Over at the New Oxonian, this question is asked:
I therefore put to the succeeding symposiasts the simple central questions, “What would have to occur or to have occurred to constitute for you a disproof of the love of, or the existence of, God?”
For the second part of the question, there really couldn’t be disproof of God’s existence in an event. When I was in my teen years and I was thinking about constants in physics, it hit me that even those were contingent in some way. As I went on thinking, I realized that if everything that is, doesn’t have to be then there must be some prime thing that causes other things to be the way they are. That particular argument and the more sophisticated ones I have found has forced me to belief in God regardless of which religion is true.
In terms of God’s love, the author means, from earlier in his post, the love of God insofar as it is love like a human father. I don’t typically see God’s love quite that way. The analogy in the New Testament for God’s love is of an ancient patron, not of a modern day father. In that respect, God’s love is for the whole world, insofar as God invites those who believe the gospel into everlasting life. So his love is expressed in that sense. God loves the whole world of humanity in the specific way that he invites members in the household of the world (or as John’s gospel puts it, of the household of the prince of darkness) into his own. In that respect miracles of healing and even mystical experiences of God’s love are secondary to an eschatological expression of God’s salvation from sin. This is not meant to qualify my belief in “God’s love is like a human father’s love,” but my attempt to explain what I see God’s love to mean in the New Testament.
That being the case, I suppose if somebody could demonstrate that the New Testament authors made it all up, then I’d have to stop believing in God’s love in the Christian sense.
But to make some event capable of disproving God’s existence sort of misunderstands how I, and I presume many people, came to believe in a monotheistic deity in the first place.
It really is a good question though, it forces people to put some teeth to their beliefs.
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