I come across Atheists now and again who will truck with Star Signs or similar nonsense. I think it soothes people to feel some part of the universe is watching out for them and their particular misery is not forever. People are complex and their mental needs just as so.
20 years ago I was a fire brand Atheist on this board. There is no god, believe THAT. But I’ve grown to leave people alone if they leave me alone. We aren’t on this silly spinning rock long enough for anything else.
I live in a quite secular society (about 50% of us are non-religious), and the times I have been asked what religion or church I belong to? Zero. But from time to time I get asked about my sign, go figure. (I always answer “Squirrel, ascendent cupboard”)
What about those of us who don’t think that is a coherent question and so basically unanswerable as asked?
n/m, I see Crow already raised this and you answered
Yes, it does. It’s not just a “language problem”, it’s a problem with the actual coherence of the concept of deity. That’s not about the terms of specification, it’s about the logic of it all.
In my experience, it never is. Cleared up, I mean.
Do you view specific claims like “This is [God name], his powers are this, his prophet is this guy, here are his rules, and here how he intervenes in the world every day” as incoherent and unanswerable, or can you refute that idea based on lack of evidence / internal logical contradiction / whatever factor discredits that particular version of God? Because you could very well reject every specific God ever created except for some deistic God so vague you can’t really even analyze it, but the way you frame your position makes it sound like you may think that Zeus is the same as Spinoza’s God in terms of being unknowable and incoherent.
In my observation, the vast majority of theistic vs atheism / agnosticism / ignosticism / deism debate happens in this gulf and neither side acknowledges it even though it’s the an entire massive framework of theism and theistic claims. It’s basically the main move theists make, and those that oppose them rarely point out because the unstated premise is so deeply baked into the culture that neither realizes it.
Someone can be an atheist for bad reasons just like they can be a theist for bad reasons. They are often the types who say “I used to be an atheist, but…”
Depends greatly on what “his rules” and “how he intervenes” are.
Because it’s not just the word “god” that is incoherent, it’s also related concepts like “spirit”, “divine”, “transcendent”, etc. I’ve yet to encounter any attempt to define a god that doesn’t go there.
And Zeus-as-deity very much is in the same league as Spinoza’s deity in this sense. Just because Zeus is not presented as all-powerful doesn’t mean he doesn’t also have the “divine” tag - whatever the hell that is supposed to mean.
People often say things like “you can’t measure spiritual things empirically” but that’s not categorically true. If you pray to God to heal your diseases, we could study the rates of spontaneous remission in cancer across religions or how much someone was prayed for, and in fact, we have studied that very thing with null results. So if you make the claim that your prayers miraculously heal, that’s saying that your God intervenes in the world, and that intervention is observable.
The problem with ignosticists is when they seem to defer to this religious logic - that God is unknowable, therefore we can’t make judgments on the merits of any particular God. But that’s obviously false – if a God is claimed to intervene in the real world, then you’ve transitioned from the vague world of mysticism and metaphyiscs into real, observable results that we can measure.
Ignosticism in practice often falls into the same trap as agnosticism, which treats all claims of a spiritual nature of being equally unknowable, which is simply not true. Only the most vague claims are currently beyond observation – if a religion claim that God(s) intervene directly in the real world – and almost all of them do, agnosticism and ignosticism can correctly reject those religions as implausible or untrue. Only a vague deistic concept or not really religions like some schools of Buddhism survive the challenge.
You’re still using several words like spiritual and God without defining them.
My argument is not that specific claims can’t be tested. My argument is that the claims are currently couched in meaningless words.
I’m a skeptic first, and an atheist second. Neither of those makes me a materialist (whatever that is). As a skeptic, other woo stuff also doesn’t get very far with me.
Identifying as a skeptic allows me to skip past a lot of these word games, because it just turns it back against the one making the assertions. I’m not making any assertions, I don’t say “g/God doesn’t exist.” I just say, define your terms and then prove the assertion. They never successfully reach the first step in that process.
