That the concept 'real god' has any coherent definition hence meaning.
Sure looks like a "belief" to me. Even a statement of reality/truth. I'm just not seeing any "unbelief" in it.
And I've responded by asking you (a) do you mean a real 'god', a 'god' with objective existence? and (b) if not, who cares? and (c) if so, what's a meaningful definition of this 'real god' such that if we find a candidate we can tell whether it's 'a god' / 'God' or not. And you haven't offered such a definition.
I am not 'theism'. Are we discussing theism, or my understanding and practice of theism? I thought we were discussing theism as a philosophical proposition; that God/gods exist. Leaving it to each of us to determine for ourselves the nature and effect of such God/gods would be. Normally I'd be happy to discuss my own view of it but you seem to have rejected all definitions as "incoherent" prior to even knowing what they are. Not a very rational thing to do, is it? ... Allowing your bias to overwhelm your curiosity and reason like that.
What does 'transcend the mechanisms of physical existence' mean? The only way to be real is to have objective existence, and if something's not real in that sense, the only other way for it to exist is by being imaginary, no?
If imagination is not real, because it's not a physical object, then the idea of reality itself is not real; which negates the whole premise that reality requires physical objectivity. And if imagination is real because it's comprised of physical activity in a physical brain, then so is "God", as it is also comprised of the the same physical activity in the same physical brain.
The problem here, for you, is that you want to assert that the idea of a thing is not real, when every "thing" that we humans experience and understand, including "objective reality" itself, is experienced and understood as an idea. And anything that may or may not exist apart from and beyond human cognitive comprehension (idealization) is by default beyond the reach of this or any other discussion.
God, like love, truth, reality, objectivity, and everything else we can name is an idea about reality derived from our experience of reality. If any of them "exist" apart from or beyond our human ideological cognition, we have no way of knowing it. Literally. So your "objective reality" is just as much an ideological myth as "God" is. And there is no way around this. Which is why atheism is a logical failure from the start, and is also why atheists are so determined to pretend that they don't believe in it when they clearly do. Atheism would not be a logical failure if it would base it's justification not on knowledge, but on value, as most expressions of theism, are. But most atheists are so caught up in their own bias and denial that they can't even consider atheism as an act of faith.
That appears to be an amplified take on the qualia argument. Human mentation has been the subject of an ever-growing amount of research as better and better tools have become available since the 1990s. My sense of self, complete with memory, speech, interior dialog, perception, understanding, &c &c, is the product of the biochemistry of my brain. No modern research gives the slightest encouragement to dualism.
So is "God". And the brain functions via comparing and contrasting information sets, so dualism is inevitable. Most of what we think we "know" is known against the conceptual background of it's opposite: here/there, good/bad, now/then, me/not me, real/not real, true/false, and so on.
Love is also much studied. We experience it subjectively, but that experience is created particular biochemicals (especially hormones) interacting with the brain.
Same goes for everything else we experience, including "God". It's ALL cognitive experience. And as such, it's all "real".
'Truth', to me, means conformity with / correspondence to / accurate reflection of, reality. Reality means the world external to the self.
The problem is that there is no "world external to the self" that the self could possibly apprehend. So you are using your "self" to define something that, by your own definition, you cannot know, but only surmise (imagine). Which is exactly what you are accusing theists of doing, and then negating as invalid. What you're proclaiming, here, is nothing but a blind bias. And how is that different from any theist of any sort proclaiming the reality of their own personal concept of "God"? You proclaim the existence of an "objective reality" that you cannot possibly know or prove because you are the "subject" in the terms, "subjectivity" and "subjective reality". And you cannot possibly escape from that condition. And yet you are using what you imagine to be this "objective reality" to negate everyone else's subjective conceptualizations of reality and truth for being subjective and imaginary.
Can you see how wildly incoherent this reasoning and behavior is?
