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[Blimp]

If you believe God affects your life on earth, you are wrong. This argument is not about the existence of God. However, there is nothing that distinguishes a Christian's life from the life of anybody from other religions or lack of religion. Prayer does not work. I'm not saying that things that people pray for can't happen, but that prayer does not affect it at all.

Also, I realise that church and the fellowship there probably does affect your life. However, this is not distinguished in any way from any other religion or gathering of like-minded people.

[jimwalton]

The problem with you case is that it's unverifiable, and therefor illegitimate. How can you declare which parts of life are God-affected and which are not? By what legitimate criteria have you determined that prayer doesn't work? Are you approaching prayer statistically or scientifically, and what makes those the only valid assessment points of something like prayer? How have you determined that nothing distinguishes a Christian's life from anyone else's?

There are plenty of things on earth that suggest that Christianity is divine, but probably not what you're considering as evidence or what you are willing to accept through the filter of your obvious biases.

[Blimp]

Would you be able to name one or two things that make Christianity divine that can be observed? I'm an atheist as you may imagine from the post, but if there is I would like to change my views. And to answer your question, I speak mainly statistically. Take, for example, when a basketball team thanks God for helping them win the championship. God certainly did not help the other team even though there are Christians on both teams. It's pretty clear that Christianity did not affect the outcome

[jimwalton]

Well, I guess part of discussion lies in your phrase "that can be observed." What are you hoping to observe? Usually people are talking about miracles or statistical anomalies attributable to answers to prayer, but those two are both misguided expectations.

The first step in any discussion about miracles is to define a miracle. Some philosophers say that it is an occurrence contrary to nature, but we shouldn’t be so quick to embrace that definition and then find our hands tied by our own definition. The Bible never claims that God violated the laws he himself imposed on the world. Maybe a miracle is God working with the laws of nature rather than against them, just in a different manner and on a different time scale. C.S. Lewis, for one, said that miracles were just nature on a different time continuum, like fast forward. He said water always turns to wine; it just usually takes four months instead of one second; human bodies have the capability to heal, just not instantaneously at the word of the Master. So what is a miracle?

The Cambridge Introduction to the Philosophy of Religion (pg. 208) defines a miracle as “An event (ultimately) caused by God that cannot be accounted for by the natural powers of natural substances alone. Conceived of this way, miracles don’t violate the laws of nature but rather involve the occurrence of events which cannot be explained by the powers of nature alone.” That's an OK definition. I would tentatively define miracle as “a supernatural exception to the regularity and predictability of the universe, and therefore it is not a common (this term needs to be interpreted) occurrence.” Maybe the laws of nature speak of naturally recurring events, and miracles speak of supernaturally nonrecurring events. After all, the laws of nature are not really laws, but rather more accurately forces (gravitational, electromagnetic, weak and strong field forces) and constructs (velocity, mass, energy, acceleration). Einstein’s theory of relativity lets us know that velocity makes a difference in reality and can come into play in ways we are still deciphering. It’s quite possible that God has forces as yet unknown to us, and can manipulate velocity, as well as other forces, to initiate relative states.

Secondly, we should realize that science cannot prove that miracles are impossible (here's your "that can be observed" conundrum). After all, science can only speak to what is within the purview of scientific observation and the study of nature. Anything outside of that ballpark is outside of its scope. Science can’t prove to us whether entities exist outside of nature, and whether or not those entities could possibly have an influence in our natural world.

There is no philosophical argument or scientific experiment that conclusively disproves the possibility of miracles. Scientifically speaking, the odds of certain miracles occurring (such as the resurrection) may be infinity to one, but theologically speaking they are x:x (unknown to unknown). Miracles are outside of the scope of probability calculations. But realistically, the question is not so much “Can they occur?” but “Do they occur?” Anyone will admit that scientists exclude the miraculous from their scientific work, which they are entitled to do. But that’s because if a scientist tried to offer a miraculous explanation for something, he or she would no longer be doing science, but something else, like theology or philosophy. Miracles are inadmissible as scientific evidence because they are unpredictable, not able to be compared with a control group, and unrepeatable for confirmatory studies.

