The YouTube channel "The Friendly Atheist" put out a video a while back called "20 Short Arguments Against God's Existence. " This is a playlist full of videos responding to each of those arguments one at a time, and here's the next one. "The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike.
" Keep in mind that you're supposed to think, "I shouldn't believe in God because He is Invisible and because invisible things are so much like things that aren't existing that I should assume He doesn't exist. There's a problem with this right? There's actually a lot of problems with this.
First off, it's in the idea of "Look, okay, invisible and non-existent things do look very much alike, but that's because of the quality of what things look like when they're invisible is that they're not visible. Like, this is just to say Invisible things are invisible, okay? That's right.
That's true. And non existent things would also be not visible, okay, hat's also true. But you can't actually walk this argument any further.
That's where the similarities end. Non-existent things are different than invisible things in that they have no causal relations in the real world. But there are invisible things which exist that have causal relations in the real world, like gravity.
I don't see gravity I can't physically see it. It's invisible, but it's definitely having a measurable impact in the world. Radiation's invisible but it can still kill you, right?
Whereas non-existent things - if it was non-existent radiation - it's gonna kill me. If it's invisible radiation, I'm dead. And so these are these are just qualitative differences between invisible and non-existent things.
Time is not a visible thing, but it's absolutely standing in constant impact with the world You don't conclude because you can't see time that time doesn't exist I mean you've likely checked the time length of this video before clicking it because you thought it mattered and it stood in causal relation with you. So the question is going to be "Has God caused anything? Has God stood in causal relation with the world?
And I would say that the evidence for the inspiration of the scriptures, the evidence from the creation of the universe out of nothing, the grounding for moral values and duties, the various miracles that we have evidence for, including the resurrection of Jesus Christ, the philosophical arguments for God's existence, these things are based upon God having interacted with the world in a causal fashion. So God's nothing like non-existent things but yes, He's not visible. So because God is not visible He's not part of this creation in some observable, you know directly observable thing, we observe Him indirectly, we see design and we see beauty and we see, we see the existence of simply anything and all this stuff is evidence for God's existence -- it's indirect evidence, and it's still very powerful and very important.
So saying that God doesn't exist because He's not readily visible , I mean, this is like, this is like saying people in wheelchairs don't exist because they don't leave footprints. Think about it -- like we don't expect them to leave footprints. That's the nature of them being in wheelchairs.
So we look for different kinds of evidence than footprints when we're trying to identify them. So if I, if I was able to put God in a beaker and observe Him in that sense, well, that wouldn't even be God, like, that's, that's obviously not God. Why?
'cause I was able to put it in a beaker and observe it - like this is just simply It's it's almost kindergarten level complaints against Christianity; yet it's coming from Hemant Mehta who considers himself the atheist voice, the voice of atheism, at least in some circles online and I think that it demonstrates something. It demonstrates that sometimes high up, the high up level of atheist apologetics, it seems to me, Is sometimes really irrational stuff-- like kindergarten complaints against Christianity. Yeah, we think Go's invisible but invisible is not the same as non-existent.
This is, this is just silly. Sometimes well-known even well respected atheists are coming with arguments against God that are just downright silly. Just silly.
And if you stop and think about them for just a few moments you can see right through the problem - no pun intended with the invisible nature of things. So the next video in this series is actually about divine hiddenness, which is a massive complaint, a huge issue that we need to deal with when we're talking about God's existence So please check the playlist, get that video, and remember this is part of a series -- you want to watch all of them.
