Which is why the duck was set up as the less preposterous example. You start adding new roles for God and it just gets further and further out there.
But it’s not adding new roles, but a fundamentally different conception of God. Whether one finds any particular asserted attribute of God to be implausible or absurd can be discussed. Some claimed qualities will be more like feathers and bills, but we must also be on guard not to dismiss possible attributes just because we don’t like them.
You’d started on this point earlier. i.e. Just take a conception of God, strip out all the stuff you find implausible, and what you’re left with is a concept of God that works for you.
The trick is, with me, if I strip out all the stuff I find implausible, what I’m left with no longer qualifies as a god in any sense. In fact, I’m pretty sure what’s left is just a squirrel. You know, mammals being less offensive than birds and all that 😉
I’m not saying strip stuff out until it works for you. I’m saying through the application of reason (and increased knowledge) certain conceptions may be effectively ruled out (eg those that resemble an unknowable and irrelevant cosmic duck) while others remain plausible, whether or not one accepts them as fact. The idea that any concept of God may be ruled out remains, as Frink said, more unlikely than someone knowing for certain that God exists.
If you treat God as man’s own creation from the get-go then that is where you will end up. Your standard for implausibility remains opaque. The cosmic duck may be - unbeknownst to you - conveying the secrets of the universe to you, but there is plenty we might say is “implausible” without indicating we actually possess especial insight. I wager there are people here on both sides of the debates over time travel, string theory, sasquatch, ghosts - I find the first two implausible, though I wouldn’t say I know they are false, and the latter two factual.
I still don’t know how anyone can have such certainty to know there is not a God.
*Squirrels, who have a longstanding feud with birds, are awesome.