He claimed that God does not exist.
My response shows that he has not thought this through. It is a response to his claim.
Your accusation is based on YOUR own assumption.
Your response? Post 662 is a response by you to someone who has posed a thought experiment, not someone who has made a claim of God's non-existence.
It is the response you made to this person that is fallacious, for the reasons laid out previously and which you simply choose to ignore... in fact not just ignore but dismiss as incorrect, with nothing but a handwave.
My notion is not the issue. It is his notion that God does not exist, which is the issue.
There is no issue - it is a thought experiment.
Let me remind you of it: "
Imagine a world in which it is a fact that there is no God. Now look at our world and it looks the same as that world you just imagined."
If we are to establish that God does not exist, then God has to mean something.
Noone has established that God does not exist; it is a question of whether you can imagine it or not.
How is it possible, in your mind, to conclude the non existence of God without knowing what God is, or even supposed to be?
It's not possible, and I don't conclude the non-existence of God. Nor has the comment to which you responded with your circular argument.
There is no circular reason, that is purely your assumption. He already brought God up, and made a conclusion, which was based on an incomplete definition of God. I merely highlighted at least one of those definitions to show that his reasoning is lacking.
I have laid out the circularity of your reasoning, numerous times, and I find it insulting for you to dismiss it without reference to the content. Your dismissal of it thus appears unwarranted and unsupported.
Further, I am not sure you even realise what you are now arguing about, and all you are trying to do is evade.
Where did I mention that it is truth, or reality? I'm not telling him that God DOES exist, he brought up the subject matter, not me.
To repeat: one can deduce with sound logic what you did say:
"A world with no God, means no ability to imagine, and a world where imagination exists is a world with God."
To add to the explanations, let me try this one:
A: Imagination exists.
B: Without God, there is no ability to imagine.
Conclusion: Since imagination exists, there must be a god.
This is your circular reasoning, and it is also a claim of the reality of God's existence. You ARE saying that God does exist, because you equate God being necessary for imagination, and I think we agree that imagination exists.
I have to assume that he has a definition, and some understanding/comprension of that definition, because it was a claim. This means that my response to him, should be relevant to him because we are talking about the same thing.
Again, I'm not sure what you think you're arguing against here... there was no claim made of non-existence, just a thought experiment (requoted above) to which you replied fallaciously.
You're the one making assumptions, and basing your argument on them, despite my explanations.
You have given no explanations.
We are capable of imagining anything we are capable of, but he asked us to imagine a world without GOD, resulting in such a world as the one we live in today. If he had missed out the exercise, and assert that God does not exist, period, he wouldn't have got a response from me. By including the exercise, he is assuming that God means something, hence my response.
God does mean something in his thought experiment - it means what you define it as: the cause of all.
But that does not necessarily mean that God does not exist in reality.
If God does not exist, then none of His attributes exist, the most important one being His creative one. It is therefore easy to draw that conclusion within the imagination. One does not have to make any claims.
If God does not exist in reality then His attributes still exist as concepts in relation to the concept of God. But if God does not exist then Him being the
cause of all has no place in reality other than as a concept. And if God does not exist then everything in reality you deem caused by God is actually caused by something else. If God does exist, then by definition he would be the cause of all. But you can not use his definition as the proof of his existence (i.e. use circular reasoning), as you have done, currently do, and undoubtedly will continue to do, and not expect to be called out on it every time.
If someone posed the question ''who would win in a fist fight between me and Superman?'' There would be nothing wrong in concluding superman,
due to his abilities, despite knowing that Superman is a fictional character, regardless of whether one accepts Superman as a real being or not.
Yet you don't seem capable of imagining God as a fictional character. Your arguments all carry with them the a priori assumption of God's existence, from which you conclude God's existence. Circular reasoning.
Where did I claim that God exists?
He claimed that God does not exist. That is the only claim that is being made.
You merely assume that I made the claim, and that assumption is wrong. Why can't you accept that?
See above. You did claim that God exists. You do claim it. You will do again. I have explained and justified why your claim is a sound deduction from the words you have used. The only thing you haven't actually done is explicitly stated it, but rather implicitly.
You drew that conclusion, and that conclusion is based on faulty logic, and prejudice.
Please identify the faulty logic. I have done so with yours, and now you merely try to handwave the criticism away.
And where is the prejudice? You mean against arguments who employ fallacious logic? Yes, I am extremely prejudiced against those. That's not a problem to those that don't employ them.
Correct, in the same way Superman is fictional.
Well done. Now then, if God
is fictional (the way Superman is fictional), then without using an a priori assumption that God exists as anything other than as a fiction, what would the world around you look like?
Correct, which is the general atheist perspective. God does not exist (for whatever reason).
It is irrelevant whose perspective it is.
Like I said, had he claimed that God does not exist, he wouldn't have got a response from me. However, he asked us to imagine a world in which God doesn't exist. So what does he mean by 'God'? I can only assume he means the original cause/creator.
Yes, that is what he meant.
If that is what he means, then is open season on what the reality of God not existing would mean.
And you could only respond with a logically fallacious argument, as explained seemingly ad infinitum. Had you started "I believe God exists so am unable to imagine a world without God..." then we would at least know your limitations and this whole debacle could have ended early.
If his exercise started with the conclusion that God is a fictional character, then he asks us to imagine a world where such a fictional character does not exist, then it is his logic that is at fault ,not mine.
He didn't start with that conclusion. It started with a simple thought experiment - to imagine what the world would look like if God does not exist / was not real / is a fiction / etc. Where is the conclusion that God is a fictional character in that?
Then what did he use to draw his conclusion?
The conclusion that the world would be the same? It is simple logic: when two competing theories lead to the same result, it is not possible to conclude which theory is correct by reference to the result.
The "result" is this world. The competing theories are "God exists and is the
cause of all", and "God does not exist, and something else led to this exact same result".
By reference to the result we can thus not conclude which theory is correct. Anyone who does can only do so through circular reasoning from their a priori assumption of existence or non-existence of God.
I'll get to your other response later.