No, you have indeed misunderstood. If God demonstrates his existence to someone through something other than an argument for his existence, then that is not a circular argument.
Quite right. It isn't.
What
is a circular argument is what I already stated, to wit:
Employing an argument in which the the thing yet to be proven is contained within the premises is question-begging/circular reasoning/petitio principii if you prefer. As you have done in trying to use "Even if all the other arguments were not very strong, we would still have this witness from God himself" as an argument for the existence of God. God is the thing yet to be demonstrated to exist - you can't assume the existence of God when trying to marshal an argument for God.
... which is what you did in section 6 of #92 already referred to.
I am not seeing to demonstrate to you that God exists.
... a comment which is, to say the very least, rather hollow given that you have not only written/compiled but posted here (presumably so that others can read it - otherwise,
why?) a meretricious 3,000+ word essay on reasons why somebody should believe in God.
What I wrote was that if God gives us a witness to himself, even if we can't demonstrate it to others, that is sufficient reason for us to believe.
Except that it isn't. This is still more circular reasoning, in that it assumes the very thing (
God) that the argument seeks to demonstrate (
God giving a witness to himself). I'm trying, and I fully admit failing, to see how I can possibly make this any clearer and simpler than I have already tried to make it. To believe that God has given you a witness to himself requires that you already have a prior belief that there is a God in the first place to give a witness to himself. God has to be the starting point, the first assumption - the presupposition if you will - before you accept the conclusion (
God has given a witness to himself) as valid. This is an unevidenced, unsupported, in fact if you're a non-cognitivist like me an
undefined assumption. Atheists see no reason, no rationale, no justification for making that assumption. In that sense atheism is the null hypothesis, the default, the application of Occam's Razor to the God hypothesis: the basic ground state so long as God remains unevidenced (and, again for the non-cognitivists, undefined).
Furthermore, your determination that
God has given a witness to himself could, for a multitude of differing but related reasons, be entirely mistaken. And, while we're about it, for all manner of reasons - principally those bearing upon human psychology - is
vastly more likely to be so.
That's why I wrote that this bit was for Christians (in #92). It was not meant to be a means of convincing others of God's existence. Maybe I didn't put that very clearly.
You didn't. Why would it only be for Christians? This strikes me as mounting an argument for the belief in something aimed specifically at people who
already believe in that something. What, exactly, is the point of that? Yes, yes, yes, I know that the old phrase
preaching to the choir is the first, most obvious, perhaps even cliched recourse here, but it absolutely fits this case.
If I meet my wife, but cannot demonstrate to you that she exists, that is not a circular argument.
Correct. It isn't. But then that isn't what I said, either about your wife or your rubber band collection.
As it is ""absolutely groaning with logical fallacies and horrendous non-arguments which have been skinned, boned, gutted and given a decent burial a million times before" is very pretty language, claims much and demonstrates nothing.
It claims that you are either ignorant of or know but choose not to engage with the multifarious points and arguments, put forward by an embarrassment of riches of philosophers, scientists and other thinkers down the ages, which either rebut or refute the arguments you marshalled in #92. Your #92 demonstrates this.
