>>172
Perhaps my choice of words in >>165 was poor. I meant not to state my own beliefs, but rather propose that if God is exempt from causality, then perhaps the phenomena I listed are exempt from causality as well. You can't rule out the convenient explanation for some phenomenon and not others.

My understanding is that if God is not required to obey natural laws, such as the law of causality, it means either two things: those laws are invalid, or God is supernatural. That which is supernatural is by definition outside the bounds of science. Your argument may be true, but if you hold that God is omnipotent (making him exempt from every natural and scientific law), it is neither scientific nor a proof and is an inadequate rebuttal to the opening argument of this thread: "God is not real because there is no scientific proof that he ever existed."

> My argument is that one cannot make sense of ANYTHING let alone causality, without God (a personal, omnipotent, immaterial, timeless being) as the first cause.

You know, there's a funny pattern throughout history. All sorts of phenomena (though particularly the dramatic) that contemporary scientific knowledge was unable to adequately explain - rain, lightning, earthquakes, life itself - was thought to be the work of gods or of God. As scientific explanations for these phenomena were developed, tested, and refined, the belief in a divine origin of these phenomena slowly faded away and in many cases disappeared entirely.

I see no reason why this pattern should not continue, until some distant day science has succeeded in explained everything, and there is no room left beyond it for gods to dwell. That is my faith.