Now that I've gone and stuck my nose in ...
Fortuna -
I just wanted to make a note on the zangulator:
I think you're off a couple degrees with that criticism.
That God is undefinable is largely a metaphysical point oft-abused by more vulgar religionists who have not or will not undertake the broader considerations. Think of an omnipresent God; all sorts of persnickety logical foibles result, but one must choose to make those things important, which can be unwise. Is the Universe infinite? Are there multiple Universes, a Multiverse? When we wrap up all that is (an insufficient term in itself) into a single term, what is that word? Because it must include what is as well as what isn't, the past as well as the present and the future, the known as well as the unknown and unknowable. Human language, at least the prevailing languages of the dominant societies, find such a condition ineffable largely because the word that happens to coincide-God--is treated like a dictionary definition and watered down according to diverse needs and symptomatic perspectives.
This state, condition, idea, or object--God, as such--actually fulfills most of the common rhetoric among Christianity. By evolution, we have come about the only way we can; we are, therefore, as God (e.g. ineffable reality) has determined. If we take a particular description of aliens, for instance--large eyes with black natural shields, thin body, much agility, long fingers, &c.--we can actually speculate some about the world from which said alien comes. If we were, for instance, to know that the black shields over the eyes filtered excess ultraviolet, we might wonder if perhaps the alien's home world orbited a star that put out too much ultraviolet; the gray skin might also represent a shield against that excess UV. Higher gravity might result in a more delicate and precise skeletal system (or, indeed, a heavier and clumsier one), and would also explain seeming agility on this planet. Long fingers? What if the primordial days involved picking food out of cracks in rocks on a geologically young or active world? In the mundane, our ten fingers and toes, our two lungs, our upright skeleton with a notch in the back of the skull that lets us look up ... these things are all determined by nature, by evolution. Nothing in this Universe is wholly independent, and thus our eyes and ears and fingers and toes and so forth are just as much a result of that state, condition, idea, or object--God, as such--as our inability to hear cosmic background radiation, or a fish's gills.
But what happens when this larger idea, condition, &c., is compressed into something practical? Well, as with any data compression, certain faults are inherent. An .mp3 is not as rich a signal as a .wav, and that .wav is not as rich a signal as sitting in the concert hall listening to the reel coming straight off the fiddle. What we teach our children is a compression of what we have learned, which is a compression in itself of what reality is. How far-removed are we from that reality?
Any idea goes through this process. "Justice", for instance, goes through cycles, every time the idea is rediscovered in a newly-applicable context. Justice seems very precise at that outset, and over time erodes until it includes the very things its original condition prescribed against.
So if I say, "define this justice you don't believe in," you might respond that you don't believe Saddam Hussein provided justice for Iraqis, or perhaps that the Three-Fifths Rule, despite constitutional endorsement, was still lacking justice. But what is justice? That it cannot be precisely described does not mean it does not exist. And, surely, there is the metaphysical reality that Justice is, in itself, a fiction, but people are more willing to argue about what is justice than whether justice is at all.
To "define this God you don't believe in" may say nothing to other atheists, but as the dictionary definition provided shows, at least one atheist objects not only to something that is not there, but something that few people believe in. It's a snipe hunt at best.
Most proactively-identifying atheists identify primarily against the customary God of their society; an American Lutheran's first recognition of atheism will not come because s/he claims Islam or animism false religions. It will come from that person's Christian experience. An atheist born and raised without religion will still identify against the prevailing God of the culture. Other anti-identifications come with time. Most proactively-identifying atheists do not make a deep study of the religion(s) decried. A former Christian certainly does not wish to go through fifteen or twenty years of believing Islam or Witchcraft or Judaism merely to debunk it. And therein lies an expectation of falsehood. As humans are imperfect, imperfections abound, and interpreting them according to an expectation of falsehood might bring a middling statistical result, but it's the difference between having walked the twenty miles to your destination and having walked twenty miles in the wrong direction.
So we see in atheism a possible limitation in the breadth of gods objected to. At this point in the discussion, we can say it's natural--but it won't necessarily remain so.
Because few atheists begin their atheistic formulations with broader considerations. If Joe the Atheist walks into a room where Bob the Baptist and Karen the Catholic are arguing, Joe might ask, "Define this god you're arguing about". Regardless of the argument--and for the sake of our discussion here--we might presume the answers will be somewhat similar. So if Joe says, "God doesn't exist," at the same time Mike the Mystic walks in and says, "Define this God that doesn't exist," Joe can certainly turn and hand over the definition that Bob and Karen just gave.
