I almost wish you hadn’t been convinced, and were willing to go a few more rounds on this point, but that’s just me being selfish.
I’m totally out of my depth here, intellectually, but you’re both being so cogent, lucid and intelligible, that just reading it makes me feel smarter.
I would like to explore this bit, however, and I hope I’m articulate enough to adequately communicate my cavil:
Doesn’t the validity of this argument rest on the notion that the observer doing the logical analysis is NOT already immersed in a culture where omnipotence is accepted as an attribute of godhood, as a matter of course?
ISTM that one COULD deliberately choose to discard all frontloaded assumptions, but one wold need to reliably identify them all first, no?
Of all the arguments against the existence of God, I think that pointing out the logical inconsistencies in an extreme definition of “omnipotent” are among the weaker… because you can go on and on and talk about “can God make a boulder so heavy God can’t lift it” and so forth, but at the end of the day, the believer can just say “ok, God is omnipotent for all practical purposes” or something, and really that fits fine with every real conception of God that anyone actually believes in.
People believe that God created that universe, that doesn’t mean that they also must think he could create something that was a triangle with 4 sides, or what have you.
I think the best argument against God is just the Occam’s razor/null hypothesis issue. Could a universe exist in which a being that was recognizable as being similar to the Christian God existed? Well, I dunno, that comes down to a whole bunch of subtle distinctions about how Good is Good and so forth. But who cares, because there’s zero evidence that even if such a universe COULD exist it’s the one we live in.
Lack of belief is not the same as belief in non-existence. You can’t prove a negative – there may be invisible green unicorns swimming in my breakfast cereal every morning, but how could I disprove it? Especially if they’re made of neutrinos.
Also, how do we define “God” in this debate? Deism posits that God does exist, but all he/she did was create the world and then left it to its own devices. If that’s the case, then the lack of God’s evidence (since the Big Bang, at least) is perfectly in line with that hypothesis. Yet it would be foolish to presume that Deism MUST be true, based on that correlation.
You missed the one in 2001. And the other one in 2001. And there were probably more in 2000 and 2002.
I have an idea for fighting these threads: The rest of us hold off our snark and we let the philosophers argue endlessly until the OP goes blind staring at walls of text with hardly a carriage return in sight that he has no hope of understanding.
We still haven’t even gotten a satisfactory answer to the question of whether or not Jesus could microwave a burrito so hot that he himself could not eat it.
Since God is a non-corporeal being, but manifested Jesus to interact with us, one could argue that God could in fact create a boulder so heavy that his physical manifestation could not lift it.
When I used terms like “probable” and “plausible” I meant them to refer to an objective standard–certain pieces of evidence really do make certain things more probable, regardless of whether the person the evidence is presented to thinks so or not.
For example, if I show you ten cards, and nine of them are spades while the other one is a diamond, and then you shuffle the cards and I draw one, it doesn’t matter whether I or you think I’m probably holding a spade now or not–what we saw just does make it more probable that I’m holding a spade now.