Religion

When arguing about the existence of God, the vast majority of arguments I have ever run into always go to the point of asking for evidence. With that word in use they are implying the physical manifestation of evidence to prove God true and, as a theist, that is not how God works in relation to what we are taught. Must evidence, in a physical form or with science backing its existence, be truly necessary to believe in the idea of the supernatural?

Comments

Thank you for this inquiry! The idea that all our beliefs, religious or not, must have sufficient evidence is sometimes called "evidentialism." It is much debated today: some philosophers think there is no uncontroversial domain of what may or may not count as evidence nor, if we did agree on what counts as evidence, how much evidence one needs in order for a belief to be justified. I am inclined to think that all or most of our beliefs are in fact backed up by some evidence (reasons for thinking our beliefs are true), however modest and elusive. And I also suggest that the belief in God is rarely without some evidence, even if it only amounts to 'it appears to me that God exists.' But four things might be noted in reply to your question(s).

First, not all evidence for a belief need involve "physical manifestations," a "physical form," or the natural and social sciences. Part of the problem with these claims is that we do not have a clear, universal concept of what counts as physical.

Second, evidence may include the experiential or what seems manifested in one's experience. So, I suspect that for many theists, part of their evidence-base is some sense of the presence and reality of God. Appeals to experience in a philosophical argument is sometimes referred to as an appeal to phenomenology, an appeal to what seems evident in our experience. Appeals to phenomenology are sometimes used in ethics (e.g. claims are advanced that good and evil are evident in our experiences of health and harm), philosophy of mind (some philosophers seem to deny the reality of consciousness and awareness; other philosophers reply that such a denial flies against all our waking experience), aesthetics (e.g. appeal to our experience of what seems like beauty and ugliness). There are also a variety of arguments for theism based on religious experience. You may find references to this literature on the free, online Stanford Encyclopedia.

Third, a significan number of philosophers reject "evidentialism" whether in a religious or secular context. Some think that what makes a belief justified or warranted is the reliability of the belief being true, even if the "believer" has little idea of the evidence available. Some philosophers have argued for believing in God on non-evidential grounds, such as Pascal's wager (if you do not know whether there is a God, it is better to believe or assume that there is a God rather than not). In several dynamic, interesting books and papers, Paul Moser (of Loyola University) has argued for the primacy of a volitional account for believing in God. It is "volitional" insofar as Moser argues that to seek God one must be willingly open to recognize the reality of a perfectly good, loving God. Once this openness is in play, Moser believes that a yielding to this God of love will become both apparent and justified (the belief in God through this process is not at all in conflict with one's intellectual integrity). You can find references to his work by just doing a google search for: Paul Moser philosopher belief in God.

Fourth, I suggest that the term "supernatural" may not be the best to employ in connection with reflection on God. This is partly because the term does not have a consistent usage in English and some associate the "supernatural" with the superstitious. The term "theism" (coined in the 17th century in the first philosophy of religion texts in English) is the more consistent term for the belief that there is an all good, powerful, knowing, necessarily existing, omnipresent God who has created and conserves the cosmos in being.

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