Maybe we CAN disprove God...

[The Grave]

Piggy, I agree...........A *

Griff.

 

[The Grave]

Or, perhaps it simply has a meaning you disagree with.

I'd refer to my old Mare Muscoviense argument. MM is the largest dark spot on the far side of the moon, and thus we had no way of detecting it until the Space Age. According to your narrow definition of "real," MM did not exist before 1957 or so... which is nonsense.

Likewise, Io didn't exist until Galileo saw it. And likewise, nonsense.

All we know about a Universal Creator is that He hasn't been observed yet. In that sense, we have no reason to believe He exists. But to declare that He definitely doesn't exist is to cross the line into irrationality.

Umm well not quite, because, the examples of things you have listed Beleth were things: Not observed, and hence not talked about until discovered.

Whereas, the god fallacy is that IT is much talked about but NEVER observed.

This is incorrect logic on your part.

If god indeed does exist {which IT doesn't} then we should NOT be actually talking about IT, unless IT had actually been discovered. The fact that we do, and IT has not, means that god is merely an idea. Nothing more.

Only a poor attempt to make sense of things that people want explained.

You see the point I hope, by now, that Mr. G didn't (ever) talk about Io, until he saw it.

Faithers talk of gods, yet none have evidence and many have mental deficiencies....in that they can not think logically.

After all we are apes!

Griff...Also known as Ape-man.

 

[dglas]

Next you'll be talking about "verifiable in principle." Which Io is and God is not (by definition).
Then you may move on to incorporating tests into the definition of a word.
Down the torturous road to science...

 

[Piggy]

If god indeed does exist {which IT doesn't} then we should NOT be actually talking about IT, unless IT had actually been discovered. The fact that we do, and IT has not, means that god is merely an idea. Nothing more.

I can't go with you there, PT.

For example, we've talked a long time about black holes, still not sure we've found one. And if we have, then still, there was a long time when we had not observed one, but still spoke of them as possible.

So what's the difference between God and a black hole?

Why does it make sense to say that black holes might exist when we've never observed them, but not make sense to say that God might exist?

The answer is this: A black hole is an "anchored" concept. That is, it has qualities which define it, and our understanding of the world tells us that it is possible. God is not.

The notion of the black hole was proposed as our understanding of physics developed. As the laws of nature were described, it became clear that -- if they panned out -- something like a black hole should occur somewhere out there. And indeed, the laws turned out to be accurate. We had reason to believe that black holes might be actual, even before we'd seen one.

And people could tell you what one was. It was not allowable for anyone to think up pretty much anything and call it a black hole. It was not allowable, if the qualities of a black hole were shown to be impossible, for anyone to simply dream up a new definition off the cuff... or worse, to claim that someone else might someday dream up a better one (as is claimed of God).

Yet for God, there is nothing at all in the universe which requires it to exist. In fact, there's no place for God to exist. There is no action for God to perform. All of our reasons for proposing God have fallen apart -- either proven false, or answered by other things or phenomena. So God is both unobserved and unanchored.

But the final straw is that God is incoherent. It has no definition. And that is the death stroke for God.

 

[lupus_in_fabula]

Well, Piggy, I set out to argue for a theist standpoint thinking it would be easy – satisfying my curiosity. It became very quickly clear that that I was being spanked and had to recapitulate into a form of apologist standpoint. Now it seems that position might as well be somewhat hard to defend. I guess I have to conclude it’s not very easy to have such a standpoint and still follow some general guidelines of a critical debate. It’s fair to say my position didn’t hold together. If nothing else, I somehow understand the agony of theist better, when they try to hold faith while still also trying to hold a fairly rational view of reality.

