Whether God's Existence Can Be Proven X

OK, so we're back.

As was mentioned previously, people generally take the proposition that no human being can prove that god exists as an easier position to establish than that "No sound argument with the conclusion that God exists is logically possible." They are sometimes surprised to learn, however, that to assert that no human being can prove that God exists is also not entirely clear for two reasons.

First, it must be pointed out that "can" refers to what human beings are capable of, not to what they have actually accomplished. If human beings actually do something, then obviously they can do it; but if they do not actually do something, it does not follow that they are incapable of doing it. Just as there are many things which human beings do not do which, nonetheless, they are able to do, so also it does not follow that human beings are incapable of proving that God exists simple because they do not actually do this. Therefore, the proposition that no human being can prove that God exists must be distinguished from the proposition that no human being actually proves that God exists.

But a second ambiguity still remains, however, since the temporal modality of these propositions is unclear. To assert that no human being can prove that God exists might be a proposition about what is presently so, or instead what is so for all of time. The same applies to the proposition about what human beings actually do.

This distinction generates the second and third propositions which one might have in mind when one says "It's impossible to prove that God exists," namely: "No human being for all of time is capable of proving that God exists," and, "No human being for all of time proves that God exists."