So your god is unknowable, started the “universe” and is the “universe”.
I’m sure you don’t “believe” in it because of that. Your god seems to be “the laws of physics” - except that we at least know some parts of the laws of physics.
You know that once this discussion has settled down, you’ll end up with either an impotent god or something that wouldn’t be called a “god” anyway, right?
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which they don’t.
That indicates a change in our understanding doesn’t it, rather than a god that doesn’t exist.
Are we talking about details like God flooded the world and saved Noah. God made the whole world dark after Jesus died, things like that?
How can you disprove more general concepts of God?
Not unknowable; indescribable. And no, God is outside the universe.
No, I don’t believe because of that. I believe because of my personal experience with God – but that’s not part of the definition of God nor evidence to anyone else that God exists.
No; I expect that you’ll end up accusing me of waffling or cheating in my definition.
I’m making my strategy quite clear here: most of the stuff in the bible is either hear-say and/or has no evidence at all (while it should, like the flood). And more general concepts of gods make those gods less interesting to worship.
Personally, I’m fine with thousands of impersonal gods that can’t be reasoned with. No way to disprove them, I don’t care. The plain reality is that those are not the kinds of gods people actually believe in. Gods are useful/people pray to gods because we can get something from them. Show me what they can do and I’ll at least believe they exist - even if I might not call them gods.
Easily; your definition is logically inconsistent. If God is “wholly Other - ineffable and beyond human comprehension”, then that’s all you can say about it. The rest of your definition contradicts your first part by laying out definitions for the supposedly undefinable.
And the other problem is that it’s something of a cheat. Very few people, probably not even you actually follow an undefinable god; the undefinable god is little more than a rhetorical prop that gets trotted out in conversations like this to defend religion. As soon as the critics go away, back out comes the actual version of God that people follow, which has all sorts of definitions, desires, commandments and so forth and resembles the undefinable god not at all.
That means you can’t say anything at all about that god, right? Like, say, that it exists…
That’s fine. It’s just not useful evidence.
I expect a bit more from fairly sane posters on this board 
But I still haven’t heard a definition that’s not tailor made to be untestable. Untestable gods don’t do anything.
What discussion? You’ve been given a God hypothesis that you said you could disprove. Get at it.
We already did; it’s an internally inconsistent definition which is disproof.
Give me a definition that people actually believe in. Geez. Do I have to spell it out?!
Since we can’t understand God in any way, we also can’t possibly know what he wants for us. So we can drop all this moral business now. We have no idea whether God thinks of abortion as a sin or a sacrament.
If you disagree, please help us distinguish what is true or false about God’s supposed actions throughout history and what is true or false with God’s moral direction.
So does every other God ever invented. The only evidence we have that this god was the actual First Cause (assuming there is one) is some very incorrect information in Genesis. Given that, I think we can correct this claim. If we assume that some deity was the First Cause, and has communicated with us, is it too much to ask that the communication be different from what any clever priest living 4,000 years ago or so can come up with? Asian religions have the beginning a long time ago - it is a concept even people living back then can get.
Eternal? Unfalsifiable, but please explain why he didn’t bother to make himself known back in the days of the early Egyptian or Chinese kingdoms? Omnipresent? Again, pure assertion. By any test we can do, he isn’t everywhere, he is nowhere. He also didn’t seem to be around when Adam and Eve were getting into trouble. Your average mother does a better job of keeping a kid from sticking his finger in the light fixture than God did in keeping them from Falling.
So far we have a God who is so mysterious we have no idea of what he wants or is like, one that created the Universe but told a story nothing like the history of a universe, and one who is everywhere, but whose presence seems equivalent to his absence. The only thing here remotely falsifiable is first cause, and he falls down badly there. Got anything else?
Sadly you’re to right.
It gets rid of or seriously alters huge chunks of religion who assume they know what god wants of them and everybody else.
Every organizaion will have some structure and guidelines, it’s own traditions. That’s okay if you don’t confuse those things with God’s will. In reading on the Bahai page again I found these
anything here a good atheist or agnostic couldn’t get behind regardless of a lack of god belief?
I agree with Spong that Chriatianity has to evolve and change and gradually abandon rogid dogma, especially those bits science has disproven, and focus on the principles that Christ taught and there application in our daily lives.
I mentioned the philosopher Daniel Dennett, who is most definitely not religious. There’s lots more - Onfray, Singer, etc.
If God is fully outside the universe, then he doesn’t interact with any of us inside the universe, does he? If he does, then he spends some time inside the universe, and his interactions with us can be verified.
I’ll give you points for not claiming that your supposed interaction with God constitutes some kind of evidence, though.
Not to piss you off, but “good riddance” is my view.
Most of those sound quite nice. I’d sign up.
As a philosophical view, I quite like the points you brought up. But they are “just” philosophical points. Not “absolute/religious” ones. I don’t care where they came from, as long as they’re good ideas.
The bahai god is omnipotent and omniscient, thus it is logically certain that everything is already exactly as the god wishes. This fact escapes a lot of people, but it means that if a peaceful society with unity and education and quality and whatever were the god’s wish, it would already be happening. It isn’t, thus any omnipotent and omniscient god that wishes it does not exist. QED.
Yes, this nixes the Christian God too and no, free will doesn’t help.
I think you were given one. It contains the traditional concept of the Christian God.
If you like , I gave a link to the Bahai concept of God which is pretty similar although longer. Try that one.
If it helps remember Jesus said the most important commandments were Love the Lord thy God with all your herart might mind and strength and, Love your neighbor as yourself. According to Jesus if you strived for those two things everything else would follow.
I include that only to show that we can throw out more specific details such as the flood and other myths and stick just with very general basic and common god concepts which IMO are pretty impossible to disprove.
But I’d be glad to be corrected by those who claim they can.
A god’s commandments are not the same as the god’s characteristics. What are god’s properties? As we’ve already seen, if one of them is “ineffability”, anything else ascribed is bunk. And omnimax gods are logically inconsistent.
True for most things, but if our understanding of God came from God, how could he have steered us wrong?
As I mentioned, unfalsifiable god as the universe gods can’t be disproven - but they don’t really interact with us either.
I’m sorry but I don’t believe anyone believes in that god. And I’m not interested in dead people who did. They’re dead. Like the followers of Jupiter.
I don’t really want to be pedantic, but what did Jesus know about gods?
Do you mean the global floods are impossible to disprove (since they’re obviously not) or what?
We simulposted.
Am I the only one who’s starting to think this is ranging pretty far off-topic?