I'm just posting the whole thing cause it's short and ties in the with last one on "You Can't Prove God Doesn't Exist"
When do we hear it?
This argument is a common companion to "You can't prove God doesn't exist." The theist claiming, "God can't be defined," means to imply that we, as humans, lack the capability to properly comprehend the truth of what God is, and therefore we are not competent to define him, let alone disprove him.
Counter Apologetics
- The first problem with this statement is that the claim of an undefinable entity requires no refutation, so the argument lacks rhetorical power.
- The atheist can point out that the claimant is attempting to 'sneak' premises into the argument. The notion of 'god' has a long history associated with it, and the entity it describes has been given numerous attributes; the theist is assuming that these attributes can be defined for an undefinable God, while there remain other attributes that cannot. The theist is also sneaking in the assumption that a fundamentally undefinable entity can nonetheless exist in reality.
- If something is undefinable, then by claiming it exists is to provide definition, making the argument self-refuting.
- By raising this objection, the theist is admitting that despite being undefinable, he or she believes that God nonetheless exists. How does he or she arrive at such a claim without the capacity to even so much as define the object of the claim?
- If humans lack the intellectual power to define God, how can humans be expected to have the intellectual power to evaluate claims about this god? How did the theist arrive at a specific version of the god claim? Here, some may claim that they have supernatural knowledge of a particular god, but not enough knowledge to adequately define him. Even so, making it supernatural is no more than an appeal to ignorance and a claim of personal revelation.
- If the theist assumes that God created humankind to worship him, why does this God not give us the capacity to define what we are worshiping? Why does he instead demand that we worship an ill-formed, contradictory mess of an idea that doesn't come close to representing his essence? For that matter, if we worship one particular (inadequate) model of him, are we worshiping God or the model of God?
I know I could just say "dark matter or suitable cutting edge undefined scientific idea" and be done with it, but this won't take long.
YES! You can't define something you don't know. And we don't know Snagglepuss. Even the most hardcore non-mentally-ill Christian will tell it's faith, not knowing. I'm going to use bulletpoints to respond to their bulletpoints cause I wanna feel fancy, too.
- The first one needs translating first, I think. "The first problem with this statement is that the claim of an undefinable entity requires no refutation, so the argument lacks rhetorical power." means "Saying that something is undefinable is not something that can be argued, so it's not convincing." So it's just an outright dismissal and disregards all things scientific or Snagglepuss that aren't defined. I doubt there's many theoretical astrophysicists quoting this one.
- Yeah, it really throws a wrench in the atheist's argument if he can't quote Leviticus, doesn't it. If you want to talk about whether Snagglepuss exists, that's fine. If you want to talk about how much religion sucks, that's fine. You actually don't make any sense when you try to make the argument "Religion sucks therefore Snagglepuss doesn't exist." It's two separate things, but it's much harder to be smug when faced with logic and not dusty old fairytales.
- No, it doesn't. This one makes zero sense and I'll point to undefined hyperyupitismarians as an example. I just created something without a definition. Things can exist without being defined.
- I'm going to sound like a broken record if I keep talking about undefined science, words, and so on. I think they'd be less hung up on definitions if they learned German. Nevermind. I can claim lots of things exists that I don't know the definition to or that can't be defined. For all we know Snagglepuss can be defined and we just don't know the definition. I can arrive at such a capacity yada yada, because I do not claim the certainty that Snagglepuss exists. It's very easy to say there is probably an external force that influenced the universe at some point and may be influencing the universe today without a definition of that force. We can't define the structure of the hydrogen ions that were present at the Big Bang. Do you doubt their existence? No, you trust scientists that they were there.
- Good point! Let's see it again: "If humans lack the intellectual power to define God, how can humans be expected to have the intellectual power to evaluate claims about this god?" And I'll reply: "Yes. I agree." Keep in mind this is meant to be an argument in favor of having the intellectual power to evaluate claims about this god despite humans lacking the intellectual power to define God. Yes. We don't know. That's why you can't think there is no Snagglepuss.
- The last one is assuming all religion is correct and has nothing to do with the existence of Snagglepuss, just a couple old holy books. Nothing to talk about there since Snagglepuss doesn't have a religion.
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