And thus I think God can create a stone too heavy for him to lift, and lift it. — Bartricks

The example of the stone may not be good because we cannot watch.

Imagine someone in the desert praying for it to rain. It will then rain or not rain (before he dies of thirst). He will know. How can it rain and not rain at the same time?

The problem occurs when God contacts us. We cannot perceive contradictions.

Thus, it is irrelevant whether God can create contradictions, we would not perceive them.

Can you expand on this? The expression (from the Gospel of Matthew) 'Ye shall know them by their fruits' springs to mind. — Tom Storm

Sure. Here's my take.

Atheism isn't so much a logical argument as it is a social position. If I don't believe in god, there's an end of it. But atheists are notorious for furiously proselytizing (hugely ironic as that is). SO you have to wonder, if everyone who believed in god also happened to believe that god decreed that you should devote yourself to learning everything you can about the universe (i.e. endorsed scientific knowledge), would the atheists still have a problem with theists? Atheism, from what I have seen, is highly correlated with a rather aggressive belief in the value of science, often to the point of scientism.

If you look at it as a purely logical or epistemological problem, the question of god is really one of definition. If you define god as "the most advanced form of sentient being" then there is a god. In which case, god isn't a specific being so much as a role, like "CEO of the universe." It's only when you start to heap a whole bunch of arbitrary qualities onto the concept of god that everything becomes problematic. Omniscient. Omnipresent. Sempiternal. Ex hypothesi, "god" is beyond the limits of our intellect. Can an amoeba conceptualize what it is like to be a man? Truly scientific reasoning suggests that we should be a little more...humble, about dismissing what we know to be beyond our current ken.

Thanks, I appreciate you spelling it out and agree mostly.

Atheism isn't so much a logical argument as it is a social position. — Pantagruel

Ah, that's very good. As is the rest. I'll happily admit that my recent apparent proselytisation of atheism was as much about irking christian fundamentals as easing lock-down boredom.

I'd found, after the first twenty-odd years of unbelief, that it's more profitable to argue with (religious) theism which exists than to argue against gods which do not. Thus, atheism matured into antitheism, and my career in freethought became even freer, a vocation; these last decades, theism can be shown to be not true, and the rest follows.

People once believed in "phlogiston," which does not exist. However the phenomena in question did have an explanation. So just because the specifically theist conception of "god" may be flawed, doesn't mean that there is not some explanatory correlate.

And your point?

Just because someone believes in something under a flawed description doesn't mean the belief is ultimately wrong, only a poor approximation. Scientific beliefs are subject to the same caveat.

It just means the belief is proximally wrong, which for proximal creatures like us is all that matters. Believing Earth is "flat" or "hollow" or "only six millennia old" is not three approximate truths on par with Newton's gravity or Wallace-Darwin's natural selection. The most incorrigible form of ignorance, Pantagruel, is the illusion of knowledge (e.g. beliefs which are, in fact, just wrong – not even approximately true – such as e.g. "Earth (Man) is the center of the universe").

Btw, fuck if I can tell what your last two posts have to do with my post before my last one. :brow:

It just means the belief is proximally wrong, which for proximal creatures like us is all that matters. Believing Earth is "flat" or "hollow" or "only six millennia old" is not three approximate truths on par with Newton's gravity or Wallace-Darwin's natural selection. The most incorrigible form of ignorance, Pantagruel, is the illusion of knowledge (e.g. beliefs which are, in fact, just wrong – not even approximately true – such as e.g. "Earth (Man) is the center of the universe"). — 180 Proof

I'm not aware of any criterion of 'proximal truth' that would invalidate what I'm saying.

I think I made it quite clear that and how all beliefs are subject to revision based on the advancement of knowledge in general. It seems to me that much criticism of theism is a criticism of theists as people who are holding on to an outmoded conception of the thing that they are actually trying to conceptualize. Clearly, deism is a superior and encompassing category.

