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piggy piggy piggy, can't you see, sometimes your words just hypnotize me. Well said. Do I detect an echo Voltaire in that last paragraph? I don't think anyone you takes the time to think and open their mouth (or more likely, just open their mouth) is arguing that God is a semantic placeholder. I see 'ravel, will ravel' has decided to ignore my invitation to join the dark side. I was hoping to have at least a few people play devil's advocate to their own posts, but I guess everyone here believes they're so indisputably right that they can't even think of how their arguments could be flawed. I thought this topic could be discussed and jested with. The last thing I wanted was more fork related blindness Ravel, though experience would lead me to believe this will always be the outcome of my philosophical debates.
It’s time we all solemnly acknowledge what we know in our hearts and minds…atheists and theists behave equally illogically, fundamental agnostics win the day by being the only group to admit they have no idea what’s going on.
My support for agnosticism is anecdotal at best, but bear with me.
For the sake of this explanation, Pigglet is the smartest human being conceivable for the near future. He is not omnipotent, but simply has a deep understanding of math, history, science and whatever else you’d like.
You challenge Pigglet to ‘prove’ a particular grain of sand that you pick up. A month passes, and Pigglet analyses that piece of sand’s composition, trace its existence back thousands of years by studying weather patterns, and forecast with certainty where it would be in a million years using chaos theory and some other things we haven’t invented yet.
You challenge Pigglet to provide that same information about every grain of sand in an entire beach. “This will take piggy style,” is his response, and a few years later you’re told just about everything about the sand in the nude beach Pigglet studied.
You then issue your greatest challenge, which is to have that information about every particle in the universe. Needless to say Pigglet does not accept this challenge, and states that because so much about the universe will never even be seen, there is no way to substantiate any theory he could come up with. Even given a thousand Pigglet’s and a thousand years, only the most minute fraction of the universe could be explained. The rest would simply have to be left unexplained, or at best explained by flawed theories.
If you concede that our universe is finite, or even infinite to a degree less than the degree God is infinite to, you concede that our universe is mathematically nothing in comparison to God. If even Pigglet had difficulty explaining what was relatively nothing, it follows that if God is omnipresent, it is quite impossible to know anything about God. This does not mean God exists. It does not mean God does not exist. It just means we can never know either way. So you can believe in God, but you can’t say you have any good reason, not matter how you define God (as long as you’re attributing omnipresence to God). You can believe God does not exist but you can’t say you have any good reason (if omnipresence=yes).
You may now return to believing Pigglet is as intelligent as you wish.
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