Ask a Radical Atheist

Does this come in English?

Sure.

Let's take the case of claims such as "God might exist in another dimension we can't perceive" or "God may exist but be beyond our understanding".

Do we really need to take such claims seriously?

Well, no, actually we don't.

In these cases, we're asked to accept the notion that God may exist under conditions in which existence cannot be distinguished from non-existence, in which the terms "real" and "not real" have no functional difference.

And if God can be said to "exist" or to be "real" only under such conditions, then there is no meaningful claim of God's existence or reality.

Or let's take the case of the claim that "God is nature" or "God is the universe" or "God is whatever created the universe".

In these cases, any meaningful difference between God and mere physical reality is erased. So God is proposed to exist only under conditions in which God cannot be distinguished from not-God.

In all of these cases, the claim "God is real" or "God exists" become meaningless statements.

And to ask anyone to affirm that a meaningless statement may potentially be true is unreasonable.
 
Sure.

Let's take the case of claims such as "God might exist in another dimension we can't perceive" or "God may exist but be beyond our understanding".

Do we really need to take such claims seriously?

Well, no, actually we don't.

In these cases, we're asked to accept the notion that God may exist under conditions in which existence cannot be distinguished from non-existence, in which the terms "real" and "not real" have no functional difference.

And if God can be said to "exist" or to be "real" only under such conditions, then there is no meaningful claim of God's existence or reality.

Or let's take the case of the claim that "God is nature" or "God is the universe" or "God is whatever created the universe".

In these cases, any meaningful difference between God and mere physical reality is erased. So God is proposed to exist only under conditions in which God cannot be distinguished from not-God.

In all of these cases, the claim "God is real" or "God exists" become meaningless statements.

And to ask anyone to affirm that a meaningless statement may potentially be true is unreasonable.

Hmm, well that would kill your rejection of what I wrote quite nicely, which is why I couldn't figure it out. The scenario posited with the simulation makes God and Not-God quite easily distinguishable.

Edit: Also agree with what Bodhi wrote below. You can't just write your definition of what God is in such a way that God cannot exist and then declare God doesn't exist because your definition is unworkable. I put forward my definition twice already, and you have both times avoided commenting on it, despite the fact that it does lay a reasonable framework for declaring a being God.
 
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Wrong again. I've said this very clearly. There is no possible definition of God which is valid (i.e. not mere humpty-dumptyism, or empty, or nonsense, or equivalent to not-God) which can be meaningfully said to possibly exist.

Nope, this merely clear things up. You clearly state here that any definition should fit your own definition, ergo, you are playing a variant of strawman.
 
I was wondering what evidence you use to come to those conclusions? What about love for you?
This thread is not about love. I need to understand the relevance here.

You only want God questions?

OK - is your belief about God based on probabilities? So that - currently you'd say there is no God because there is a 0% chance, or maybe a 5% chance He's there? So, in other words, it's so low - you've decided that there is no God. And if so, what percentage of probability do you need before you believe He's there?

No, probabilities have nothing to do with it for me.

It boils down to this:

The entire worldview which produced and allowed the god hypothesis has vanished. As a result, all claims about God's existence have been rendered contrary to fact, empty, nonsensical, or meaningless.

If we take the current claims about God and apply them to, say, flogiston -- another dead proposal which was replaced by a valid one, namely oxygen -- the silliness of modern God claims becomes apparent.

Once it was clear that oxygen, not flogiston, was the critical agent of combustion, suppose flogiston theorists had said things like:

"Actually, we were wrong about the properties of flogiston. We now believe it has properties identical to those of oxygen."

"You can't say flogiston doesn't exist because we might one day discover something currently entirely unknown which we could call flogiston if we so chose."

"You can't say flogiston doesn't exist because we've decided that it has no core properties, so anyone is free to make up any definition they choose, and you can't possibly refute them all, because they are infinite."

"Flogiston may exist, but on a higher plane of existence."

"Flogiston may be entirely beyond our understanding. If so, you can't possibly say it's not real, because by definition we'd all be ignorant of it."

"You can't say flogiston isn't real because someone might one day think of an entirely new definition for it which actually conforms to something we observe."

It's all rubbish.

And yet we're expected to accept such ridiculous arguments about God?

I think not.
 
To declare it false is also unreasonable. The only thing you can say is that it is meaningless.

This is one of the most persistent errors about God.

Meaningless statements have no possible truth value.

One does not need to "declare them false" or disprove them. That step is superfluous.

Take the meaningless statement "The Fourth of July is taller than C sharp minor".

It's mere childishness to assert that it cannot be disproved, then claim that this means that we must somehow hold out the possibility that it may be true.

Nonsense has no possible truth value. It needs no disproving.
 
Edit: Also agree with what Bodhi wrote below. You can't just write your definition of what God is in such a way that God cannot exist and then declare God doesn't exist because your definition is unworkable. I put forward my definition twice already, and you have both times avoided commenting on it, despite the fact that it does lay a reasonable framework for declaring a being God.

Put it in a question and I'll answer it.
 