Okay. :roll:

For example, man may not be the center of the universe. However man may represent one of the most highly evolved physical systems in the universe. Exactly how high on the overall scale, no one really knows. But depending on whether it is "somewhere in the middle" or "near the top" the whole anthropocentric bias may have more or less validity and merit.

Personally, I think that it has some validity, but that it applies to the entire system to which we belong (i.e. along the lines of the Gaia hypothesis).

This thread is about lists of arguments made against God. — elucid

Technically they are arguments against people telling you what god is or thinks. You would have to talk to God to argue.

Thus, it is irrelevant whether God can create contradictions, we would not perceive them. — SolarWind

Indeed. No matter how much one might try, one couldn't perceive a square circle, even if there was one.

I'd found, after the first twenty-odd years of unbelief, that it's more profitable to argue with (religious) theism which exists than to argue against gods which do not. Thus, atheism matured into antitheism, and my career in freethought became even freer, a vocation; these last decades, theism can be shown to be not true, and the rest follows. — 180 Proof

But the real question is, Are you getting payed for your antitheism? Does it rake in money for you?

It's (part of) a vocation now, as I've said, not a career. Besides, I'm no sophist.

atheists are notorious for furiously proselytizing — Pantagruel

That's like saying "Americans are notorious for relentlessly shooting people in the street." The statement exposes your ignorant prejudice. There are billions of atheists in the world; entire countries that are largely atheist. Do you really imagine that all these masses of people are "furiously proselytizing" all the time?

My comments are about the ones I personally have interacted with including on here, which I qualified elsewhere. I admitted that the one's who don't proselytize are drowned out (in their silence) by what could well be an overly-vocal minority.

When the din of 'proselytizing unbelievers' reaches the jet engine ear-splitting roar of proselytizing believers (i.e. fundies, orthodoxists, theocratic demogogues, traditionalist ideologues, right/left utopians, 24/7 wall-to-wall commodity fetishistic mediacrats et al) then the former might be a problem. Until such time, y'all are just sanctimonously whinging that we won't shut up and tremble in silence like in the good old blinkered days of the Holy Inquisition, etc.

the din — 180 Proof

An Estimate for no ‘God’

1a. All that we observe proceeds from the simplest realm of tiny events/things/processes to the larger composite to the more and complex, where we exist, which cascade may continue into the future, where/when we can expect beings higher than ourselves to become.

1b. The unlikely polar opposite of (1a) is an ultra complex system of mind of a ‘God’ being First as Fundamental; however systems have parts, this totally going against the fundamental arts.

2. (1) gets worse, for ‘God’ being, given that there can be no input for any specific direction going into the necessary Fundamental Eternal Capability—the basis of all, this bedrock having to be causeless, with random effects, due to no information being able to come in to what has no beginning. It thus appears that it could be everything possible, although not anything in particular, which is also the way it shows, in its constant transmutation at every instant, this all according to what we call the laws of nature.

3. So, (2) indicates that there is no ultimate meaning, not that a built-in meaning would be great, for it would be quite restrictive, but at least, as ‘liberating’, there’s anything and everything possible that could have become from the basic eternal state of not anything in particular—our present Earthly life path being one that is being lived now by us after 13.57 billion years, much of which progression can be accounted for by science.

4. On top of the preceding unlikelihoods, and given that obviously that no Designer made everything instantly, but is curiously constrained to doing exactly what nature could do on its own (and why so slowly!), it is unlikely that all eventualities could have been foreseen by a Deity in starting a universe suitable for life. It seems more like we were fine-tuned to the Earth.

5a. It’s still that the religious might then suppose a ‘God’ Deity who is like a scientist who throws a bunch of stuff together that is balanced and energetically reactive enough, but not too much so that it races along too fast, etc., to make for something livable coming out of it, but, again, really, what is a fully formed person-like being doing sitting around beforehand, this also being all the more of a quandary that ever enlarges the question by ‘begging’ rather than answering it.

5b. But, if it is supposed that life has to come from a Larger Life, then a regress ensues, making this not to be a good template, for it cannot be used on ‘God’ and so has to be thrown out of the stain-glass window. As for a Deity trying to put workable stuff together, this is much like the idea of a multiverse. We continue to estimate no ‘God’.

