The Dink Network

Scratcher:

"And your proof that a christian god cannot exist is that it's contradictory?"

That it violates the LAW of NON-CONTRADICTION. A thing cannot be both 'A' and 'Not A' at the same time. It is impossible. A guy who says things like "Everyone should be treated fairly" but then randomly cuts innocent peoples' brake lines or poisons their food is 'contradictory' but he does not violate any principles of logic doing so. But a cheetah which gets further away from you as it moves TOWARDS you or a God which somehow knows the future with 100% certainty and yet is able to ponder and make decisions...those things cannot exist because they are inherently contradictory by their very nature.

"This seems pretty flimsy to me."

Can't wait for you to get to college and try to pass that "being contradictory is flimsy evidence against existence' line. *chuckle*

"It's also impossible to disprove the existence of pixies, ghosts, and the tooth fairy, though."

Yes, in MOST cases it is impossible to prove a negative. Santa Claus, giant radioactive dinosaurs etc. would all apply here. But there IS one exception and that is in things which are logically contradictory. To those the 'Can't prove a negative' rule does not apply.

"There's no way to do it, besides, what's considered "existence" anyway? If something exists in your mind, it exists on some level."

There are two principle types of "existence" relevant here.

Independent existence - These are things which exist independently of what we think or believe about them. A blind man who believes he is walking on clear, smooth ground will still trip over a rock in his path regardless of what he believes about that rock because the rock exists independently of human thinking or belief.

and the second type is of course:

Dependent existence - These are things which only exist within our minds and if no brained creatures existed, neither would the ideas and imaginings we conjure up in our heads. You cannot trip over a rock in my head no matter what you believe because the rock only exists as an idea/thought.

Which brings us to 'God'. Which type of existence does one suppose him to have?
I say he is an imaginary thing. One in a long line of similar imaginary things created in human imaginations for specific purposes. We have NO concurrent observation of such an entity which is an earmark of an imaginary thing.

"Saying that SOMETHING CAN'T EXIST PERIOD is just really obnoxious."

Okay if you are going to raise a fit over some semantic nonsense then please, whenever you see me say that something which cannot exist for reasons of logic, assume I mean that it cannot exist as an independent entity. God may well 'exist' in a sense inside your head and millions of other imaginations but I do not concern myself with such since your imaginations cannot cause me any harm or grant me any benefit.

"Are you sure you didn't use to post quite a lot around here under the name DraconicDink? The keen attention to semantics and black-and-white logic bear an uncanny resemblance."

Positive. I do not ever recall seeing any of his or her posts either. We're not going to start playing the 'Let's assume Tony is some other poster we didn't like and ran off' game are we?

"Perhaps the people you talked to just sucked? I don't know what free will means to YOU, but to me it just means being able to choose to do whatever you will."

Close enough I suppose but for simplicity's sake let's just say it is the ability to ponder a decision.

"How does knowing what you will do cancel that out?"

Okay listen up; let's say you are God, sitting around 50 gazilllion years ago. At this point since you are omniscient you already KNOW with absolute certainty that Adam & Eve(or humans in general) will exist and live on Earth.

Now...at what point could you ponder a decision to create humans?

No matter how far you go back the omniscience applies and you are without the capability to ponder anything. This is so unless or until you are somehow stripped of your omniscience and that cannot happen without you knowing it would.

"Of course, if you know what the future brings, you might do stuff differently than you would have done if you didn't know."

Not at all. You could not do ANYTHING but what you KNEW you would do. You would be as a robot following programming only without the possibility of a malfunction or bug occurring in the coding because any action you took which violated your omniscience would of course render your omniscience null and void.

"But then you would know what you will ultimately choose to do, not what you'd have done if you didn't know. "Duck, I can't do what I want to do because omniscience tells me I do this other thing!" is obviously contradictory to free will, but omniscience doesn't need to mean that. Nothing is forcing anyone to do something they don't want to do."

Then you are seeking to re-define omniscience to mean something less contradictory. You are free to do that but such a re-definition is at odds with the definition found in the Bible/Qur' an/Torah.

"Omnipotence is a much more difficult trait to have, I think."

Not really. One reason I never use the "Can God create a rock so heavy...?" argument is because it does not really apply. "All powerful" does not mean "Able to do the logically impossible". A 'rock' by definition MUST be 'lift-able' or it is not a rock and if it is lift-able then an all powerful being can lift it.

[i]"But anyone can just cop out of answering that question by saying that it's beyond your (or if you want to play safe, beyond anyone's) grasp. Just because YOU find it impossible doesn't mean it actually has to be impossible. God can make it make sense by being awesome."

Nope...that does not work and no one in the world would accept that sort of reasoning for any other claim. For example:

"Ted Bundy was a saint and should be given a martyr's burial. Just because YOU are unable to comprehend the true humanitarianism of his actions does not means he was not a saint!"

"A fall from 50 stories up cannot kill you. Such perceived deaths are illusory and brought on by our too-limited sensory capabilities. When you take a swan dive off a skyscraper you actually bounce right into a parallel universe!"

And so on...

"What is real proof? Back in the day, plenty of proof existed to support the theory that the earth is flat."

There was no "theory" that the earth was flat and certainly no "proof" of such. It was an understandable assumption and one that even modern children have to be talked out of. There was PROOF that the earth was a globe though, even 250-500 B.C.E. but like I said...having proof available does NOT mean that everyone will unanimously be aware of and understand such.

"Any well-spoken and intelligent believer can give you proof as to why their deity must exist."

This is absolutely FALSE. The absolute MOST intelligent of believers cannot even provide good EVIDENCE, let alone proof. What happens is that such believers have ONE standard for what constitutes good evidence when it comes to things they do not believe. For those things they by and large agree with skeptical criteria. They will not believe in fairies or other gods based on the evidence that believers in those things present.

But for THEIR god(s) they have a much lighter criteria and it is as nonsensical as things get. Typically a God-believer who is otherwise intelligent will make special exceptions for his own god, allowing for anecdotal evidence and such to constitute "proof" for him while disallowing anecdote for other extraordinary claims(for good reason).

"Clearly Mister E's two sticks weren't very good proof since no one believed him. It's only in retrospect that we can say his proof was "real"

False. Everyone who knew of and understood his "proof" acknowledged it as such(which amounted to a tiny population of Greeks at the time). The error you are making here is a fallacy called argumentum ad populum. It is an error in reasoning which presumes that the popularity of an idea or claim is directly tied to the validity of said claim or idea.

"And that proves god exists... at least in peoples' minds. Even if he has to be a physical, omniscient entity with mass-murdering tendencies, lack of proof of him existing doesn't prove he doesn't exist. An imagined contradiction of his character certainly doesn't."

Anyone claiming that God only exists as an imaginary thing will get no argument from atheists. In fact you probably would not hear a word from us again ion the matter if such were the case all around.

Lack of evidence is some of the strongest evidence AGAINST a thing's existence you can find, contrary to some common assertions to the contrary. And those holding the negative position NEVER have the burden of proof so if the positive claimant's of God's existence absolutely lack proof(or even evidence) then our position is the default.

"I'm not trying to say that believing something exists because it can't be disproven isn't ridiculous, just that it can't. And that logic and proof aren't absolute."

This last sentence is too ambiguous for me to make sense of.