Want to play a game?
It won’t be global thermonuclear war; we are likely to get that some other way. Let’s play a logic game, instead. It’s something you probably heard in your early secondary education years. Yeah, it’s juvenile, but maybe you’ll still learn something by how we dissect it.
Smart-aleck atheist wannabe asks, “Do you believe your God can do anything?”
Christian kid says, “Yeah, sure.”
Smart-aleck: “Do you believe He can make a rock too big for Him to lift? Yes or no?”
We’ll make this quick and merciful. Three category errors, a false dichotomy and a charge of intellectual dishonesty.
False Dichotomy: It doesn’t have to be yes or no; it can be, “Illegitimate question.”
Category Error 1: Statements of faith are not verifiable in the classic sense, because they can’t be falsified. Faith is an established category which is neither rational nor irrational; it is non-rational. Such statements are not subject to debate because no proof is necessary for a valid faith, despite what Aristotle might have said. However, assuming there might be some literal meaning to this thing, we come to…
Category Error 2: God makes literal rocks, and some of them are awfully big. Seen Jupiter? In order for us to imagine a rock that God must lift, we must posit a gravity well against which to lift. Where you going to get a gravity well big enough if the biggest rock He has made is still bigger than your “ground”? Planets are not among things which can be “lifted,” and if they were, you couldn’t possibly know about it.
Category Error 3: God as posited in faith is not a physical being. That is, He is not confined to this universe, so the idea of Him having to lift anything is a category error of its own, since He is posited as creating the entire universe more or less as a minor hobby.
Category Error 1 wins the prize for intellectual dishonesty. Nobody makes that mistake by accident; if you know enough to play with logic, you already know that assertions of faith are off limits.
Thank you for playing.
never mind. Had trouble with it all day, though.
I had trouble getting through this post. Some random key press simply logged me out and I lost part of what I had typed. I don’t know of any single keyboard shortcut that is supposed to do that.
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