I’ll just address this. Be careful now, because you’re coming off as another philosophically sterile skeptic. Yes, everything may be an illusion, but since there is an apparent consensus on objective reality, to deny it would be irrational. Personal experience implies it is relative to you exclusively. Empirical evidence implies verifiable, replicable data that is held to be true based on our shared understanding of reality. If personal experience is corroborated with empirical evidence, then the experience is justified. For example, I have skinned my knee many times, demonstrating the influence of gravity, consistent with scientific study. If I claim that my gallbladder sprouts lips and sings to me when I’m alone, then I am making a claim that violates certain laws of physics and brings my sanity into question. Solipsism and theism have similar problems.
Maybe you should then explicitly define what exactly it is you believe in then. “God” is a character from a book, who in that book has specific powers attributed to him. If you don’t believe in that, then you don’t believe in God. If you do believe in some other higher power, then why call it God, leading to such confusion? Why not call it Bob, or Joe? If you want to defend the existence of a higher power, then you’ll have to explain what exactly this higher power is first.
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kind of simple things. mostly answered prayers. no one seems to touch on that, the power of prayer and meditation. in fact i saw an athiest here volunteer that meditation helped in the same ways people say “God” helps them. 'splain!
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aye. but typically, such things are argued “with religious fervor” or “his ideas on _____ are almost religious.”
i conceid you are right, strong belief in something doesnt make it a religion, but on matters of anti-religion, especially when argued and preached with the same voracity of pro-religion is equal to religion.
why is this matter of such personal value to all of you? i dont see this kind of debate happening about, say, what brand of toothpaste is best? it seems really important that you insist and prove there is no God. i’ve already admitted the most concession i’d ever hope for is the admission God COULD exist, to me.
the hard part of that is no one can prove it’s not true, nor can you prove i’m even here doing this now, but of that i digress…
you’re speaking strictly of the judeo-christian God, God of the bible. and if you think if i just started saying “i believe in Joe” in this debate as providing LESS confusion, i’m sorry to say that’d be crazy. i call it God because that’s the accepted term for it. The original Creator. the thing that came first.
God exists in all cultures across all time, not just for Bible people. Native americans, aztecs, ancient babylonians, etc etc etc all had their ideas of God.
geeze, everyone here is so hung up on the Christian God. look, i agree–the God of the bible makes little sense. the bible itself makes little sense. Christians make little sense. none of that has anything to do with me.
BTW the whole complexity of God debate perplexes me. why does that matter? Dawkins says God must be more complicated than the explanation He provides, which is something i’ve always believed. the vastness and unknowable nature of God is the basis of evolution–the goodness that results from seeking to understand that and the enlightenment that follows. that is experiencing God. perhaps it’s cyclical, but it makes sense to me. we are pretty feeble, there’s a LOT of stuff we do not understand (terrestrial things as well as the outer reaches of the universe). the seeking of enlightment and knowledge, Gnosis, truth, all of this makes us better. as individuals, as a species. that’s sort of what i believe in.
i guess i dont see why that deserves you all trouncing me.
I’ll certainly admit that.
I guess the difference between matters of gods and such and toothpaste, beyond the practical effects, is that they’re matters of the fundamental makeup of reality. Toothpaste is a matter of taste, even so far as political views are a matter of examining people and so forth. But theism and athiesm are about the very fundamentals. People who disagree on them are disagreeing on something that may well affect the way we see the whole world, and at the least colours what we see. So it’s interesting in that way because, to all of us, our own experiences seem so obvious, in a way; to find people who disagree on what seems obvious and they in turn find what they see as obvious calls into question a lot of things.
I mean, look at it this way; you’re interested enough that you decided to ask questions and put out your point of view. And to continue to talk with us as we are. What’s motivating you to debate?
Oh, and apologies for referring to you with religious terms. You’re right, those weren’t appropriate terms to use for you and your situation.
True, but even if we assume any god of any pantheon currently imagined, there is still no requirement for his/her existence, nor any empirical reason for them to exist. Not even a requirement for something to come first.
But the problem is that some here have gone to great lengths to redefine god to be some amorphous being with either no interactivity activity in the universe or defining it as the personification of an emotion. Both of which are fairly non-standard versions of the term god, and both of which are wholly irrelevant to the universe. It’s a pretty obvious attempt to do a linguistic two step to avoid the problems inherent in a more standardized model of god.
So your definition of “God” is this feeling that you get when you’re relaxed? Well, OK, but be warned that when you refer to that as the word “God” you’re communicating a different idea in the people you’re talking to.
