English

The Windowless Room: On the Unintelligibility of Theism

Imagine you live in a room with no windows. These walls are the whole of what you get. Everything you have ever known you found in here. Now someone tells you there's a maker on the far side of the wall, and all you have to do is look. So you picture a window. Every piece of it comes off these walls. The frame, the glass, the little latch, scavenged from the only room you have. And the thing you imagine on the other side, the maker, the outside, the real, you build that out of in-here too. You take what surrounds you, shuffle it, and call it new. The view is inside. So is the window. There is no looking out, because there is nothing to look through and nothing on the other side that didn't come from this side first. People ask what it would take for me to believe in God. They think the answer is some argument I haven't heard yet, or some experience that would finally tip me over. They don't grasp how far off the question actually lands. Theism isn't simply unconvincing to me. It's unintelligible. Asking me to believe is like being handed a fork and told to eat fraud. The sentence is grammatical. There is nothing on the plate. The text is dedicated to the public domain under CC0. No

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