The logical consequences of omnipotence

[Ryantology]

Seriously... God cannot be understood from a position of unbelief, it is completely not possible.

I was a believer for most of my life, as are many here, and I've conducted this argument from both sides. The loss or rejection of that faith does not mean you lose the understanding you once had.

The only real difference, fundamentally, is that I once argued from a position assuming that God was real and that his scriptures were basically sound and true. I no longer make that assumption, and now my understanding of God is that of a fictional character, like any of a million others in literature. As there exists no evidence to suggest God is anything but a fictional character, that is how I understand him, and in all likelihood, that is the correct way to understand him.

There is nothing 'stupid' about not taking someone else's assumptions to be factual when you are in a debate with them, and indeed, that would make it silly to do so. Pointing out the problems inherent with the God these people worship serves to illustrate what is the atheist debater's fundamental point: God is a human invention. The reason there is no answer to these problems is not because we lack an understanding, it is because the very concept is flawed.

Case in point:

God is a logical God. We wouldn't have a concept of an illogical God, so your first theory collapses badly.

This raises two enormous problems with the very idea of God the Absolutely Perfect Creator of the Universe:

1. The problem of Logic: if God is bound to comply with the rules of logic, then he necessarily cannot have created the rules. There already existed rules and God cannot act contradictory to those rules. This raises an insurmountable problem.

A common theist justification for the existence of God, and 'proof' that he created the universe, is the First Cause idea. They claim that the universe must have had a creator because 'something cannot happen from nothing'. Ignoring the fact that this reflects a complete lack of understanding about Big Bang theory, it moves the goalposts back one step. The universe cannot have come from nothing, but God can? It's special pleading, asking for an exception because the entire argument is invalid without it, and there is absolutely no reason to accept it, as it ultimately does not provide a satisfactory answer.

2. If God was the Prime Mover, he must have been, himself, moved, the result of other actions, and if you follow creationist logic, you have to assume that the Creator was, himself, the creation of a being even higher than he is. Of course, the Creator's Creator cannot have come from 'nothing', so it too must have had a Creator. And so on. Because you'll never be able to point to a specific time and say 'this is where everything, ever, in any possible frame of existence, began'.

The only way this can be terminated is to finally accept that dumb natural processes ultimately gave form to intelligence of some variety, in this case, God. That raises a completely different problem: if God is, himself, the result of a process just like an atheist is likely to believe we do, why worship it? The very basis of God worship in the monotheisms is the idea that God is the absolute highest everything. If he is not, then he is no more worthy of worship from us than we would be from a toaster or washing machine.

What you miss in your second paragraph, not that the question is directed at you, is God's perspective. You assume God from a human perspective, so your second set of objections fail.

There is no reason to 'assume' God from any other perspective until it can be demonstrated that any other perspective exists, and it is furthermore the height of arrogance to suggest that you are capable of doing it, as your understanding is every bit as subject to human prejudices and assumptions as mine. The evidence we have makes it all but certain that God is the invention of human perspectives, and on top of that, God as he is depicted in the Bible behaves in an entirely human fashion, with human emotions and human methods of thought progression, He is jealous, cranky, angry, disappointed, persuasive, happy and satisfied, vengeful and murderous. He states outright that he does what he does because he can. There is nothing about it which comes across as alien to human perspective, and while the theist will argue that it doesn't make sense because God thinks differently, the truth is, it makes perfect sense because there are plenty of people who show behavior traits identical to those displayed by God. Most of them we keep locked away in padded rooms.

Every suggestion that God's thinking is alien, or that he is not bound by the rules of time and space, is such naked conjecture that it is simply not worth considering, as it serves only to dodge questions and dance around bullets. It is a non-answer, and it is the 'dogpile of stupidity', because it requires no intellect and requires us to be satisfied with being ignorant. "Seeing things from God's perspective" is a nice way of say ing "Accepting baseless, illogical assertions, and defending them with more baseless, illogical assertions". It is an easy task. Any idiot can do it. The only limit is the scope of your imagination.

In short, fr0d0 is drowning in the deep end, and you're tossing him a life raft. You don't get to say 'nuh-uh' unless you've made a point and demonstrated it to be true beyond doubt.