Where do you stand on the existence of God?

[Redbeard The Pink]

I'm one of those people that's probably most accurately defined as an "ignostic atheist."


What that means (as I understand it), is that I positively believe that gods don't exist, and my reasoning for such is the way the term "god" is currently defined.


When you're talking about god, you're talking about one or both of two very specific things:


"God" refers to any one of a looooooong list of characters appearing in the writings of religious humans, or it refers to the ultra-vague "higher power" that most apologists are actually hiding behind and trying to paint up as their individual "gods" by the first definition.


Under the first definition, all of man's conceived gods fail because of either contradictory traits and/or being said to have a location that we can actually go check, and science can generally explain the origins of each character, how they were influenced by other characters, and why they were written the way the are. The only place left for these things to hide is in the "personal revelation tainted by imperfect human perception, and you can't prove it wasn't" box.


Under the second definition, god fails by virtue of being too vague to mean anything and too elusive to be discussed in anything but the completely hypothetical sense. The "higher power" that apologists insist on is literally nothing more than a linguistic device that has been deliberately, painstakingly, and unabashedly contrived to hide under a pile of logical fallacies, the foundation of which is argument from ignorance and misplaced burden of proof. I find it absurd that anybody could lay out such an obviously dishonest contrivance, designed to evade both empiricism and logical questioning, and then point to it and say "Look! You can't prove such a thing doesn't exist!"


Such a thing as what? You haven't described anything. How could anyone prove the existence of an entity that has no definite traits, can be attributed no definite actions, and cannot be observed or measured in any way? "You can't say Gaud doesn't exist because science maybe hasn't discovered the existence of, like, a thing or something."


So yes, there are atheists who insist we can't positively claim gods don't exist because we can't know anything for certain, nothing can be proven not to exist, and science could always find "god" out there in something we haven't found yet.


By the aforementioned definitions of "god," that is just not going to happen. If we ever do find something out in the Universe that science decides to term "god," the definition of that word will suddenly get MUCH more specific, to such a degree that it wouldn't resemble anything the word currently describes. If we find "god," it won't be a god by any current uses of the word because those are either definite fictions or too vague to mean anything at all (and therefore can't be proven or disproven by virtue of being abstractly defined).