If someone was very good at opening locks and safes but instead of using that knowledge as a locksmith he used it to break into people's homes and business and steal their wealth and future from them, would you still admire them for their lock picking talents?
People have found proofs for their delusional beliefs in gods since before recorded history, everything from seeing the image of jesus on a piece of toast or in a spider's web to full blown hallucinations. Stick to science and the scientific method, it is very unlikely that it will lead you from the true path.

Welcome to the asylum. Enjoy your stay.

Focus on the science. Ignore the delusions.

When he proves his "god" exists with the same proof requirements that are demanded by science, then perhaps he has an argument, but that has been an ongoing attempt by men for 5000+ years, and no one has done it.

You can find evidence for anything anywhere. If you are uncritical in your judgment of how good the evidence is, and you do not take any counter evidence into consideration.

For example. Proposal. There are fairies living at the bottom of my garden. Test. I go down the garden and find there are weeds growing there, where did the weeds come from, I did not plant them ? Obviously the fairies must have planted them. Therefore evidence of fairies.

IF, and that is a MASSIVELY big if btw, there was ANY evidence in either Physics or any other of the Scientific Disciplines that actually support and prove conclusively the existence of God/Allah/Yahweh or any of the 300,000 + Deities that humans have created and worshiped in the last 2,000,000 + years then you can be 100% certain that evidence and proof would be emblazoned in every media source, upon every billboard, in a countless number of books, Scientific papers, Journals, Magazines, etc, etc, etc, across the entire world for ALL to see.
Humans have been searching the Universe for decades now looking, with Radio Telescopes, etc, for signs of ANY and ALL Extra-Terrestrial Intelligences but never once have they either heard nor picked up even a tiny squeak from this Omnipotent, Omnipresent Being called God/Allah/Yahweh, etc, etc, that according to the bible, the koran, the torah, etc, etc could talk to Moses, Abraham, Mohammed, etc, carve with its Omnipotent Will the 10 Commandments into blocks of stone, part the waters of a sea, make food and water appear in a desert and, last but by no means least of all, CREATE with a mere word the Earth, the Sun, the Moon, Human Beings, animals and all other forms of life in a mere 6 days.
Yes, there are those who will state the God/Allah/Yahweh, etc, etc, are beings that live beyond Space, time and the realms of the Physical Universe and as such cannot be heard, seen nor interacted with and they WILL make countless excuses as to why we cannot interact physically with such a Being because it is the WILL of that Being and we should not question it,etc, etc.
But the simple, logical FACT is that Man creates God/Gods/Goddesses in his/her OWN images and in his/her own mind/s and NOT the other way around as the Believers would have us believe.
Therefore, IF God/Allah/Yahweh, etc, ARE real then, logically, should not EVERY other God/Gods/Goddesses from the Dawn of Human History must ALSO be real as well?

Many smart people are stupid

He may be good at teaching physics, but he is demonstrating catastrophic cognitive failure elsewhere. It is trivial to infer the following:

• He has no understanding of the Scientific Method
• He has no comprehension of the nature of falsifiable evidence
• He is committing the logical fallacy of special pleading his own Allah
• He is demonstrating compartmentalised thinking (Francis S. Collins, a world class geneticist, also demonstrates compartmentalised thinking)
• He is making unfounded assumptions about the both the nature of time and the nature of causality.

As @twill observes, many smart people are stupid. An example of that is Einstein's claim that "God does not play dice" when in the context that Einstein was using He clearly does. Putting that quote into context, Einstein was rejecting the notion of quantum mechanics (QM), and QM has subsequently shown itself to be a very good model of that part of the natural world to which it refers.

"So put that in your pipe, Mr Physics Teacher, and smoke it!"

Edit: as you may have gathered from the tone of my comment, I have no time for galloping great fools.

That brother is preaching not physics.

If he has evidence in physics for a god and also that god is going to punish humans who don't believe in it... Well he'd better his proof in a paper and up for peer review as all good physics is advanced.

Or I rather suspect his evidence is actually unproven and usually unprovable hypothesis that doesn't actual prove anything except the author's confirmation bias.

Ask him how Mohamad's trip to heaven and back on a winged horse equates with the laws of physics. If he says it was a miracle he is full of shit.

I would suggest that you just stay on topic and only discuss physics with him. Close your ears when he mentions religion if you do want to pass.

You haven’t stated any of his arguments for us to counter. Also this is the wrong forum. Ask other physics professionals, not atheists and agnostics. If all he ever said was there’s endless evidence but hasn’t provided any then you can simply counter by saying there is no evidence in physics that proves god. If he appeals to his authority then let him know you recognize that as a logical fallacy. Good luck.

I met a lot of nuts when I was in school, too.So many in fact, that I began calling academia 'macadamia' (after the nut). That was because it reminded me of those tin boxes of mixed nuts you buy at the CVS as last-minute Christmas gifts. Every semester seemed to offer a mixed bag of 'macadamians'. That's just a part of 'academic freedom'.When you encounter a macadamian, just bite your lip, and try hard not to laugh, at least until class is over with!

If you're an adult studying physics I'd assume you can reason. It takes very little reason to come to the conclusion that the muslim or christian gods are bullshit. If you're a child just accepting what you're told without thinking about it, you're doomed.

It is impossible to convince a fool that they are wrong so I would just ignore him.

My evangelical sister once told me that I was going to hell. I told her that it's a good thing that I don't believe in heaven or hell.

it sounds as though he is thoroughly set in the old traditional beliefs. You are unlikely to persuade him. All you can do is be strong and stay true to yourself. No one truly knows.