That one is just a matter of opinion, not of external reality. But take a look at other debates here, such as on the existence of UFOs, or homeopathy, or the JFK conspiracy theory. And each of those affects our lives less than belief in God does.
You’ve misunderstood. People here have repeatedly said that a disproof of God is a logical impossibility. Prove there’s NOT an invisible dragon in my garage!
Everyone here admits that God could exist, it’s just that we have no reason to think it does exist. Just like the invisible dragon in my garage who helps me feel better when I close my eyes and pretend I’m talking to him.
But what do you mean “to me”? This discussion is about God as an external, real entity. If you want to talk about a feeling you get when you’re relaxed, that would be fine, but I’d prefer you find a word to describe it that doesn’t mislead everyone.
Like I said earlier, prepare to be challenged! You’re not being trounced though. Anyone who comes here making claims should expect to be challenged and to defend what he’s saying.
Could god exist? Sure. Anything that isn’t impossible could exist, and we can at best say that we don’t know whether or not it’s impossible for god to exist. But, that doesn’t imply that the existence of anything is therefore a crapshoot – i.e. that it could go either way, so to speak. Most people wouldn’t claim this regarding the existence of elves, trolls or invisible pink unicorns; strangely, though, a lot of those very same people have no problem assuming such a ‘maybe’ stance regarding god; and that’s what you, dontbesojumpy (welcome to the boards, by the way, sorry for jumping into this all unintroduced like that, but I’m pressed for time and just quickly wanted to say my piece), do when you call atheism ‘just another religion’, or something equivalent.
The reasonable stance to take is a sceptical one – else, if one had to be non-committal towards god’s (non-)existence, one would have to be non-committal regarding the acceptance of any proposal not sufficiently decidable by evidence – such as the existence of fairies, the world having been created last Thursday, or everybody living in the Matrix. What that would mean, then, is that scientific reasoning – or any form of reasoning that attempted to derive hypotheses from observations – simply would become impossible.
Hence, if you want to reason cogently about the world, you must approach any proposal, including that of god’s existence, with disbelief as your initial stance. You may then endeavour to be proven false in this disbelief, but to start out from belief leads to absurdity – the absurdity being that all beliefs, no matter how wacky or out there, would have to be treated as equally as justified, with the very real consequence that all theories lose their predictive value, because for each Newtonian theory of gravity, there’s one that’s qualitatively identical regarding all observational evidence so far, yet predicts that gravity reverses on Dec. 21, 2010; and that theory would then be just as justified as Newtonian gravity.
So, there is a very significant distinction between belief and lack of belief in anything – thus, there is a significant difference between religion and atheism (note, also, that a lack of belief in the existence of something isn’t the same as a belief in that something’s non-existence).
Can you provide any evidence for “answered prayer?”
The perception that your parayers are sometimes being answered is an example of what we call in the atheist business “confirmation bias.” You remember when you get what you pray for. You ignore it when you don’t. You also ignore all the unanswered prayers from billions of other people in the world, some of them whom a loving God would have no excuse not to answer.
There is no evidence that praying for things has the slightest effect on outcomes, and we see desperate prayer ignored every day.
Your question about meditation is simply that meditation is a cognitive and physiological exercise which can have a calming effect on the body and mind, and that some forms of prayer do the same thing (basically because some forms of prayer are really just meditation). There is no external, or magical or divine influence.
Firstly, atheism is not “anti-religion.”
Secondly, I don’t think one person here has tried to either “insist” or “prove there’s no God.” That’s not something that can be proven, and if you’ll read the thread carefully, you won’t find atheists either trying to insist that God doesn’t exist or trying to convince anyone else that God doesn’t exist. This thread was started by a theist as an attack on atheists (and this is one of an ongoing series of anti-Dawkins/anti-atheism threads started by this particular poster). The tenor of this thread has not been atheists trying to “evangelize” theists, but one particular theist trying to evangelize atheists, and getting his own arguments FOR theism taken apart.
In all honesty, you’re starting to sound a little whiny here. This is a debate thread about theism in a debate forum. It’s kind of silly to complain about people debating. If you don’t want to debate, you don’t have to.
If you do choose to keep going, I have two requests – one, please try not to misrepresent the positions of those you’re debating with, and two, please learn how to use the shift key. If you want to be taken seriously, you should make an effort to use proper capitalization, spelling and grammar. This is not a youtube comments section.
This is one reason why it is impossible to disprove God - because there are millions of contradictory definitions.
