Quote:
Originally Posted by Martian
Here's the catch, though: if you are Christian, you can't use the above argument to invalidate atheism without invalidating your own religion. If we assume for the sake of argument that it would be correct to say that there are an infinite possible ways in which God or a pantheon of gods could manifest, we have to accept as a given that one of those ways is for no gods to manifest at all; non-existence is one of those infinite possibilities. From there we can then equate atheism with any other faith, with the only difference being that atheism uses empirical evidence as a 'Bible.' From that perspective, you really can't use the infinite possibilities argument against atheists any more than they can use it against you, since those infinite possibilities contain both of your 'religions.'
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I'm not so sure how such an argument would invalidate my religion as, assuming God is anything, then, by association, my definition of God would be among one of the possibilities. This doesn't validate the atheist position, though, as while anything can be something, anything can't be nothing. And, yes, while I realize that the argument here is, if I'm understanding it correctly, that "Nothing is a possibility of anything (Which would make the probability of God existing being zero)", the usage of the word anything excludes nothingness (Or, in other words, existence doesn't include non-existence).