Oy. It's too early in the morning for logic, but Mrs Tilton just had to prod me with a link to this theological argument:

Think about it: what are the chances that a media whore like Gannon would turn out to be an actual whore? It's impossible. It boggles the mind how infinitely unlikely this is. It's like if you found someone pirating CDs, and it turns out he actually had a peg leg and a parrot on his shoulder and sailed around the Caribbean saying "arrrrrr!" and plundering booty. You wouldn't believe it. But there it is: impossible, but true. Impossible truths are miracles, and only God can work miracles. Ergo, God exists. Q.E.D.

I'm sorry, but there's nothing revolutionary or in the least bit novel about that, although I always appreciate philosophy that throws in a pirate or two. All theology sounds like that to me…"umpty-tumpty squigglety-poo, therefore God." Man, if you want those kinds of laughs, you don't have to read The Poor Man, just crack open your Bible.

Wouldn't you know it, though, at the same time that Wilkins fella is playing logic games (it's understandable, though, and so we should forgive him; he is a philosopher, you know.) He's gone and invented a new logical operator, the floogle, to describe another common line of argument.

Floogle is the "possibly-therefore-true" operator. It is possible that life was made by an intelligent design (despite the complete lack of any reason to think so), therefore it was. It is possible Iraq had WMDs, therefore they did. It is possible that Clinton was a sleeper spy for the Communist Chinese, therefore he was. And so forth.

Here's the floogle:

And here's its use:

Possibility  God

The symmetry with the Poor Man's argument is obvious. Not being one to allow Wilkins to steal all the glory, I have therefore invented a complementary operator, the thingumagod.

Impossibility  God

These together will allow us to compress all religious arguments about the existence of god into a series of floogles and thingumagods, thereby both shortening the discussion and making it immediately apparent that it is all a lot of fatuous twaddle. (We may also need a non sequitur operator to be truly complete, but I will leave invention of that one as an exercise for the reader.)

I've also invented another operator (wow, but logic is so easy!)

It's a unary operator that negates the previous two operations. I call it the bullpoop.