Dawkins says that he writes his books in no small part because whenever he writes about evolution he gets letters and emails from all sorts of creationist cranks, who say that teaching evolution ruins our morals. You think Christianity is nuts, fine. Why? There are more of them than there are of you. Is it just a personal preference, or have you used any sort of logic to reach this conclusion?
True - and these ideas are contradictory, and have evolved over time. If a God did exist, and talked to us, wouldn’t these ideas of god have some similarity? Isn’t a better explanation for this observation that many people have a need for explanations of the world, and before there was science goddidit was the best?
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Consider it your initiation to GD. 
Why does any idea of God have anything to do with evolution? Evolution is perfectly understandable using natural principles only. Of course there is stuff we don’t understand, but we understand more every day and none of this understanding comes from faith or belief in the supernatural. Upthread you said science uses superstition to fill in the gaps, but this just shows you don’t understand science at all. The response to a gap is “I don’t know” not god or a fairy or a Maxwell’s Demon did it.
I do agree that seeking knowledge and the truth makes you better. That is exactly what led me to atheism. I had no negative experiences with religion at all as a kid, but when I started reading about history and the Bible, it became clear it was hooey. I’ve never seen a reason to believe in any god.
Meditation? Why can’t this be purely internal? There is nothing supernatural about our brains being able to affect the organs it is connected to. I was able to reduce my heart rate once when I was connected to a monitor and left alone for five minutes. Nothing spooky about it. As for answered prayers, do they all get answered, or do you make up excuses for the ones that don’t get answered. (Or, as the Onion said - get answered with a NO!) Is your god a personal one who goes around answering prayers? Does he have a plan - if so why ask him to change it just for you? If you try to think it through, asking the creator of the universe to help you get a job makes no flippin’ sense.
I don’t know what I can say further than what I already have said. In this sort of debate, the atheists and agnostics often seem to assume that “religious experience” constitutes a relatively small things, a few seconds or minutes of unusual feelings by a small percentage of the human race. In reality it is anything but small. Indeed it could be argued that more of the human experience is religious experience than isn’t; in any case, it is certain that many human beings have devoted their life to religion or mysticism, and further that they did not do so because of insanity or hallucinations. I already mentioned the research tying strong, intrinsic religious experiences to excellent mental health. You responded by saying that effects don’t matter, but I think that’s looking at it backwards. It is not that religious belief or practice leads to better mental health, but rather that excellent mental health leads to religious experiences, as the research of Abraham Maslow suggests.
So as for the explanations that have been offered to explain away religious experience, I can’t take them seriously because none of them tackle the subject in its entirety. In short, none of them try to explain why healthy, sane, intelligent, well-read people would devote their entire life to something that, in your view, is easily explained away as a neurological phenomenon or something else of that sort. As I said in that earlier thread that you’ve linked to, none of the candidate explanations would be classified as a new idea to a typical believer. Indeed, while some specifics may be recent, the broad outlines of those arguments wouldn’t be too surprising to anyone a hundred years ago. Most people reject those explanations because those explanations do not match up with observed reality.
But again, if you have such an explanation that you truly think can explain all religious experiences, I’d be happy to read it.
“Explain away?” What is that supposed to mean? There is nothing about religious experience that needs to be explained away. It’s a a set of unremarkable phenomena without any need for magic. Explaining is not the same thing as “explaining away.” You’re the one alleging magic. You’re the one who needs to explain why natural, mundane causes (causes supported by physical evidence) are less preferable than fairies.
It’s not one explanation, since “religious experience” is not one phenomenon but a set of various kinds of psychotic experiences (and you don’t have to be mentally ill to have a psychotic experience, so that’s a straw man) which are often interpreted as religious revelation, or whatever, but not a single one of them has ever been shown to require a magical cause.
YOU have the burden of proof here. YOU are the one who needs to prove that no natural explanation can apply.
So why haven’t you answered the question I asked before?
I have no doubt that you have experiences. You saw something or heard something or felt something. Everyone has experiences. The problem is not the existence of experiences, but your interpretation of those experiences. What evidence do you have that a particular experience is ‘religious’? How do you know that this particular event has to do with god, and this one doesn’t? Human beings don’t have to hallucinate to be wrong. We’ve cataloged lots of ways that human senses are infallible, and even more ways human interpretation can go wrong. Pareidolia is a great example, one that just about everyone has experienced, is very well known, and doesn’t involve hallucinations.
