GOD

 

Besides the evidential problems, the supposed existence of God has coherence problems. Omnipotence vs. Omniscience vs. Logical Consistency is just one of them.

God is just this bin of wish-fulfillment into which people toss all the things they want but don't have. It would seem that if Someone that important and powerful did actually exist, His existence would not be something that was argued about.

The skeptical disproof of the existence of God: "I doubt, therefore God does not exist". God, if He existed, would be a Thing of such perfection that His existence could not be doubted. But His existence is doubted. Therefore, He does not exist.

(And neither does She.)

This kind of naive XIXc atheism is passé, partly because it's too obvious and flat-footed, and partly because atheism doesn't do any of the work that theism claims to be able to do. No salvation, no afterlife, no ecstasy, no grounding of ethics or politics. But the argument from skepticism has a lot of power.

(From a comment here).

Further development of the argument

God is of necessity too large and imposing to get lost in the sock-drawer. If you look around carefully and don't see any God, there isn't one. God isn't like a ring of keys that might still show up.

There are those who claim that Anselm's "greatness" is not the same as "bigness", and that "being able to hide in a sock drawer" is one of the powers of God, and in no way a deficiency.

These people probably also believe that God can create a thing so heavy that he himself cannot lift it. Rather than argue about this, though, I just added a sock-drawer proviso to my list of axioms.

It is one of the axiomatic beliefs of my creed, though also provable by reason, that Gods hiding in sock drawers would be lesser Gods. However, because of their very lesserness, they would also be strictly non-existent, since Godness is identical to absolute moreness.

A real God hiding in a sock drawer would be so transcendently evident that his attempt at hiding would fail. His transcendent butt would be sticking out, and you'd just want to kick it so bad.

My interlocutor asks me why I would ever want to kick the butt-greater-than-which-none-can-be-imagined.

That's an easy one. If I were able to kick the butt-greater-than-which-none-can-be-imagined, I would be the ass-kicker of the universe.

 

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I am emersonj at gmail dot com.

Original materials copyright John J Emerson

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