To which kosta replied: Proving that God exists would not be worthless, bb! It would be the greatest discovery known to mankind.
Did you notice how kosta totally refused to acknowledge my point? But then, I supposed he had to refuse, since to acknowledge it would implicitly entail the recognition that God, as transcendent Being, is not reducible to human techniques of proof. Which was my entire point.
To so reduce Him is to treat Him as if He were an entirely immanent existent, like any other ordinary object of the natural world — which He is not. Hence my conclusion that any such proof would be worthless, in that it can tell us nothing about God, but only about how some men would like to reason about Him. That is to say, to falsely reason about Him — by bringing Him "down" to the level of an object of ordinary human observation and experience.
If such a thing could be done, however — which it cannot — faith would be altogether unnecessary. As a radical skeptic, kosta has no use for faith. Hence he is looking for "the greatest discovery known to mankind" that would obviate the need for faith.
Yet any person who could make such a "discovery" would have to be "a god" himself....
Kosta denies the transcendence of God. Or at the very least, seems entirely skeptical on this point.
Also I suggested earlier that kosta got the definition of "Christian" entirely right, in that he said people who don't believe in the Triune God and the Risen Christ are "not Christians." He ticked off a list of such, but didn't put his own name on it — as I imagine he should have done.
For note he states the case in the negative — that is, by an inversion.
Earlier, I suggested that atheists have a weird way of "inverting" Truth. Kosta's negative definition is yet another good example of this.
Kosta INSISTS he is not an atheist. But to me, "if it looks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, and walks like a duck, it's probably a duck."
Kosta seems to be a thoroughly dogmatic thinker. His dogma is entirely sui generis, having little if anything to do with the real world. It is rather the projection of his internal world of wishes, preferences, and dreams....
I anticipate his clever reply to this observation: In all likelihood, he'll say I am doing the same exact thing. He has to say that; for my insight is qualitatively different than his because I recognize the transcendence of God, and he does not. If there is no transcendence, then I am wrong, and merely projecting my own internal dream world. And thus he and I are "'doing the same thing."
To compound the difficulty, I doubt he and I are speaking the same language. Though we are both nominally conversing in English, our world views are so far apart that the words we respectively use often seem to refer to entirely different external objects....
An analogy comes to mind. Our respective use of language is like the difference between an analog and a digital recording....
Also I am reminded of David Hilbert's attempt to "reduce" the mathematical language of number theory to pure syntax by excising all semantic elements. It didn't work. Kurt Gödel (i.e., the Incompletness Theorem) showed why. But this has been discussed here before so I won't repeat myself.
All things considered, I strongly doubt that kosta is a "good-faith" correspondent.... And I'm getting a little tired of his "jerking me around" like this — by refusing to engage points, trying to change the subject, or attempting to steer the argument in directions more favorable to this peculiar methods.
Or so it seems to me, FWIW.
Thank you ever so much for writing, dearest sister in Christ, and for your kind words of support!