A previous post explains about how "nothing can be said" of God is not entirely accurate. Many things can be said of God (and boy howdy are they!) the problem is that there is nothing that can be said of God of any certainty (which is addressed in the post). This, I believe, is the long held belief that God can be neither proved nor disproved.

Dealing with those mystically inclined, the *I-feel-god-in-my-heart* crowd, and in general all irrationalist believers requires a different approach from dealing with rationalists.

Their usual spiel: I know that my god exists -- but he/she/it cannot be described, or is beyond human understanding.

The philosopher Wittgenstein, in one seemingly cryptic utterance announced, "A nothing would be as good as a something about which nothing could be said."

Spelled out: you claim that something exists, but no property (like, being blue) could ever be ascribed to it. This is the famous Western "via negativa" - negative path to god - also the "neti, neti" not-this, not-this of Hindu mystics. God is not blue, is not evil, is not good . . . .

Logically, however, a claim that something exists does not ascribe a property to it -- or, as you ought to have learned in logic class -- existence is not a predicate. (Non-existence is not a predicate either.) Nobody can talk about Nothing. True.

Nobody can talk about Nothing? Who's doing the talking here? (Nobody?) And what's being talked about? (Nothing?) And what did Nobody say about Nothing? Zen Buddhism figured all this out long ago -- hence, koans if you're lucky or a hard slap in the face when you're persistently obtuse.

‘A god exists’ seems to be saying something, but the sentence is meaningless. You might as well be saying bar-bar or saying nothing at all. The Viennese novelist, Robert Musil wrote "The Man without Qualities." The man who can't be there. A nobody. Nothing.

If a god "is a something about which nothing can be said," then this putative something is equivalent to "a nothing."

So-called mystics in India, China, Japan, and even Europe apprehended that any *god* without qualities was nothing.

And, they said so. And, they were right.

bipolar2 © 2008

Religions generally are based on three presumptions:

- "free will", i.e. that you are responsible and have to struggle for salvation;
- "moral order of the world", which means: there is an eternal and invariable thing called "the will of God", which once and for all time determines what man ought to do and what he ought to abandon; that the value of an individual or a people is measured by the extent to which they fulfill this will of God; that the destinies of individuals and peoples are CONTROLLED by this will of God, which rewards and punishes according to the level of obedience;
- the existence of "moral deeds" ("non-egoistic" etc.).

All these ideas are just errors. It can be proved APRIORICALLY. E.g. to disprove free will you even don't need determinism, fatalism (necessity vs chance, foreknowledge and such) is just enough.

You know what it means if there is no free will. And you know what it means if there is no moral order of the world - then, evil is more powerful, and goodness (in the church sense, that is: piety) dies.

But what is most funny - and what is probably the strongest argument against God ever possible - two ideas "free will" and "moral order of the world" contradict each other...

In defense of Dawkins, Dennett and Harris, I have two issues regarding your article.

1. First off, I feel your choice of defining 'proof' in a probabilistic manner is unfortunate, because we already have terms such as 'cogent' for describing strong, well-supported arguments that are compelling yet not utterly conclusive. And at least in English, I am unaware of any well-known alternative choice to the word 'proof' to describe unassailable, conclusive, definitive reasoning from correct premises. I am sure that you have encountered similar semantic differences between parties in debates before, but I feel your picking at words here clouds the issue unnecessarily. If we assign 'proof' a weaker meaning, then we will just have to come up with another word to encapsulate the strong meaning, and then we will be back precisely where we began.

2. I concede that various concepts of God are disprovable via internal inconsistency. I also recall Victor Stenger also saying as much. However, in argument, many theists, when pressed, gradually retreat to a deist concept of God- of the prominent ones, I have seen Dinesh D'Souza blatantly and transparently do so. It is almost as though even though their own ideas are internally inconsistent, and disprovable, the fact that the deist concept of god is 'not disprovable' is somehow considered by them to be conductive to their absurd views.
Further, if atheists focus their efforts on arguing for a disproof of God, even when there are such available (for a certain subset of the varied definitions of 'God'), this would have the practical effect on many laypeople at least of conceding the burden of proof as lying on the atheist. This misconception of atheists bearing the burden of argument is already extremely widespread and attacking this is at the heart of many of the most prominent 'New' Atheist writings.
We don't need to trawl through 70000 pages of Henry Darger's opus to locate inconsistencies before declaring it fiction. Likewise, engaging Religion on its own terms often encourages it to create even more absurd, more tenuous explanations, such as the Roman Catholic churches stance on the 'two miracles' of the Eucharist- the first being the physical transformation to the body of Christ, and the second miracle being the wafer's indistinguishable retention of its original physical form.
To me, it seems that the heart of the problem with faith is that it is a misunderstanding of the very nature of how truth and falsehood can or should be evaluated, a misunderstanding of how conclusions should best be drawn in the absence of utter certainty. I feel a specific disproof of concepts of 'God' via internal inconsistency will fail to address faith itself - this deeply-ingrained, largely unexamined and highly dangerous aspect of our society.