“The Courtier’s Reply,” as described by RationalWiki, involves “telling a non-believer that he should study theology before he can properly discuss whether a god exists.”
Daniel Fincke, a guy who gets paid to philosophize, has an answer to this. He wants us atheists to stop arguing against strawman versions of religion once and for all. Instead, he says we should focus on what they really believe, in a purely theological sense.
And it’s important to note that Christians don’t believe in such silly and absurd things like that God is a man in the sky with a beard. I used to be a devout Christian and I never thought any such silly thing. God is ineffable. God cannot be material. God cannot, as sophisticated theology and philosophy teaches us, be “a” being at all. God is, rather than ineffable ground of all being or Being Itself. God is that from which all other beings derive their essence and that by which they are instantiated in reality. To call Him merely “a” being would be absurd since that would imply He was just one of the beings rather than that inexplicable, self-existence in which, and through which, all those beings have their being.
And Christians are very knowledgable about theology. They understand all this. The average person in the pew would leave Christianity tomorrow if you told him its true meaning was that there was an old man in the sky with a beard who has human emotions and thinks human-like thoughts. He would laugh you right out of his house if you talked about God in such anthropomorphic terms. A sophisticated theologian would fail you for being about 2,000 years behind the curve on human knowledge if you indicated you thought about God as being anthropomorphic like that. God is not a human just because we use human metaphors to describe God any more than I am a rock just because my best friend says to me, “Dan, you are my rock in times of trouble.” And we atheists need to understand that Christians are not ridiculous. They only ever mean to speak metaphorically about God. When Christians refer to God as “father” they don’t mean anything so literal as that God was a man who had sex and conceived them through that. They obviously say God is a father only in order to express in human terms that the “Ground of all Being” is the source of our being. This has been known for centuries of Christian thought.
Satire doesn’t go to a higher level than this.