Just a clarification: A) The religious experience I’m referring to is, well, such experience that’s almost impossible to explain; such an experience where words only get in the way when trying to explain it. Perhaps it is nonsense since its meaning cannot be transmitted in an authentic way, and thus perhaps have no meaning for the listener, I don’t know. B) The phenomenon I’m referring to is the religious experience as a whole; where fairly intelligent people understand the message as perhaps nonsense in the critical sense, yet are invoked into a similar kind of experience nonetheless. Kind of like: “rationally it doesn’t hold, but still there’s that “Hintergedanke” it might be real in some weird way” (aka having some kind of faith).

I’m still very curious about your stance here, and I hope you can reiterate a little bit on this point. You say “if God has no definition, God is not real”. It kind of touches on the issue with the map and the territory – that I have thrown around ad nausea (and I try never using it again). You don’t seem to take that seriously at all (calling it hooey, or making it into a joke). How did you arrive at such a stance? Are you saying there’s no phenomenological dilemma in understanding reality at all?

To me, failing to provide a definition for an experience just means that; not having the proper tools explaining it; like having seen the whole puzzle, but then trying to recreate it with a limited set of parts. I find it difficult to simply conclude that as nothing, since I still have the ability trying to read between the stuttering lines of that transmission – regardless of the outcome. Perhaps language isn’t sufficient in describing every aspect of reality? Could you please explain the line of reasoning you have here, you seem utterly certain about this, hence my curiosity.

 

[Piggy]

Just a clarification: A) The religious experience I’m referring to is, well, such experience that’s almost impossible to explain; such an experience where words only get in the way when trying to explain it. Perhaps it is nonsense since its meaning cannot be transmitted in an authentic way, and thus perhaps have no meaning for the listener, I don’t know. B) The phenomenon I’m referring to is the religious experience as a whole; where fairly intelligent people understand the message as perhaps nonsense in the critical sense, yet are invoked into a similar kind of experience nonetheless. Kind of like: “rationally it doesn’t hold, but still there’s that “Hintergedanke” it might be real in some weird way” (aka having some kind of faith).

Don't worry, Tim Leary and I know exactly what you're talking about.

I’m still very curious about your stance here, and I hope you can reiterate a little bit on this point. You say “if God has no definition, God is not real”. It kind of touches on the issue with the map and the territory – that I have thrown around ad nausea (and I try never using it again). You don’t seem to take that seriously at all (calling it hooey, or making it into a joke). How did you arrive at such a stance? Are you saying there’s no phenomenological dilemma in understanding reality at all?

Well, maybe I have to make my own clarification here.

I wasn't calling the idea hooey -- I was calling the sentences hooey because, to me, they weren't coherent and I could not understand the point you were making.

But actually, I was thinking about this point more last night, specifically regarding Beleth's point about features on the far side of the moon. So maybe a discussion of that will help clarify.

As Beleth rightly points out, for untold years no one had any idea what was on the far side of the moon. All that stuff was without definition. But it existed anyway.

Ditto today for who-knows-what out there in the unexplored regions of space, or in the deep seas, or in the realm of the very small. There must be many things, and many kinds of things, we have not yet even imagined. Undefined, yet real.

For convenience, let's call one class of this type of object or phenomenon a "u2" (short for Rumsfeld's famous term "unknown unknowns").

A u2 differs from an "anchored concept" (see post 64) -- which I'll abbreviate AC for convenience -- in that an AC has some set of defined qualities. For instance, the "7 bolt" example that I used here and in an earlier thread: a hypothetical piece of space junk, a bolt orbiting the Earth, with a number on its surface which begins with the digit 7. There's no reason to believe it exists. But we can't assert that it doesn't. Because we know that space junk exists, that bolts may be part of objects sent into orbit, and that machine parts can have numbers on them.

The thing about u2s is, they are utterly undefined. We've never heard of them or thought of them.

So, if it's possible for us to talk about a thing or event at all -- even a totally imaginary one -- it cannot be a u2. It's not a totally unknown thing which we may eventually or never know about.

So God is not a u2. The fact that people do have ideas about God and talk about God establishes that. Now we have to ask if God is an AC or some other kind of thing.