"It’s not just a ‘language problem’… it’s about the logic of it all.” Fine, follow that through. Either “a god exists” is a real claim or it isn’t. If it isn’t, you can’t believe it - nobody believes nonsense, full stop. If it is, you still don’t believe it, for whatever reason you’ve got. Either way: you don’t believe a god exists. There’s no door marked “incoherent” that skips the fork.
“In my experience, it never is. Cleared up, I mean.” That’s about your debate partners, not the concept. People build careers finding contradictions inside the god-concept; it has to hold still long enough to get refuted. Pick one: it’s been torn apart, or it’s too vague to engage with. Not both.
Then to Senor: “my argument is not that specific claims can’t be tested… the claims are currently couched in meaningless words.” That’s not what you told me. You said Zeus is “in the same league as Spinoza’s deity,” same divine tag, both equally suspect. Can’t be both. Zeus is about as specific as a claim gets: named guy, mountain, family, a documented paper trail showing where the myth actually came from. If that’s testable, like you just told Senor, the divine tag never did any work - you reject Zeus with ordinary evidence, same as any other false claim, no “meaningless words” required.
Still not a third category. Just a quieter excuse than the one you opened with.
Some god claims are precisely defined, such as the god of the inerrant Bible. Now, they are logically incoherent, self-contradictory and disproven by historical and scientific evidence, but that’s different from being meaningless.
The fuzziness of some god claims, which is a thing, I agree, I think comes from people who understand how incoherent the standard god claim is but who wish to believe anyhow.
No. It’s a meaningless claim. “Real” isn’t a logical statement, anyway.
No. I have no opinion on whether a meaningless concept exists or not. Because it’s meaningless.
Well, you’re my debate partner now, what god concept are we debating?
Yes - both equally meaningless.
No. Zeus is not just some guy. He’s a guy who is imbued with θειότης . Again, the meaningless is baked in.
No, I reject Zeus for the reason I said.
Go ahead, give me this precise definition of this version of god.
Meaningless often comes from some kinds of logical incoherence, actually, like self-circularity.
“No. It’s a meaningless claim. ‘Real’ isn’t a logical statement, anyway.”
Swap “real” for “meaningful” - same fork, same place you end up next.
“No. I have no opinion on whether a meaningless concept exists or not. Because it’s meaningless.”
Having no opinion on whether it exists already tells us you don’t hold the belief that it exists; that’s not anyone’s particular definition, it’s just what “belief” is: a stance on a proposition. Declining to take one isn’t a third option next to yes and no, it’s what the absence of a stance looks like. Nobody’s claiming you believe it doesn’t exist either; that’s a different, stronger claim, and nobody needs it here. “Meaningless” is just one more reason for not holding the belief, no different in kind from any other.
“Well, you’re my debate partner now, what god concept are we debating?”
Whichever one you brought up. Zeus.
“Yes - both equally meaningless.” / “No. Zeus is not just some guy. He’s a guy who is imbued with θειότης. Again, the meaningless is baked in.”
They’re not equally anything. Whatever θειότης adds, it doesn’t subtract the “just some guy” part. Zeus is still a named figure on a named mountain with a named family and a documented paper trail: immortal, throws actual lightning, fathers actual kids, shows up at actual battles. None of that needs θειότης settled to check, and all of it checks out false. A maximally vague “ground of being” god doesn’t hand you any of that to work with. If you want to argue the θειότης tag itself is separately meaningless, fine, make that case; it still doesn’t erase the rest of Zeus, and the rest of Zeus is enough to reject him on its own.
“No, I reject Zeus for the reason I said.”
That’s repeating the claim, not answering the argument. Your reason doesn’t have to touch the part of Zeus that’s plainly checkable, and that part alone is enough to reject him, regardless of what’s true about θειότης.
And since you brought it up with Voyager, “meaningless often comes from some kinds of logical incoherence, actually, like self-circularity.” That cuts both ways and neither way gets you where you need to be. A circular definition doesn’t make a term meaningless; we use plenty of imperfectly, even circularly defined words every day without losing track of what they pick out. And outright contradiction is the opposite of meaningless: a square circle is self-contradictory and still completely intelligible; we know exactly what it would take for one to exist, which is precisely how we know none can. If the inerrant-Bible god’s properties don’t fit together, that’s a reason to call it false, not a reason to call it undefined.
