Proof of Strong Atheism

[trvlr2]

Piggy-You have carried this thread very well. I must chime in to say that I find these discussions very entertaining.
That said, Stop it!(I'm trying to get my life organized around NO Computer, and am powerless to resist threads like this!

 

[quixotecoyote]

into the cut&paste frenzy I go!

I'm not demanding it; you are. "We know enough now about the universe to state without reservation that God is not real" is necessarily from a scientific viewpoint. Everything we know about the universe has been gained through the scientific process.

Let's accept that as true for a moment. No god of any conceptualization has been shown as valid through a scientific viewpoint, per your logic we therefore can't know about it. Following from that, if we can't know about it, we can't accept or agree with it. Safety, 2 points to the other team.

Exactly my point. A created thing is evidently lower on the awareness scale than the thing which created it.

Aside from being too semantically vague to be argued against in detail, this runs into the same problem as above.

Actually it's worse than that; it's an I-can't-know-what in an I-can't-know-where. But again, unless you are demanding a scientific viewpoint, it can't be disproved. And your last sentence shows, again, that you are demanding a scientific viewpoint.

He's talking about a reality based viewpoint. It can't be disproved in the same pedantic philosophical nonsensical sense that all things cannot be fundamentally proven or disproved. But if you are to take the viewpoint that it is possible to disprove something, then this is one of them.

Just because something is irrelevant, or that we currently don't have the means to observe it, doesn't mean we can conclude that it definitively does not exist.

That's not the sense in which irrelevant is being used. I can say it's irrelevant to me that my neighbor is named Bill. In that case, you're right, it wouldn't be an argument against him existing. However, were I to say that there is a spirit inhabiting my neighbors body whose only characteristics are that it inhabits a body and causes the owner to be named Bill, that is irrelevant as the only function of the spirit is one caused and explained by (pre)existing natural phenomena.

Does it matter what the vast majority of theists believe? Is the existence of God decided by committee? There is an element of argumentum ad populum that runs throughout your thesis, Piggy, that I have to admit I find uncharacteristic of the high quality of your posts.

I really enjoy the lack of semantic quibbling that this thread has sustained so far, but I feel obligated to say that "creator" has an overtone of willfulness that "brute forces" does not have.

It matters what they believe because his proof is partially structured to deflect expected arguments against it.

Lightning causes thunder. Lightning creates thunder. By changing the semantics I have not imbued lighting with cognitive ability, I've only projected my anthropomorphic tendencies on it.

This ties in (tip of the hat to piggy on the writing) with the earlier point on irrelevancy/redundancy. If lightning causes thunder than the existence of a lightning sprite that rides on the bolt making booming noises can be rejected as redundant and unnecessary once we understand the thunder is created by the shock wave from rapidly cooling air. It could still be argued that shockwave is really the lightning sprite, but that's a redundancy that can be eliminated with no loss of clarity or explanatory power, just like eliminating god from a creator role if one was to define him as indistinguishable from the natural forces of creation.

 

[Ace_of_Sevens]

Here's my take: Mustn't rhetorical proofs also be logical? Mathematics and science are subsets of logic. The idea of a valid proof which is not necessariliy a logically valid proof is at least as incohorent as the uber-god concept. If the validity of proofs doesn't rest on logic, then what?

Occam's razor can't be used to prove anything. If God's existance is indistinguishable from hits non-existance, then it's easier to say God doesn't exist. This doesn't necessarily make it true, especially if we come up with some way to distinguish them later.

If the god-concept is incoherent, that is not proof that it is wrong. It's proof that it can't meaningfully be said to be right or wrong. That's logical positivism, not strong atheism. This applies to most of Piggy's argument, actually.

God claims can really be put into three categories: The concrete ones which make definite testable claims that have been disproven such as Zeus, the ones that make no testable claims, like the deist conception and the subtle, that make claims of actual interaction with the world, but are not currently testable such as many modern conceptiosn fo the Christian God. Obviously, the boundary between the first and last group is fluid and changes as science gains the ability to do more. The fact that as claims become testabel, they've always turned out false suggests that as further claism becoem testable, they too will be proven false, further suggesting the non-existance of this variety God, but induction can't make definitive proofs. The middle variety is inherrently untestable. That may mean it's fairly meaningless on a practical level, but it doesn't necessarily mean it's false. We're back to logical positivism again.

