Benjamin Cain
2 min readJan 4, 2022

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You ask what you're really saying. What you're doing is playing a game with words. You're equivocating on the meaning of "God," to avoid refutation. Of course there's evidence that love, forgiveness, justice, compassion, and goodness exist. We even know the chemical component of love (oxytocin, dopamine, serotonin, etc).

The theistic God isn't just love or justice or goodness. God is supposed to be a personal creator of the universe who exists outside of the universe but who intervenes in it to guide its evolution or to fulfill his or her mysterious plans. Those plans may involve love, forgiveness, and justice, but God isn't identical to those plans, according to theistic religions. God is an eternal, immaterial creative person, the supreme being because God exists before and after the whole natural universe.

By identifying God with ideals or with psychological realities we all take for granted, you're trivializing theistic religions. You're watering them down and cheapening them, all because you'd rather avoid criticism.

So you've also missed the point of the "spaghetti monster" analogy. The point is that the theist often plays word games, defining "God" to make the deity artificially immune to falsification. Essentially, this article of yours falls right into the trap set out by the spaghetti monster analogy. If God were a flying spaghetti monster, how could we tell? The definition of "God" is arbitrary and nonempirical. It's just an empty word game.

We take certain psychological phenomena for granted, but do you want God to be only subjectively real, like a matter of artistic taste? And would it make sense for people to be punished or rewarded for eternity because they reject or accept a mere subjective opinion? Again, you're trivializing and weakening religion to save it, which makes for a pyrrhic victory.

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Benjamin Cain
Benjamin Cain

Written by Benjamin Cain

Ph.D. in philosophy / Knowledge condemns. Art redeems. / https://benjamincain.substack.com / https://ko-fi.com/benjamincain / benjamincain8@gmailDOTcom

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