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Originally Posted by Martian
If you wish to use a completely literal interpretation of the statement "God could be anything" and therefore exclude non-existence as a possibility, that statement ceases to be atheistic in nature (which it never really was to begin with) and becomes an implied declaration of faith. Therefore, assuming such an interpretation for the statement "God could be anything," it for the purposes of this discussion carries essentially the same meaning as "God is an all-knowing, all-powerful benevolent creator," and any atheistic viewpoint becomes irrelevant. You are essentially making an argument against the different flavours of theism, rather than an argument for or against atheism. Regardless, the first highlighted statement and the second highlighted statement are inconsistent unless one adopts a more liberal interpretation of one or the other.
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First of all, the one point in which I said "God is anything" should be changed to "God could be anything" as I have it everywhere else (Not sure why I did that, but *meh*). From there, what I had written should logically follow. My goal wasn't to make a statement (a)theistic in nature, but rather to show that if God could be anything, then He can't be nothing, as anything excludes nothingness (Or non-existence). And, if God can be anything but nothing, then an infinite number of possibilities of God being *something* should preclude atheism.
(Now as I said earlier, I didn't come up with the statement "God could be anything", so don't go ballistic on me for that one.)
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This definition is theistic in nature and is therefore not well suited to a discussion of theism vs. atheism. A better definition would be "an entity assumed by some individuals to be the creator of the Universe," since it will allow discussion of God without an implied discussion of the Universe.
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Ehhh... That's not much much different, but fair enough, I guess.
[QUOTE=KnifeMissile]Your logical and analytical skills are as abominable as ever. You also like to make shit up, which seriously offends me. Either that, or you're totally ignorant of the meaning of the words (and phrases) that you use...
Infinity is not undefined.
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Originally Posted by Knife_Missle
Now, I think I can agree that infinity is immeasurable but that doesn't mean it's incomparable. For instance, lets define a power set of a given set as the set of all subsets of the given set. It's not too hard to prove that the power set has more elements than the given set, regardless of whether the given set had an infinite number of elements or not! Thus, some infinite sets are larger than others... |
*Sigh*
inBOIL said that one might consider that the infinite set consisting of all possibilities for God is smaller than the infinite set consisting of all possibilities for no God, to which I said there'd be no way of knowing this unless you simply assumed it to be true.
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I think you're misunderstanding the argument. The conclusion of the argument you're trying (desperately) to refute isn't "therefore, there is no God." The point of the argument is that the burden of proof is on the theist to provide compelling reason to believe in their particular god. The atheism comes from the sad fact that no one has provided any evidence that such a being exists and, therefore, it's most reasonable to not believe in any...
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I understand what the argument just fine. But, you see, I'm not concerned with proving whether or not a particular God exists, as that doesn't terribly concern me at this point (Especially since trying to argue
which God exists with someone who doesn't believe in one to begin with is futile), but rather that, if one assumes God could be anything, then there's no way he, or she, could be an atheist. And, you know, I might be wrong here, but I don't know too many atheists who claim God, assuming he exists, to be only a few, finite possibilities.