I believe that the universe is ~14 billion years old. Except you and I have 1) never used a stop watch from the beginning of the universe until now and 2) have never done any (much less all) of the measurements necessary to come to the conclusion that the universe must be that old. We have faith, that is rely on testimony, that the scientists that do this work are being honest. They could be lying or deluded. You never know!.

Anyway, like I said, more avenues for evidence would be great, and perhaps we will make some discovery that will lead to investigating this stuff more directly. But for someone to say that testimony is never good enough, despite hundreds to thousands of replications that have been controlled for religious background and expectations, means that these scientists better reject all forms of testimony as reason to believe anything or otherwise they must admit that they hold a double standard.

“But as for your question about why I would
believe if there is no evidence for God… It’s not that I don’t believe
there is evidence for God… it’s that the evidence we do have for God,
a scientist would say that it’s not concrete enough to consider
“evidence”.”

Well, there you go! That’s different. I got the impression, apparently as did the others who commented here, that you just believed for the sake of believing. Just because what you think constitutes reason to believe in God, or at least is consistent with God, hasn’t been experimentally tested in a laboratory (or otherwise) doesn’t mean your beliefs aren’t valid and you aren’t using some sort of logic to come to your conclusions.

Scientists have different standards of evidence, as becomes clear when you’re aware of the many disputes that exist within different fields. Commenting on evolutionary biology, the truth is that a lot of our evidence can be interpreted in different ways but it depends on what assumptions you’re relying on. Often, our data says nothing conclusive about a question but just generally seems to point in one direction.

“It’s because the spiritual side of life is on
a completely separate plane, even though it is intricately woven
through and connected to the physical world. It can not be seen. It can
not be observed.”

Yet!

“Of course, we can’t agree on everything! ”

Not with that attitude, we can’t!