Dear Those Trying to Prove the Existence of God:

I'm afraid you've missed the point. So well and truly missed the point, that you've found yourself in a parallel dimension, where everything is perfectly circular.

Now I myself am an atheist, but I have many friends and family who are religious, with varying degrees of extremity. Despite my atheism, I very strongly acknowledge the power of faith.
Now for clarification, in this post (and in any other religion-oriented ones, and just in general in my everyday speech), when I refer to faith I refer to the belief in God(s) and it's/their ability to make our lives better; while by religion I am referring to a community or organisation of people who share the same or similar beliefs.

The power of faith is the power that you gain as a result of their belief in (a)n omnipotent being(s) and it's/their vested interested in your personal welfare. It's most strongly present in particularly hard times, when you feel completely at loss and incapable of dealing with the issue, so you look to a higher power for guidance. This creates hope, a tiny spark of light in a tunnel that was previously completely black. And small as it may be, you can see that light, and so you know it can be obtained.

Faith begets hope, begets strength.

Whether or not this is in fact an interference from a higher power, or simply the accessing of a hidden well of strength within you, is unimportant, but the unimportance of the source is important. Confused yet? I'll explain.

Faith is illogical by it's very nature. Faith is defined as a belief in something despite a lack of empirical evidence to support this belief. If a friend who's opinion of film I have faith in tells me that something is good, I will believe them, and go see it. Until I've seen it myself I don't know whether or not I like it, but I have faith in their opinion.
You have faith in God, for whichever reason, even without evidence of his/her/their existence.

This is different to believing something that you know, through experience, is true. I know that if I buy a pair of Nike's, I need to buy size 11.5s. I know this because I have tried on and subsequently bought that size, so I have evidence to support this belief. Therefore, it isn't faith.

This illogicality is precisely what gives a faith in God it's potentially life changing power.

God is an abstract concept: we don't know what it looks like, what it's purpose is, how or when it was created, we don't even know if it exists. We know nothing about God. All we have to go on are faith and scripture. The scriptures, though generally claimed to be "the word of God", are written by men who we've never met, and so for all we know they could be as real as the idea that there isn't actually such a thing as "space" and what we see when we look at the sky are just a bunch of very large TV screens. To believe in the scriptures is to have faith in them.
Thus, any concept an individual has of God is a projection of their faith.

This abstractness means that you can (and will) create an image of God that suits your needs to get through whatever it is you need to deal with. If you've lost a loved one, you have faith that they've gone to a better place, and God is a loving looking after them. If you're scared of terrorists, you have faith that God is a righteous, vengeful god who will protect the good and smite the wicked.


Which brings us back to the point of this post: if you're trying to prove the existence of God, you've missed the point of believing in God.

What happens if someone actually does prove, with empirical evidence, that God exists, then God loses its abstractness.
God becomes something definably real; everyone knows exactly what it is and isn't capable of, and we lose the strength gleaned from faith in what "could" be real.