By Schubert Ogden
The Notebooks of Schubert Ogden
One understanding of what it is to conceive the existence/nonexistence of something is that it is to imagine experiencing its presence/ absence. But if this is, indeed, what it means to conceive the existence/nonexistence of something, it seems clear that the nonexistence of God is inconceivable.
Consider the following reasoning.
To experience the absence of a thing x is to experience the presence of some other thing y, whose presence is incompatible with that of x. But it is a contradiction of the very concept of God to suppose that the presence of anything could be incompatible with the (omni-)presence of God. Therefore, there is no way of imagining experiencing God's absence, because one cannot imagine experiencing the presence of anything that would be incompatible with God's presence.
Assuming the understanding of what it means to conceive God's nonexistence, then, there is no way of conceiving it. For one cannot imagine experiencing the presence of anything with which God's presence would or could be incompatible.
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