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Nope, this merely clear things up. You clearly state here that any definition should fit your own definition, ergo, you are playing a variant of strawman.

Wrong again. I've explained why the appeal to the cookie jar is invalid, and I'll be happy to explain why all possible definitions must end in these possibilities if the question is asked.
 
I'll ask you both the same question I asked Piggy. Piggy said, "cannot."

Is there a difference between useless/irrelevant and forbidden? Also, if there is, is it an important difference?
"Forbidden"? Sorry, I don't get your point.
 
I agree, but could there be some concept of god that is impossible to define because of our own limitations?

As I said earlier, an ant can't do math, never will be able to, but still the concepts and principles of math exist.

Am I making sense?
No.

You can make all sorts of god definitions and then try to have science address gods so defined. That is fitting the evidence to the conclusion.

What does the evidence actually support? It overwhelmingly supports all god beliefs are myths of human imagination.
 
No, he sees you as his top dog.

There's quite a difference.
You don't know that. Can you read my dogs' minds?

But aside from that, it depends on how you define gods. If I were just top dog, then I would be with the pack most of the time, eat my fill and maybe let them have the leftovers, yadda yadda yadda. That is trying to fit my role into the animal model. That may be just as fallacious as trying to interpret everything animals do within a human framework.

No, I am god, their creator, the controller of their ultimate fate.
 
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We know quite a bit about dog behavior/psychology: It's a pack animal, it needs to know its place in the pack, and can be trained to do various things, etc. There is nothing that tells us that dogs have supernatural beliefs.

Do you want to argue that animals have supernatural beliefs? That is indeed an extraordinary claim.
Do you want to argue that because dogs view dogs a certain way they necessarily view their human owner in the same way?
 
Oh, you're gonna love my calendar shot. ;)
Which year is that? I'll buy one. I'm kind of curious.



I think there's an interesting question behind there.

Seems to me if we somehow destroyed all evidence and memory of religion overnight, it would have reinvented itself by next Thursday.

I believe the urge toward religious thought is an artifact of the way our brains are built.
It may be that our brains are hard wired to find patterns and associations and to draw conclusions. But I have a more optimistic view here that given the fact humans have improved in our ability to systematically observe the Universe and that we have evolved a better understanding of how to determine cause and effect we would not be making the same mistakes made 100,000 years ago (give or take). Beliefs in gods is a remnant of the past. It is a growing pain we have yet to fully conquer. But to think we've made no progress and that god beliefs are simply part of the human condition, that I do not believe.
 
I'm not sure that argument is entirely fair to the Deists. Assuming you have an entity who can create universes, influencing things that happen 14 or 15 billion years down the line during creation doesn't seem much more incredible than the premise.

Of course this argument quickly becomes moot (predestination versus free will) so screw it, it doesn't matter.

I was wondering if we can come up with a hypothetical description of God. I mean if we can't, then there's a semantical problem with the concept, and we can't even discuss it. I'll put forward: "Can accomplish anything within the universe, and knows everything that occurs within its bounds (all-powerful and all-knowing)"
In that deist view of god, how does one explain the belief then? The deist god set things in motion and sat back to watch, how did god beliefs then arise?
 
Piggy:

Do you believe in love? What scientific evidence would you need to believe someone loves you? Would you also accept other evidence? If so, what kind? How much evidence do you need before you believe someone loves you?

NOTE: Yes - I know it's tempting to give a silly answer (with plenty of euphemisms), but I'm really hoping for a serious answer.
To describe love as an intangible concept is merely the inability to actually conceptualize what love is. I have no trouble conceptualizing the thing called love. It exists. It has describable characteristics. It has measurable and observable characteristics. Just because some people are unable to articulate the qualities and characteristics and underlying psycho-social-biological qualities of love does not mean those qualities and characteristics are not there and do not exist as real things. They are there and they do exist. Gods are not analogous.
 
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Nothing. Which is precisely what I do accept.

But if you don't have to accept anything wrt a deist god, what's your problem?

Yes. Yes. Yes. No.

If you don't deny that feelings of love exist and feelings of a god exist, what is the difference?

What if God was what, exactly, that we haven't been able to detect yet?

Claims about entirely undefined entities are not claims at all.

It's like my claiming that a woogle exists. When you ask what it is, I say I have no clue, it's something we might run across one day, that's all.

This would be mere silliness.

What if I told you that there is something that make you believe in god - yet you can't see it, we haven't any clue as to what it is, and we can't measure it - yet?

No. God is not something we have no idea about. God is an ancient concept, and there's no use pretending it might be something entirely different.

But we had an idea that there was something that would later be called X-rays. X-rays is electromagnetic radiation that is between gamma rays and ultraviolet rays. The latter was discovered in 1801, so - since there was no reason to think that wavelengths shorter than ultraviolet rays was an impossibility, all it would take was to make something that would either produce those shorter-than-UV rays or detect them.

All it makes you is a sloppy thinker.

Can you name one person who has absolutely no beliefs of any kind?

Wrong again. I've said this very clearly. There is no possible definition of God which is valid (i.e. not mere humpty-dumptyism, or empty, or nonsense, or equivalent to not-God) which can be meaningfully said to possibly exist.

