Reply #11: So there's something not merely bigger and greater... [View All]

[Silent3]

...than any atheist can possibly imagine using apparently tired old arguments like infinite regress (tired, regardless of the fact that plenty of modern theists continue to pull out their own tired and completely unsubtle, First Cause/Unmoved Mover arguments to which the infinite regress argument is a necessary retort), but of a completely utterly transcendent nature.

So what?

If you can't then prove that this amazingly grand whatever-it-is is an intelligence, a personality, a force of will, something with a plan for humanity and a concern for immortal souls, it's just a synonym for the universe itself, not a deity in any special sense that would be distinguishable in any way from an impersonal universe.

You want to tell me that the universe is stranger and more subtle than my tiny little human mind can grasp? You want me to understand that the nature of existence itself, the most basic question of why there's anything at all rather than a nothing so completely nothing that it would mean a total lack of anything that could even be empty of the anything that might otherwise exist?

That's no surprise to me. It's a given. I've accepted that for a long time.

What I don't buy is that transcendent words games of the theologians get them any further than pointing out that there's a big conceptual roadblock that they have no path to get around any more than I do. What I don't buy is that calling their conceptual roadblock "God" gives us anything more than a glorified "I don't know" to parade around as if it's mystical knowledge instead of an admission of human ignorance and the limits of human imagination.