The trouble is, the soda can people are clearly physical. God is somehow simultaneously spiritual and capable of bending the physical to his will. The Soda can people seems like a more philosophically sound (and less trollish) version of the Flying Spaghetti Monster. No theologian with any credentials is going to argue that we could find God with a telescope, other than a few who are only taken seriously when they show a church mailing list a pretty picture of the Hubble Deep Field and write some religious poetry on it.
Theism nowadays is mostly like the philosophical zombies concept, except the claim is that God actually does things and hides them to test everyone’s faith. (Based on my extremely loose reading of the obscure elements of theology, this implies that there was a backstory where God went through a lot of suffering to become wise, which probably drove him insane. So basically, God is MoR Dumbledore, but also nonphysical somehow.)
“Spiritual” in this case is, of course, a semantic stopsign. I suppose if one wrote a very contrived map of the universe, it could include God without contradicting reality, but I’d only be impressed if it offered more predictive power than Traditional Chinese Medicine. (I think of TCM as where spiritualism and science meet without one annihilating the other; the qi concept has gone through variations that are sorta-kinda loose approximations of some concepts like thermodynamics and conservation of energy, vaguely like alchemy, which makes it subject to refinement through experimentation, until we get to today and the people who use the concept predictively admit that there’s no magic and it’s a way of modeling reality that just uses pretty semantic shortcuts. God appears to be a purely psychosocial concept; maybe a scientific study of tulpas can dissolve it?)
ETA: This does not go against the core of your argument, though—the God concept proposes something complex that hasn’t been observed ever, and treats it as not only as valid as things that have been observed, but many times more so.
Consider whether your belief is making things clearer for you, or if you’re stuck on point Z in an “A->B” discussion. Start by asking yourself, since God in your proposed philosophy is nonphysical, comprised of no readable patterns or energies and exerts no predictable, tangible effect on reality; What is the ontological difference between a universe WITH this strictly conceptual god and a universe with no god at all. Think about it for at least a minute… Okay, you’re back? Now, if your answer is anything like “Well, there wouldn’t be any difference we could see” then you might have to wonder who you’re really arguing against, why you’re arguing it and whether you’re willing to give your perspective a real new start. Eliezer Yudkowsky’s resources cover all of that much more eloquently, including an editorial that essentially gets across that sometimes agreeing to disagree is just a way to avoid having to reexamine one’s beliefs, so just a pat reminder to review the sequences if needs be. I’ll do my part by entertaining the idea of a non-physical form for a god: We should still be able to observe some kind of pattern that could indicate an outside influence, like binary flashes from the stars that contain all of god’s blueberry tart recipes, or predictable and repeatable inspirations in at least one person claiming to be a prophet, or some statistically or psychologically significant distinction between the health, sanity or safety of practitioners of different faiths and similar living conditions. Lacking this, I can still see how my aluminum can people are argumentum ad absurdium, but that was sort of the whole original point of the thought experiment by my interpretation.
since God in your proposed philosophy is nonphysical, comprised of no readable patterns or energies and exerts no predictable, tangible effect on reality
In traditional Judeo-Christian-Muslim theology God is nonphysical but can take physical forms at will, and while He is not predictable (generally speaking, there are nuances there), He certainly can exert tangible effects on reality.
We should still be able to observe some kind of pattern
Not necessarily. Imagine that God lives in high-dimensional space and His blueberry tart recipes happen to be stored in the fifth and sixth dimensions...
Responding to this after so long is strange. Anyways:
There is a solid, evidence based reason that we suspect higher dimensions are real rather than strictly theoretical. Particles quantum tunnel, occasionally interacting with the observable dimensions. If and when we develop the capacity to more fully explore these inconceivable aspects of reality we can sweep the corners of the eleventh dimension for the traces of deities (or their tart-crafting secrets) that have yet to provide any evidence for themselves.
And in that untold time, when we’ve devised ways to knit the universe back together on one end while it unravels like a cheap knit sweater on the other from entropy, when we’ve conquered death and consciously seized the future of our living form, when we have faster than light travel and can wrangle a star like cowboys breaking a new calf, when the difference between the perceived and the real can be eradicated through the combined talents and ever growing powers of ten trillion eternal human minds… Maybe then we can stop wasting hot breath allowing for the theoretical existence of something that we have no factual reason to believe in.