Good luck.

No. You cannot counter the religiously intoxicated. Pass his course and move on to a reality based world.

There is no evidence in physics which supports the existence of any gods so his "argument" is unfounded so there really isn't anything to counter. Is this a trap?

You are at an important step in your life. The decision you make next will affect your life. I went through this same experience decades ago, and it has affected my life, largely for the better. I'll explain:

I had a similar amazing (at the time) physics teacher who was also religous and believed there was no conflict between his religion, his faith and science.

But you have to realize, as I later did, that he really isnt good at physics and hasn't really studied the history of science.

Please read books on the history of science, espcially physics. You will find that science and religion have been in conflict for over 2000 years, and religion lost about 500 years ago. Before 500 years ago it was common for religion and science to be compatible, but math and new technology got introduced and it destroyed all the ideas religion held dear. You can't argue with math.

So what happened 500 years ago? Galileo used math. Galileo is the grand father of physics, he used math to invent the concept of velocity and accelration, and he showed that acceleration due to gravity was constant. He used this to prove that to the experts that Aristotle (the authority the experts followed) was wrong, that heavier object do not fall faster than lighter objects. They fall at the same speed and acceleration.

What led Galileo to use math? Galileo was tired of having useless arguments with his peers, because all the arguments they made were an Appeal to Authority (look up what that means, it's an important idea). Basically it means they said "This great person or book said it was true, so it must be, other wise you are disrespecting the person or book or the writer of the book, and you should be punished".

Galileo wanted a way to know the truth without saying God said so, or this important person said so, or this expert said so. Yes even experts can be wrong and Galileo didnt trust experts either. He wanted to know the truth independently from any authority.

There is only one thing Galileo knew that was universally unarguably true: math. So he started describing nature using math...and in doing so he set the path towards modern physics. All the great phsyicists took his lead and studies physics by describing in through math and experiments, seperating it from relying on an authority.

And here is the important thing I learned: your teachers can be wrong. The person you most admire and trust can be wrong. Doesn't mean they are evil, it just means they are wrong.

When I learned about Galileo, I no longer blindly trusted teachers. But more importantly I no longer blindly trusted books, especially textbooks. I developed the skill of being a skeptic, questioning every line every statement. When you do this build your ability to analzye and you build your own knowledge of truth informed by authority but doubled checked by logic or experiment.

And it led me to become a physicist.

So don't blindly believe or trust any authority figure, including your teacher, imam, parents, grandparents, siblings, relatives, police, lawyers, poltiiciansb etc.

Use logic, especially math, and evidence, especially scientific evidence based on math, to guide you to the truth. Don't do it because I said so. Analyze it and figure out if it is the best path to the truth.

And most important, and most difficult: be skeptical about yourself. It is very easy to lie to yourself, and that can hurt you the most.

When you do all this, especially when you learn physics, chemistry, biology, and math, you will find there is no place for God or religion in there. God does not need to be invoked, and no religious rules apply or come out of science. They are independent, do not rely on each other, and as the last 500 years has shown, fiercely contradict each other. There are HUGE conflicts between Science and religion, especially with physics on the nature of the universe and biology on the nature of life.

So, don't believe your physics teacher, he is wrong. But don't take my word on it, figure out why he is wrong for yourself.

Atheists will be "punished by God"?! The dude is an asshole.

Physics teachers in all countries teach the same equations. How can American physics be christian and Indian physics be Muslim? It cannot. Physics is just the description of physical matter, and has no denomination. Rest assured, any argument he gives for physics "proving" the existence of god is not proof at all. His initial assumptions are false, which lead to a false answer.

Good luck in physics! It's fun!

Successful or stable conditions does not indicate any kind of intent which the explanation of a God implies. If you take a handful of sand and pebbles and gently blow on it, the smaller and less dense meterial blows away while the larger and denser material remain. Can we really say that the larger and denser items were a matter of intent? Or is it simply a matter of what remained under particular conditions? If other mathematical formulas applied to physical phenomenon wouldn't be stable and sustainable, they have had billions and perhap trillions of years to implode and disappear leaving behind that which is stable and sustainable. Unless we are able to identify the remnants of some unstable and unsuccessful phyical systems, we wouldn't know they ever existed, just as some extinct species that never fossilized would never be known.

In my estimation, the idea that a God will punish nonbelievers is BS - an indication that God is a narcissist. Any God who expects blind faith in him - blind because God certainly doesn't leave any strong evidence of its existence - expects fear and ignorance from humans. Any God worth anything would respect that its creations have used the brains provided them and would respect that the lack of evidense God leaves of its existence would lead to an atheistic or agnostic conclusion. If God can't respect such a conclusion based on rational thought processes, then it is God who has the problem for expecting humans to not use their "God-given" brain and not the thinking human being.

Physics does not address the existence of god. God is irrelevant to the process. That's kind of what bugged Einstein so much about Niels Bohr's ideas of Quantum Mechanics. Einstein insisted there was a Unified Field, but he could never prove it. No one has.

Bullshit

There are many intelligent people that are easily confused by not seeing what's right in front of them, reality. They learn really well how things work and make things that are complex but think that intelligence is special god given issue. The measured understanding of physics of is just that
our own learned understanding of it. Since there is no rational reason to believe stuff not found in our reality they must not understand that simplicity. Life started millions and millions of years before any of the modern(the last 5000 years) religions started and we evolved to this. If they cherry pick the sciences as some silly proof of a belief system, i think more, much more study is needed by them to prove such silliness. I think a reasonable scientist would understand this.