 

[Piggy]

I'm not demanding it; you are. "We know enough now about the universe to state without reservation that God is not real" is necessarily from a scientific viewpoint. Everything we know about the universe has been gained through the scientific process.

I don't consider it a scientific viewpoint per se, even if an understanding of science is necessary in order to come to that conclusion.

I also don't believe that "everything we know... has been gained through the scientific process".

But let's assume that you are correct in this.

In that case, you must agree with my conclusion.

Because God is not a scientific proposition.

And if science is the only source of what we can know, then claiming "reality" for a non-scientific proposition is nonsensical.

 

[Piggy]

Exactly my point. A created thing is evidently lower on the awareness scale than the thing which created it.

Evidently? From one example, involving a conscious being creating a material object, extrapolated to a universal principle. I don't see any legitimate reason why we will not, in theory, eventually be able to construct machines with self awareness of the kind we have, and capable of holding a lot more data.

No, this pot/potter example does not constitute any logical barrier.

 

[Piggy]

Actually it's worse than that; it's an I-can't-know-what in an I-can't-know-where. But again, unless you are demanding a scientific viewpoint, it can't be disproven. And your last sentence shows, again, that you are demanding a scientific viewpoint.

I am demanding a rational viewpoint.

This "can't be disproven" bit is a red herring.

You can't disprove that there's an undetectable dog in my office who moves my glasses and books -- it's not simply that I forget where I put them. You can't disprove that hypothermia isn't taller than the 4th of July. You can't disprove that thraks are real -- btw, thraks are inherently undefinable and exist on a subtle plane which is inherently indescribable.

But so what?

No one is obliged to grant potential reality to non-concepts.

And an ineffable transcendent God is a non-concept.

 

[Piggy]

Given the condition of the near side of the moon, what we see on the far side of the moon is highly unexpected. MM, the largest far-side mare by a great degree, is tiny compared to any of the near-side mares. And in the same vein that the people of the past would have agreed that we would just have to wait and see, perhaps all we have to do is wait and see if God will show up some day.

None of that matters.

Surely you're not suggesting that God is the same type of thing as MM.

The point is, MM is an anchored concept. God is not. It is meaningful to "wait and see" for anchored concepts such as black holes, mares, and the like. Yet to wait and see for a thing which is incoherent, or undetectable, or which we might not recognize if we saw it... this is to wait for Godot.

When you say "see if God will show up some day", I must ask "see if what will show up some day?" What is this God you're talking about, and what would its showing-up be like?

 

[Piggy]

Does it matter what the vast majority of theists believe?

Regarding the question of reality, absolutely not.

As I've said before, the question of reality is not a question about the thing, it is a question about the world.

Is the existence of God decided by committee?

No.

There is an element of argumentum ad populum that runs throughout your thesis, Piggy, that I have to admit I find uncharacteristic of the high quality of your posts.

Hmmm. I haven't noticed it. Can you point it out for me?

I feel obligated to say that "creator" has an overtone of willfulness that "brute forces" does not have.

If that is the case, then it is proper to introduce the quality of consciousness or intelligence into the definition. I've said before that it's my opinion that this would eventually have to be done anyway.

 

[Piggy]

into the cut&paste frenzy I go!

My apologies, quixotecoyote. I responded to Beleth before reading your excellent post. And I said essentially the same things. Oh well, it never hurts to have a couple of different phrasings to help things sink in.

 

[Piggy]

Mustn't rhetorical proofs also be logical?

Yes. This is one of the first principles of rhetoric. Yet they are not formal logic, which is its own discipline.

Occam's razor can't be used to prove anything. If God's existance is indistinguishable from its non-existance, then it's easier to say God doesn't exist. This doesn't necessarily make it true, especially if we come up with some way to distinguish them later.

Occam's razor does not necessarily apply here. Occam's razor, as you know, is a convenience which prefers simpler explanations over more complex ones.

In those cases where God is equivalent to natural forces, then OR does not apply, because God is not a more complex theory, but rather God has become something which mainstream theists vehemently deny is God -- God has become something other than God.

In cases where God is proposed to be real or extant in ways which are indistinguishable from being unreal or nonextant, we must reject these on the grounds that to accept such conditions -- in which terms and concepts are allowed to mean their contraries -- pulls the rug from under all understanding and rational thought. At that point, all bets are off, and anything goes.

If the god-concept is incoherent, that is not proof that it is wrong. It's proof that it can't meaningfully be said to be right or wrong. That's logical positivism, not strong atheism. This applies to most of Piggy's argument, actually.

