Is the belief in god a scientific claim?

When someone says that the belief in god is spiritual and cannot be tested by science, what are they actually saying?

Many people claim that belief in god is not based on physical evidence and is not a scientific claim and that it should not be treated as such.  They claim that god is not physical.  If god is not physical, then what is god?  If they say god is spiritual, I ask what is spiritual?

If god is not physical wouldn’t that mean that god doesn’t exist? If  something doesn’t have a physical impact or body then it does not exist.  If there is a god, then god would have a physical existence even if it were something like light or energy or waves. If god interacted in the natural environment there would be some scientific evidence for the existence of god. There is none to date, still the belief in the nonexistent is wide spread and many toss out physical evidence that contradicts their belief in something that  is nonexistent.

Often times religious people use the term spiritual experience to describe why they believe there is a god. They don’t refer to their feelings of awe or joy as human emotion and usually they don’t admit or realize that people of other faiths or those who lack faith have similar experiences.  People who believe also claim that god is a spirit and that they have a spirit.  If there is such a thing as a spirit, what is it and what are its physical properties?

The so called spiritual experience cannot be used as evidence of god the same way that hatred or anger or confusion cannot be used to prove or justify a belief in god. If there is a god the only way to tell is if there is one is by physical evidence.  The only way we would believe anything else is with physical evidence.

Now some say we take things on faith all the time but I ask what do we believe that we could not be proven with physical evidence?

Like the idea of someone having a brain or if they care about us.???

It would be very easy to check if someone had a brain.  We just have to open up their skull and peer inside.  The reason why we know people have brains is because that is exactly what people have done.

For matters of abstract ideas such as love it is possible to prove someone cares about you by the way they treat and interact with you..  If someone tortures you or abandons you,  you can assume they don’t care about you.  If on the other hand they take care of you and treat you with compassion and kindness you can assume  that they care about you.  There is certain amount of physical evidence that a person cares about you or doesn’t. The word love is a label of a physical response in terms of emotion and action.   How people responds to us and how they treat us determines how we think they feel about us.  So as the question of love’s existence it is easy to tell by physical evidence because love or the lack of love have clear physical reality to our persons, even though we may disagree about what it means to love because love is a term used to refer to things that happen in the natural world.

So what do we believe that does not rely on physical evidence or that could not be proven to certain probability by observing the natural world?  Faith is the belief in the nonexistent.  This is very clear. Why do people believe in things that are nonexistent or have no physical evidence?

What is god?  Is it a feeling like love? Or is god believed to be like us, a physical being in the universe, not a word to describe an emotion or actions or chemical reactions that happen in our brain and bodies.  It is easy to prove that people believe in god in the same way we can tell if someone loves us.  We may be wrong or be misguided but there are physical manifestations. However when people say that god is spiritual and not physical what they are really saying is that there is no physical manifestation of god, which is the same as saying god is nonexistent or there is no god.  Who could say that about emotion or clouds or chairs that have a physical reality and impact on the natural world without being labeled as out of it?

If there is a god, god must be physical in the same way an atom or a wave or a rock is.  To say otherwise is to say that god is nonexistent. So the existence of god is in the realm of science and evidence.  When we say there is no evidence for god or god’s existence cannot be proven, we are saying that god does not exist according to the evidence that we have so far.

I have heard it said that believers of god(s) and atheists don’t share common ground and therefore can’t debate but I think they do because both believe that god is nonexistent. One just realizes the implications of nonexistence and other does not.