No one can believe in “God” because it is characterised by pseudo-propositions …

That’s right. “God” is characterized entirely by pseudo-propositions; in other words, it is completely undefined.

What do I know about God? Let’s say I start out unfamiliar with the term. First, I am told that God is everywhere, AND nowhere. Well, both these predicates cannot hold simultaneously; so I don’t understand the claim; so I have learned exactly nothing. Next, I am told that God loves us, AND that we have no hope of truly understanding this love (since it allows, for example, the annihilation of entire populations). Again, I have learned nothing whatever about God. Finally, I am told that God is one being, AND three beings, AND that there is no contradiction between these two descriptions. Again I am bewildered and uninformed.

At this point I have heard an awful lot about God, but nothing I have heard has increased my knowledge or understanding even a little bit. I know nothing about God. And therefore, any opinion I now express about God is guaranteed to be bullshit. If I say that “God is love”, I am bullshitting, because that is not something I know. Neither can I know that I “believe in God”. The statement is not necessarily incoherent (I’m still wrestling with this question), but it is either incoherent or false. I can’t know that I believe in God, because I don’t know what the word “God” means.

On the other hand, to reply, “No, you don’t believe in God, because that’s not possible,” is not incoherent. It is shorthand for “Your claim to be ‘believing in God’ is not credible, because you don’t know what ‘God’ means (nor does anyone else).”

The sentence as a whole can be coherent even if the quoted phrase (“believing in God”) is not. “I believe in God” is nonsense; “‘I believe in God’ is nonsense” is not.

No one can believe in “God” because it is characterised by pseudo-propositions; despite all surface appearances of grammatical soundness and normative standards of language use, propositions about “God” are of the pseudo variety only because “God” is not really a word at all; it just looks an awful lot like one. It merely maintains syntax but is completely incapable of having anything predicated of it, any semantic content, or even attempting to refer; it is just an audible sound, an ecumenical grunt (you can have that one). And it is also impossible to argue for or against this position because we can’t even form a coherent sentence about the pseudo-word in question. By your own admission, your arguments are literally meaningless! You should, of course, excuse me if I don’t take meaningless arguments too seriously.

You can’t even step back from this radical argument either because as soon as you admit that “God” is a word like any other those pseudo-propositions become propositions again. You have to stick with your unsayable and arbitrary (it has to be arbitrary because you can’t even say why it is so)exclusion of a single (and relatively consistently used) word of the English language.

I … have no idea what you are referring to with Klarn … . I do have an idea what you are referring to when you say “God” …

No, you don’t. No one does. That is the point.

What is the difference between what “klarn” refers to and what “God” refers to? You don’t know. For every instance of “God” you really could write “[proper name]” and you’d be getting just as much meaning out of it – that is, none.

Note that a sentence with “[proper name]” as the subject can never be about the being that the placeholder refers to – because it does not refer to a being. (By definition, it is not a name; it is a symbol for a name.) Such a sentence can only be about the sentence itself, or its grammar, or some other abstract entity. It cannot be about the entity named by the thing the placeholder stands for. The thing the placeholder stands for is not part of the sentence – only the placeholder is. “God” is a placeholder.

We can keep doing this all down the line, all the pseudo-propositions which are supposed to form the characterization of “God” will turn out to be meaningful because “God” is a proper name which serves to designate a thing and the rest of the propositions will be constituted from meaningful words in correct syntactical relations. If at some point a theist, when asked why they believe, replied “God baboon sneakers optometrist” then your argument would work. But that is not very likely to happen. Now some of the composite propositions may well turn out to be illogical nonsense, in which case, they will be false, but they will all be propositions if they have the correct syntax. Just insisting that a perfectly formed proposition are meaningless doesn’t really hold water when we have a proper name which refers, or at least seems to, even if only to something mythological, and a syntactically sound form with meaningful predicates. “Jesus loves me” is a perfectly formed “proper name – verb – object” sentence, surely you can see that this is not the same as ““Europe albedo artichoke!” which is just a list of nouns, it has no syntax, and is not capable of being true or false for this reason, it really is meaningless, but it is very different from the sentence you compared it to.

If you are using Klarn as a proper name then I would ask you what you are referring to, I might then be interested to know whether it exists or not. I currently have no idea what you are referring to with Klarn though. I do have an idea what you are referring to when you say “God” and so do you, you admit this much just by using the word, your use of the word really does prove that you believe it to have some cognitive weight, unless you think that every instance of your use of the word could be replaced with something like the place holder [proper name] which makes no attempt to refer to anything but could maintain syntactical form. Personally, I would think of something like “the god of the old testament” or “a omniscient, omnipotent and omnibenevolent being.” It might be the case that these formulations are inconsistent, illogical and impossible but not meaningless. The same way that Pegasus is inconsistent and impossible but not meaningless. “Does a omniscient, omnipotent and omnibenevolent being exist?” has correct syntax and we know what these words mean even if there is no reason to believe that anything can exemplify them. It is also very different and considerably more common than your obviously contradictory examples.