Indeed, incoherent concepts are neither wrong nor right. Indeed, nothing meaningful can be said about them. So it is unreasonable to demand that everyone proclaim that the object of an incoherent concept (which is a non-thing, actually) might somehow be "real".

And yes, this is a very important point in my argument, because the last-gasp effort to salvage God-theory relies on the demand that we are somehow obligated to concede that God might be real. And if one does not give it too much thought, the idea sounds attractive. But upon examination, it falls apart. No one, in fact, has any such obligation.

God claims can really be put into three categories: The concrete ones which make definite testable claims that have been disproven such as Zeus, the ones that make no testable claims, like the deist conception and the subtle, that make claims of actual interaction with the world, but are not currently testable such as many modern conceptions fo the Christian God. Obviously, the boundary between the first and last group is fluid and changes as science gains the ability to do more. The fact that as claims become testable, they've always turned out false suggests that as further claims become testable, they too will be proven false, further suggesting the non-existance of this variety God, but induction can't make definitive proofs. The middle variety is inherrently untestable. That may mean it's fairly meaningless on a practical level, but it doesn't necessarily mean it's false. We're back to logical positivism again.

It seems I must forever be repeating this, but "proving it false" is not the standard.

When dealing with an utterly unanchored claim, the question is whether the burden has been met by the claimants to provide enough meat to the concept so as to raise it to a level of comprehensibility which obliges us to concede that the thing could possibly be real.

This hasn't been done.

We are nowhere near "proving it false". Proving what false?

And it's not merely the case that God has failed all tests thus far. In fact, God has failed every test of its most significant qualities, forcing the theory to be rigged so as to place the entity into a no-place and no-time.

We gave up on geocentrism long before that. And cosmic either. And the demon theory of epilepsy. Etc etc etc. Why the special "out" for God?

 

[chriswl]

And in the same vein that the people of the past would have agreed that we would just have to wait and see, perhaps all we have to do is wait and see if God will show up some day.

If God is just any old kind of supernatual being then maybe. We can't just rule supernaturalism to be invalid. But surely God is more than that?

Just because something is irrelevant, or that we currently don't have the means to observe it, doesn't mean we can conclude that it definitively does not exist.

Absolutely, but it's different if the thing is defined in such a way that we could never, in principle, observe it. Like a deist "god" or a god who "neither exists nor doesn't exist" and other such nonsense.

Does it matter what the vast majority of theists believe?

Don't you think that believers in God have some claim to authority about what the word God means? People who claim to live their lives according to God's will and pray to him and supposedly recieve guidance from him and are part of a tradition going back thousands of years that invented all this terminology in the first place?

I'm not saying they have an absolute right to define the word - if they are incherent we'll just have to ignore them. But shouldn't they have a pretty major input into the definition of a word that they (and mostly only they) use every day?

 

[Ace_of_Sevens]

It seems I must forever be repeating this, but "proving it false" is not the standard.

When dealing with an utterly unanchored claim, the question is whether the burden has been met by the claimants to provide enough meat to the concept so as to raise it to a level of comprehensibility which obliges us to concede that the thing could possibly be real.

This hasn't been done.

We are nowhere near "proving it false". Proving what false?

If you are making a definitive negative claim, which strong atheism clearly is, then proving it false certainly is the standard. The thread title does claim proof, after all.

You seem to be playing word games here. Here is my summary

You say that whether God theoretically could exist is irrelevant, because it's entirely possible for it be possile for God exist without God actually existing, however, this is predcated on an assumption of free will or something similar. You argue that Fell Beasts could theoretically have evolved on Earth, but they didn't. The only way to possibly construct this is that if conditions were different, Fell Beasts could have evolved on Earth. However, conditions were not different, so Fell Beasts could not have actually evolved on Earth. Essentially, the whoel things is based on the idea that conditions could have been different, which is a philosophical assumption and not somethign that can be proven true or false.

So the question of whether God could exist is quite relevant when it's taken to mean whether God could exists given the actual state of the universe, which is how most people have meant it. Without a unifying concept of God, it's impossible to answer that question. We can say that all Gods that have been defined in some testable fashion have been shown to not exist, but there are concepts of God which are defined which you would not expect to be detectable given our current scientific knowledge, so it is not valid to say that we know enough about the universe to know that God doesn't exist. Even if there weren't such concepts, there's always the possibilty of such a thing existing that no one has thought of until our scientific knowledge is complete, which will probably never happen.