At Sciforums, the most detailed atheistic arguments will concern Christianity and "Judeo-Christianity". Of course, the devil is in the details, and as we can see, identifying against a dictionary definition most certainly is a troublesome detail. The dictionary definition would be excessive for some religious folks, and inadequate for some theologians, anthropologists, sociologists, historians, or psychologists. I know the dictionary definition is insufficient for my view of what God is; humans create gods, but what those gods represent--e.g. "God"---is a condition that is ineffable. An atheist telling me God does not exist is probably working by another definition of what they don't believe in, else they're (usually unwittingly) subscribing to the philosophy that nothing is real, not even the conversation we might be having.
One's definition, as many atheists have shown, need not be accurate when discussing "God". In fact, an accurate definition seems well impossible, but so it is with Justice, History, Right/Wrong, and other seemingly-intangible ideas that continue to bear real effects in our lives. One need not believe that the history ("a lie agreed upon") put before them is complete or even accurate, but it's hardly the same thing as saying history doesn't exist, the past never happened, and yesterday was merely a random symptom of now. And while such a condition as yesterday and tomorrow being random symptoms of now is, indeed, possible and even viable, it's not particularly practical.
As to the ancient world, it seems some were more practical than our modern society. Here's an interesting question: What authority limited the conduct of the gods of Roman or Greek (or any other) pantheon? That authority, by proxy of its authority, becomes the ruling authority. A nameless namer, an unmoved mover: the scandal of atheism is that it holds totality aloof and overasserts itself into unfamiliar territory: the symptoms of "religion" that make religion problematic will only move elsewhere in humanity if we end religion. And baseball is religious enough already.
If you want to call God a zangulator, so be it. But short of that, the zangulator will be an inadequate comparison. There are many ineffable things that we humans acknowledge: Justice, Love, the Dollar, ad nauseam.
I'm not going to tell you to believe in God; that's hardly my point. But I would urge you to reconsider your definitions of what the argument is. "God" is not some idea invented so casually as a "zangulator" or one-eyed one-horned rotten purple people eater. There is a certain small disrespect in viewing other people's faith as something so simplistic, but more than that there is a significant self-imposed limitation to what you can understand about religion, faith, or the idea of God.
Ex-nihilo doesn't fly with atheists, so why should it fly for them?
Fortuna -
I just wanted to make a note on the zangulator:
I think you're off a couple degrees with that criticism.
That God is undefinable is largely a metaphysical point oft-abused by more vulgar religionists who have not or will not undertake the broader considerations. Think of an omnipresent God; all sorts of persnickety logical foibles result, but one must choose to make those things important, which can be unwise. Is the Universe infinite? Are there multiple Universes, a Multiverse? When we wrap up all that is (an insufficient term in itself) into a single term, what is that word? Because it must include what is as well as what isn't, the past as well as the present and the future, the known as well as the unknown and unknowable. Human language, at least the prevailing languages of the dominant societies, find such a condition ineffable largely because the word that happens to coincide-God--is treated like a dictionary definition and watered down according to diverse needs and symptomatic perspectives.
This state, condition, idea, or object--God, as such--actually fulfills most of the common rhetoric among Christianity. By evolution, we have come about the only way we can; we are, therefore, as God (e.g. ineffable reality) has determined. If we take a particular description of aliens, for instance--large eyes with black natural shields, thin body, much agility, long fingers, &c.--we can actually speculate some about the world from which said alien comes. If we were, for instance, to know that the black shields over the eyes filtered excess ultraviolet, we might wonder if perhaps the alien's home world orbited a star that put out too much ultraviolet; the gray skin might also represent a shield against that excess UV. Higher gravity might result in a more delicate and precise skeletal system (or, indeed, a heavier and clumsier one), and would also explain seeming agility on this planet. Long fingers? What if the primordial days involved picking food out of cracks in rocks on a geologically young or active world? In the mundane, our ten fingers and toes, our two lungs, our upright skeleton with a notch in the back of the skull that lets us look up ... these things are all determined by nature, by evolution. Nothing in this Universe is wholly independent, and thus our eyes and ears and fingers and toes and so forth are just as much a result of that state, condition, idea, or object--God, as such--as our inability to hear cosmic background radiation, or a fish's gills.
But what happens when this larger idea, condition, &c., is compressed into something practical? Well, as with any data compression, certain faults are inherent. An .mp3 is not as rich a signal as a .wav, and that .wav is not as rich a signal as sitting in the concert hall listening to the reel coming straight off the fiddle. What we teach our children is a compression of what we have learned, which is a compression in itself of what reality is. How far-removed are we from that reality?
