To prove God not existing, atheists conflate God with invisible unicorns.

By way of a digress on the meaning of the word conflate:​

Okay, conflate is used routinely by atheists to compare God with absurd entities like invisible pink unicorn or flying spaghetti monster or tooth fairy or Santa or cake in the sky or with Bertrand Russell, an orbiting teapot.

Annex

 

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I am into this thread to explain the concept of God (in concept) as the creator and operator of the universe and everything with a beginning.

That is the most important and the greatest credit to God, before anything else.

What about atheists, what is your concept of God?

In this thread I am talking reason, not revelation, and I am grounding my thinking on facts and logic.



Annex

 

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The nose is a part of the universe, so that if the whole universe is the nose, it is still a complete universe.

From the fact of the nose in our face we can already go all the way back to the cause of the nose: God, in concept the creator and operator of the universe and everything with a beginning.




Annex

 

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Do you know now?

 

No need to compare God with absurd entities.

If you want to say that the concept of God is similar to ridiculous images, then just show how the concept of God is similar to the ridiculous contents of the images you want to compare God to.

But your purpose in bringing up ridiculous images is because you atheists do not have any argument at all to disprove the existence of God -- except to bad mouth God, which is no argument whasoever.

Okay, here are your two pseudo grounds for a fake argument against the existence of God in concept as the creator and operator of the universe and everything with a beginning.

1. First you claim that you cannot prove a negative, namely, God does not exist.

2. Besides, you also claim exemption from any burden to establish anything at all, because you are not making any claim.

So, in effect you are altogether without any ground whatsoever for denying God existing.

But you are engaging in only bad mouthing God, thinking that it will convince all folks that God does not exist -- with your bad mouthing Him.

That is no argument whatsoever with bad mouthing, except what I should call the fallacy of blaspheming God away.


Dear readers, let us sit back and wait for atheists here to present an argument against God, or even just an explanation why they have to resort to blasphemies against God.

 

Absurd gods are naturally compared to other imaginary entities.

 

Blaspheming is speaking irreverently about sacred things. Gods are not sacred. You should try to get over your notion that the ultimate overwhelming purpose of atheists is to prove gods do not exist. No 1 needs any grounds to deny something which has not been proven. We cannot badmouth any gods until they get up the courage to come out of hiding & show themselves. Until then we are only discussing fairy tales.

 

Are you talking the god of the christian bible?
Because that god is responsible for dooming humanity to thousands of years of suffering by planting an IED (improvised epistemological device) in the garden of eden. Encouraging war, rape, genocide and every other crime against humanity, these bits of inspired psychosis:

As well as tolerating war, cancer, famine and all the current ills of the world. Either he has no power to stop all of this or is indifferent, or given his record, is a evil prankster, the greatest criminal in the history of humanity.

So either god doesnt exist or isnt worthy of worship by any right thinking moral person.
Personally, im relieved he is fiction, i wouldnt want to share a universe with him.
Nonetheless if you watch the news, the fact that he doesnt exist doesnt stop the villians and the insane of the world being inspired by him and praising his name as they bathe in the blood of their fellow beings.

And dont give me any of that original sin blame the victim crap, every perp uses that old saw.

 

When you write again in this thread, dear atheist confreres here, please present what you know of the information of the concept of God in the three Abrahamic faiths, and give the most important features in the concept of God for the adherents of these faiths.

And please, no need to resort to blaspheming God, that is no argument whatever, it is like dishonoring Obama calling him a black man but with a pejorative word, thinking that thereby he will just evaporate into thin air instead of a person holding the highest office of the most powerful nation on earth ever -- well, at least in destructive power to annihilate mankind and all life forms several times over, what with say over 2000 deployable nuclear warheads.*

*United States: 4,804 nuclear warheads as of September 2013 [2], including tactical, strategic, and nondeployed weapons. According to the latest official New START declaration, the United States has1,585 strategic nuclear warheads deployed on 778 ICBMs, SLBMs, and strategic bombers [1]. The Federation of American Scientists estimates that the United States' nondeployed strategic arsenal is approximately 2,800 warheads and the U.S. tactical nuclear arsenal numbers 500 warheads. Additional warheads are retired and await dismantlement.
http://www.armscontrol.org/factsheets/Nuclearweaponswhohaswhat​

 

See you tomorrow guys, and don't forget to work on your information of the concept of God, with the most important features in relation to the universe and everything with a beginning.

Here is my concept of God, in concept God is the creator and operator of the universe and everything with a beginning.​

 

If god is up for discussion we have to include his criminal record. Read the documents, watch the news. God is answerable for great evils.
As the say in the legal system, facts are not slander, but if facts are blasphemy, i guess im guilty

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There is no need to resort to inanely accusing people of blasphemy & upsetting yourself about it. No gods can be blasphemed against until they show themselves. I have good reason to suspect Obama exists. I cannot say that about any gods. Before I could think of making any gods evaporate into thin air, I would 1st have to see them. Soon as I see any gods, I'll try your magic trick on them.

