Let's answer CARM's Questions for Atheists

[Esquilax]

But you can deduce the existence of immaterial things from material things.

Which means we're no longer talking about what the original question asked. My main contention, in the context of the initial question, was that rendering a claim unfalsifiable by pulling it beyond the reach of investigation doesn't make that claim safe, it makes it unjustifiable. I largely don't care about arguing against immaterial things on principle, but I do hold to the same standards I always have: without a means to detect them, I have no reason to believe in them. Though I don't think your example of a hole is a very good one, if we can glean positive evidence of the immaterial from the material, that's testable and I have no specific problem accepting that concept on principle.

But that's not what CARM was asking us about.

And if you take a step back, you can also infer the existence of material things from personal experience, which is not a material thing. And that takes you right back to where you started.

Only if you accept a thing/not thing dichotomy, which I don't. Personal experience is a part of consciousness, which I'm more inclined to approach as a process arising from an object, rather than an object in and of itself. As another example, wind isn't material, but it's not immaterial either; it's a descriptor of the motion of air, which is a material thing.

Unless you accept the concept of the immaterial, the concept of materiality likewise makes little sense. You can go back and forth trying to define one in terms of the other without reaching any conclusion as to which is primary and thus remain forever stuck in paradox. (Hence the category error) The simpler solution is to just accept that both materiality and immateriality are part of one reality.

Again, I think this is a false dichotomy if we're going to expand the range of the discussion to include concepts and the like. At the very least, I'd say that there's a lot of difference between the immaterial examples you've given, which I don't think are applicable for various reasons, and the idea of an immaterial god, which is neither conceptual, nor the absence of something.

Changing the name from ‘hole’ into the fancier sounding ‘an interruption in an expected pattern’ does not solve the problem. An interruption is just as immaterial as a hole, gap, opening, chasm, or rip.[

Look, it's just a word to describe a concept because we require the ability to communicate the realities of physical space, Chad. If you're really, actually attempting to tell me that a hole and god are remotely similar, then answer me this: if you remove all of the matter around the hole, does the hole still exist? Is there an essence of "hole" still floating in the same spatial coordinates? Or is the hole gone, because the attributes of the hole, the marked absence of what should be there, is also gone?

See, this is a bit of an equivocation on your part, in trying to pretend that the absence of something- because a hole is literally nothing, and we have a term for it due to its defined boundaries in physical space- is a literal thing that exists in its own right. I wasn't trying to change the name from "hole" to something else, I was using human language to communicate in greater depth what the word describes, and why it isn't what you're claiming it is.

We have words, and those words don't always describe literal things. Sometimes, they describe the attributes of a thing: when I say "the glass is empty," that doesn't mean the glass has emptiness in it, because emptiness is an objective thing that exists and is filling the glass, but rather that the glass has nothing in it besides regular background air. Similarly, when I say "there's a hole in that rock," I'm not pointing out that the rock has the literal object "a hole" embedded into it, I am describing the notable absence of rock enclosed by the boundaries of rock. When it's dark in a room, it's not because the room is filled with objectively real darkness, but rather that it doesn't have sufficient light to see by.

The only way you could get away with having that be a valid comparison to god is if you defined god as "the absence of a being," but then, somehow I doubt that'd be satisfying to you.

In each case we see similar forms that can manifest in various materials. Forms do not depend on a specific substances for their existence. This property allows people to say things like, ‘the hole in the metal is the same size as the hole in this paper.” If you insist that holes do not properly exist, then you simultaneously and tacit deny the existence of all other forms, like triangles.

I'm not calling you on the existence of holes. I'm quite happy to accept that holes exist as conceptual labels applied to corresponding phenomena in the real world. What I'm calling you on is the equivocation between a term used to describe the absence of something, and an objectively extant non-material thing. They aren't remotely similar.