"Nonsense", "meaningful". Those are all value statements, not statements of facts.

You might think of the former as a subset of the latter.

The reason God cannot exist is that the entire framework upon which the concept of God or gods rested -- the mythic, supernatural worldview -- has collapsed, and has been replaced by a naturalistic worldview which is now the only game in town.

It is the best explanation we have - so far. But it isn't the only one.

Some of these devices are easily exposed by careful examination, which reveals that the conditions they propose (under which God may exist) require us to accept that God may be real only if "real" ceases to be different from "not real", or if "God" ceases to be different from "not God", or if "exist" ceases to be different from "not exist".

So there is a subset of false arguments for God which rest upon rendering the statement "God exists" non-meaningful.

To you, no. But you can't deny that the idea of God is meaningful to others.

No, it would not, because frisbees and beach balls are not hyperdimensional objects.

Oh? How do you know? Because the way they are defined?

Since I haven't made any such claim or addressed evolution, I fail to see the point of these questions.

Here's the point: Evolution is a fact. We're pretty good at pointing that out, when we debate creationists. "The theory of Evolution is a theory, sure, but evolution is a fact". You know how it goes.

Do you think evolution will ever be proven false?

No, I'm seriously asking you that question.

Where do you propose such a thing would exist?

I am not claiming that everything we don't currently perceive must not exist.

Now, where would such a thing supposedly exist?

In a place we haven't looked. Why is that so hard for you to accept?

This is another case of confusing the idea of a thing with the thing itself.

Your thoughts did not create the universe or do any of the things attributed to God by those who believe in God.

Heard of the creationist explanation of fossils being buried there by God to test our faith?

It could be true - only it falls outside a scientific explanation, since the explanation is non-falsifiable.

Is there any doubt about love? All you have to do is look at human behavior to understand that it's real. The totality of human activity makes no sense without it.

But what does that have to do with God?

There is much doubt about love. E.g., the way we view "love" in the western world is very different to how other cultures view it.

You got a definition of "love" nailed down?

Hmm, well that would kill your rejection of what I wrote quite nicely, which is why I couldn't figure it out. The scenario posited with the simulation makes God and Not-God quite easily distinguishable.

Edit: Also agree with what Bodhi wrote below. You can't just write your definition of what God is in such a way that God cannot exist and then declare God doesn't exist because your definition is unworkable. I put forward my definition twice already, and you have both times avoided commenting on it, despite the fact that it does lay a reasonable framework for declaring a being God.

Precisely.

Let's say you and I were twins. We are brought up exactly the same way, as Catholics. We go to the same classes, we are told the exact same thing.

But if we are questioned about God, we won't give the same answers. To me, god would be one thing, to you another. Sure, there would be huge overlaps, but at some point, somewhere, we would disagree on what god is.

This thread is not about love. I need to understand the relevance here.

Love is a concept that encompasses a lot of different things, depending on who you are.

The entire worldview which produced and allowed the god hypothesis has vanished. As a result, all claims about God's existence have been rendered contrary to fact, empty, nonsensical, or meaningless.

If we take the current claims about God and apply them to, say, flogiston -- another dead proposal which was replaced by a valid one, namely oxygen -- the silliness of modern God claims becomes apparent.

Once it was clear that oxygen, not flogiston, was the critical agent of combustion, suppose flogiston theorists had said things like:

"Actually, we were wrong about the properties of flogiston. We now believe it has properties identical to those of oxygen."

"You can't say flogiston doesn't exist because we might one day discover something currently entirely unknown which we could call flogiston if we so chose."

"You can't say flogiston doesn't exist because we've decided that it has no core properties, so anyone is free to make up any definition they choose, and you can't possibly refute them all, because they are infinite."

"Flogiston may exist, but on a higher plane of existence."

"Flogiston may be entirely beyond our understanding. If so, you can't possibly say it's not real, because by definition we'd all be ignorant of it."

"You can't say flogiston isn't real because someone might one day think of an entirely new definition for it which actually conforms to something we observe."

It's all rubbish.

And yet we're expected to accept such ridiculous arguments about God?

I think not.

As long as the arguments take into account that this could, in the future, be so, yes. Today, however, we have a much better explanation, namely science.

But that doesn't mean that we won't find an even better explanation of the world in the future, one that could also encompass god.

This is one of the most persistent errors about God.

Meaningless statements have no possible truth value.

One does not need to "declare them false" or disprove them. That step is superfluous.

Take the meaningless statement "The Fourth of July is taller than C sharp minor".

It's mere childishness to assert that it cannot be disproved, then claim that this means that we must somehow hold out the possibility that it may be true.

Nonsense has no possible truth value. It needs no disproving.

Again, you use value statements: Meaningless, superfluous, childishness, nonsense.

Do you think quantum physics make sense?

Wrong again. I've explained why the appeal to the cookie jar is invalid, and I'll be happy to explain why all possible definitions must end in these possibilities if the question is asked.

But then, your mind is closed to new possibilities. You cannot call yourself a skeptic, then.
 

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