MikeHD wrote:You fail to understand my argument. To say there is gold in China, all I have to do is find gold one place. I do not have to go everywhere. To show God, I just have to find Him one place. I do not have to find Him everywhere.
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I don't find that "argument" in the post I quoted. In that post your argument consists of claiming that in order to make an absolute statement, one must have absolute knowledge. Since we don't possess such knowledge, we can't know that God doesn't exist. I simply turned that argument around: since we don't possess absolute knowledge we can't know (absolutely) that God exists.
Of course, this hinges on what means by "absolute knowledge" - something you don't make clear in the quoted post. In philosophic circles, absolute knowledge is generally considered to be impossible, since no one is omniscient. So in that account it would be impossible to know absolutely *any* truth, including that about a god.
But you seem to be making your concept of omniscient/absolute knowledge location-based - that is, you're not denying that it's possible under certain conditions. One might have absolute knowledge, for example, that there is NO gold in China by scouring every nanometer of land and property in the country and finding none. In that case - as far as I can make sense of your amended argument - one would have "absolute knowledge" of that question. One would also have absolute knowledge of that question the moment gold was discovered in China.
Drawing on this analogy, you argue above that all you have to do is locate God in one place, and you have absolute knowledge that God exists. However, if we cannot find God , we cannot deny the possibility that it exists, since we are unable to look/see everywhere (omniscience).
Yes, it's quite true that *given* you have found God, then it exists. But that isn't an argument; it's simply an assertion that God exists. What's missing is the argument/demonstration of that existence.
It would be as though I claimed: "If the Loch Ness monster exists, all I have to do is find it somewhere (in Loch Ness or other body of water), but you - the Loch Ness Atheist - have to show that it exists nowhere in Loch Ness. Since you have not searched or are unable to search that entire body of water, you lack absolute knowledge of its nonexistence, and therefore ought to reasonably be an agnostic on the subject."
There's nothing in the above that argues for the existence of the Loch Ness monster. All it demonstrates is that lacking absolute knowledge of the Loch Ness - just as we lack absolute knowledge of our universe (or existence itself) - we are not logically entitled to claim with absolute certainty that the Loch Ness monster doesn't exist.
Likewise, your argument says absolutely nothing about the existence of God, but rather claims that since we do not know with absolute certainty that God doesn't exist, we ought to be agnostic on that subject.
That may be fine, but it provides zero reasons for suspecting that God exists. Unless you're claiming to have located God - in which case you could point us to that location and, depending on whether or not we find God there, we may possess absolute proof that it does or does not exist?
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