If you want to say that the concept of God is similar to ridiculous images, then just show how the concept of God is similar to the ridiculous contents of the images you want to compare God to.
There doesn't need to be any similarity, in fact there shouldn't be any, apart from the inability to disprove the existence of any of them.
I'll repeat what I wrote in post #7:
What atheists are typically doing with the 'invisible unicorns' analogy is responding to a bad theistic argument that says in effect:
Inability to prove that God doesn't exist means that it's reasonable to think that he does. (Certainly as reasonable as the atheist belief that he doesn't.)
The 'invisible unicorn' example, along with 'Russell's teapot' and other variants, are part of the counter-argument that there are no end of things, some of them quite ridiculous, whose existence we can't actually disprove. It certainly isn't reasonable to believe in the existence of all of those things.
Which in turn suggests that stronger epistemic justification is necessary. We need credible and positive reasons to believe in the existence of things. Noting that the existence of something can't be disproven is insufficient reason to believe in its reality.
I think that's a sound philosophical point.
But your purpose in bringing up ridiculous images is because you atheists do not have any argument at all to disprove the existence of God -- except to bad mouth God, which is no argument whasoever.
Your failure to understand the point doesn't mean that it hasn't been made.
Okay, here are your two pseudo grounds for a fake argument against the existence of God in concept as the creator and operator of the universe and everything with a beginning.
Who are you talking to here, who are you addressing? I get the feeling that you have this picture of 'atheists' in your head, this idea of what they think and how they argue, and you are here on Sciforums to denounce it. Never mind what the real-life atheists on the board are saying.
Admittedly atheists sometimes do the same thing, reducing Christians, theists and 'religionists' to caricatures and refusing to consider what they really say. It's equally stupid, no matter who is doing it.
1. First you claim that you cannot prove a negative, namely, God does not exist.
I've never said that it's impossible to prove a negative. Negative propositions can often be proven using reductio-ad-absurdum methods. Negative propositions about fixed finite domains can be proven by enumeration.
I do agree that the existence of God can't be disproven. But that's not because one supposedly can't prove a negative. It's true though that certain collections of purported divine attributes can be proven to be inconsistent with one another, and the argument made that any being possessing all of those attributes can't exist. In my opinion that isn't so much an argument against the existence of God as it is an argument against certain kinds of theology.
2. Besides, you also claim exemption from any burden to establish anything at all, because you are not making any claim.
Just rhetorically, if A wants to convince B of something, the burden of proof is going to lie with A. (In real life, the word 'proof' is something of a misnomer, since we rarely if ever use literal logical proofs in persuasion.) If a theist wants to persuade an atheist to believe in God, the theist needs to convince the atheist that God most likely exists. And if an atheist wants to persuade a theist not to believe in God, the atheist needs to provide some convincing reason why the theist should do that.
So, in effect you are altogether without any ground whatsoever for denying God existing.
A great deal depends on how the word 'God' is defined.
If we are talking about a collection of cosmological functions such as first-cause or the reason why something exists rather than nothing, I don't have a clue. What's more, I'm quite confident that no other human being has those answers either. So I'd call myself an agnostic regarding metaphysics. (I'm also unclear on how an abstract philosophical function even becomes an object of religious devotion.)
When it comes to the deities of the theistic religions, Yahweh, Allah and Vishnu for example, I'm pretty much an atheist. I just think that it's vanishingly unlikely that the ultimate cosmological principle will turn out to be a big blustering Jewish guy in the sky. I can't totally disprove that possibility, but I think that the probability is so low that I can safely dismiss it.