So how do you know? Where’s the evidence?
a few points:
on the necessity of God existing: you misinterpret what i mean. i said in a well-oiled (functioning) universe, God need not exists; that is to say that once the grand contraption was set in motion, letting it go and do what it was designed to do would be next. for instance, when you play the sims. or robots that are created to perform tasks; ie the ‘letting.’
we are simple, but i think if we created a universe that could function and evolve on its own, we’d let it. in more simple terms, as we grow up and our parents let us grow up when we ‘no longer need them.’ that lack of necessity.
as for things existing that do not have any immediate necessity: there’s tons of shit that exists which we can find no discernable necessity. TONS.
about existence: someone said experience does not at all necessitate existence, that things can exist, in theory, even if we never experience them. this, to me, sounds like a very secure debate FOR the existence of an unknowable, unmeasurable God. thank you.
about proof:
there’s a lot of evidence for God. i’ll lay out a few points off the top of my head but i’m not in a position here to get indepth.
first, i’d like to mention that in science, you are all very liberal as to what sufficies as ‘proof’ or evidence in support of theories in all cases except God. scientific facts are constantly changing (lets call it evolving) due to new research, new data, etc etc. however the former truths (data, findings, etc) were upheld and accepted as true until disproven.
often these evidences are the by-product of misinformation, misinterpretation, or other issues.
take pharmecudicals. how many times have they tested something to have benifits or affects, marketed and released the drug, then later found they were way off and wrong. for a while, they had scientific proof of their findings.
take earth-centric old-world science. it was science of that day. surely some of the science we hold now as proof, fact, and reliable will fall out of favor when new discoveries push it out of bounds.
for fun, i refer you to the flat earth society. they are a ‘scientific’ group who have ‘evidence’ and, yeh, PROOF that the earth is flat. this, of course, is corraborated across experts and with data and yadda yadda…they make a pretty strong argument…but it doesnt mean anything.
anyway, we cannot test all that we know in science (as individuals, in practice). but we believe what other scientists claim to have tested and what their data reflects. now, i call the world’s belief in those findings as FAITH.
we all function on faith. i do not perceive faith as a moral or religious artifact, but rather as a necessary function of human existence.
we function on faith daily–every time we drive we have faith that other drivers will obey traffic laws.
you, men of science, have faith that the findings of science are true (unless of course, you individually test these things).
how many of you have been to the sun? no one. but we all agree on so many facts, proofs, and theories related to our sun. all of that is on faith, even if it’s corraborated with others. when tested in your faith, you cite evidence. often that evidence is nothing you’ve witnessed, often it’s intangible, theoretically, mathmatical, or otherwise something you can only explain, but not show or prove.
my point is this: there is proof, just the same, of God. there’s large scale corraboration between MILLIONS of humans. eons of civilisations have come to the same conclusions and ideas about God without interaction. universal truths exist in all of nature about morality. hundreds of thousands of books support the theory of God, across every language, every culture, from the beginning of the written word. miracles. the infinate complexity of nature, the universe, us as beings, sentience, etc.
hundreds of studies have shown proof of prayer (cite: google it, there’s a lot out there).
this is just off the top of my head. there’s more, which i’ll get to later–but THIS IS EVIDENCE. corraborated evidence across vast cultures and civilizations.
if it were scientific theory, you’d accept it based on the overwhelming majority of supporting persons, then you’d have faith that their findings were true.
you’ll say 'but we can test it" and i’ll say "no, you can’t. go test a black hole. go experience it. you cannot.
there’s a certain amount of faith that goes into everything about being alive, really…it’s not so different.
now, it’s actually getting really rude for you to say “if god why not pink unicorns or trolls or whatever.” that’s a false ditchotomy and i see it as nothing but a red herring you meaninglessly throw out. just because there *could *be a creator God doesnt mean there *must *also be every other thing *YOU *personal think is ludicrous.
some things ARE ludicrous. some things, debateably, are not. things like UFO or water dowsing or other phenomena are not exactly the same. the existence of God doesnt change science. it doesnt suddenly render everything as meaningless or that anything can happen because all of the sudden everything’s all miracles and fluff. it doesn’t change anything, not in your world, not at all.
however, i conclude that the biggest problem is that God is not science and can’t really be expressed as such. i do not think that precludes Him from existing, just that the terms are oblique.
I’ll have to explicitly ask you again then: Would you call my experiences as an atheist religious? Either my profound meditative experiences, my deep introspective experiences, or my everyday feelings of secure happiness, inner peace and awesome wonder that I am able to experience life at all? That would be rather confusing language to use, IMO. But the crucial issue is whether an external, divine entity is necessary to explain such experiences. I still cannot ascertain whether this is your position or not. I have asked the question every way I can, yet I feel you are avoiding a straight answer – please help.