6. Existence/capability has no alternative, given that nonexistence has no being as a source and that there is indeed something, and as such the existence of something/capability is mandatory, there not being any choice to it. It’s a given; no magic required. Still, it could operate almost as what is called ‘God’, except that it’s not a Mind.

7a. We see that the One continually transitions/transmutes, never being able to remain as anything particular, which matches its nature supposed due to no information coming into it in the first place that never was, for the One Fundamental Eterne has to be ungenerated and deathless if it is so. But how can there be a finite absolute One with an impossible None outside it?

7b. Or all could be relative if there are no absolutes, for Totality can’t have anything outside it. So then Totality must be relative to itself.

7c. Of course, either way, the capability remains, as necessity, with no alternative, without needing any cause for it to be. It is the Ground of Determination — G.O.D. It has no opposite and so it is not remarkable.

8. Aside from the trivial definition of free will being that without coercion the will is free to operate, and the useless definition of the harmful random will equaling ‘freedom’, the deeper notion of ‘free’ as being original and free of the brain will is of a currency never being able to be stated and cashed in on, leaving ‘determined’ to continue to be the opposite of ‘undetermined’. This stands against a ‘God’.

While eternalism can’t yet be told apart from presentism, the message from both is of a transient ‘now’, whether pre-determined or determined as it goes along. All hope then, is crushed, both for us and the Great Wheel itself having any potency. This is the great humility; all hubris is gone.

It is enough, then, that we have the benefit of experiencing and living life well, sometimes, much more so given this modern age, although still with sweat, tears, and aversive substrates of emotions that those of the future might consider to be barbaric. The early days of humankind were horrendous.

10. It doesn’t seem like a God’s world, and so fundamentalist literalist Biblical ‘reasons’ cannot apply here, about a ‘fall’, for those already went away. The pride of being special and deserving of reward and avoiding punishment is still a nice wish, though, for us electro-chemical-bio organisms who appear be be as organic as anything else that grows in nature. Hope grants comfort.

11. God’s operations, curiously restricted to be the same as nature’s has us not being able to tell them apart from nature’s, but which is more likely, the natural or the supernatural? Earth is just where it ought to be, in the Goldilocks zone, and not impossibly flourishing out near Neptune.

12. And why must there be a truly distinct transcendent, immaterial, intangible, super realm when it would still have to give and take energy in the physical material language, talking its talk and walking its walk? Dubious, plus the speculation of an invisible realm goes nowhere toward it being so, it tending toward making excuses for what really ought to be seen everywhere.

13. So, we can sit on a fence and go to church half the time or estimate the probability either way, but note that there can be no blame for not knowing what can’t be shown for sure. It’s all in what it does for you.

Let us have wine, lovers, song, and laughter—
Water, chastity, prayer the day after.
Such we’ll alternate the rest of our days—
Thus, on the average, we’ll make Hereafter!

Yeah. Interesting. For me (with a good buzz) it's pandeism or nada.

My comments are about the ones I personally have interacted with including on here, which I qualified elsewhere. I admitted that the one's who don't proselytize are drowned out (in their silence) by what could well be an overly-vocal minority. — Pantagruel

So what you were trying to say was that all and only those atheists who are notorious for furiously proselytizing are notorious for furiously proselytizing. Very insightful, that.

Atheism isn't so much a logical argument as it is a social position. — Pantagruel

And why can't it be both? People with positions on all manner of things like to share them with other people, and even try to convince others to come to their side. So why is it not socially acceptable to be outspoken about atheism, of all things? Is it too shameful, too outrageous? It's especially funny to see someone complain about atheism being discussed on a philosophy board, where people come to discuss and argue about anything and everything, no matter how abstract or irrelevant. Methinks you are clutching your pearls too hard.

He got banned/

LOL no, that was someone else. Pantagruel is all right.

your arguments all ask the same question: is god bound by logic?

Oh lol