What other kinds of things can we name? Well, briefly, for our purposes here, among the other kinds of things are.... What we might call real things -- all the stuff we simply accept to be actual, like water, butterflies, and 2-for-1 Labor Day sales. We can also talk about unanchored concepts (UCs). These are things that are made up, but which we have no particular reason to imbue with any chance of reality.

For example, I can claim that there's an undetectable dog in my house that is responsible for moving my glasses when they're not where I thought I left them. But nothing in the world we know indicates that this should be so, there is no reason that it should be so, there are accepted real explanations for why my glasses aren't where I thought they'd be, and in fact everything we know about the world tells us that dogs cannot be undetectable and still be dogs. The concept is unanchored.

In fact, I would argue that the undetectable dog is a nonsense object (NO). NOs are things which, by their very definition, cannot be real -- like a circle with corners.

But not all UCs are NOs. We can't say that it must be impossible for us to dream up ideas totally out of the blue, with no basis in any facts we currently know, which may eventually turn out to be true.

Now, back to God....

In the world we know, no evidence for God -- as God is most commonly conceived of around the world and throughout time -- has ever panned out. In every case, when we became able to choose between God and another model, the other model has won. It turns out, the heavens are not filled with divine hosts. Angels don't move the planets. Demons don't cause disease. The mountains weren't raised in a divine war. Etc, etc, etc.

But the idea of God persisted. And retreated. As the God-based world view was thoroughly replaced with a world-view which did not require that concept, intellectual theism removed God in various ways from the realm of the here and now. (There's no need to discuss the thoroughly debunked theories of God which, though still wildly popular, are directly contradicted by evidence.)

Of course, even in ancient days, and certainly now, there were wildly differing conceptions of what God was, or could be. Many of these were/are mutually exclusive, and it's not uncommon for theists in one camp to claim that another camp isn't even talking about God at all.

This presents a special problem, and puts God in a rather rare category. It is a concept so fluid as to be infinitely plastic, within certain boundaries -- although the boundaries themselves are not agreed upon.

In this way, God is not at all like the un-thought-of stuff of the universe, or the features on the far sides of planets we have not observed, or black holes, or even the hypothetical structures of modern physics like p-branes.

Once we discard the models of God we know to be false, we're left only with ideas of God in people's heads -- and today, we have a perfectly rational theory of why those ideas should be in people's heads, which itself does not require God.

So we're left with a God which is not found in the world, and with "ideas about God" which are explained by valid theories that do not include God, and with no valid definition of what God may be.

God is a lot like phlogiston, in some ways. Once oxygen was discovered, and the essentials of modern chemistry firmly verified, there was no room in the world for phlogiston, which was once proposed as a component of combustion. So people discarded the notion, and everyone agrees that phlogiston is not real. But not everyone, by a long shot, has let go of the idea of God.

So what does this mean for claims of God's reality?

Well, no claim may be based on a concept so vague as to have no agreed-upon qualities. If any and every feature of God is open to dispute among those who believe, and an infinite variety of novel ideas may be added at will, and formerly accepted (even central) notions discarded with impunity -- as is the case with what may be rendered "GOD" in all-caps, meaning the totality of all existing conceptions of God or gods around the world -- then it cannot be said that anything at all is being claimed.

So there can be no claim based on GOD. Any claim based on GOD is necessarily a nonsense claim. And no one is obliged to concede that nonsense may be true.

That leaves claims about God or gods. And all of these are fatally flawed.

Definitions of God which give God an active role in the world are contradicted by the evidence.

Definitions which do not give God an active role in the world end up stripping God of all qualities, so that God becomes a non-concept -- as I said, "an I don't know what living in I don't know where at I don't know when doing I couldn't guess which". And it makes no sense to speak of the potential reality of a non-concept.

Of course, there are Humpty Dumpy definitions and other such canards, but these are dispensed with logically.

Once all is said and done, there turns out to be no possible definition of God which anyone is obliged to concede might be "real", unless -- as we have seen -- the term "real" ceases to have any meaning. So claims for God's reality are nonsensical.

