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Originally Posted by Infinite_Loser
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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Um, so if you take narrow definitions of a vaguely worded claim, you can manipulate it into saying something you want.
How is this interesting? I mean, other than demonstrating the fun of picking narrow definitions for terms?
Let X be the term that means "anything or nothing". Let Y be the term "anything, but not nothig".
Now say "God could be X" as opposed to "God could be Y". Both X and Y are decent working definitions of "anything" -- and when someone says something, it seems polite to use the working definition that is closer to what they seem to want to say, rather than to pick another working definition that makes their statement nonsense?
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*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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No, you made some nonsense about infinity being undefined.
You are also seeking to
prove that there
must be a god. The fact that your proof ... does not eliminate alternatives ... means that it isn't a proof.
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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.
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You did it again. You took a term "anything", defined it narrowly in such a way that the other side's position was wrong, and then said "aha! By (my) definitions of terms, your side is speaking nonsense! Nevermind that if you very minorly tweak one of the words away from my personal definition that my argument is nonsense -- there is nobody behind the curtain!"
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Second, here is a neat trick.
We have a random number generated by the following process.
First, we flip a fair coin. If it lands heads, the answer is 0.
If it lands tails, we then grab a plutonium atom. The random number produced is the number of seconds that it takes that plutonium atom to decay. And heck, we'll neglect quantized time for now.
Now, let's look at that random number. What values can it hold? An infinite number of different values! That plutonium atom can decay after any number of seconds.
It has a zero chance to decay at any one particular moment in time -- ie, at exactly pi seconds after we grab it, there is actually a zero chance that it decays. Note that it could still decay at that time, but the probability that it happens is zero. Gotta love probability.
It has a non-zero chance of decaying over any small interval of time. And it has a 100% chance of decaying eventually....
However, the random number generator I made has a 50% chance of returning 0, and it can return an infinite number of different possibilities.
So here we have a random process that can return any one of an infinite number of values, yet has a 50% chance of returning zero.
Why did I do this? To demonstrate that even if you have an infinite number of alternatives, you can still have a finite chance to produce a given value.
That 50% chance of a particular value can be made as high as one wants.
So no, demonstrating that there are an infinite number of "alternatives" does not mean that a particular case is impossible.