Nothing science can ever do can disprove the possibility of a God that doesn't actually do anything (whether he theoretically could is moot, as explained above). Granted such a god wouldn't be very meaningful, but that's a philosphical position and not proof of anything.

 

[Piggy]

If you are making a definitive negative claim, which strong atheism clearly is, then proving it false certainly is the standard.

Fatally incoherent concepts can have no claim to describing entities which can be meaningfully said to be "real". Therefore, if the concept of God is incoherent -- as the GOD concept is -- then we are safe in affirming that nothing real can be said to be described by it.

There is no need for positive disproof, because nothing coherent has been presented to disprove. The demand for such "proof against" is absurd on its face.

The claim is then proffered that a sub-theory might describe a potentially real entity.

And yet the available options do not support this notion, either.

Dead gods are not credited by god-theorists, so they are out.

Traditional notions (e.g., the Biblical God of Genesis 2) are contradicted by known fact, and are also out.

Anecdotal definitions are unsupported by evidence, do not solve the plasticity problem, and are up against a verified explanatory model. It is unreasonable to demand that we grant the imaginary (unanchored) model preference, in that this requires rejecting the verified model.

Transcendent gods are undefined entities existing in undefined contexts. In order to claim that they are "real", then "real" must be defined as non-different from "unreal".

Redundant gods also have no claim to independent reality, since they are non-different from naturalistic theory.

A god must either interact with the world or not. If it does not, it is transcendent. If it does, it is traditional, anecdotal, or redundant.

 

[Piggy]

You seem to be playing word games here.

A curious point of view, seeing as how words are all that are offered as evidence of God.

You say that whether God theoretically could exist is irrelevant, because it's entirely possible for it be possile for God exist without God actually existing, however, this is predcated on an assumption of free will or something similar.

Sorry, but you lost me. That left turn at "free will" threw me.

You argue that Fell Beasts could theoretically have evolved on Earth, but they didn't. The only way to possibly construct this is that if conditions were different, Fell Beasts could have evolved on Earth. However, conditions were not different, so Fell Beasts could not have actually evolved on Earth. Essentially, the whoel things is based on the idea that conditions could have been different, which is a philosophical assumption and not somethign that can be proven true or false.

Not quite. Let me run through it again.

The fell beast example was offered to illustrate that we do not need to prove abstract logical impossibility (as is sometimes demanded of strong atheist arguments) in order to assert that a thing is not real or does not exist.

That is the context of the example.

One would be hard pressed to argue that it is logically impossible, in theory, for earthly fell beasts to exist, if we define these things as enormous, living, winged creatures who resemble flying dinosaurs.

Since pteryodactyls once existed on earth, and there seems to be nothing in this definition which defies any principle of evolution, I don't see how it could be proven that the existence of these critters is somehow logically impossible per se.

And yet, when we examine all the data, we nevertheless come to the conclusion that these beasts do not, in fact, exist on earth.

That's all that was meant by that example. Proof of abstract logical impossibility is not required to demonstrate that a thing isn't actual.

So the question of whether God could exist is quite relevant when it's taken to mean whether God could exists given the actual state of the universe, which is how most people have meant it.

Yes, the actual universe is my frame of reference.

And yes, the question of whether God could exist is relevent, to the extent that if we demonstrate that God could not exist, then we're done. Yet, as demonstrated above, a failure to demonstrate logical impossibility does not cinch the case for actual existence.

Without a unifying concept of God, it's impossible to answer that question.

Without a unifying concept, there's no question to ask, because there's nothing to consider.

We can say that all Gods that have been defined in some testable fashion have been shown to not exist, but there are concepts of God which are defined which you would not expect to be detectable given our current scientific knowledge, so it is not valid to say that we know enough about the universe to know that God doesn't exist.

Really? What are they?

Even if there weren't such concepts, there's always the possibilty of such a thing existing that no one has thought of until our scientific knowledge is complete, which will probably never happen.

Sorry, that's a non-claim. I can't propose that thraks exist, then provide an incoherent definition, then generate several mutually exclusive theories, then have each of them debunked, then claim that thraks still might exist because someone might generate another definition of this incoherent non-thing which might agree with as-yet unproposed discoveries.

There's no "there" there.

Nothing science can ever do can disprove the possibility of a God that doesn't actually do anything (whether he theoretically could is moot, as explained above). Granted such a god wouldn't be very meaningful, but that's a philosphical position and not proof of anything.

