[Hank Kerchief]

Hank Kerchief has pointed out that the way get a believer to understand disbelief is through appropriate use of definitions. My reply was that if the definition is nebulous enough, ala Deists' ideas about God, the definitional approach might not work.

Yes, you said: " It seems, though, that your argument is vulnerable to a nebulous definition - for instance, that God created the universe. The Deists believed that God's "testament" was in His works, which we see all around us."

That is my very point. The Deists do not define God, they simply use the word and it amounts to nothing more than "whatever came before everything else." As soon as someone attempts to assign actual attributes to it, it becomes testable and probably disproveable. In the mean time, to believe in something on the basis of a "word" without definition is identical to my Morkano, which exists and no one can prove it doesn't, because it has no definition.

Absurd? Just because I used the spelling Morkano instead of God?

Hank

[jimt]

As soon as someone attempts to assign actual attributes to it, it becomes testable and probably disproveable.

If I postulate the existence of gnorixes, for example, who control the rate of corrosion on pennies, can you prove they don't exist? Particularly if I'm fast enough with the soft shoe routine to add any facts you may deduce about penny corrosion to the gnorixes catalog of behavior?

While Occam's razor points us in the right direction, I think proving gnorixes don't exist could be a lifetime effort with no guarantee of success.