I Know That God Does Not Exist

So, since you don't lack "alternative numbers" as a rationale, you either have to supply a different rationale, or state that there is none.

And what is your rationale for saying that two plus three is "many"?

Seeing as how intelligence evolved on earth starting from a non-intelligent rocky planet a few billion years ago, your position is clearly untenable.Or maybe it was the Little Green Men (or some black Monolith or something) that gave the primitive primates intelligence?But even if that was the case, you're stuck with a dilemma: either there was some point before there was intelligence in the universe or the universe is infinitely old and there always was intelligence.

Not sure what the point of all this is, unless it's to eventually argue that it is (now, in the 21st century) rational to believe in some sort of deity.

In the end, it hardly matters. People's actions are rarely rational, anyway.

That explains why people who count "One, Two, Many" or "One, Two, Three, Many" might answer "Many" to the question.That would be, for them, rational.But for us, it would not be rational to answer "Many".

Interesting point of view. If we are wondering about X (whatever X is) and whether or not it is rational, then all we have to do is find somebody who has some rational reason to agree with X (or did agree however long ago). Then, no matter what else we may know about X, we must also consider X to be rational.That doesn't sound rational.

It is you who are making it into a popularity contest - a weird popularity contest in which the voice of one outweighs the voice of many - instead of a debate! We might argue whether something is rational or not, but your position allows you to say that because someone in the past (that we have no opportunity to persuade and show them their error) thought something rational we cannot now be allowed to demonstrate that it is irrational.Pretend we had a time machine and we could bring Og, our neolithic chum who believes in a thunder god, forward to our era. We could then explain to Og the mechanism of clouds and electric charge and so forth. This might take some time, of course. In the end, though, wouldn't you feel sure that Og would say that there was no longer a rational reason to believe in a thunder god?

But if Og changes and decides that the thunder-god thing is irrational, can we still say that it is rational? Even though now you have NOBODY who agrees that it is rational?

I didn't say make it go away. It still exists, in a sense, in the past. In the same sense as an ice cube, melting, was (in the past) ice. But now it's liquid. You may say it was solid, but it's not logical to say it is solid.I think you're just caught up in a logical quandary. You want to use the idea that people in the past believed in something we now know to be nonsensical as some sort of support for that something. After all, we have to have respect for those in the past, even if they haven't got the knowledge we've gained over the centuries. But that's just my speculation on your thinking, of course.

Your logical fallacy hinges on the question of how we determine if the reasoning was rational or irrational, valid or invalid. In fact, in an earlier post, you write, "As long as the logic is internally consistent, the concept of God is not irrational." You cannot claim that the reasoning of the neolithic people who personified natural phenomena as deities was rational by our standards, even if it was rational by their standards (it may not even have been rational by their standards, of course, just a legend made up as we would write a best-selling novel, but that's neither here nor there).So you may, if you like, say it's rational by their standards but irrational by ours. What doesn't make any sense is saying, "If it is rational to somebody, it is not inherently irrational."Perhaps you are confused about the terms. What do you intend the word "inherently" to mean?

If you could answer my question it would help. What do you intend the word "inherently" to mean?

The universe is all there is. If you're insisting that there is something outside the universe, you're abusing language.

Ah! Now we're finally getting somewhere.You've already conceded that, logically, the idea of a deity is irrational by our standards, whether it was an ancient thunder god worshipped by neolithic shamans or a more "advanced" notion of someone who could forgive offenses not committed against him personally, or anything else.Your only claim of rationality is for some people in the past who may (we'll say they did for the sake of argument, rather than that they took it as an article of faith) have had a line of reasoning that they considered logical that they thought led them to the concept of a deity.Considering this disagreement, how could you say rationality is inherent in the concept of a deity?

The idea of someone forgiving offenses not committed against him (or her) is wholly irrational. If someone punches you in the face and then apologizes and you say, "I forgive you," that makes sense. If someone punches you in the face and then a third person says, "I forgive you" that makes no sense.In a logical world, both you and the person who punched you would turn to that third person and say, "Huh?"