Therefore, we can deny the reality of God.

I hope that clears things up.

 

[Beleth]

Umm well not quite, because, the examples of things you have listed Beleth were things: Not observed, and hence not talked about until discovered.

Whereas, the god fallacy is that IT is much talked about but NEVER observed.

This is incorrect logic on your part.

You're not seriously asserting that people never speculated about what was on the far side of the Moon, are you?

"Incorrect logic" right back atcha, with a side scoop of "assuming unreasonable things".

 

[Beleth]

This thread has caused me to bark at my son, so this is the last time I will read or post to it. Just two more comments.

Definitions which do not give God an active role in the world end up stripping God of all qualities, so that God becomes a non-concept -- as I said, "an I don't know what living in I don't know where at I don't know when doing I couldn't guess which".

1) You cannot say that with certainty. The best you can say is that all the definitions of God which you have come across do so. I do not believe that the Deist concept of God strips that God of all qualities.

2) A non-concept does not imply a non-entity. I believe that you have no concept of my great-great-great-grandfather's personality, yet it's perfectly logical to assume that he had one. To a pot, the potter wil forever remain a u2, yet the potter exists.

 

[Piggy]

1) You cannot say that with certainty. The best you can say is that all the definitions of God which you have come across do so. I do not believe that the Deist concept of God strips that God of all qualities.

This is the appeal to the GOD concept, which as we have seen, cannot be a basis for a claim about God.

We can certainly examine any proposed definitions that anyone would like to seriously consider. But it's telling that everyone stops short of actually proposing that God is actually what this or that group believes it to be.

Til that happens, there's still nothing to disprove.

However, it is an interesting point that can be gone into in more detail: Is it really true that all possible definitions of God cannot describe something which we are obliged to concede might be real?

I'm willing to argue that this is precisely the case.

2) A non-concept does not imply a non-entity. I believe that you have no concept of my great-great-great-grandfather's personality, yet it's perfectly logical to assume that he had one.

Your ancestors are not UCs. The situation is not analogous.

Because you're here, I know you had a g-g-g-g'father. And because he must have been human, I know he had a personality. That's anchored.

God is an unanchored concept. It's an entirely different case, and we cannot reason from one to the other.

To a pot, the potter wil forever remain a u2, yet the potter exists.

That's because pots have no brains. We have brains. We know things about the world. And we know enough now -- although we have not always -- to conclude that God is no more real than phlogiston.

 

[Piggy]

The cookie jar fallacy

There are certain false arguments that always come up in these discussions, so I find it useful to identify them so they can be pointed out and taken off the table as we go.

First up, the cookie jar fallacy, which is just the abovementioned appeal to GOD as an argument for the potential reality of God.

An analogy:

Suppose I tell you "You cannot reasonably say that no flurg exists".

"What's a flurg?" you ask.

I point to a cookie jar. "See that cookie jar?" I say. "It's stuffed with scraps of paper, some of them have been in there for generations. And on each piece of paper there's a definition for 'flurg'.

"Some of these definitions describe things we know aren't real," I continue. "Some of them are so old and faded we don't really know what they say anymore. Others have had parts scratched out and rewritten. We've probably lost several that used to be in there. But anyone's free to add one anytime, so it never gets empty.

"Of course, that means that a lot of them describe things that are mutually exclusive," I admit. "If one's right, a lot of others will be wrong. One thing I can tell you, though, is that no one's ever found any evidence that anything described on any of those pieces of paper is real."

"Um, look," you say, "why don't you just tell me what they all have in common, and we'll call that a 'flurg'?"

"Can't be done," I tell you. "We can't find anything in particular that absolutely everyone agrees on. But you have to admit, with all those definitions in there, and you haven't read them all, and they can be changed anytime, and folks can add one anytime they want, you can't say that it's impossible for a flurg to exist."

Obviously, there's a problem here.

