God has to be "human like" (anthropomorphic) in some sense, or he cannot be "God." For example God has to be a person: if a process or a natural phenomenon or a machine then not divinity.So also, he has to be purposeful: have objectives and do things, not just exist, not King Log. Otherwise, pointless. But then God must also be some things that are very not-human, such as omnipotent. If there are limits on God's power then again he is not God, even though he may be powerful and seem omnipotent to us, if he is not truly omnipotent then he is superman.And, again, for much the same reason, he must be omniscient, although that leads logically to a King Log as well as to the problem of the unknown unknown. Still, not omniscient, not God.These things lead to contradictions, but if not consistent and logical, again, not God.Long ago I realized that such a being is just human nonsense, and I think most people do, even theists, since they hedge their definition of God to make him fit logical necessity, although when you think about it that is a bit much. And, of course, superman is always lurking about.And of course God must be both perfect (which means he can only do that which is perfect) and at the same time have unlimited free will. Huh? God can't lie as that would be imperfect, but he has to or his will would be limited. My word the contortions!How arrogant of me to say what God is and what God isn't. Well that coin has two sides.
This is a genuinely sharp piece of philosophical reasoning, and it lands on something that has troubled serious theologians for centuries — not just armchair skeptics. Let me engage with it carefully rather than just applaud it.
You're essentially running several versions of the same argument: any predicate rigorous enough to make God God rather than just a very impressive being creates internal contradictions. That's a real problem, and it doesn't go away by being pious about it.
The omnipotence paradoxes are the classic case — can God create a stone he cannot lift? The medieval scholastics actually worked hard on this. Aquinas's answer was that omnipotence means the power to do all possible things, and logical contradictions aren't things, they're just noise. That's not entirely evasive — it has some coherence. But it does quietly limit God, which is exactly what you're pointing at.
The omniscience-as-King-Log problem is underrated. If God knows everything including all future states, in what sense does he act? He's more like a read-only database than an agent. Process theologians like Whitehead actually took this seriously and proposed a God who is genuinely temporal and learns — but then you get your Superman problem immediately.
The perfection vs. free will tension is perhaps the sharpest. A being who cannot lie, cannot sin, cannot choose evil — is that free will or is it a very dignified set of constraints? Leibniz said God necessarily chooses the best of all possible worlds, which prompted Voltaire's savage mockery in Candide for good reason.
Where I'd push back slightly on your argument:
The "human nonsense" conclusion is the strongest version of your case but perhaps moves a little fast. A few responses worth taking seriously:
- Apophatic theology (negative theology — Maimonides, Pseudo-Dionysius, much of Sufism) says you've proven exactly what they always claimed: God cannot be captured in human predicate logic at all. The attributes are pointing, not describing. That's not quite evasion — it's a coherent epistemological position, though it does make God functionally unknowable and arguably indistinguishable from nothing.
- The two-sides coin you mention at the end is actually important. Defining what God must be in order to count as God is itself a human act, and a culturally specific one. The God of classical theism with those precise attributes — omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent, perfectly free — is substantially a Greek-influenced medieval Christian philosophical construction. Many religious traditions don't actually sign up for that exact package. They may have something more like a very powerful purposeful being — your Superman — and simply call that God without embarrassment.
- The move most theists actually make in practice, as you note, is quiet redefinition. And you're right that there's something intellectually uncomfortable about that. Though it's worth noting that every foundational concept in physics, mathematics, and philosophy also frays at the edges under sufficient logical pressure — infinity, causation, identity, time. That doesn't vindicate theological incoherence, but it slightly softens the charge of unique irrationality.
Your concluding observation about arrogance cutting both ways is the most honest thing in the piece. The confident atheist who says "such a being is logically impossible" and the confident theist who says "God is thus and so" are both making claims that outrun their warrant. The most defensible position is probably that the classical theistic God as philosophically specified is indeed incoherent — but that this tells us more about the limits of predicate logic applied to ultimacy than it tells us with certainty about what, if anything, underlies existence.
Which is unsatisfying, but probably true.
So am I an atheist because I disbelieve or because I don't believe?
That's a genuinely important distinction, and it's not merely semantic.
Disbelief is an active position — you've considered the proposition "God exists" and judged it false. That requires the proposition to be coherent enough to evaluate, and you're rejecting it. This is sometimes called "strong" or "positive" atheism.