It may be that “a solution to the problem of true negative existentials” is needed (by someone, somewhere), but that is not the problem in front of us in this thread.

I did not say that “we can’t refer to a non-existent”. It is rather that we can’t make a meaningful statement about an entity that is entirely undefined. “God does not exist” is meaningless – not because it’s a “negative existential” but because that famous noun has no definition. It is characterized only by pseudo-propositions like “God is everywhere, and nowhere” – that is, not at all. It is unspecified. It is an empty placeholder.

We do often say things like “God does not exist”, but that does not prove that they mean anything. Even considered as shorthand for “the question of God’s existence was settled a long time ago”, it is not quite true, if by settled you mean answered. “Does God exist?” cannot be answered, because it is not a question – just a meaningless series of words with a decorative curlicue at the end.

“The USSR does not exist anymore” is true, because we know what the term refers to. “Does the USSR exist?” is a proper question and has a proper answer. “Does klarn exist?” is a question that cannot be answered until we know what klarn is; and if we are certain that the word “klarn” has no meaning, then the question also has no meaning.

You might insist that even if “klarn” is known to be meaningless, “does klarn exist?” is a properly formed question and has a clear answer (“No”). But consider this. Let’s say we also know “blemb” to be meaningless. Is the question “does klarn exist?” the same question as “does blemb exist?”, or a different one? There is an infinite set of such mutually indistinguishable questions – and of course this set includes “does God exist?”. It is indistinguishable from “does klarn exist?”. Do you really think that “does klarn exist?” is a good question?

Frege might have been wrong about senses, most people think he was but the problem still remains that we need a solution to the problem of true negative existentials. I mean, “God does not exist” is true right? You say it quite often, something along the lines of: “We don’t need to entertain talk of God because the question of God’s existence was settled a long time ago, we need to figure out what this God talk really means.” On your account this is utterly meaningless, we can’t refer to a non-existent at all. “I don’t believe in your silly impossible God” is as hoplessly unintelligible as “I believe in God.”

Take a less controversial negative existential to better indicate why we need a solution to the problem: “The USSR does not exist anymore.” This is true, cognitivley meaningful, believable and about a negative existential. And the reverse is also believable, it would be a false belief in a non-existent thing.

If “God” fails to refer the proposition is still meaningful because “God” has a sense.

No, if it does not refer then it does not have a sense. I don’t care what Frege says. If you are not saying anything about anything, then you cannot even claim to have made a statement. No statement has been made.

Picture this. I stride to the podium and I proclaim, “Europe albedo artichoke!” Then I challenge the audience: “Are you with me, or against me?” They can’t be with me or against me. Why? Because I have not said anything! And in exactly the same way, you can neither agree nor disagree that (for example) “Jesus loves me.” It is not a statement, just a senseless series of words. And therefore, if I tell you that I believe it, you should say, “No. I don’t think you do.”

As for the argument though, I’m sorry but it just doesn’t work. If “Vicky loves me” is a proposition then so is “Jesus loves me”, they are grammatically identical in form. Both “Vicky” and “Jesus” are proper names. If “Jesus” is an impossible being then the proposition is false, or if Jesus exists but does not behave in a loving way the proposition is false, but either way the word “Jesus” is still functioning in as a proper name in truthbaring sentences. Just as it does in the proposition “Jesus was not the son of God.” The same is true of propositions like “God is omnipotent.” “God” is a proper name which serves to designate a referent and omnipotent is a property of the referent. If “God” fails to refer the proposition is still meaningful because “God” has a sense. God is imaginable even if not conceivable (logically possible). This talk of sense and reference is from Gottlob Frege’s “Sinn and Bedeutung” if you’re interested. If God is genuinely logically impossible then the word fails to refer to any actually existing entity but this does not rule out truthbaring propositions which include the word. Like “God is logically impossible” for example.

I’m humoring you way too much, but here goes another try.

When I say that Vicky loves me, I know who Vicky is and I have seen evidence of her love. The claim that Jesus loves me has neither of these properties. No one knows what this “Jesus” entity is. Clearly I can’t be loved by a man who is no longer alive, or by a pile of bones in the desert. Of course the loving “Jesus” is not a man but a special, immortal, non-human agent – but that’s a fairy-tale. We have no real information about this special Jesus. None. It’s all hearsay, and contradiction, and bluster. And what is the evidence that this impossible being loves anyone? What does that even mean? How do we know what it considers loving behavior? It’s not even human! Maybe it thinks that giving us occasional heart attacks is the kindest thing to do – or the funniest.

A statement like “Vicky loves me” might be vague, or false, or both – but “Jesus loves me” is utterly vacuous. So if ‘to believe’ means ‘to regard [a proposition] as plausible’, you cannot believe that “Jesus loves you”, because it’s not a proposition. It only looks like one.