RE: The meaninglessness of the Christian god concept
November 14, 2011 at 8:48 am
(This post was last modified: November 14, 2011 at 8:50 am by Captain Scarlet.)
Still nothing to dismantle the argument from meaninglessness. Infact just the opposite, in that the more threads are posted, the more meaningless it becomes. No primary attribute/s of god.
As for entities which are not available to empiricism, lets suspend disbelief and grant that this is possible. There is a problem here though, if the said entities impact on the natural world (as god is said to do), there effects must produce observable phenomona and natural explanations would be inadequate. However this is not what we find (infact quite the reverse), even given that from the protestations of theists that 'miracles occur on a daily basis'. Whenever this is tested the results appear to be consistent with chance (or even worse in some double blind trials of prayer efficacy). This is exactly what we would expect if the atheism were true. So if there is a claim that a being exists that we cannot directly test, whose impact on the natural world is not measurable, for which there is no knockdown reasoning and for which the concept as defined is meaningless. It is reasonable to conclude that we are not justified in beleiving in such things. Also note here the consistency of the athiest position wrt to 1) arguments from divine hiddenness/reasoned non-belief, 2) the success of natural science, 3) the necessaity of naturalism and 4) the subject of this thread re the meaninglessness of the term god.
As for entities which are not available to empiricism, lets suspend disbelief and grant that this is possible. There is a problem here though, if the said entities impact on the natural world (as god is said to do), there effects must produce observable phenomona and natural explanations would be inadequate. However this is not what we find (infact quite the reverse), even given that from the protestations of theists that 'miracles occur on a daily basis'. Whenever this is tested the results appear to be consistent with chance (or even worse in some double blind trials of prayer efficacy). This is exactly what we would expect if the atheism were true. So if there is a claim that a being exists that we cannot directly test, whose impact on the natural world is not measurable, for which there is no knockdown reasoning and for which the concept as defined is meaningless. It is reasonable to conclude that we are not justified in beleiving in such things. Also note here the consistency of the athiest position wrt to 1) arguments from divine hiddenness/reasoned non-belief, 2) the success of natural science, 3) the necessaity of naturalism and 4) the subject of this thread re the meaninglessness of the term god.
"I still say a church steeple with a lightning rod on top shows a lack of confidence"...Doug McLeod.