Still the same spot: you don’t hold the belief that a god exists. Just a fancier reason than the rest of us for not holding it.
This entire post is indeed- meaningless unless you define your terms.
Calling everything “meaningless” is a pointless debate. This is Great Debates.
No. Those are not the same thing. If I ask you “Do you believe <whisper, whisper, whisper>?”, the correct response is “speak Up”, not “No”. This is the same.
The absence of a stance on an issue is not a negative opinion on the issue.
I didn’t bring up Zeus.
Equally meaningless. Both are defined using meaningless concepts like θειότης or “eternal and infinite essence”
But absent it, Zeus is not a god. He’s just some guy. Plenty of beardy old guys throwing lightning around in stories who are not specifically called out as divine.
And can you PLEASE learn to use the quote function?
For the purpose of theological debate it does. This is not just casual conversation, where ambiguity or idiosyncratic meaning is fine.
Self-contradictory and self-circular are not the same thing. I’m not saying the obvious contradictory stuff like theodicy, I’m talking about defining god without using the word god (or divine, or supernatural, or spirit…)
I wouldn’t always know, since people keep using meaningless terms for talking about the question.
Agreed on that last sentence completely, and it’s not what’s being claimed. Nobody said no opinion is a negative opinion - a belief that no god exists. That’s the stronger claim, and the same paragraph you’re quoting from already said as much a few sentences later: nobody’s claiming you believe it doesn’t exist either. You’re agreeing with something that was already on the table, not rebutting it.
The analogy itself doesn’t actually match what you’ve been doing in this thread, though. “Speak up” fits a situation where the obstacle is on the transmission side - a fragment came through, or a garble, something about how the message arrived that kept you from knowing what’s being claimed at all. That’s not Zeus. Whatever you think of the word “divine,” you’ve never once acted confused about who Zeus actually is, a specific figure, a specific mountain, a specific family, well-documented enough that you could compare him to Spinoza’s god in the same breath. Nothing was garbled or partial there. What you’re objecting to isn’t a transmission problem ; it’s that one word applied to a fully-received profile doesn’t meet your bar for a rigorous definition. Different kind of obstacle than the one your analogy describes.
Stepping back from Zeus specifically, maybe you’ve concluded there’s nothing back there to hear, or maybe, like you told me, “in my experience, it never is. Cleared up, I mean,” you’re still waiting on a better explanation than anyone’s managed to give you. Doesn’t matter which, and it doesn’t matter whether a better one might land tomorrow either. What matters is what you’ve actually told us, in your own words, more than once: “I have no opinion,” “it’s a meaningless claim,” “I wouldn’t always know.” That’s not anyone reading silence as evidence, that’s your own report, and it’s all “non-belief” needs to describe where you’re standing right now.
True, Senor did, asking you point-blank whether Zeus and Spinoza’s god are equally unanswerable. Doesn’t move anything. You answered it on the record, calling them “the same league.” That’s the claim on the table, whoever typed the name first.
What makes a king a king instead of a guy in a fancy hat isn’t some separate ingredient called “kingship” hovering apart from everything else. It’s the whole package: crowned in a recognized ceremony, commands armies, sits in the line of succession, has subjects who treat his word as law. Once you’ve cashed all that out, there’s nothing left over for “kingship” to add on top. Same with Zeus. Immortal, throws actual lightning, fathers actual kids, shows up at actual battles, has a specific spot in a specific genealogy, and was the literal object of temples, sacrifice, and cult worship by people who called him theos.
That last part is exactly as checkable as the rest of it. It’s a fact about ancient Greek religious practice, not a metaphysical mystery, and you don’t need θειότης independently nailed down to confirm it any more than you need “kingship” independently nailed down to confirm a coronation happened. And even granting your point in full - say θειότης really is empty - that doesn’t make Zeus’s existence unanswerable, it just means there’s an empty tag stapled onto an already-falsified guy. The checkable parts don’t get a pass because of what’s attached to them.
I’m giving it a shot here, but I don’t see a preview button. Hope this doesn’t make it look even worse.
