In my quest for ever stronger and more organized
strong atheist arguments I have been considering
the various classes of gods, the basic type of gods
in the god zoo.
Most find are easily enough debunkable.
I have found one that is not.
Consider the class of immanent, maya gods.
All is illusion, all exists only in the mind
of god. This god is easily debunkable if
you claim such a god is good, and cares
deeply about us, all the disproofs of the usual,
omni-everything, creator gods apply, and this
one is debunked, just like transedent gods
that sit outside the material Universe on
their heavenly thrones.
But consider the maya god who is not claimed
to be in anyway omni-benevolent. It gets very hard
to disprove such a god. How do you disprove
such a being, or that this is not an illusion
in the mind of such a god?
Its very much like disproving last-Tuesdayism,
the claim that all was created last Tuesday with
illusions of an old Universe. Or disproving
solipism.
On the other hand, one can only achieve a
logically un-debunkable god only by abandoning
all the assertions made about Christian or Islamic
gods. Without goodness or evil, it simply cannot
be grafted onto real religion, when you do that
the god is debunkable again.
There are also other questions, if god is omniscient,
then he knew what he would dream and would never be
surprised, or even entertained by it, and why do it?
And why dream up evil men and good men anyway.
But if god does not know what he will dream up,
if god is also not omniscient, god is just a babbler.
This then becomes very inexplicable since we have no
free will, we just are figments of god's fevered
imagination, such as god one day imagines Hitler
and his victims.
This sort of god more resembles H.P. Lovecraft's
blind, stupid god, gibbering out comets and planets
at random.
So one can create a hard to debunk god, but its
a very alien god that does not and cannot fit any
common sort of attractive religion. Its utterly
alien to religions like Christianity and Islam.
And it still has unprovable assumptions.
That it is one god and not a dozen, million, or
trillion such gods dreaming together.
Because if you have a class of maya, dreamer
gods, that there is but one god is an unprovable
assertion. And where no assertion is provable all
assertions are equal. And there is as usual,
no mechanism, no physics for such a god, no biology
of such gods possible. Atomism, materialism has
stood the test of time and proved wildly fruitful.
Maya gods are at best attempts at a dodge, a final
penultimate god of the gaps. A god that really,
doesn't do anything, and is mystifyingly useless
for anything. It doesn't explain physics and the
real world and does not fit theism in any way.
Since there is no way to investigate the issue,
nothing can be said about the issue that can be
in any way factual.
Maybe such maya gods exist in huge numbers, and
maybe they are mortal and are born and die.
Nothing can be said about the class that is
useful in anyway.
There is no reason the strong Atheist must agree
with any definition of maya god or gods.
All one can say is the class does not in any way
fit religion as many wish god to be, and this
sort of god does not explain the world in a
scientific manner that helps us with understanding
the Universe. So its not very satisfying.
It most certainly has to be a very most unpleasant
conception of god from the theist point of view,
and a silly set of ideas to the atheist.
Since it cannot be used to prop up theism, its
a dead issue, along with rhetorical claims the
Easter Bunny created the Universe or the Invisible
Pink Unicorn, or Flying Spaghetti Monster.
But the most important and telling point here
for the debunker, the strong Atheist is;
1. This class of god or gods cannot be used to
prop up claims of the major religious traditions,
such as Christianity or Islam, or Judaism.
2. Imbue the maya god with attributes of omni-benevolence,
omniscience et al, and it becomes a member of the
class of creator, omni-everthing gods and self
destructs.
3. It adds nothing to our understandings of science
or physics or anything else imaginable.
4. As a class of gods, the gods have no evidence,
no way of researching the issue, its all a matter
of what baseless assertions you want to make.
5. This sort of god is an imminent god rather than
trascedent god.
6. This sort of god is monist, rather than dualist.
All is some sort of 'mind stuff', not material.
Nor is it material with 'mind stuff', its all
illusionary by definition.
7. Thus immanent gods as a class also are debunked
as you have immanent creator- omni-everything gods
or immanent gods that cannot prop up a useful
or normative sort of theist religion.
8. Likewise this undermines monist, idealist types
of gods as a possible class of existant gods.
9. This sort of god debunks teleology.
All teleogical gods as a class are debunkable.
Eschatology is a form of teleology.
10. These sorts of issed-ues are crushed out between
omni-everything, creator gods that self destruct
and useless maya gods without good or evil, or
omniscience.
11. An immanent god that is omniscient knows always
what it will think and thus all is determined and
thus no free wil is possible for such a god
or anything it dreams of.
So this as a class of gods is also a dead end
and also is as futile and silly as solipism.
And takes out a lot of theology with it along
with the omni-everything, creator god class.
Bewteen the two, there isn't much room for
these sorts of theological concepts to live.
--
"If I saw a man beating a tied up horse, I could
not prove it was wrong, but I'd know it was wrong."
- Mark Twain
Cheerful Charlie
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