Interesting ideas. Thanks for posting this article.

• You wrote, “…arguments for and against the existence of God are ineffective because they did little to convince people to change their belief about God.”

— Is this the only goal of an argument, to convince others to change a belief? A great many philosophers argue in order to plant a seed or challenge an idea — or at least to try to see if they are missing something that they haven’t thought of.

• I am not clear on your reasoning that God exists because it is an idea. Do ideas exist? Ideas are thoughts; they are fleeting. Can we say they exist when, by the time the conscious mind becomes aware of them, they are already in the past?

• Why don’t ghosts exist? Are they really nonphysical? We would have to broaden the common idea of what something means when we say it is physical. At one point in history, not so long ago, science could not prove that air existed, but now we know it is a physical thing that exists. If a ghost is visible or can be sensed in any other way then why are they not physical? This brings up the question of how a ghost can be seen by the physical eyes if it is not itself physical.

• I agree with this that you wrote: it “…is important to define what you mean by existence before you get started.”

• Your argument about existence reminds me of Plutarch’s ancient Greek thought experiment, The Ship of Theseus, about a ship that is completely rebuilt, plank by plank, and the original parts are used to build a new ship so that the question emerges as to which is the real ship? What, then, is existence except for another arbitrary concept of the psychologically conditioned mind? And what factors bear upon the idea of existence?