Again here you have begged the question and are assuming that which you are trying to prove. Your predelictions toward these apparent prejudices wash away your arguments and is clearly seen..

I started off explaining my position, and I'm still not writing a formal logical proof. The first and only logic professor I ever had was woefully unprepared to teach on the subject (he was confounded by the Knights and Knaves puzzles). I since transfered from that school and never had the "free elective" to take formal logic after that.

The atheist requires no 'faith' to believe in 'no god' just as you don't require faith in other arenas of life. Else you would not be able to function on a day to day basis....(please don't resort to fencing with me here, we are both seeking veritas, no?)

Anyone who leaves his house is demonstrating some "faith" in humans and their institutions or else, as you say, it would be impossible to lead a normal life. Thus statements like "I have faith in our legal system." There is a fuzzy threshhold along the faith continuum, one wide side the faith is considered rational and on the other it is considered "blind faith." This threshhold varies per person and seems to roughly average out in groups... among a specific church's followers it is "rational" that Biblical teachings be applied literally to everyday life. I believe it is possible to live a completely rational life, but one would probably be living alone in the woods. In general society, it is rational to believe that an airplane will head toward its destination (accepting the calculated risk of an air disaster) because customer would not long patronize an airline that failed to meet this basic level of service. At least, that is what those with faith in market economies believe.

I am not attempting to build a straw man argument and play "gotcha" to force you into a category of "one who has faith." When dealing with laws penned by theists, the ability to point to a "personal faith" is a huge weapon. When making apples-to-apples comparisons between atheist views and theist views, it allows the atheist to map the theist views onto his own frame of reference then proceed to argue the traits without having to bring the whole argument to a halt and hashing out minutae of definitions.

5. Your quote---There are shades of meaning in "exists." I am using it in the sense of "describes something in reality."

Here is a grand contradiction...a thing either is or it isn't...even with quantum theory..but that is beyond our scope here. Your logic here is framented. You can't have a pick and choose reality on monday and a new set of laws on saturday. See your own assertions above about how firm the Universe is over light years and into the stars.

See what I said earlier about Tolkein's Hobbits. There is an entire category of US law that deals with things that don't "exist" in a tangible sense: intellectual property. You can patent an idea, copyright an expression of an idea, trademark a distinguishing characteristic, or protect knowledge with a trade secret. What all of these things have in common is that they are not normal consequences of any natural objects (you cannot trademark the clarity of bottled water nor patent the action of gravity).

Given this broader array of objects, ones that "exist" at some point in spacetime and ones that are described but do not "exist," one can now ascribe attributes to any particular religion's god just as one can ascribe attributes to a fictional character. When one says with certainty that "fairies do not exist," one can only make this assertion because he or she knows of a widely-understood set of attributes for "fairies" to seek out. It is therefore not correct to say that fairies have no attributes... rather there is nothing in reality that matches the attributes assigned to the symbol "fairies."

My understanding of your use of "exists" goes roughly like this:

Theist: "God is X, Y and Z."
Atheist: "If X was true, then A would be true, and we know that A is untrue."
Theist: "It's because we don't have the language to properly describe the X in God. But there's something X-ish about God."
Atheist: "But X is impossible for the following 11 reasons--"
Theist: "Forget X. We can agree that God is Y and Z, no?"
Atheist: "If both Y and Z were true, then B could not occur, but we know that B is true based on--"
Theist: "But God is Almighty and can will Y, Z and B to all happen at the same time."
Atheist: "Then X would be true. But we established that X isn't."
Theist: "You aren't listening. God is X, Y and Z because He's God."
Atheist: "But there is no X, and if you like I show you why there is no Y or Z either."
Theist: "God doesn't need X, Y or Z to be God. He's God."
Atheist: "So the argument is that God is God because God is God. Fascinating."

thus reducing the theist's god to a set of no agreed-upon attributes. However, humanity has about as much of a handle on the Universe's fundemental laws... some ideas about the concept but no agreed-upon attributes.

Again here you have begged the question and are assuming that which you are trying to prove. Your predelictions toward these apparent prejudices wash away your arguments and is clearly seen..

The atheist requires no 'faith' to believe in 'no god' just as you don't require faith in other arenas of life. Else you would not be able to function on a day to day basis....(please don't resort to fencing with me here, we are both seeking veritas, no?)

5. Your quote---There are shades of meaning in "exists." I am using it in the sense of "describes something in reality."

Here is a grand contradiction...a thing either is or it isn't...even with quantum theory..but that is beyond our scope here. Your logic here is framented. You can't have a pick and choose reality on monday and a new set of laws on saturday. See your own assertions above about how firm the Universe is over light years and into the stars.

Try following the Installation Guide. If you continue to have errors showing in the Messages tab, please copy and paste them here, there are sometimes codes that let us know what's happening.

MJ

Try following the Installation Guide. If you continue to have errors showing in the Messages tab, please copy and paste them here, there are sometimes codes that let us know what's happening.

MJ

Try following the Installation Guide. If you continue to have errors showing in the Messages tab, please copy and paste them here, there are sometimes codes that let us know what's happening.

MJ