mentalgymnast wrote: ↑Thu Jul 16, 2020 4:40 am
To come to an absolutist position as to the non-existence of a creator is rather risky business in my book.
It is possible to feel justified in a strong affirmation of the existence of certain well-defined things - such as black and white cows with horns, since we can easily identify actual examples of such things in the world around us. Similarly, certainly other well-defined things may be subject to a well-justified denial of their existence - an example of those might be 'full-scale models of the Empire State Building made entirely of green jello on a planet with a surface gravitational field similar to that of our home planet'. Given the density and mechanical properties of jello, such an object cannot exist.
Suppose however someone starts talking about a thing called 'boopaloop', which they claim to be both existent and very, very important. You ask some questions about boopaloop, and they can't tell you what it is made of, or where it is, or how how its presence or absence may be detected, or why they think it is 'there' (wherever 'there' is) at all (apart from the fact that their mother and father always talked about boopaloop a lot). Some of the things they say about it don't make sense, such as 'boopaloop made everything there is, because otherwise where did everything come from, but nothing made boopaloop, because boopaloop didn't have to come from anywhere.' In other words, they fail to identify any clear and consistent
referent for the word 'boopaloop'.
You might say, after a while, 'I'm sorry, but I don't think there is a 'boopaloop'. That is not the same kind of denial that we applied to the jello model of the Empire State Building, where we felt sure that a thing like that was simply a physical impossibility. It is more like saying 'You gave me a box labelled 'boopaloop', but the box was empty', or 'I followed the URL you gave me, but it led nowhere'.
For 'boopaloop' read 'God'.