RE: How may one refute the religious stonewall argument "all is one"?
October 5, 2020 at 10:05 pm
Yeah, you're stuck at the word go with this one. People aren't starting an argument with the, "All is one" schtick. It is a thing known as a deepity - "A deepity is a proposition that seems to be profound because it is actually logically ill-formed. It has (at least) two readings and balances precariously between them. On one reading it is true but trivial."
Also language has quirks to it such that, while a sentence is grammatically correct it is also profoundly meaningless and when that occurs sometimes the brain will go haywire trying to apply meaning to something that could and should be rejected outright. One of my favorite demonstrations of this is the sentence "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously". The wiki entry expounds on what is going on:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colorless_..._furiously
It is part of why I am an theological noncognitivist. I believe that the idea of God is so nebulous and undifined that ANY argument for the existence of God/god or gods pretty much is a non starter. I still enjoy engaging with theists sometimes based on part of their idea but inevitably the goal posts move all over the place!
Also language has quirks to it such that, while a sentence is grammatically correct it is also profoundly meaningless and when that occurs sometimes the brain will go haywire trying to apply meaning to something that could and should be rejected outright. One of my favorite demonstrations of this is the sentence "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously". The wiki entry expounds on what is going on:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colorless_..._furiously
It is part of why I am an theological noncognitivist. I believe that the idea of God is so nebulous and undifined that ANY argument for the existence of God/god or gods pretty much is a non starter. I still enjoy engaging with theists sometimes based on part of their idea but inevitably the goal posts move all over the place!
