It was not an appeal to authority, nor was it intended to support any of those arguments. It was intended to underscore the point that a particular philosophica

It was not an appeal to authority, nor was it intended to support any of those arguments. It was intended to underscore the point that a particular philosophical argument is not automatically invalid simply because some people, no matter how intelligent and rational, do not find it convincing. In effect, it was a rejection of gp's appeal to his own authority as a student of philosophy. As for your latter point: if you disprove the possibility of deities with a particular quality or set of qualities, I can then describe a deity which lacks those qualities and is therefore outside the set of deities you have proven impossible. For example, if you can somehow prove that there has never been divine intervention of any form (which I highly doubt is possible to prove), then I could respond by positing a deity that does not intervene in the temporal universe at all, but instead rules only in the afterlife. Since the afterlife is beyond temporal measurement, it is by definition beyond empirical observation, and there is therefore no way you can disprove the existence of an afterlife. By extension, there is no way you can disprove the existence of a deity which rules the afterlife.