The problem is that, under these conditions, the term "flurg" in the sentence "a flurg may exist" has no meaning. Why? Because the term itself -- when used merely as a reference to the infinitely changing and myriad contents of the cookie jar -- does not refer to anything in particular. No reasonable statement may be made about flurgs as long as the term is used to mean "whatever the hell's in the jar".

Therefore the assertion that "a flurg may exist" is a meaningless claim. No one is obliged to say it may be true.

Thou shalt not appeal to the cookie jar!

 

[andyandy]

the cookie jar example as you give it is a very good example of the incoherence of "god" - and i'd agree that such is the incoherence of the term, any generic statements about "god" are essentailly meaningless. This is a major tenet of agnostic argument - ie that of ignosticism.
Nevertheless it is not a proof that a god however defined does not exist.

If God is indeed like the cookie jar then god as a generic term is an infinite set, dependant upon subjective interpretation.

[a,b,c,d...] = g

Person A may believe in the interpretation of a
Person B may believe in the interpretation of b

and whilst a and b may be mutually exclusive that does not disprove eithers' subjective interpretation - it merely proves the incoherence of a consistant, generic "god" concept.

The sticking point is proof. If c is essentially unknowable, then there is no proof one can offer. You can question why someone would choose to believe in such a god - but proof will forever, by definition, be beyond your abilities.

 

[Piggy]

God is not a number system, a logic puzzle, or an abstract set of variables. No one is praying to that, hoping to go to a paradise ruled by that, or burning incense at an altar honoring that.

If anyone wants to make an assertion of the reality of something called "God", then in order for that assertion to be meaningful, they must mean something by the term "God".

Otherwise, no meaningful claim is being made about God, so there is nothing to disprove.

Here's the primary problem with your analysis:

If c is essentially unknowable, then there is no proof one can offer. You can question why someone would choose to believe in such a god - but proof will forever, by definition, be beyond your abilities.

We're back to the very first problem I addressed in this thread. If "God" is "unknowable", then we're talking about nothing. Why any person on the planet would choose to believe in nothing is irrelevant to our question. All that matters is that claims for the existence of nothing are nonsense.

And no one is obliged to concede that nonsense might be true.

Thou shalt not appeal to the cookie jar!

 

[T'ai Chi]

Maybe we can.

The first step is to apply SOME characteristic to God.

This would only disprove a paper god(s), not the notion of god(s) in general.

Hey, to make the disproving easier, just assign qualities to the paper god(s) that you already know are problematic!

For example...let's say that God created the universe. The laws of thermodynamics tell us that matter cannot be created nor destroyed. Therefore, according to what we've observed, God is impossible.

Oh but you see this god exists outside our universe, maybe in one of those multiverses (the theory that allows anything to be possible), maybe with different laws of physics than our own.

 

[Piggy]

The "real" bit

Although there are plenty of people in the world willing to support untenable ideas about God -- the very concrete or scriptural kind -- these are so easily dismissed on this board that they almost never crop up.

Instead, we are offered a buffet of other ruses, such as the cookie jar argument, the "other way of knowing" argument, the "you don't know everything" ploy, arguments from essential qualities, and so forth.

At times, specific definitions of God are dangled out in order to (supposedly) demonstrate that disproving one notion of God -- or any number of notions of God, for that matter -- doesn't invalidate them all, because hey, lookie what I got here.

However, when you ask the person dangling their borrowed God in front of you whether they intend to propose that this particular God is actually God and is real, they always say no. No, that was not their point. No, they're not saying that, you see.

And so we remain at square zero. No claim. Nothing to disprove. The team that brags of their invincibility sits nailed to the bench and points to the blank spot on the opposing team's scoreboard while polishing the "Undefeated" plaque on their trophy.

The problem is, all these arguments about the qualities of God are insufficient to even rise to a claim for God's existence. Why? Because it omits the 2nd essential bit of the equation: "real".

