>>58
And they can say things like "God planted fossils to test our faith," it just sounds totally conspiracy-theorist-like. But it is valid, nonetheless. I mean, he's omnipotent, so it is within his capacity.
Yes, it is within his capacity. No, it is not a valid argument for the existence of the Christian God. You still don't understand my argument.
If all the evidence *is* planted just to test our faith, then God is not falsifiable and has no observable effect on our universe. This means it is nonsense to wonder whether he exists, and it is nonsense to say that you don't know whether he exists.
The most fundamental requirement to behaving rationally is the assumption that what we observe is in fact objective reality. We have to assume this because if this is not reality, we wouldn't know the difference. We can't know whether our brains are in jars in the Matrix, or whether a God created the universe yesterday and planted our memories, or whether this is indeed all real, because they all predict the same physical results. We're trapped in our universe, so we can't say any of the above is true.
But the gods of mainstream religions DO affect us. They're falsifiable. That's why it's not a valid argument.
I sound like a broken record here, because YES, I AGREE you can hide anything behind omnipotence. I've said it a dozen times in this thread, stop fucking telling me this, I AGREE with you. The point is that saying whether these Gods actually exist is nonsense in the first place. Calling yourself 'agnostic' simply because you realize this is a pointless use of the term, and it's elitist; you imply that atheists don't understand this, when in fact it's quite the opposite.
The 'possibility' of unfalsifiable Gods is not a matter of opinion; it is a fact, just as sure as 2+2=4. Terms such as 'atheist' and 'agnostic' refer to the possibility of gods who recognize humans as a species and meddle in our affairs. That's why I'm an atheist; science has shown that there are no such gods.