Taking the common Christian definition of 'God' (omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent, disembodied intelligence or 'spirit' - whatever that is - that exists beyond our univese and created it and and gave us the purpose of being moral, and acknowledging him through faith, etc), how much reliable evidence is there for such a being? Here is a quick round-up of the evidence I'm aware of:
- private, subjective feelings of 'spirituality' (does not equal evidence that they are anything more than experiences caused by brain events)
- anecdotes of miracles (number confirmed by independent verification = 0)
- the Old and New Testament - claimed to be 'the word of God' (fails because the authority that they are the word of God is the texts themselves - it's circular, plus of course there are the internal inconsistencies, inconsistencies with demonstrable reality and the fact that there are a range of other texts saying contrary things, all claiming to be the 'true word of God/Allah etc'
- The existence of the universe itself. (The existence of a thing is not evidence for one particular explanation for a thing - salt exists, therefor the salt-cellar of the gods must exist? No.)
- The existence of life. (Same argument above applie, plus there are other explanations which have substantial *actual evidence* are more powerful, and provide actual detailed explanation of the processes rather than sweeping, nonspecific ones, like 'God did it' or naive, implausible ones, like 'he made man out of clay, then made woman out of his rib').
Therefore the verifiable evidence is nil. There is certainly no more evidence for a Judeo-Christian account than there is for a Shinto, Hindu or Ancient Egyptian account.
What is the evidence for the hypothesis that invisible elephant-like creatures live on a planet orbiting Alpha-Centauri or that extra-dimensional pixies inhabit this planet? Hypothetically it should not be excluded, but again there is no verifiable evidence, so the possibility remains purely hypothetical.
Furthermore this 'God' entity is proposed to possesses a number of characteristics which we have no other examples of and have difficulty even making sense of - so we don't even know if it is even possible for such a thing to exist. For example, he is said to exist outside of the universe - we don't know of any space, time or existence of any sort in which he could exist and without those concepts, in what sense can he be said to exist and to have causal relationships with our universe? If he is part of (or all of) some 'greater reality', where did it come from? This is not an explanation for the origin of everything at all its just a case of pushing the problem further backing into a transcendent reality and clouding it with 'mysterious unknowability'. If the greater reality 'always was' or 'is not subject to the concept of time' then why can't we say the same about our universe as a totality? Indeed, relativity shows time to be a *property of* the universe, not something which the universe *exists in*.
Another example is the concept of omnipotence and the conundrum this leads to. If He is all-powerful, and all-good, why is life so crappy sometimes and why is there evil? Freewill and suffering are necessary for our spiritual development and judgement I hear you say. But an all-powerful God would be able to perfect us without resort to such indirect, inefficient and painful means. And, does the concept of unlimited power actually mean anything? Can he create a rock that he cannot lift or not? Can he make a square circle? Can he make good actions evil and vice versa?
Faced with the logical absurdities even of the concept of God's existence let alone the absense of evidence, I'd have to put him into the vast category of vanishingly small possibilities and apparent impossibilities - probably some way below the invisible pink elephants and extra-dimensional elves. The fact that there are as many of these undemonstrated and untestable hypotheses as we have imagination to think of them is significant. If we accept them we would not be able to function due to uncertainty and indecision - our knowledge of reality would be effectively zero. The default state of our knowledge is not zero, ie. not a certainty that hypothesis X is false. This background of vanishing hypothetical possibilities is actually the default state. And the 'God' concept slides right into it along with unicorns and jabberwockys. What we need to find the 'real' as opposed to the merely 'conceived of' is something which will pull the proposed hypothesis out of this near-infinite mass of vanishing possibilities - that is why we seek verifiable evidence and how human understanding has advanced over the millenia. The thing that pulls the 'God' concept out of this background is not evidence or even reason, it is IMO that the memetic evolutionary complex that is religion has evolved a powerful emotional appeal and a doctrine which encourages people to circumvent the usual need for evidence and reason and accept this particular hypothesis on a faith-alone basis. See Richard Dawkins and Susan Blackmore for more details.
If, we are motivated to do so, we can redefine 'God ' in such a way that it avoids many of these logical problems. If we accept a finite entity of some sort, which nevertheless created our local universe and may have great power over it and exists in some sort of hypothetical transcendent reality, like a computer programmer who creates a simulated world, then we at least have a coherent idea. There is however, still no evidence for it, it still has no real explanatory power, it isn't the Judeo-Christian god and there is no verifiable way to acertain its intentions for our behaviour if any, no divine support (let alone absolute moral imperative) for the claim that homosexuality is evil, for example.
