The "God" of the Philosophers Is Empty

In #religion #philosophy #religion

So I recently had a bit of a discussion which ended somewhat abruptly with complaints of category errors on my part and implied scientism. The initial Tweet was:

https://twitter.com/dryapologist/status/1548281913873313792 Pasted image 20220723111528.png

To which I replied:

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Then @MetaChristianity posted in seeming exasperation:

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@MetaChristianity then references this blog post to point out my "category error". The post summarizes the difference between the "God" of the so-called "serious theists" and what I was apparently responding to.

In any serious discussion about theism, it is absolutely crucial to distinguish between God and the gods. If you don’t understand this distinction, you will literally never understand what serious theists are talking about.

God is, by definition, the Absolute. The one, absolute, unconditioned ground and source of all that is; the Alpha and the Omega, as Christian scripture puts it.

The term "source of all that is" comes up a lot in these descriptions, and I am baffled about several things.

  1. How is this not just word salad? I can make any definition I want, but that doesn't guarantee I am saying anything meaningful.
  2. When we say that something is a source of something, then we should be able to specify some of its properties. For example, if we say that the source of the large rotation speeds of galaxies is dark matter, we are saying that dark matter (whatever it is) has mass -- or at least a gravitational effect -- and we can quantify the effect, the cases where we see the source and where we don't, we can rule out some of the things that dark matter isn't, etc... What properties does this Alpha and Omega have?
  3. Why call it "God"? That word has a lot of baggage, and is commonly (and historically) used to refer to an agent which answers prayers, produces miraculous events (both modern and historical), and fine-tunes universal constants. If "source of all that is" is a different thing than this, then use a different word or you run the risk of equivocation.
  4. Why think the "Alpha and Omega" is a mind at all? Why not just some brute property of the universe, like the laws of logic or abstract numbers? How could you tell?
  5. How can you possibly get from this nebulous "source of all that is" to the stories in a religious text? If the "serious theist" wants to say that some of those stories and claims in those texts are actually true, then they become testable (and have failed as far as I can tell). If the "serious theist" wants to say that these stories are just metaphors, then the texts hold the same content as Harry Potter books -- nice stories that might give some life lessons.

So I come back to the idea that if this "source of all that is" has any discernible impact on our lives, then it is measurable and thus testable empirically. If not, then it has no use and is indistinguishable from nothing. The "serious theist" can state all they want that "the existence of God is not an empirical question" but all they are saying is that their claims are just empty words.