I for one, do not argue that gods cannot exist. I simply see no evidence of them. Funny how you don't appeal to the fourth dimension to argue for the existence of Odin or Zeus. Only for the Christian god, right?
There are pre-Christian, pagan conceptions of God that satisfy the kind of preconditions and postulates that
@izzy88 often discusses (i.e. a Creator that is Being itself and the ground of existence).
In discussing "Zeus" (a lowercase god) you are, if I may say so, conflating two very different ideas and critiquing one theistic concept in lieu of another which is suggesting something not at all the same. When Socrates spoke in the Platonic Dialogues of "
the god", he was referring to another philosophical conception about the ground of existence, quite distinct in his mind from his references to "gods" such as Zeus or Saturn.
The so-called monism or monotheism of the philosophers, such as Plato's Demiurge and Aristotle's "Unmoved Mover", actually
influenced the Christian theological conception of God.
In Platonism, for example, material reality is dependent upon a Supreme Monad ("Mind") that Plato in his
Timaeus calls "
the divine Craftsman (“Demiurge,” dêmiourgos, 28a6) who, imitating an unchanging and eternal model, imposes mathematical order to generate the ordered universe (kosmos)...the outcome of the deliberate intent of Intellect (nous)" [
Platonic Dialogues (360 BCE)].
Aristotle, likewise, had his "Unmoved Mover":
Unmoved mover - Wikipedia
The unmoved mover (Ancient Greek: ὃ οὐ κινούμενον κινεῖ, romanized: ho ou kinoúmenon kineî, lit. 'that which moves without being moved')[1] or prime mover (Latin: primum movens) is a concept advanced by Aristotle as a primary cause (or first uncaused cause)[2] or "mover" of all the motion in the universe.[3] As is implicit in the name, the unmoved mover moves other things, but is not itself moved by any prior action. In Book 12 (Greek: Λ) of his Metaphysics, Aristotle describes the unmoved mover as being perfectly beautiful, indivisible, and contemplating only the perfect contemplation:
self-contemplation
When we refer to the existence of God, we aren't technically referring to anything derived from purported divine revelation
per se but rather from the reasoned reflections of natural philosophers, many of whom antedate Christianity and actually shaped how we think about theism.
Consider:
How Did God Get Started? | Arion
As any student of ancient philosophy can tell you, we see the first appearance of a unitary God not in Jewish scripture, but in the thought of the Greek philosopher Plato, who wrote in the early fourth century bc.
Moreover, its origins go back to none other than Thales, who had proposed that nature can be explained by reference to a single unitary principle that pervades everything.
In his contribution to a groundbreaking book called Pagan Monotheism in Late Antiquity (1999), the classicist Martin West calls these monist principles “mindless gods,” which suits them admirably.1
Adding limited agency to this tradition, Plato in his dialogue Timaeus described what he called the Demiurge, a divine Craftsman who shapes the material world after ideal Forms that exist on a perfect immaterial plane. And Plato’s student Aristotle put his own twist on the concept, conceiving of God as an Unmoved Mover—a conception that would later, like Plato’s Demiurge, profoundly influence Jewish and Christian theology.
Centuries would pass before the Jews assimilated Greek thought, and scholars suspect that it was Hellenized Jewish philosophers such as Philo of Alexandria who imported the Greek idea of a single unitary God into the Jewish tradition. Philo, who was educated in Platonic philosophy and lived in the lifetime of Jesus, wrote, “God is One, but he has around him numberless potencies . . . ” Philo’s “potencies” would soon become the angels and demons (including Satan) whom early Christians would equate with the traditional gods of Greek polytheism as Christianity split off from this evolving Jewish tradition.
So one indisputable thing the last century or so of scholarly work has uncovered about faith and reason is that they are hardly the rigidly separate traditions we commonly take them for. It’s surprising for us, looking back, that reason came first. Even more surprising, perhaps, is how quickly monotheistic faith followed, starting with its first glimmering in the thought of Thales himself. As we perceive order in nature, it seems, we also gravitate to the One.
Please read this section of the review of a book by the Eastern Orthodox theologian David Bentley Hart in
The Guardian:
The one theology book all atheists really should read
The God attacked by most modern atheists, Hart argues, is a sort of superhero...
The superhero God can do anything he likes to the universe, including creating it to begin with. Demolishing this God is pretty straightforward: all you need to do is point to the lack of scientific evidence for his existence, and the fact that we don't need to postulate him in order to explain how the universe works.
Some people really do believe in this version of God: supporters of 'intelligent design', for example – for whom Hart reserves plenty of scorn – and other contemporary Christian and Muslim fundamentalists, too. But throughout the history of monotheism, Hart insists, a very different version of God has prevailed. In a post at The Week, Damon Linker sums up this second version better than I can:
… according to the classical metaphysical traditions of both the East and West, God is the unconditioned cause of reality – of absolutely everything that is – from the beginning to the end of time. Understood in this way, one can’t even say that God "exists" in the sense that my car or Mount Everest or electrons exist. God is what grounds the existence of every contingent thing, making it possible, sustaining it through time, unifying it, giving it actuality. God is the condition of the possibility of anything existing at all.
God, in short, isn't one very impressive thing among many things that might or might not exist; "not just some especially resplendent object among all the objects illuminated by the light of being," as Hart puts it. Rather, God is "the light of being itself", the answer to the question of why there's existence to begin with. In other words, that wisecrack about how atheists merely believe in one less god than theists do, though it makes a funny line in a Tim Minchin song, is just a category error. Monotheism's God isn't like one of the Greek gods, except that he happens to have no god friends. It's an utterly different kind of concept.
If you think this God-as-the-condition-of-existence argument is rubbish, you need to say why. And unlike for the superhero version, scientific evidence won't clinch the deal. The question isn't a scientific one, about which things exist. It's a philosophical one, about what existence is and on what it depends.
