god's existence can't be proven

Jesus floats down from Heaven over Jerusalem, good Christians start rising into the sky and are assumed to heaven. The Earth turns under Him and while it turns every believer is promptly taken up in the Rapture. How would that not be proof? I daresay, even as a rather staunch atheist, that would be remarkable evidence that I am categorically wrong. In fact, I would have about 10 hours before Jesus floats over my area and takes up the believers and would probably be a firm Bible-believing Christian by that point. --- This idea that there are no possible proofs for the existence of God are nothing more than atheism in agnostic clothing. Stephen Colbert once noted in an interview with Bart Ehrman that agnosticism is just atheism without balls. A meaningful God could very easily demonstrate his existence. "God if you exist make this pencil fall upwards." "Wow, look at that. It fell upwards." I think the very ideas behind this concept of "defining God in meaningful terms" is an anathema to reasoned discourse. God wasn't defined before? Could we define God as male, female, gender neutral? In fact, a number of people do exactly this. I once conversed with a theology student who when pressed why God would sacrifice Himself to Himself to accomplish (forgiveness of sins against Him) a task he could have just accomplish directly, he argued that there was some greater law than that of God. When asked why he didn't worship that law or what that law required, or how it came to be, he took a few days and had a few discussions with others to determine that God wasn't actually bound by that law. How do people decide such a things? They just reorder the entire universe in their minds unilaterally without God's permission? In a discussion about Adam being made in God's image the question arose as to if God had a penis and, if so, what was it's purpose. Initially the individual agreed that God had a penis, then had second thoughts and removed God's penis from him. Why, can this be done? Why do the definitions ebb and flow like the tide? This entire debate pretty well presupposes the non-existence of God. You can define God, pick and choose what's true or false, and there's no objective thing these beliefs apply to as to enable us to find that they do not perfectly describe the qualities of this deity. Now to the argument at hand. You argue that if God is defined in any meaningful way, then God's existence cannot be proven. I categorically disagree. If we were to define a God and have a concrete definition of this God rather than the typical wishy-washy impossible to pin down understanding typically used we would be overwhelmed with ways to prove the existence of God. * If we were to define God as caring who answers prayers of devout believers we could do a very basic test of statistics to see that far fewer than 100% of prayers are answered and, in fact, no statistically significant occurrences happen with or without prayer. * If we could define God to be all-powerful and all-good then we could find a contradiction if there were suffering or evil present anywhere in this world. * If we defined God as just and punishments for non-belief strict we would expect that unbelief would be completely unreasonable, completely unjustified, and this debate would be trivially false. * If we could define God as the pantheists do, as the universe and all phenomena within it (which I contend is a meaningful definition even if I disagree with its application), then we could show that God exists as easy as we show the universe exists. * If we define God as Jesus accurately described in the Bible, who said that before everybody in a crowd of first century Israel would not perish before the second coming occurred, we could see failure in that prophecy and in that God. As the oldest individuals alive today are only as far into their second century as I am into my first, a far cry short of the several thousand years so required to hold out hope. You stated in your opening that it "Depends on the level of proof you want, and how you define God. But ultimately, if you define God in any meaningful terms, or with substantial level of proof, God's existence cannot be proven." I'm sorry, but the exact opposite is true! The meaninglessness of the definition is the only saving grace of this supposed Saving Grace. Any "meaningful" definition would be far enough from wishy-washy as to be scientifically relevant and subject to evidence. It is only these definitions of pathetic gods who cower just beyond the relevance of our world which are meaningless and unprovable. The claims made by swaths of supporters and by the Bible are testable. If we have a concrete meaningful definition, then we have a concrete meaningful test. Agnosticism (even theistic agnosticism on your part) is unjustified for the great majority of these gods. You can test the claims made, the prophecies fulfilled, the abilities thereof, and find these deities wanting and contrary to the observed reality of our existence. It is rather, the constant redefinition of God, which narrowly escapes proof. The apologists waiting in the wings to invent new qualities or banalities to deities do so avoid subjecting beliefs to reason. They would far prefer to settle for a meaningless God than a nonexistent one. Meaningful gods are crushed by science like snakes in the cradle of Hercules. Meaningless gods attempt to slither out of this universe to be justified by the flawed logic and pathetic rhetoric. If a meaningful God existed, we'd easily show this to be the case. Any relevant God could demonstratively be shown to exist. We are forced to conclude that god is irrelevant either through non-existence or non-interference. Even if, God were so defined, to be non-existent or non-interfering wouldn't that be the very definition of meaningless. You say that the existence of a meaningful God cannot be proven? To which I ask, which God? --- * Faith is meaningless. At the core, faith is nothing more than a flawed epistemology and a way of accepting things which are unacceptable by the evidence alone. Believing false things, in all cases, requires a degree of faith; properly viewed, the evidence always attests to truth. * The cosmological argument, that everything has a cause and therefore the universe has a cause is certainly flawed. Any loophole to stop the infinite regression could better be applied to the universe rather than the supposed God. Also, there's no need for a God because a flying spaghetti monster fits the bill just as well. This doesn't disprove God, but shows that the argument is either flawed of the flying spaghetti monster exists. * It is simply a good insight that looking for causes is a productive use of our time. However, we have found in a number of fields (biological sciences, quantum mechanics, and cosmology) that there does not always need to be a cause. It is simply a good rule of thumb, rather than a law of nature. * The big bang doesn't really suggest much about causes. It could be that something caused the Big Bang, but it could also be that it just happened. Such are the possibilities. * As for order in the universe, there is a good deal of it. Order exists as a consequence of just bare statistics and quickly arises out of disorder. If there's a fifty-fifty that a particle will breakdown in a given amount of time, the purest form of random we could fathom, then we can and do use this with staggering regularity to make very accurate predictions about large numbers of particles (half of which will be gone in that given amount of time / half-life). The universe is disordered with amazing regularity, even entropy is conserved.