“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. Continue reading →