It is impossible to determine the reality of nonreality of a thing by examining the concept of the thing. Because... the question "Does X exist?" is not a question about X; it is a question about the world.

I can give you a detailed explanation of a unicorn, but that does not answer the question of whether unicorns exist. I can tell you enough about my grandfather for you to know who he is, but that will not tell you whether he still walks the earth.

So even if we were to have a definition of God -- which we do not -- this would only be step one. At that point, we would then have to look at reality, and ask "Could this thing be?"

The skeptical team remains on the field, waiting for an opposing team and a ball.

 

[andyandy]

God is not a number system, a logic puzzle, or an abstract set of variables. No one is praying to that, hoping to go to a paradise ruled by that, or burning incense at an altar honoring that.

If anyone wants to make an assertion of the reality of something called "God", then in order for that assertion to be meaningful, they must mean something by the term "God".

Otherwise, no meaningful claim is being made about God, so there is nothing to disprove.

quite - and people do have their own interpretations of the term - it's just that those interpretations fill [by the cookie jar example] an infinite set. And you can't go about falsifying all the members of an infinite set, one element at a time

We're back to the very first problem I addressed in this thread. If "God" is "unknowable", then we're talking about nothing. Why any person on the planet would choose to believe in nothing is irrelevant to our question. All that matters is that claims for the existence of nothing are nonsense.

we're not "talking about nothing" - this is simply not true. It is perfectly possible for something to be something and yet be unknowable to us. Unknowable =! nothing. The universe doesn't have to be Anthropocentrically orientated. This is a fundamental logical error - and the argument falls down because of it.

 

[Piggy]

quite - and people do have their own interpretations of the term - it's just that those interpretations fill [by the cookie jar example] an infinite set. And you can't go about falsifying all the members of an infinite set, one element at a time

Nor does one have to.

You cannot assert that a claim cannot be disproven if no claim has been made.

Pointing to a placeholder with infinitely plastic contents -- none of which has any evidence to support its validity -- and labeling that placeholder "God" does not qualify as a meaningful definition of "God".

If "God" has no meaningful definition, then the sentence "God is real" has no meaning, anymore than the phrase "flurgs are real" can be said to have meaning if I point to a cookie jar where anyone can add, remove, or amend the definitions of "flurg" therein at will, especially while admitting that none of them are supported by any valid evidence, and there is no consensus among flurgists on a single quality of flurgs.

Under those conditions, the statement "God is real" is every bit as nonsensical (tho for different reasons) as saying that the Fourth of July is taller than C sharp major.

Since the initial statement cannot be said to signify anything, it is absurd to then claim that it might actually be true because it cannot be disproven.

Thou shalt not appeal to the cookie jar!

The assertion "God is real" will only become meaningful when you provide a coherent definition of "God". Failing that, you're talking nonsense.

Apologies in advance to lurkers and posters: On some threads, I have a tendency to repeat myself ad nauseam. This is bound to happen in this thread. This is intentional. A common tactic of empty argument is to attempt to move on to further points before necessary prior points have been covered, hoping everyone forgets that by omitting the previous steps we've moved into la-la land. In some cases, the only way to prevent this is to steadfastly refuse to set sail before anyone has brought a boat. And continually remind the hopeful voyagers that there is no boat.

 

[Piggy]

we're not "talking about nothing" - this is simply not true. It is perfectly possible for something to be something and yet be unknowable to us. Unknowable =! nothing. The universe doesn't have to be Anthropocentrically orientated. This is a fundamental logical error - and the argument falls down because of it.

This has already been covered, in post 66, and has nothing to do with anthropocentrism.

It's true that unknowable != nothing.

For example, as you know, the light cone of our visible universe restricts the range of our ability to know what exists in our universe. But that doesn't mean there's nothing beyond it. In fact, by deduction, we can be sure that there is something beyond it.

So we can be sure that there are, in fact, things which are unknowable to us, but which are also real.

God, however, is not one of those things.

God is not a u2, as has already been established.