Fields with real stakes run on imperfect definitions all the time. “Energy” worked for a century before thermodynamics tightened it up. Biologists still don’t have one definition of “species” everyone signs off on. Nobody calls those words meaningless in the meantime, because what actually proves a term has content isn’t a clean, non-circular definition, it’s whether anything can be derived from it. The omnipotence paradox, the problem of evil, the foreknowledge/free-will mess: all derived directly from theological terms. You don’t pull a real contradiction out of an empty bag.
Fair distinction. You said earlier in the thread: “I’ve yet to encounter any attempt to define a god that doesn’t go there.” Fine, here’s one that’s neither circular nor self-contradictory: take a being defined by three separate properties, not one implying the others. It knows everything, it can do anything logically possible, and it’s perfectly good. Whatever tension shows up once you add a created world and that world’s evil into the mix is a separate question about how this being interacts with other things, not a defect sitting in the three properties themselves.
That’s the standard “omni-God” used throughout philosophy of religion, nothing new, and not one of those four banned words shows up in it. Knowledge, power, and goodness are properties ordinary things already have in degree; that’s just the limit case of each, not a separate fourth ingredient smuggled in. Anselm’s version is shorter still: a being than which none greater can be conceived. Also clean. And since you brought up “eternal and infinite essence” yourself - that’s not your phrase, that’s close to verbatim Spinoza’s own definition of God, and it doesn’t lean on divine, spirit, or supernatural either. So either these count, and “I’ve yet to encounter one” just stopped being true, or they don’t count, and you need to say specifically what’s missing instead of restocking the banned list every time one gets cleared.
Worth separating into two different situations instead of treating them as one. Sometimes “I don’t know if I have an opinion” really is hiding a determinate answer waiting on a definition. Ask someone if they believe in UFOs, and the honest answer is “depends what you mean.” Then once you specify “a flying object that’s not identified” they say yes. Once you specify “alien spacecraft” they say no. That’s not absence of belief; that’s two settled beliefs sitting behind one ambiguous question.
Zeus is the one case here where you actually got handed a fully specified candidate, the equivalent of someone finally telling you which UFO they meant. If your uncertainty elsewhere works the same way, this was the moment a hidden answer would show up. It didn’t. What came back was “equally meaningless,” backed by insisting that without the tag, Zeus wouldn’t be a god at all. That’s an explicit non-affirmation, not a hidden yes that just hasn’t surfaced yet.
I imagine asking about God in Ancient Egypt or Mesopotamia was sort of like asking about the Prime Minister in Australia. “Oh, yeah, he’s this really important dude that runs the world. You know, calls the rain clouds and the sun. His house is right over there. I just delivered three sheep to him this morning.”
Newsflash: the Elamites dragged the statue of Marduk out of Babylon… and now Babylon is literally godless! “Who will protect us?” King Nebuchenezzer furrows his brow and replies, “We can use the army… to go rescue Marduk!”
~Max
If you ask a true believer questions about this god, they can give you Bible passages answering many of them. Now, if you ask if this god always tells the truth or if he lies, they can give you passages justifying both. If you think that this means God is meaningless, fine, but it is a semantic issue. A four sided triangle is non-existent by its nature but I wouldn’t say the concept is meaningless. YMMV.
If you go there then you run right into philosophical definitions of atheism such as the one in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy which states,
- What is Atheism?
Atheism is the view that there is no God.
Atheism | Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy
despite acknowledging that that’s not always how the word is used,
- Definitions of “Atheism”
The word “atheism” is polysemous—it has multiple related meanings. In the psychological sense of the word, atheism is a psychological state, specifically the state of being an atheist, where an atheist is defined as someone who is not a theist and a theist is defined as someone who believes that God exists (or that there are gods). This generates the following definition: atheism is the psychological state of lacking the belief that God exists. In philosophy, however, and more specifically in the philosophy of religion, the term “atheism” is standardly used to refer to the proposition that God does not exist (or, more broadly, to the proposition that there are no gods). Thus, to be an atheist on this definition, it does not suffice to suspend judgment on whether there is a God, even though that implies a lack of theistic belief. Instead, one must deny that God exists.
Atheism and Agnosticism (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)