Originally Posted by Yakk

Willravel, it isn't that there is no proof of God. Proof is a rather high standard to hold a hypothesis up to.

It is that there is no evidence.

Let's take a hypothesis. "This coin is a fair coin".

What kind of predictions can I make? Well, if the coin was fair, and I flipped it 100 times...

We'll, I'd predict that a 95% of the time, we'd get between 40 and 60 heads.

So if I did a trial and ended up with 45 heads, that would be evidence that the coin is fair. It wouldn't be proof.

If you flipped a coin and got 45 heads, in a way the simplest explaination would be "the coin is fair".

Proving it was a fair coin can't be done by merely flipping it. Because no matter how many times you flipped it, the coin could be "almost fair".

Now, you could "prove" that the coin "is no more unfair than X" -- by prove, I mean "provide extremely strong evidence".

You could also "prove" that the coin was fair by analyzing it's physical makeup.

But what is lacking about the god hypothesis isn't proof. It is evidence.

There isn't an observation whose simplest explaination is "Omnipotent Omniscient Benevolent Being, Alpha and Omega".

There are possible observations that would require the "OOBB,A&O" God as the simplest hypothesis.

However, the same holds true of the Invisible Pink Unicorn. Lacking these observations...