God is supposed to be infinitely perfect and lacking in nothing. But, suppose that I (or anything else) exist apart from God. If so, God is lacking all that I am. In other words, my existence apart from God diminishes what He has and thus entails He is less than infinitely perfect. However, if I (and everything else) am part of God, then this would lead to pantheism. Pantheism, to be properly technical, seems completely nuts. So, it would seem that if I exist apart from God, then God (assuming He exists) would not be perfect.Here's what I've never understood about pantheism: if everything is God, then why does the concept matter? Given pantheism, can't we just speak of the
It seems to me that for the concept of a god to be of any relevance, she has to exist apart from us, and preferably apart from the universe as a whole. But the problem with such a being existing apart is that it becomes very difficult to find testable evidence of her existence, and a lot easier to imagine her to be whatever you want her to be -- or whatever several millennia-old books of Jewish fairy tales imagined her to be.
Andrew later links to Alex Byrne:
...the devout are not exactly holding their collective breath. For the most part, they do not believe that God exists on the basis of any argument. How they know that God exists, if they do, is itself unknown—the devout do not know that God exists in the way it is known that dinosaurs existed, or that there exist infinitely many prime numbers. The funny thing about arguments for the existence of God is that, if they succeed, they were never needed in the first place.Indeed many devout will tell you that arguments aren't needed, and that the existence of God is self-evident. Andrew himself says this in his dialogue with Sam Harris. Arguments only exist in order to try and convince infidels, and becoming devout never entails a rational epiphany based on a valid logical argument or testable evidence.
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