I have already agreed with this many times. But that is only evidence of their belief in an external divinity. To propose that this constitutes evidence of said entity is an ad populum fallacy, agreed?
Again, if this research is correct (which I’ll provisionally accept for argument’s sake), this is evidence only of mental health in believers, not evidence of the entity they believe in. Unless you are proposing that ‘mental health’ is the phenomenon which cannot be explained without an external divinity, how is it not a non sequitur?
Right, so we’re not talking about the instances in which poor mental health leads to experience of personal communication with God. I trust you would agree that the source of these experiences were the person’s own mind, yes? If so, why cannot one’s own mind be responsible for positive experiences as well as such appallingly negative ones?
Ah, but I didn’t, and don’t, simply call them a ‘neurological phenomenon’. I would point to psychological studies of the inner dialogue which arises from the evolution of language (sorry, the papers I really want to cite are subscription only – this rather dry book excerpt merely references them). That is not simply a ‘neurological phenomenon’ – it is fundamental to how we think, and serious impairment is strongly correlated with auditory hallucinations. But we all talk to ourselves in our head – that’s mentally healthy. Personally I even find it useful, nay comforting, to give the ‘responder’ a character different to mine. This isn’t a full-blown hallucination, nor even an imaginary friend as such. Just a comforting presence to talk to, in my head.
My question: In your opinion, ITR,could this presence be misattributed to an external source by a mentally healthy individual?
But I’ve barely told you any candidates! If I recall, we had a brief dabble with hyperactive agent detection and the evolution of language before you opined that I wasn’t addressing the ‘introspective’ aspects that you were really talking about. That’s why “tackling the subject in its entirety” is unlikely to be helpful to you, since the goalposts can be shifted so quickly, and why I seek to engage you regarding very specific aspects of religious experience that you feel cannot possibly be explained without a real, external divine entity.
Not a single explanation, no. A broad spectrum of candidate explanations each dealing with different aspects of religion? Maybe, but I’d much prefer you to specify the precise aspect you consider most inexplicable first.
Oh, what the heck. This is literally one of the most interesting books I’ve ever read.
[quote=“Voyager, post:170, topic:514544”]
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Christianity precludes anyone that’s not a christian from any salvation (which is another way of saying FINDING or knowing God.) i do not believe that the christian bible is the only way of knowing God. i grew up as the son of a pastor and never bit on all that jive. the bible is too convoluted to be taken as 100% imfallible. that being said, religious texts (devine docturines) could exist, but so much about religion has been bastardized for the sake of individual control that it’s a mucky mess.
oh, no. i said science DID use superstition to fill in the gaps, historically. and i stand by it. science, superstition and magic all existed next to and intertwined with eachother. us modern people think we got it all figured out, but rememeber using leeches was (and in some places still is) considered science.
i thought that was called agnostic?
why can’t that be God? why can’t that be an answered prayer? if, scientifically speaking, i believe when i ‘meditate’ or pray, or ask for divine guidance, and something internal happens that makes me more akin to solve said problems, how is that not an anwered prayer? explain that. what’s the science of meditation? it’s still speculative and not 100% transparently explainable, testable in double blinds and with constant results. it’s elusive and strange. sure you can host theories and have “supporting evidence” but not proof. things of this nature get hazey and odd.
Ah, you misunderstand. I am talking about whether God is necessary in order to explain certain phenomena: positing unnecessary explanatory entities violates Ockham’s Razor.
This is a long argument ad populum fallacy followed by an urban myth about proof of prayer.
But we don’t say there must be, only that there could also be invisible unicorns and the like. We ask why either is necessary to posit.
Uh, why not?
“God exists” and “dowsing works” are both claims about the nature of reality. If the latter is manifestly ludicrous, why isn’t the former?
(And, dude, use your shift key! Reading your writing is PAINFUL.)
We hold god and scientific theories to the exact same expectation of evidence.
You’ve got it wrong. You draw a conclusion based on all available evidence. If you get new evidence, you add it to the pool and see if you need to draw a new conclusion. The old conclusion may be wrong, but at the time it wasn’t. It wasn’t misinformation or misinterpretation, it was just a lack of information. Pharmaceuticals is a bad example, because it’s not pure science. Greed plays too big a role.
