So I came into this one late, Oh well.
You don't need proof, but some people refuse to believe in anything that doesn't have conclusive evidence. The problem with God is that there is no conclusive evidence either for his/its existence or non-existance. As a result I think many people will refuse to believe in God or make a decision on the matter. Unfortunately, since there is no conclusive evidence for God's existence, most people that need proot to believe in something take this as evidence he doesn't exist.
Another way to look at it comes from one of my old phil teachers. He described belief in God (aka. faith) as like a cold, though I think that using genetic code as an analogy works better. He said faith is either something you have or you don't. If you get it you will believe in a thing despite lacking evidence, whereas without it you cannot. But he specifically pointed out that faith is not something you can force yourself to have, and I think he is right on this point. I think most poeple require proof. For example, try to believe, right now, that there is an elephant sharing your chair with you. You can't do it, no matter how much you may want to you will always refuse to believe an elephant is in the chair with you. Even if everyone in the room was staring, shocked at the elephant next to you, if you didn't see it you would be looking back confused.
To really show one's geekiness, one can use the example of the episode of Next Gen where Picard is caught by Cardasians and the guy holding him prisoner keeps telling Picard that there are 5 lights above his head when in reality there are 4. Picard is tortured until he admits there are 5 lights, which he never does. Yet at the end of the episode he admits to Troy that near the end he began to see 5 lights rather than 4.
Either way, I see faith as something you have or you don't. You can try to force it upon someone, or create an environment that makes those with faith go overboard, but if someone without it tries to believe in something he has no reason to, he will not be able to. On the other hand, people can take things to the extreme and refuse to believe anything not proven to them, but that is just as harmful as blind faith. For instance, I would want to be a single hermit for the rest of my life if I just believed what I saw from the women I have dated, but I have to have faith that somewhere out there is a girl worth being with. Or I could take the evidence that people are horrible, nasty, cruel, unloving, selfish jerks whose only goal in life is to get as much as he can at another's expence, but I believe and know, despite all the evidence to the contrary that people really aren't that bad, they simply get caught up in the lives they know and forget that everyone else is just a free, just as able, and just as deserving of respect as they are. So I think having some faith of some kind is important to living a full life.
Yea, my two cents.
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