You don't go far enough. It wouldn't be meaningful at all. It would never leave the realm of thought. And a concept which never sets toe outside the realm of thought is merely thought, and thought alone. It has not claim to reality.

 

[Piggy]

We don't need theories of God

One fact we should always keep in mind here is that theories of God are unnecessary.

We observe lights in the night sky. Some of them appear fixed in relation to each other. Others move about. We need an explanation of that, if we care to understand what we see.

Things fall down. They don't hover, or go whizzing off into space. We need an explanation of that, a theory of attraction, if we hope to understand our world.

There are living things and nonliving things. We need theories to help us explain these as well.

Yet we need no theory of God. Because God has been only imagined. There is no apparent referent for this concept.

We do need a theory to explain the existence of the concept, and we have one which fits perfectly well with the verified naturalistic model of our world.

It is jumping the gun to go theorizing about a proposed actual entity to correspond to this wholly unanchored concept. We should never forget that all God-theory, however, does just this.

God-theory is not like the theory of, say, black holes. Because black holes are necessary consequences of verified models. If the world is the way we have confirmed it to be -- a place with certain properties of gravity, chemistry, atomic and subatomic forces, and light -- then black holes are possible.

Not so with God. At one time, God might have appeared a valid theory to explain the stars (a Heavenly Host of angels), the origin of the universe, birth and death, agriculture, the weather, disease, and other phenomena. Yet all these things once explained by God theory are now explained by another model of the world.

So God theory is superfluous.

This places the entire burden onto God-theorists to present a modicum of justification for why this concept should be supposed to potentially describe something actual.

Their case is not helped by a retreat into nowhereland, or know-nothingness, as is required by transcendent theories and the "can't disprove" defense respectively.

What we have, then, is a debunked theory, together with a concept whose existence is explained by verified naturalisitc theory.

Under these conditions, the proposition that anyone must grant God the potential of phenomenal reality, of actual existence, is not just unreasonable, but nonsensical.

 

[T'ai Chi]

Because God has been only imagined.

You are stating that as fact, something which you cannot possibly know. Have you surveyed all of space and time? No? If Yes, you must be the god, disproving your own hypothesis.

What we have, then, is a debunked theory, together with a concept whose existence is explained by verified naturalisitc theory.

Under these conditions, the proposition that anyone must grant God the potential of phenomenal reality, of actual existence, is not just unreasonable, but nonsensical.

It must really get to you that this superfluous, unreasonable and nonsensical theory is believed as real, wholeheartedly, by billions, in every culture past and present, in many different forms.

There must be more to it than what you are able to understand.

 

[Piggy]

Piggy has a conversation with a Glorn theorist

GT: I was talking with a fellow at work this morning, and he said Glorn doesn’t exist. I correct him, of course. I told him he should say that he doesn’t believe in Glorn. But to say Glorn doesn’t exist is irrational, impossible, because after all, you can’t disprove it.

P: What’s Glorn?

GT: Didn’t your parents ever teach you about Glorn?

P: Nope.

GT: Well, it’s time you learned, then. First of all, most Glorn theorists say that Glorn is responsible for all the motion in the universe, and—

P: Whoa, time out. A couple of questions here. I’m no scientists, but I’ve read my basic physics, the laws of motion included, and I don’t remember any Glorn.

GT: Well that’s just science. Glorn isn’t science. It’s bigger than that.

P: Bigger?

GT: Metaphorically speaking, yes. It used to be thought that Glorn caused all motion directly, and some Glorn theorists still believe that. But nowadays, sophisticated Glorn theory holds that Glorn created the forces of nature which govern motion, although some contend that Glorn still affects motion subtly when—

P: Okay, that’s my second question. What’s all this about some theorists say one thing and others say another?

GT: Well, Glorn theory is a lot like science in that regard. There’s legitimate disagreement.

P: So what you’re saying is that people used to think that Glorn caused all motion, but when science showed otherwise, then they changed the theory?

GT: The theory was refined. Our understanding changed, it became more complete.

P: Alright, well, so some people say Glorn causes all motion directly, others disagree. Some say Glorn sometimes affects motion, others don’t. Does everyone agree that Glorn created motion, then?

GT: Pretty much.

P: But not everyone?

GT: Well, there are some backward people who believe that there isn’t one Glorn, but rather that there are many glorns, and so….

P: Wait a minute. What percent of Glorn theorists believe in multiple glorns?