People who believe in God do not conceive of God as an unkown thing we've never heard of.

Of course, if you want to propose "unknowable thing" as the definition of God, we can go forward with that. Something tells me, though, that you will not want to do this.

And as has already been noted, if God is an I don't know what in I don't know where at I don't know when doing I couldn't say which, then indeed, "God" is an empty term, and you are in fact "talking about nothing".

Contrast this with, say, a discussion of anchored concepts such a p-branes, which actually have agreed-upon qualities.

 

[Piggy]

Talking about "talking about nothing"

It is not true to say, generically, "When one talks about God, one is talking about nothing".

If a man comes up to me and says that "The God of Abraham and Isaac, who formed man from the dust of the earth, brought the plagues upon Egypt, and led the people of Moses to the Promised Land, has wrought a miracle in my life by removing the tumor from the body of my young child", that man is not "talking about nothing" when he talks about God.

So when I, from time to time, point out that this or that person is "talking about nothing", I am not saying that all talk about God is talk about nothing.

I am saying that, in the post I'm responding to in particular, certain assertions about God are "talk about nothing", because God has been left undefined, or for some other reason.

And it is very telling that the case against God has succeeded so thoroughly as to render God in the same class of vanished objects as phlogiston, leaving the theists -- other than those who simply maintain easily debunked notions -- no resort but to posit their non-thing in its non-place at its non-time going about its non-business.

 

[andyandy]

Nor does one have to.

You cannot assert that a claim cannot be disproven if no claim has been made.

Pointing to a placeholder with infinitely plastic contents -- none of which has any evidence to support its validity -- and labeling that placeholder "God" does not qualify as a meaningful definition of "God".

If "God" has no meaningful definition, then the sentence "God is real" has no meaning, anymore than the phrase "flurgs are real" can be said to have meaning if I point to a cookie jar where anyone can add, remove, or amend the definitions of "flurg" therein at will, especially while admitting that none of them are supported by any valid evidence, and there is no consensus among flurgists on a single quality of flurgs.

Under those conditions, the statement "God is real" is every bit as nonsensical (tho for different reasons) as saying that the Fourth of July is taller than C sharp major.

Since the initial statement cannot be said to signify anything, it is absurd to then claim that it might actually be true because it cannot be disproven.

Thou shalt not appeal to the cookie jar!

The assertion "God is real" will only become meaningful when you provide a coherent definition of "God". Failing that, you're talking nonsense.

*sigh*

simply repeating an argument doesn't make it so. I agree that god as a generic term has essentially no meaning. That does not mean that an individuals' interpretation of god has been proved false. The "cookie jar" is not a sufficient argument.

 

[andyandy]

This has already been covered, in post 66, and has nothing to do with anthropocentrism.

It's true that unknowable != nothing.

For example, as you know, the light cone of our visible universe restricts the range of our ability to know what exists in our universe. But that doesn't mean there's nothing beyond it. In fact, by deduction, we can be sure that there is something beyond it.

So we can be sure that there are, in fact, things which are unknowable to us, but which are also real.

God, however, is not one of those things.

God is not a u2, as has already been established.

People who believe in God do not conceive of God as an unkown thing we've never heard of.

Of course, if you want to propose "unknowable thing" as the definition of God, we can go forward with that. Something tells me, though, that you will not want to do this.

And as has already been noted, if God is an I don't know what in I don't know where at I don't know when doing I couldn't say which, then indeed, "God" is an empty term, and you are in fact "talking about nothing".

Contrast this with, say, a discussion of anchored concepts such a p-branes, which actually have agreed-upon qualities.

well if we agree that not knowable =! nothing then why do you persist with this as a cornerstone of your argument? Take out that and the "proof" collapses.
We're reduced to unprovable claims like "there are, in fact, things which are unknowable to us, but which are also real. God, however, is not one of those things." What is your evidence for this? Your proof is built upon unprovable claims - and as such is no proof at all.