How?

Freelancer,
There is no such thing as a dumb question.

You will first need to do some mental exercises to rewire logic functions.

Look at this picture several times each day. When you look at the picture, tell yourself that this is a perfectly normal picture. It is important not to miss a day. If after 30 days, you still see a problem with the picture, forget it. You are not a good candidate.

Edit: I assume your question referred to Bible God.

I once started a thread called "How do you believe in God?"

Click here.

heh

I like this post. Very much.

I am a Nichiren Buddhist which suggests that each person has the inherent potential for elightenment and the ability to control his/her own destiny. As you practice Buddhism you begin to realize there is no God and you stop asking these kind of questions.

I posted this in another forum, but it seems appropriate to copy here:

I'm new here. Hello everyone. I most of my time on the Internet, reading everything I can find about how the universe was created. If you search for that you will find (in my mind at least) two extremes. Those who think there is a god who has always been and created the heavens and the earth and everything in it during a week, around 4000 years ago. And those who think there is no god and that we and all of what we perceive are the result of an incredible twist of fate. I fall somewhere in the middle. I like to think that I am a scientific thinker, and working in engineering, I like to think that all this is the result of an incredibly complex and wonderful plan. The universe was "engineered", if you will, explicitly for us to exist in. It has become clear to the scientific community that a few percentage points change in any one of a pretty fair list of physical constants such as the mass of an electron, and life as we know it could not exist. In fact only in the rarest of scenarios, nothing as heavy or heavier than carbon could exist. That having been said, if you believe that the universe was engineered, you must explicitly believe in an engineer. I think it is entirely possible that there could be someone or something (no good choice of words here, I think) responsible for us being here. Of course you could also subscribe to the anthropological principle which basically says that there could be an infinite amount of alternate universes, and this universe and the physical constants exist precisely because it is conducive to our existence and that means we are here to wonder about it. I guess it's like the tree falling in the woods thing, if a universe is created out of the void, and there is no one around to wonder about how it got this way, does it really exist at all? The scientific side of my brain acknowledges the fact that given infinity as the bounds, anything no matter how infinity remote the possibility, has to happen at least exactly once. The spiritual side of my head (or my heart, as the ancients would have thought) likes to think there is a reason that we are here so I stay in the middle and hope we make it to find out. The more burning question in my mind is whether we will survive to find out. I read an interesting lecture by Hawking about why we are the way we are. In a nutshell, our social and scientific evolution has outstripped our genetic evolution thousands or even millions to one. We have developed technology to destroy ourselves thousands of times over. But deep in our genetic coding we are still driven by the urge to go to the neighboring tribe and kill all the men and steal the women and food so our tribe goes on and we have less competition for resources. At least in my world the worst scenario is all this really is an accident and there is no divine creator. Even in that case we owe it to ourselves to survive and eventually spread out over our galaxy and indeed the rest of the universe. I guess the best scenario would be there is a great engineer and we have ultimately as our purpose to master the universe, and who knows maybe even universe creation.

Freelancer, if it doesn't make sense to you why should you believe it?

Well, thanks for clearing that up!

I accept the existence of G-d because my senses and experience tell me that this is so.

I says to myself, self, how does science account for the "Big Bang" theory of Creation; the Creation of Life; and the Creation of Man.
Logically, science cannot account for these odd things without without a force existing outside of the known universe or without violating known mathematical statistical laws of probabilities.

So, I try to logically construct my universe based on Occam's Razor - which says: "one should not increase, beyond what is necessary, the number of entities required to explain anything."
Another way of putting this is that if you eliminate other possibilities as being false, then you should take the simplest, most likely possibility, no matter how far fetched it might seem to you.

The universe; Life; and Man all argue for a Creator.
If you want to call this Creating Force something like: Retchup from the star Doodoohead, that's fine by me.
I prefer to call the Creator a name based on the studies done for the last several thousand years attempting to define the aspects of this Creator. This inquiry into the study of G-d has been refined, advanced and modified until we have the Creator model we are left with today.

So, in my opinion, History; Science; and Logic all end up supporting my belief in G-d.
Big hairy deal.
I do many things that are contrary to History; Science and Logic.
It's all very confusing...

Therefore, I have to verify for myself whether or not this hypothesis is true.
Is there a G-d?

A person verifies or rejects any claim by studying and testing the body of knowledge about which that claim is specialized.

If you want to understand geometry or physics, it would be equally as foolish to reject learning long division or simple chemistry on your quest as it would be to reject the actual geometry or physics texts and professors as being "irrelevant" and a waste of time.

In order to learn advanced physics, you have to want to learn advanced physics.
And that means you have to go through all the steps to gain the knowledge to understand what advanced physics is and then go beyond that.

This is the truth whether it applies to learning about cooking; or computers; or G-d.

If you don't want to learn about G-d, then you simply reject the notion as too difficult or too irrelevant to your life (as I do with computer programming, for instance).

So, start to learn.
Read the texts. Find a teacher. Pursue knowledge. Experiment. Apply the knowledge and the practical experiments. Discover whether G-d exists.

Of course, if you aren't interested and don't want to know, why bother?

Everything depends on what YOU WANT.

Right, NickFun. One doesn't find answers to questions in meditation; one loses the oppressive questions. That's part of what is meant, I think, by "liberation."

I had it pounded in my head since childhood.

Freelancer: I agree with JustanObserver. It's pounded into us from day one. Remember, we all believed in Santa Claus at one time in our lives?

Well I take a somewhat more philosophical approach. God rarely forces Himself on anybody, but He will make anybody willing to accept Him aware of His existence.

It requires an open mind and a willingness to let God be God.

First you have to do the attitude adjustment thing and decide you just might not have everything all figured out and that there just might be something more than what you know. Then invite God to make Himself known to you with no directives about how or when or in what form that should be done and then just wait for awhile. It happens. Every time.

Not every time.

I have always had an open mind, and a willingness to let God be God, or anything else it wants to be. And the invitation for contact has always been open, yet nothing has revealed itself to me except the beauty and elegance of nature itself. Is this what you think of as God?

Best Regards,

Hard to say Ros. Certainly the perfection and beauty of the universe I see as divine. And maybe it just hasn't happened yet or you haven't quite recognized it yet. I sure am in no position to judge and I long ago gave up trying to dictate how God should do anything.

I believe in God and do not think, that anyone can control his or her own destiny. Ask anyone, going through really hard times, why they aren't contolling their diestiny and they'll tell you, the same thing as I have.

I believe in God, because of the wonders of nature, in particular the molecular structure of the human occular iris. To ever think that such a beautiful anatomical structure resulted from chance is total nonsense, in my opinion.

I believe in God because I have absolute, undisputable proof of His existence. I wish there was some pay to pass that around, but I haven't figured out any way to do that.

The human iris didn't result from chance, it resulted from natural selection, and there's big difference between the two.

Natural selection is a non-randomizing factor in the process of evolution which allows the random changes in mutation to be focused into something which fits its environment. The fact that the process itself exists is almost more remarkable than its results.

Hi Fox,

I guess we would need to know what you consider "absolute, undisputable proof". Obviously it's not empirical, or you would be able to pass it around without difficulty, so you must be using a different measurement system for determining veracity of knowledge. What system are you using?

Or maybe I do recognize it, and simply call it something different than you do. Perhaps we both perceive the same thing, but describe it differently.