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Showing posts from May 17, 2020

The Problem with God Talk

I just have one problem with God talk. It doesn't say anything. A sentence can be grammatical without being meaningful. I don't mean merely that it can be grammatical and wrong. I mean it can be grammatical and empty -- literally. It may seem otherwise, but examination will show that not to be the case. Take the sentence God exists . It appears meaningful. But is it? No, it is not. God here stands for a supernatural nonmaterial thing that has, sort of like us only better, a consciousness, a will, and a capacity to act, that is, to make things happen. And this entity is said to exist -- to be real -- again, sort of like us only better. The problem is that the concept  exist  here, while it may look like the concept you and I have used all our lives about things in the natural world, is actually nothing like it. God's supernatural "existence" is necessarily unlike anything we know or can know. The theist cashes in on familiar a word but admits he does not use