Any idea goes through this process. "Justice", for instance, goes through cycles, every time the idea is rediscovered in a newly-applicable context. Justice seems very precise at that outset, and over time erodes until it includes the very things its original condition prescribed against.
So if I say, "define this justice you don't believe in," you might respond that you don't believe Saddam Hussein provided justice for Iraqis, or perhaps that the Three-Fifths Rule, despite constitutional endorsement, was still lacking justice. But what is justice? That it cannot be precisely described does not mean it does not exist. And, surely, there is the metaphysical reality that Justice is, in itself, a fiction, but people are more willing to argue about what is justice than whether justice is at all.
To "define this God you don't believe in" may say nothing to other atheists, but as the dictionary definition provided shows, at least one atheist objects not only to something that is not there, but something that few people believe in. It's a snipe hunt at best.
Most proactively-identifying atheists identify primarily against the customary God of their society; an American Lutheran's first recognition of atheism will not come because s/he claims Islam or animism false religions. It will come from that person's Christian experience. An atheist born and raised without religion will still identify against the prevailing God of the culture. Other anti-identifications come with time. Most proactively-identifying atheists do not make a deep study of the religion(s) decried. A former Christian certainly does not wish to go through fifteen or twenty years of believing Islam or Witchcraft or Judaism merely to debunk it. And therein lies an expectation of falsehood. As humans are imperfect, imperfections abound, and interpreting them according to an expectation of falsehood might bring a middling statistical result, but it's the difference between having walked the twenty miles to your destination and having walked twenty miles in the wrong direction.
So we see in atheism a possible limitation in the breadth of gods objected to. At this point in the discussion, we can say it's natural--but it won't necessarily remain so.
Because few atheists begin their atheistic formulations with broader considerations. If Joe the Atheist walks into a room where Bob the Baptist and Karen the Catholic are arguing, Joe might ask, "Define this god you're arguing about". Regardless of the argument--and for the sake of our discussion here--we might presume the answers will be somewhat similar. So if Joe says, "God doesn't exist," at the same time Mike the Mystic walks in and says, "Define this God that doesn't exist," Joe can certainly turn and hand over the definition that Bob and Karen just gave.
At Sciforums, the most detailed atheistic arguments will concern Christianity and "Judeo-Christianity". Of course, the devil is in the details, and as we can see, identifying against a dictionary definition most certainly is a troublesome detail. The dictionary definition would be excessive for some religious folks, and inadequate for some theologians, anthropologists, sociologists, historians, or psychologists. I know the dictionary definition is insufficient for my view of what God is; humans create gods, but what those gods represent--e.g. "God"---is a condition that is ineffable. An atheist telling me God does not exist is probably working by another definition of what they don't believe in, else they're (usually unwittingly) subscribing to the philosophy that nothing is real, not even the conversation we might be having.
One's definition, as many atheists have shown, need not be accurate when discussing "God". In fact, an accurate definition seems well impossible, but so it is with Justice, History, Right/Wrong, and other seemingly-intangible ideas that continue to bear real effects in our lives. One need not believe that the history ("a lie agreed upon") put before them is complete or even accurate, but it's hardly the same thing as saying history doesn't exist, the past never happened, and yesterday was merely a random symptom of now. And while such a condition as yesterday and tomorrow being random symptoms of now is, indeed, possible and even viable, it's not particularly practical.
As to the ancient world, it seems some were more practical than our modern society. Here's an interesting question: What authority limited the conduct of the gods of Roman or Greek (or any other) pantheon? That authority, by proxy of its authority, becomes the ruling authority. A nameless namer, an unmoved mover: the scandal of atheism is that it holds totality aloof and overasserts itself into unfamiliar territory: the symptoms of "religion" that make religion problematic will only move elsewhere in humanity if we end religion. And baseball is religious enough already.
If you want to call God a zangulator, so be it. But short of that, the zangulator will be an inadequate comparison. There are many ineffable things that we humans acknowledge: Justice, Love, the Dollar, ad nauseam.
I'm not going to tell you to believe in God; that's hardly my point. But I would urge you to reconsider your definitions of what the argument is. "God" is not some idea invented so casually as a "zangulator" or one-eyed one-horned rotten purple people eater. There is a certain small disrespect in viewing other people's faith as something so simplistic, but more than that there is a significant self-imposed limitation to what you can understand about religion, faith, or the idea of God.
Ex-nihilo doesn't fly with atheists, so why should it fly for them?