 

I'm not sure you fully understand what "conflate" means.
When making the analogy between the concept of God and the concept of a celestial teapot, at no point do those making the analogy consider concepts of God to have a handle and a spout, and primarily be used for the imbibing of a beverage made from crushed leaves and boiling water.

It is an analogy.
The two concepts are compared, not conflated, in the specific characteristic to which attention is being drawn.

In the case of your examples, it is in their inability to be disproven.
For some this is sufficient reason for them to believe in God, yet they don't believe in the infinite other concepts that can't be disproven.

Analogy.
Not conflation.


Secondly, and seemingly the main focus of your argument, you seem to think that atheists use this analogy to "prove God does not exist".
No. This is your misunderstanding.
They (or at least those I know on this forum) use this argument to support their lack of belief in God... i.e. why believe in one concept that can not be disproven yet not believe in all the others that can not be disproven?
A few atheists may have the belief that God does not exist, but the analogy to Russell's teapot, the FSM et al, is not their argument for doing so. They would have other arguments.


So your initial point seems (to me, at least) not only poorly worded but based on a fallacy.

Moving forward, however, if you think the analogy with the teapot, with the FSM, et al, is flawed - please state where the analogy is flawed, and why it is not valid analogy in supporting the conclusion of "lack of belief".

 

Does the universe require an operator?

 

Indeed, you are doing a fine job of producing absurdity.

At some point, you will lie. That's just what religious types of your sort do. It's so natural for your religion, that you won't even know that you're doing it. But you will.

As it stands, you just have the dishonest position that you want us to accept your ideas without evidence while at the same time demanding evidence from us to accept any of our positions.

 

If the rest of the universe is anything like our world, it must be coin operated.

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​

 

There doesn't need to be any similarity, in fact there shouldn't be any, apart from the inability to disprove the existence of any of them.

I'll repeat what I wrote in post #7:

What atheists are typically doing with the 'invisible unicorns' analogy is responding to a bad theistic argument that says in effect:

Inability to prove that God doesn't exist means that it's reasonable to think that he does. (Certainly as reasonable as the atheist belief that he doesn't.)

The 'invisible unicorn' example, along with 'Russell's teapot' and other variants, are part of the counter-argument that there are no end of things, some of them quite ridiculous, whose existence we can't actually disprove. It certainly isn't reasonable to believe in the existence of all of those things.

Which in turn suggests that stronger epistemic justification is necessary. We need credible and positive reasons to believe in the existence of things. Noting that the existence of something can't be disproven is insufficient reason to believe in its reality.

I think that's a sound philosophical point.

Your failure to understand the point doesn't mean that it hasn't been made.

Who are you talking to here, who are you addressing? I get the feeling that you have this picture of 'atheists' in your head, this idea of what they think and how they argue, and you are here on Sciforums to denounce it. Never mind what the real-life atheists on the board are saying.

Admittedly atheists sometimes do the same thing, reducing Christians, theists and 'religionists' to caricatures and refusing to consider what they really say. It's equally stupid, no matter who is doing it.

I've never said that it's impossible to prove a negative. Negative propositions can often be proven using reductio-ad-absurdum methods. Negative propositions about fixed finite domains can be proven by enumeration.

I do agree that the existence of God can't be disproven. But that's not because one supposedly can't prove a negative. It's true though that certain collections of purported divine attributes can be proven to be inconsistent with one another, and the argument made that any being possessing all of those attributes can't exist. In my opinion that isn't so much an argument against the existence of God as it is an argument against certain kinds of theology.

Just rhetorically, if A wants to convince B of something, the burden of proof is going to lie with A. (In real life, the word 'proof' is something of a misnomer, since we rarely if ever use literal logical proofs in persuasion.) If a theist wants to persuade an atheist to believe in God, the theist needs to convince the atheist that God most likely exists. And if an atheist wants to persuade a theist not to believe in God, the atheist needs to provide some convincing reason why the theist should do that.

A great deal depends on how the word 'God' is defined.

If we are talking about a collection of cosmological functions such as first-cause or the reason why something exists rather than nothing, I don't have a clue. What's more, I'm quite confident that no other human being has those answers either. So I'd call myself an agnostic regarding metaphysics. (I'm also unclear on how an abstract philosophical function even becomes an object of religious devotion.)

When it comes to the deities of the theistic religions, Yahweh, Allah and Vishnu for example, I'm pretty much an atheist. I just think that it's vanishingly unlikely that the ultimate cosmological principle will turn out to be a big blustering Jewish guy in the sky. I can't totally disprove that possibility, but I think that the probability is so low that I can safely dismiss it.

 

Now that I understand this refinement. At one point I had about 30 cranks and trolls on Ignore which made some threads pretty bizarre - esp when they were mostly talking to each other. Over time a lot of them got banned so it's pretty smooth sailing right now.

 

What part of the universe needs operating?
Which part was out of control so that it needed to be controlled?
And what reason do you have to believe that?

 

Simply conflate God with happinness, and he is there.