Why God cannot be proven: A "Star Trek" argument

Perhaps the strongest evidence possible for the existence of God would be if some being came down from the sky and repeated all the feats performed in the Bible. But, as one enlightened listener of the Skeptics’ Guide to the Universe (SGU) podcast recently pointed out, “What could a God do that couldn’t either be done by a being such as Q or faked with high technology? Even if the Bible were 100% true, how could we be sure it wasn’t just some Q-like being screwing with us?”

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The reader was referencing one of the most powerful and memorable characters in Star Trek, an eccentric, apparently omnipotent entity with a flair for the dramatic and a tendency to cause mischief.

Yale neurologist Steven Novella, host of the SGU, concurred with the listener’s logic.

“If you hypothesize a being that is outside of the laws of the universe, how can a being like a human who is constrained by those laws ever be able to evaluate evidence that demonstrates the existence of the being outside those laws? The answer is you can’t… There is no experiment we can do, no observation that we can do… to distinguish between an advanced alien and God.”

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