Actually, they don’t have evidence. They most certainly don’t make a strong argument. And they are not scientific. What they have has been long shown to be incorrect. They drawn conclusions from misinformation and misinterpretation.
Yes, this is one definition of the word faith. It is not used the same as religious faith. Religious faith exists in spite of a lack of evidence. Faith in science exists because science has a proven track record. Even when science has been wrong, hoaxes for example, it is science that corrects this problem. These are two completely different uses of the word faith, try not to confuse them.
Actually, pretty much every civilization has come to a different conclusion about the nature of god(s). Even within groups with supposedly identical beliefs are constant variations & schisms. In fact, it’s interesting to note how often religious beliefs get shaped by the civilizations environment, like the Hindu’s treatment of cows.
Name a moral universal truth. Books have been written about boys & girls who can do magic with wands and mangled latin, does that make it true?
Oh? Why is that I can find so many that show that prayer is no better than placebo? In fact, the last prayer study I read about showed that telling people they were being prayed for caused more problems. Please, show us a scientific study that concludes that prayer works.
It would never make it far enough to become a theory. You haven’t presented a single objective piece of evidence for the existence of god. Everything you’ve given us so far is almost pure interpretation. This is not how science works.
I’m sorry you think it’s rude, but it still doesn’t change the fact that we have exactly as much evidence for god as we do for invisible pink unicorns.
Please. I ask again. Use the shift key.
This creator god would still need to be explained.
You misunderstand. No one says only necessary things can exist. We’re saying there’s no reason to hypothesize unnecessary things when there isn’t any evidence they exist.
It’s not an argument FOR anything. Don’t be ridicuous. Is the fact that we’ve never experienced man eating smurfs an argument in favor of the existence of man eating smurfs? You don’t have much experience or training in logic, do you?
Science is a self-correcting method for discovering information. It’s not a belief system. The fact that it’s self-correcting s its strength, not a weakness.
It’s also incorrect to say that “scientific proof” ever changes. It just becomes more complete.
It’s also complete baloney to say that scientific evidence for God is ignored. If it existed, it would not be ignored. It simply doesn’t exist. At all. If you’re going to assert that it does exist, please provide the cites.
Flat earthers are not a scientific group. they do not use scientific method.
This is factually incorrect. Scientists are not at all taken on faith. They have to go through a process called peer review. And even if they were taken on faith (which they aren’t), that would still not be an argument in favor of sky gods.
No we don’t.
You really don’t know what you’re talking about with the science.
We all go through life with some degree of qualified trust and expectations. That’s not the same thing as religious faith.
my point is this: there is proof, just the same, of God.
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Let’s see it.
Not true. people have come to all kinds of contradictory and variant ideas about a multitude of gods. It’s also not true that they did it without interaction. There jhas always been a lot of interaction.
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universal truths exist in all of nature about morality.[/quuote]
Humans are evolved as a social species. Some “moral” ideas are biologically hard wired. They aren’t taught. They don’t come from religion. They are simply expressed in the religion.
This is called the “argument from morality” by the way (mixed in with a liberal dose of the ad populum argument) and it’s complete horseshit.
Let’s see this evidence. Insisting on it without showing it is not argument.
You obviously don’t know what a scientific theory is. In order to be called a scientific theorty, it has to meet a whole battery of crioteria that the god hypothesis (it’s not a theory, it’s a hypothesis) fails to meet.
You seriously don’t know what you’re talking about. What do you think a scientific “test” entails?
Not really, but even if that were true, it would still not be an argument in favor of sky gods any more than it’s an argument in favor of unicorns.
I don’t even know where to start with this. First of all, you’ve misused both the phrases “false dichotomy” and “red herring.” Secondly, there’s nothing rude about those analogies, they are standard challenges to the claims you’re trying to make. You’re also clearly misunderstanding their purpose. It is not to say that "if God MIGHT exist then everything else MUST exist. The point is that they have just as much possibility of existing as sky gods. The burden you have to meet is to explain why “God” is any MORE possible than unicorns and cave trolls.
UFO’s are not only not ludicrously, but, strictly speaking, they plainly exist. The notion that unidentified flying objects are alien spaceships is more far fetched, but are actually still more plausible than sky gods.
Who said it does? The question is what reason is there to give the existence of God any more credence than the existence of hobgoblins? Why is God more possible than hobgoblins?
I don’t know what you mean by the terms being oblique. What terms are oblique?
No one is saying that God can be precluded from existing, only that we don’t have the slightest evidence that it does. Unicorns can’t be precluded from existing either.