The trouble is, the soda can people are clearly physical. God is somehow simultaneously spiritual and capable of bending the physical to his will. The Soda can people seems like a more philosophically sound (and less trollish) version of the Flying Spaghetti Monster. No theologian with any credentials is going to argue that we could find God with a telescope, other than a few who are only taken seriously when they show a church mailing list a pretty picture of the Hubble Deep Field and write some religious poetry on it.
Theism nowadays is mostly like the philosophical zombies concept, except the claim is that God actually does things and hides them to test everyone’s faith. (Based on my extremely loose reading of the obscure elements of theology, this implies that there was a backstory where God went through a lot of suffering to become wise, which probably drove him insane. So basically, God is MoR Dumbledore, but also nonphysical somehow.)
“Spiritual” in this case is, of course, a semantic stopsign. I suppose if one wrote a very contrived map of the universe, it could include God without contradicting reality, but I’d only be impressed if it offered more predictive power than Traditional Chinese Medicine. (I think of TCM as where spiritualism and science meet without one annihilating the other; the qi concept has gone through variations that are sorta-kinda loose approximations of some concepts like thermodynamics and conservation of energy, vaguely like alchemy, which makes it subject to refinement through experimentation, until we get to today and the people who use the concept predictively admit that there’s no magic and it’s a way of modeling reality that just uses pretty semantic shortcuts. God appears to be a purely psychosocial concept; maybe a scientific study of tulpas can dissolve it?)
ETA: This does not go against the core of your argument, though—the God concept proposes something complex that hasn’t been observed ever, and treats it as not only as valid as things that have been observed, but many times more so.
Consider whether your belief is making things clearer for you, or if you’re stuck on point Z in an “A->B” discussion. Start by asking yourself, since God in your proposed philosophy is nonphysical, comprised of no readable patterns or energies and exerts no predictable, tangible effect on reality; What is the ontological difference between a universe WITH this strictly conceptual god and a universe with no god at all. Think about it for at least a minute… Okay, you’re back? Now, if your answer is anything like “Well, there wouldn’t be any difference we could see” then you might have to wonder who you’re really arguing against, why you’re arguing it and whether you’re willing to give your perspective a real new start. Eliezer Yudkowsky’s resources cover all of that much more eloquently, including an editorial that essentially gets across that sometimes agreeing to disagree is just a way to avoid having to reexamine one’s beliefs, so just a pat reminder to review the sequences if needs be. I’ll do my part by entertaining the idea of a non-physical form for a god: We should still be able to observe some kind of pattern that could indicate an outside influence, like binary flashes from the stars that contain all of god’s blueberry tart recipes, or predictable and repeatable inspirations in at least one person claiming to be a prophet, or some statistically or psychologically significant distinction between the health, sanity or safety of practitioners of different faiths and similar living conditions. Lacking this, I can still see how my aluminum can people are argumentum ad absurdium, but that was sort of the whole original point of the thought experiment by my interpretation.
In traditional Judeo-Christian-Muslim theology God is nonphysical but can take physical forms at will, and while He is not predictable (generally speaking, there are nuances there), He certainly can exert tangible effects on reality.
Not necessarily. Imagine that God lives in high-dimensional space and His blueberry tart recipes happen to be stored in the fifth and sixth dimensions...
Responding to this after so long is strange. Anyways: There is a solid, evidence based reason that we suspect higher dimensions are real rather than strictly theoretical. Particles quantum tunnel, occasionally interacting with the observable dimensions. If and when we develop the capacity to more fully explore these inconceivable aspects of reality we can sweep the corners of the eleventh dimension for the traces of deities (or their tart-crafting secrets) that have yet to provide any evidence for themselves. And in that untold time, when we’ve devised ways to knit the universe back together on one end while it unravels like a cheap knit sweater on the other from entropy, when we’ve conquered death and consciously seized the future of our living form, when we have faster than light travel and can wrangle a star like cowboys breaking a new calf, when the difference between the perceived and the real can be eradicated through the combined talents and ever growing powers of ten trillion eternal human minds… Maybe then we can stop wasting hot breath allowing for the theoretical existence of something that we have no factual reason to believe in.