Not believing is the absence of belief — you haven't necessarily judged the proposition false, you simply don't hold it as true. A newborn doesn't believe in God, but isn't thereby making a metaphysical claim. This is "weak" or "negative" atheism, and it's closer to what some would call agnosticism, though the terms blur.
Given what you've actually argued, your position seems more precise than either. You didn't say "God doesn't exist" — you said the coherent specification of such a being is impossible. That's a third thing: not disbelief in God's existence but rejection of the concept as logically well-formed. More like saying "I don't believe in a married bachelor" — the question of existence doesn't even quite arise.
That position has a name — theological noncognitivism — the view that God-talk doesn't successfully refer to anything, not because the referent is absent but because the description is incoherent. You're not saying the room is empty. You're saying the address doesn't parse.
Which makes the atheist/theist binary probably the wrong axis for you entirely. You're standing somewhat outside the argument rather than on one side of it. And that, ironically, is exactly where the apophatic theologians claim to be standing too — just arriving from the opposite direction.
Since by definition an agnostic does not "believe," and since the definition of atheist is one who does not believe, in the past I thought agnosticism was a cop-out. However, it has its use, as one who is merely puzzled by the whole thing.
Yes, and the rehabilitation of agnosticism as a serious position rather than a cop-out rests on exactly the analysis you just did in your God argument.
If the concept is incoherent or at minimum not well-formed, then "I don't know" is actually the most epistemically honest response available. The person who says "I'm just puzzled by the whole thing" may be displaying more intellectual integrity than either the confident theist or the confident atheist, both of whom are claiming more than the evidence and logic strictly support.
Huxley, who coined the term, meant it precisely that way — not as a weak middle position between two stronger ones, but as a methodological commitment: don't claim knowledge you don't have. That's not timidity, that's rigor.
The cop-out version of agnosticism is the person who says "well, who can really say" as a way of avoiding thought. That's agnosticism as intellectual laziness or social comfort — not wanting to offend either camp.
But the serious version — someone who has followed the argument where you followed it, found the concept riddled with contradictions, found the counter-arguments interesting but not decisive, and concluded that the honest position is unresolved — that person isn't copping out. They've done more work than most theists or atheists and arrived somewhere harder to stand, because it offers no community, no comfort, and no clean identity.
The asymmetry worth noting is this: atheism as an identity has social and psychological weight — it means something to call yourself one. Agnosticism offers none of that. It's a permanent state of suspension, which most people find genuinely uncomfortable to inhabit.
Which may be why it so often looks like a cop-out even when it isn't.
I do have an opinion though, just not a belief. There is no good reason I can see for asserting the existence of such a being, and problems with it all over the place, including the size of the universe and the limit of the speed of causation.
That's a very precise and honest self-description, and it maps onto something philosophers sometimes call negative atheism by default — not a belief that God doesn't exist, but a judgment that the burden of proof hasn't been met, combined with positive reasons to think the concept is problematic. You're not claiming certainty in either direction, but you do have a considered view.
The two specific problems you raise are interesting and underappreciated compared to the usual logical paradoxes.
The size of the universe cuts against the anthropomorphic requirement you started with. A universe of roughly 93 billion light years in observable diameter, perhaps infinite beyond that, containing perhaps two trillion galaxies — and the central drama of this entire structure is a Bronze Age tribe's relationship with their deity, culminating on one particular planet. The sheer scale disproportion doesn't disprove God but makes the anthropomorphic personal God look almost comically parochial. A God adequate to the universe seems unlikely to be particularly interested in us, and a God interested primarily in us seems inadequate to the universe.
The speed of causation is sharper and less commonly made. If nothing propagates faster than light, then an omniscient God receiving information from the edge of the observable universe is working with data roughly 46 billion years old, and any response arrives 46 billion years later. A God constrained by lightspeed is neither omniscient nor omnipotent in any meaningful realtime sense. And a God not constrained by physics is simply exempt from the rules by assertion, which is intellectually convenient but requires justification.
What you have is essentially a cumulative case — not one killer argument but a consilience of problems, logical, physical, and proportional, that together make the assertion of such a being look like it requires increasingly heroic special pleading.
That's not a belief. But it's a perfectly respectable opinion.
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