Ultimately you are asking the wrong question of the wrong discipline. Science ("that can be observed") can really only work in a uniform environment that is predictable, repeatable, and (in this situation) controllable (a control group and an experimental group). "Things that can be observed" require some sort of material remains that allow a phenomenon to be studied, but this requirement is outside of the sphere of what we mean by “miracle.” Miracles are not predictable (so the situation can’t be intentionally studied before the event), reproducible (so the situation can’t be tested again to confirm hypotheses), nor controllable (cannot isolate causal mechanisms).

Science is appropriate when dealing with repeatable (reproducible) phenomena that can be studied under controlled conditions and give confirmatory results. One time events that were not predictable and don’t leave behind any material evidence can’t possibly fall under that category. Suppose you had a sneezing fit a few weeks back. I want you to quantify it and analyze it, or better yet, prove to me that it happened. That’s not possible, Should I then assume you never sneeze, never sneezed, and that you’re wrong until you can prove it? What evidence do you have that you had a sneezing fit? Or walked around the mall last month? Or saw a catamount? We have to use the proper measure for the proper category. And science is not the proper measure for understanding or proving miracles. Even in the area of astronomy, for instance, where some phenomena are one-time only events, to study them scientifically requires multiple repeatable examples that can be observed and compared/contrasted. Again, miracles don’t fall into this category.

In short, the bottom line is that knowledge is not one-dimensional. The methods of evidentiary scientific study are not applicable to much of our knowledge, including the occasion of miracles. Attempting to extend scientific evidence as the grounds of all knowledge is doomed to failure in many arenas, not just this one. To presume that anything remaining outside of science’s scope fails to qualify as knowledge is not justified by science or any other argument, and is, in fact, self-contradictory.
Can anyone prove that a once-only nonrecurring event is a miracle from God or not? No, because either way it’s an interpretation of what one has seen or experienced. We all decide based on what we determine to be consistent with our understanding of the world and the evidences on which we build those understandings.

As far as prayer, we cannot approach the subject statistically and more than we can determine my tastes in food statistically. It's the wrong measure for the subject at hand. It seems you may be basing your position off of an argument for the existence of God from my expectations in life situations. It goes something like this:

1. If God does not exist, my basketball team will lose.
2. My team won!
3. Therefore God exists. (!Q>!P)

This is an inadequate argument for a host of reasons, all of which involve #1 being impossible to prove or verify. The case in which #! CAN be proved is if the "answer" involves something so astoundingly coincidental and/or something that our current understanding of nature considers impossible, such that Ockham's Razor indicates that the simplest answer is divine intervention. What about this scenario:

1. If God does not exist, my basketball team will lose.
2. My team lost.
3. Therefore God does not exist. (Q>P)

This is a logical fallacy also. Instead, what actually happened is this:

1. If God does not exist, my team will lose.
2. My team lost.
3. No conclusion is possible ( = we don't know if God exists or not).

The difficulty in making this statement is that you have to prove its first premise, which is impossible. It is altogether possible that God exists and my team lost anyway. Whether or not God exists, it would be more proper to say, "We have no idea whether God is affecting the outcome of (whatever)." Ultimately, we would need only ONE example (not a statistical majority, or even a statistically significant minority) to prove that "God affects life on earth" in general. The Bible records several examples of such, and there are many testimonies of people to the same effect. And since the same Christians who believe that God affects life on earth believe that the Bible is the accurate record of the activity of God, it is not inconsistent for them to believe that God IS involved, though this offers no particular assurance that he will be involved at any particular point in time. Past performance is no guarantee of future results. Most Christians will affirm that they have no way of knowing specifically whether or not God is involved in any particular event, and most of the ones who claim they know are operating under faulty theology that I have no desire to defend.

Causation (of any kind) can't be measured empirically without fully isolating variables and replicating results. Revelation ( = being told by God) is the only way we know ANYTHING about what God is like or how God acts. Generally, when we affirm something as "God did something or other," this is not on the basis of an absence of physical/biological efficient causes, but on the belief that God works by means of those causes. In other words, we believe that God is involved in life ONLY because we first believed in a God who is transcendent.

At the bottom line then, you are asking the wrong question. The claims of the Bible were provable at their incidence, often with no lasting results. What we have is the testimony of eyewitness, which atheists are more than happy to ridicule. The claims of the Bible are also provable by those who experience them, much like love. You can't do a blood test or an MRI to prove love, but have to believe the person who is walking on cloud 9 and telling you he is hopelessly in love. It's certainly valid, but if you want to do an experiment to confirm divine intervention, you can no more succeed with that than you can for my statement, "I forgive you."