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I don't think the existence of God can be proved in the strictest sense of the word; but we have evidence, and what we do with that evidence depends on how we think about certain things.

To some people a thing isn't proved unless we can come up with some hard numbers. Science shows what happens if you heat water to 100 degrees centigrade, or what will happen if you pass a certain current through a steel bar. Many people believe that the only valid reality is that which is demonstrated by this method of measurement and experiment. Everything, we are told, will eventually be explained by Science.

If this is what they seek when they mention "proof" for God, they will be disappointed. But that's a philosophical position, not a scientific one, and where people stand on this will influence what they admit as evidence. The real quarrel is not between science and religion, but between materialism and religion.

Science has a very narrow focus, and discovers many useful things: but it hardly tells the whole story. If (as some say) it does, then our ideas of morality are merely human constructs rather than things true all by themselves.

Personally, I find that hard to accept, because it reduces so much that we hold dear - beauty, goodness, truth, justice - to things we've made up in our heads. These can't be measured or proved in a laboratory; does that make them less real? If these high concepts are merely a series of chemical reactions in our brains - that is, originating in physical reality - then value statements of good and evil are artificial and hold no real meaning. Such a view (besides being unspeakably depressing) is pretty narrow minded, for if you will believe only what you can find in a laboratory, you are tossing out much of the observed history of humanity.

I've heard it said that morality evolved simply "because it works" - that we learned to be moral because it helped us develop civilizations and legal systems that promoted the survival of the species. But it exactly misses the point. Morality is based on the value of individual persons: we are indignant when people are marginalized or abused exactly because we are aware of a person's innate value.

In a blind, cause-and-effect universe, this intrinsic kind of value is nonsense. And in discarding it, the only value concept left lies in a strictly utilitarian sense. Things are esteemed purely because of how they may be useful: I value a tree only because it would make a beam in my house; a woman only

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