(Note--To avoid confusion about sock puppetry, I am Lotharbot's wife; we've been discussing your ongoing conversation a bit, and I wanted to say some things, too.)

> > God continues to act in this world by truthfully instructing His followers. Now, if one person who I trust is His follower says "God told me X", and then X is wrong, the theory would be disproved

> That would disprove if that particular person received words from God. It would not disprove if God talks to his followers.

Actually, it kind of would. I mean, if I judged what was the word of God by what was reliable and true, you'd be right -- that would be circular and immune to any sort of experiment. It would be saying "things that come true come true." And when I was first learning to pray, I did exactly that; I wrote things down, I tested them, I compared them with what I knew and checked them out.

But look, after years of this, I know what the voice of God sounds like. It's pretty common for experienced Christians to say the same. So if someone I knew to be experienced in such matters (or I myself) heard something that turned out to be false or worthless, I wouldn't just say, "Well, I guess that wasn't God." I would have to rewrite major chunks of my worldview.

You have to understand, this experience is so real and constant for me (and for many Christians), that books have been written about what its absence is like.

But I want to be perfectly clear that this is a bit off the beaten path. I think most Christians I have talked to have, once or twice in life, personally observed something that I think is empirically, clearly a miracle: being told specific information they couldn't know, gaining the temporary (or permanent) ability to speak or understand a language they don't know, experiencing very specific shared visions. But let me be clear: This isn't one of the "important things." Faith doesn't revolve around miracles, and isn't built on private revelation. In fact, such things are so far from the center of our faith there is a debate in theology as to whether they occur at all(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cessationism_versus_Continuatio...)! Life as a Christian is about faithfulness to Jesus, not divine intervention.

I mean, such experiences generally aren't even used in apologetics -- they're too unverifiable, and too sacred anyway; you want to keep them private. I do mention them when people ask if my faith has any current, rational foundation. But when one seriously wants to talk about the intellectual foundations of Christianity, we go to big, well-documented miracles, like Jesus' resurrection.

>> God is more interested in advancing His goals than impressing people.

> He sure has a lot of big homes and statues for someone who doesn't want to impress people.

A rather tame display for someone who can cause supernovas without breaking a sweat, don't you think? And anyway, I doubt he actually commissioned all of those. They seem to me pretty inconsistent with God's commands to devote our wealth to taking care of the poor.

But perhaps it would be better said that God impresses, but he isn't upset by people who aren't impressed.

Let me give you an example. When Jesus was alive, he did a lot of miracles. (I know you don't agree with that, but roll with it for a second -- I'm trying to show you, based on the story, how he feels about proving himself to people.) Anyway, Jesus did a lot of miracles. He raised people from the dead. He healed incurable disease. He restored birth defects. He walked on water in a storm. At one point, he fed 4,000 people on a few loaves of bread. Right after he finished that, some folks came up to him and said, "When will you give us a sign that you are really from God?"

And he said, "Look, if you don't think what I've done so far counts, then you aren't going to get one."

(Mt. 15:29 - 16:4)

It's like . . . if you've ever argued with a troll, you know there's no such thing as absolute proof. People can explain away anything. There were people who watched Jesus do miracles and didn't follow him.

So what do you do? Well . . . you do pretty much what I'm doing right now with you. You put the information out there. And if they want to explain it away rather than thinking about it, that's on them.

I think God takes that approach, too. There is no shortage of evidence that he is real and acts in history. The content and history of the Bible, the historical fact of Jesus' resurrection, the experience of the modern church, and the origin of the universe -- those are the big ones. But if you're determined not to believe in him, there's no such thing as proof. People say, with Ebeneezer Scrooge, "You may be an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of underdone potato (or a space alien!)". They prefer to believe they are hallucinating over believing that God is speaking to them.

And that's their prerogative.

At the end of the day, I think such resistence isn't based on reason. It's based on emotion. If someone desperately doesn't want God to exist, nothing will prove it to them. And even if God went so far out of his way as to make belief really unavoidable, what would that accomplish? It's not like they'd hate him any less knowing for sure he was real.