(June 23, 2017 at 12:14 am)Jesster Wrote: So you're okay with it as long as it can't be proven wrong. What I care about is what you can prove as factual. At this point the word "god" is being thrown around so loosely that you can never test it on anything though. It's a useless label.The word "god" is not thrown around. We must look thoroughly into the human history and observe that various definitions have been used by people through out the history (including the ones I provided). These definitions and conceptions can vary very significantly. Therefore, a rational mind brings all those definitions into her/his mind when (s)he wants to say "god exists" or "god does not exist". But what I observe here is that you guys know god only through your own culture and background and you refuse when I bring up some well-known definitions of god which are not common in your land and culture.
Quote:And if I was saying that, you would be correct. However, read again what I said - my position is "I do not believe exists"; not "I believe X does not exist". More accurately, "I do not accept your assertion that X does exist". It's basic burden of proof. You make the case; we assess it and come to a conclusion about it.That's clever. But I think the problem remains.
You say:
I) For each person P through out the human history
I do not accept P's assertion that X which (s)he identifies as god does exist
Now I use a counterexample:
II) There exists person P* who considers god and the universe to be equivalent
According to I and II we have:
III) I do not accept P*'s assertion that X which (s)he identifies as the universe does exist
III is a fallacy so either I or II or both of them must be false.
II is true according to ample evidences (there are many people who believe god is the universe itself)
therefore
I is false.
Quote:What I can do, and have done, is negate an equivocation...because it's an equivocation.I think I understand your position, but I hold a different position: words are not necessarily definite, they do not necessarily refer to something specific. It's completely ok for words to be ambiguous and indefinite, in fact this is the very nature of language. The formal language like the one used in mathematics in definite and clear but it's certainly not the case with natural language. A word in natural language can refer to things that are vastly different. This topic is very well investigated in the study of languages. A title that comes to my mind is Wittgenstein's Tractatus which advocates these points. There is even a part where Wittgenstein discusses the word God and shows the ambiguity of this word and concludes that attempts to argue about god are usually determined to be failures due to indefinite and ambiguous nature of the word.
I'm not well-versed in the study of languages and I prefer not to discuss this point further. I think it's natural and inevitable to have ambiguity in language and you believe otherwise.
You quoted from a dictionary, it scratches the surface of the definitions of the word, if you want to make the definitions complete you must add this to it also:
Quote:Pantheism holds that God is the universe and the universe is GodI picked this sentence up from the Wikipedia page on God.
Quote:how about a bigger version?According to some interpretations of some of the gods on this list, negation of their existence will result in a fallacy. For example some Hindu traditions hold the view that Shiva is "the consciousness" it means that the consciousness that you are experience in this very moment is Shiva. Clearly denying the existence of Shiva with this definition leads to a fallacy.