OK, I can only get so far with someone so unskilled and uninterested in basic logic.
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I have already shown that if a god - any god - enters the picture, all gods must enter. When all gods enter, only ONE GOD remains. The God of the Hebrews, the Christian God. I have also included the logic.
Why should @thoughful not assume the Christian God in her argument which is built on logic? Her argument is logically legitimate. Yours is not.
Your logic analysis fails.
Is this thread still open?
If so it seems to have covered a lot of ground that cropped up in the “Introducing Boris” Badenoff thread.
Unbelief is the natural position to take on any claim until something has been proved beyond a reasonable doubt. The existence of God has not only not been proved, no evidence has ever been given for the existence of God. Therefore unbelief or atheism is the natural position to take on the God question.
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While I don’t disagree with where you end up, I would say that as an ex-lawyer I find that these notions of such things as “beyond a reasonable doubt” and “burden of proof” and whatnot are strange intrusions of legalism into other forms of reasoning. I think most of us believe, or think we believe, things on more of a “preponderance of the evidence” standard, if we’ve got to borrow the terminology from the law: we believe something when we think it is more likely true than false. Of course, we believe some things more strongly than others, and if we are good at this, we scale that to how good the evidentiary support is.
I think the question whether there are any gods or not is an empirical question, on which we should expect evidence which is both competent and relevant. The question of the existence of any particular god seems to me to be something on which the proponent of a proposition does bear what we lawyers call the “burden of persuasion,” which is not quite the same thing as “burden of proof.” But in any event, terms like “proof” are only of use to those who imagine that they can construct wholly philosophical, logical arguments which demonstrate the existence or non-existence of the gods. In the law, we do use “proof” to mean something like “persuasion,” but in philosophy it ordinarily means something more like a logical demonstration as opposed to an empirical one.
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I was just answering the question. It appears this site is rather boring without Boris. An atheist is not a person who says they can prove there is no God. An atheist is just a person who has noticed that the evidence for the existence of God is on the same level as the evidence for the existence of leprechauns, werewolves and invisible pink unicorns. There fixed it.
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While others would disagree with your characterization of that evidence, I don’t disagree with it. But I would just point out that the notion of “proof beyond a reasonable doubt” is hardly on point when the question is whether there is, indeed, any competent evidence at all. And if I were 90% convinced there was a god, instead of 0%, I would “believe” but I would also have to concede that such belief is not “beyond a reasonable doubt.”
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There is plenty of evidence for unicorns. The Indian rhinoceros (Rhinoceros unicornis) can even be observed at many zoos.
It is not surprising that the translators of the KJV Bible in 1611 applied the term unicorn to what they thought might be such an animal in the Hebrew text of the Old Testament.
And then there are werewolves:
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Nope, that’s wrong. The translators also believed in fire breathing dragons, cockatrices, satyrs, fiery serpents, demons and witches. Many people suffered needlessly because of the Christians’ belief in the last two. You’re a retired minister? Are you going to claim you don’t believe in those things?
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FYI Bela Lugosi, Lon Chaney Jr. and Henry Hull were not real werewolves.
But what about David Naughton and Russell Tovey?
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Yeah! I SAW David Naughton change. No phoney-baloney slow fade between multiple frames with different amounts of facial hair. Plus, I think I’ve been to that pub he visited.