Is the question "Does a god exist" coherent?

Started by Saul the not so great!, August 06, 2013, 02:24:41 PM

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SGOS

Christians are explicit enough about what they are worshiping for a skeptic to make a judgment about the existence issue.  Granted their imagined characteristics are self contradictory, mysterious, unimaginable, and nebulous.  But that doesn't mean a skeptic is not in a position to make a judgment.  There is no reason to freak out and claim helplessness and an inability to judge because the characteristics are implausible.  Instead, there is every reason to simply say you are not buying it.

In fact, a skeptic has every logical reason to make judgments about the incoherence itself.  Most of us have been around Christianity all our lives.  We have been blasted with various and often incoherent descriptions of the Christian god from every conceivable angle.  The fact that it doesn't make sense is no reason to run and hide from making a judgment.

Jason78

Quote from: "Saul the not so great!"Is the question, "Does a god exist" even incoherent?

Depends on your definition of god I guess.  

There's a woman at my local fish and chip shop that's an absolute goddess!
Winner of WitchSabrinas Best Advice Award 2012


We can easily forgive a child who is afraid of the dark; the real
tragedy of life is when men are afraid of the light. -Plato

LikelyToBreak

This whole argument reminds of multiple dimensions past the fourth dimension.  Evidently some people can conceive the fifth dimension.  And I am not talking about the band.  I have trouble trying to conceive the fifth dimension.  Once I watched a video about how to conceive more than four dimensions.  It made me sick to my stomach.  Then I am subject to motion sickness.  

I guess I am trying to say, that if you can conceive things beyond what others can, then yes you might logically conceive of a God of some sorts.  That doesn't necessarily make it so.  It just makes it so you are able to conceive of something which others can't.  Of course, there may very well be holes in your logic somewhere.  But, they would be very hard for others to find, because of the very obtuse nature of the holes.

The Gods of the revealed religions have huge holes which we can easily spot.  Therefore, until there is a God revealed which does not have any logical holes which we can spot, I think it is a safe conclusion that there is no God.  But, I guess that doesn't mean that someone, somewhere may have a logical, reasonable, and maybe very real God which they can conceive, but are not able to adequately describe.

josephpalazzo

The very notion of a god being all-mighty, all-knowing and all-good is a contradiction. Theists have done verbal gymnastics to explain the contradictions, but all of those explanations boil down to, God works in mysterious ways. If you can live with that, then God remains a logical coherent idea. If not, then your conclusion is what the OP title says - incoherent. The bottom line is - how good are you in fooling yourself?

Saul the not so great!

Quote from: "Solitary"You may be wrong, but it would still be an imaginarily real, and therefore coherent.
What do you mean by "coherent?" I'm talking about (1) internal inconsistency (self-contraction) in the belief about the thought or (2) in the thought itself.
In my example, I'm not actually imagining nothing (the literal absence of all things) since I'm imagining a thing (the color black) this is a contradiction. My point: I'm not imagining what I believe I'm imagining. In other words, I'm wrong about the contents of my thought, because my belief about my thought is internally inconsistent. You seem to be muddling together beliefs about thoughts with the content of the thoughts, with the existence of the thoughts, and the internal inconsistency of the thoughts and beliefs about the thoughts. Things do not become non self-contractionary just because people believe them not to be self-contractionary.

Mister Agenda

"Does the question 'does a God exist' even incoherent?

I'm a bit of a hardliner, but I'll grant it's at least incoherent.
Atheists are not anti-Christian. They are anti-stupid.--WitchSabrina

Colanth

You're asking two different questions (and misspelling a word in one of them).

Is "Does a god exist" coherent?  Not until you define "a god".

"Does God exist?"  No, it can't, since it's defined in a way that makes it impossible.

IOW, some god, depending on the definition of "god" could exist, but the Christian one, the one named "God" in English, is trivial to disprove.  (And has been disproved in many threads on AF.)
Afflicting the comfortable for 70 years.
Science builds skyscrapers, faith flies planes into them.