by Simon Wright

Created on: July 08, 2010

When considering the possible existence of a God or gods, the burden of proof doesn’t lie with atheists to prove his/her non existence. After all, we don’t require defendants to prove that they didn’t commit a crime; rather the onus is on the prosecution to prove that “he did it”.

Similarly, in the ongoing intellectual debate over whether God exists or not, the onus is on religious proponents to prove that their God exists. And because most religious people hold that their God is real and that other people’s gods are fictitious, there is the added requirement to prove which God it is that exists and that “did it”.

However, the person who framed this particular article title asked whether the “concept of God can be disproved” so let’s explore what can be said from that angle. The first thing that we need to do is define what we mean by “God”?

The freedictionary.com lists two main definitions that I feel are worth outlining:

“God - A being conceived as the perfect, omnipotent, omniscient originator and ruler of the universe, the principal object of faith and worship in monotheistic religions.”

“god - any supernatural being worshipped as controlling some part of the world or some aspect of life or who is the personification of a force.”

Whether the word is capitalised is normally determined by whether we are referring to a deity who is considered to be the one supreme deity (such as the Christian God) or whether we are referring to one of many deities all of who exist within the same theistic belief system (such as the Roman, Greek, or Nordic gods).

However, for our purposes, the vital aspect here is that both God and gods are perceived as being supernatural. That is to say that they stand apart of the natural mortal world. In theory, this separation from the rules of the natural world (and more pointedly their ability to bend and reshape such rules) should make it possible for humans to observe the actions of such deities.

To take an example, if we ever observed an instance where the established theory (or law) of gravity was overturned we could argue that this could be tentative evidence of the possibility of a higher being with the ability to intervene in a “miraculous” manner. However, there is a glaring problem with this way of thinking. This is the fact that many things that appear miraculous turn out (with the benefit of hindsight) to simply

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