GT: Well, I don’t have the figure, but… I’d say a good number in Asia and several regions of Africa. Maybe most there.

P: Those are not small areas.

GT: Well, the one-Glorn model is catching on there.

P: But everyone else says “one Glorn”?

GT: Yes, essentially.

P: Essentially?

GT: I don’t want to get into the subtleties of the theory. Middle Eastern theorists favor a strict one Glorn model. In much of India, and in Europe and the Americas, you more often see a triune model. But the triune model is still a monist model.

P: Okay, whatever. Is there anything that everyone agrees on?

GT: Everyone agrees that Glorn is not scientific, not just matter and energy. Well, I mean, yes, there are people who say that Glorn is “energy”, but they don’t mean the kind of energy Einstein was talking about.

P: What kind of energy do they mean?

GT: Listen, Glorn is ultimately beyond our comprehension. We can’t hope to understand it fully.

P: I just want to understand what you’re talking about. So far it’s all just a jumble of contradiction and fluff.

GT: So you think you know everything? Don’t you at least admit that there are things yet to be discovered? That there might be something out there greater than your little brain can grasp?

P: Yeah, sure, but what I’m saying is, I don’t have any clear idea what you’re talking about. I mean, some folks say this, others say that….

GT: Look. Glorn is greater than the forces of nature, right? It can act on nature, but it doesn’t have to. It may choose not to be discovered. You can’t say that it doesn’t – that’s just an argument from ignorance. Glorn causes motion, or it caused the forces which govern motion, so there’s your definition. I believe that there’s one, and if others believe there are many, then it could be that these are just different aspects of the one Glorn. You know, like the Grand Unification Theory says that all the forces of nature could just be different aspects of one force.

P: Yeah, but what is it? You’ve got all these theories about it, but what is it? If I talk about gravity, sure there are theories about it, but I can at least say something that everyone agrees on, and I can point to some data that demonstrate that.

GT: I’ve already told you, Glorn is something different from all that. You can’t get at it if you limit yourself to scientific thinking.

P: I just want to get a handle on this. Sounds to me like a bunch of nonsense, just ideas in people’s heads.

GT: Okay, but you have to admit that one of those ideas might be right, so you can’t say that Glorn doesn’t exist. You can only say you choose not to believe.

P: Believe what? You haven’t told me anything coherent to believe or not believe. Look, if this thing is real, you should be able to point to something it does—

GT: Motion, we’ve already covered that.

P: But we already have naturalistic theories to account for motion, and you say this is different—

GT: It’s a competing theory, then.

P: No, it’s not. A competing theory would have something to show, some deduction from a verified model, some evidence—

GT: How do you know that Glorn isn’t too subtle for our instruments to detect?

P: How do I know that what isn’t too subtle for our instruments to detect? You’re just handing me a bunch of ideas that jumped from somebody’s head. If there’s no evidence for it, and we have verified theories to account for everything it supposedly does, and there’s no agreement about what it is, then there’s nothing to believe in.

GT: But you can’t disprove it.

P: Disprove what?

GT: One of the theories might be true.

P: Which one?

GT: You can’t disprove them all. And even if we haven’t gotten it right yet, someone might come up with one that fits perfectly. We might discover new things. Science isn’t perfect. Everything you know might be wrong.

P: This is a waste of time.

GT: Now you’re just being closed-minded.

P: I’m gonna go get a sandwich.

GT: May Glorn be with you!

 

[andyandy]

Piggy, your post is an excellent example of the incoherence of "god." If a general concept of god is as meaningless as you point out, then shouldn't you be arguing for agnosticism rather than hard atheism? That is one of the key arguments for agnosticism......

 

[Piggy]

If a general concept of god is as meaningless as you point out, then shouldn't you be arguing for agnosticism rather than hard atheism?

No. Because if a concept is meaningless, there's nothing to believe in. Therefore, it makes no sense to be agnostic about it.

 

[andyandy]

No. Because if a concept is meaningless, there's nothing to believe in. Therefore, it makes no sense to be agnostic about it.

i do wonder if you actually understand agnosticism, or if you just are happy to consistently misrepresent it.......

If an agnostic position is that a general concept of god is incoherent then how on earth does is "make no sense to be agnostic about god?" Surely it does make sense to be agnostic - ie. you are accepting that general concepts of god are meaningless - and thus general proofs for hard atheism are equally meaningless.

this has been said by numerous posters on numerous occasions, and yet you perpetuate with the same fallacious logic.