What are the arguments against God?

Answer 1

Please do not include comments that do not answer this question. Opinions from contributors:

Opinion

Humans have always been very curious about their origins. With the advent of science, not only human origins can be investigated but also the origins of the Earth and Universe. Obviously why the world seemed so wonderful and why anything should bother to exist seemed inexplicable to them. For some psychological or evolutionary reason, it seemed logical to the ancient peoples that the world and themselves should have come into existence through the work of some powerful being (invisible, yet powerful). They couldn't find such a force or being. But there were other advantages to the notion of a god than just explaining the improbability of nature. The notion of a spirit watching over them seemed comforting to some. Children were told about their god who would protect them. If a child asked where did the world come from, a ready made answer could easily be found. Over generations of story telling, a culture obviously becomes convinced of a real god. It is merely a matter of culture - where one was raised and in what time - which particular brand of nonsense infects the child brain, as Dawkins puts it - that determines which religion an individual will follow.

Opinion

Scientific Arguments: These arguments are based on science; specifically, the large number of cases where what the scientific method has near-proven about our world and our universe, is largely incompatible with religious dogma.

There are far more scientific contradictions of God than philosophical ones. The bedrock of the so called intelligent design movement is that matter cannot come from nothing. One of the many reasons intelligent design isn't normally allowed in the class room is that physics shows that matter does indeed spontaneously materialize, and that the true evidence of a universe with a God, would be one in which nothing existed. In fact, it has been said by Nobel Prize winning scientists that because there is material in the Universe that is proof God doesn't exist.

'Intelligent Design', and most quasi-scientific religious arguments, are based on the Argument from Improbability. It usually manifests itself as something akin to the following: "Phenomenon X is unbelievably complex. All of its parts work together in perfect order. This could not have spontaneously self-generated?"

Opinion

In reference to a biological system:

The discovery of Evolution. No sane person has ever suggested that a tree, or a bacterium, or a fish, or a person, came about by chance. The idea is absolutely ludicrous. The religious people claim that evolution is a theory of chance, and indeed, if the two alternatives were 'it generated itself by chance' and 'it was created' then intelligent design may carry some weight. But it does not, because nobody is suggesting chance as an alternative to design. The two opposing theories are intelligent design and evolution by natural selection. The theory of evolution is one of stunning simplicity - there are very, very slight changes to an organism in each generation, and they are small enough changes that anybody could accept they had come about by chance. Some of these very small changes will be advantageous, and increase an organism's survival chances, thereby causing the genes for themselves to become more prevalent in the gene pool. Over a vast timescale of millions of years, the effects of these tiny changes add up to become greatly noticeable, and giving us the wealth of diverse life we have today.

Intelligent design immediately raises a huge question: if everything complex was designed, then who designed the designer? If God has 'always existed', then why could not life have 'always existed'? Ditto the spontaneous self-generation of God.

Opinion

Science has provided much more accurate and verifiable explanations for the observable world and universe; so good, it has been said, that had we had these scientific explanations to begin with, religion would have never taken root in the first place.

Opinion

Most religions claim that their God is a loving God, and that he loves and cares for his people. Certainly, mainstream Christianity, Islam and Judaism all preach this. However, there is the rather obvious problem that the world includes a lot of suffering, and evil. Religions attempt to overcome the problem of evil by attributing evil to Satan, however, if God were indeed a sovereign and all-powerful God, his authority would surely preside over all things including Satan, and he could end evil. The fact that he doesn't, or so far hasn't but one day will, affirms the fallacy of an all-loving God, as he has allowed evil to exist either thus far, or indefinitely; if he can't, than the proposition that he is all-powerful is dispelled.

Opinion

It has been pointed out by Richard Dawkins that if you are a Christian, you have been told that Christianity is correct. You believe this. You also think you know that all other religions are completely incorrect and belief in them would be heretical. If you were a Muslim or Jew or Hindu you would think that you know that your respective religion were truly and undeniably the correct one and believe passionately that Christianity were incorrect. As you see, the idea of God is simply an opinion, with no actual truth in any statement about him anywhere. There cannot be a truth if all other religions in the world think the exact opposite. And their religion isn't true either as every other religion in the world other than themselves is against their doctrines too. God is in the eye of the beholder as it were.

Most of the evidence 'for' God (even ignoring the fact that it is largely pseudo-scientific ramble) is evidence 'for' Yahweh, 'for' Allah, 'for' Baal and Jupiter and every other creator being that has ever been postulated. So it does not go anywhere towards proving one particular set of fantastical beliefs.

Opinion

Rebuttal of Pascal's Wager

Pascal's wager, simplified, is this: Believe in God, and if you're right, you are rewarded with heaven. If you're wrong, you get nothing. Don't believe in God, and if you're right, you get nothing. If you're wrong, you get punished with Hell. Therefore, it makes more sense to believe in God.

This is clearly fallacious on two counts: firstly, that faked belief in God (I know that I personally could never 'believe' in something for the sake of a bet) is unlikely to win you his favour, and secondly that it would be ludicrously easy to worship the wrong God, since there are thousands of them that have been proposed, and hundreds of belief systems that are currently followed.

God said "they [humans] will live no longer than 120 years", yet somebody lived to 122 years. Therefore, God's word is not correct, though it is said to be perfect. Therefore, a perfect God's word must be correct. Therefore, God cannot be perfect, and therefore cannot exist.

Answer 2

Before asking "why", you would first have to confirm that God doesn't exist. Personally, I think that God does exist.

I'm Asa9018 as user and I say that if you believe in god, then god is real, if you don't believe in god then he's not real! ( I want to say that the real answer is that god "Exists"!)

For some people god or gods do exist, for others the opposite is the case. If you chose to think he does not exist that is your prerogative. Belief or otherwise in a deity or deities is one of the true few freedoms left.

Answer 3

God's Glory declared in the Heavens These words, written in 1712 by Joseph Addison, state some of the arguments for God's existence.

The spacious firmament on high,

with all the blue ethereal sky,

and spangled heavens, a shining frame,

their great Original proclaim.

The unwearied sun from day to day

does his Creator's power display;

and publishes to every land

the work of an almighty hand.

Soon as the evening shades prevail,

the moon takes up the wondrous tale,

and nightly to the listening earth

repeats the story of her birth:

whilst all the stars that round her burn,

and all the planets in their turn,

confirm the tidings, as they roll

and spread the truth from pole to pole.

What though in solemn silence all

move round the dark terrestrial ball?

What though no real voice nor sound

amid their radiant orbs be found?

In reason's ear they all rejoice,

and utter forth a glorious voice;

for ever singing as they shine,

"The hand that made us is divine." Answer: An eye and an egg and no chance. Charles Darwin, in his book The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, said "To suppose that the eye, with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest degree possible." In Darwin's Black Box, biochemist Michael Behe points out that what happens when a photon of light hits the human eye was beyond nineteenth century science.

*In Darwin's day, a human egg was thought to be quite simple; for all practical purposes, little more than a microscopic blob of Gelatin. Today, we know that a fertilized egg is among the most organised, complex structures in the universe. A single fertilized egg (zygote), contains chemical instructions that would fill more than five hundred thousand printed pages. The field of molecular Biology also has demonstrated empirically that bacteria are incredible complex. In the words of Michael Denton, " Although the tiniest bacterial cells are incredibly small, weighing less than 10-12 gms. each is in effect a veritable micro miniaturized factory contain thousands of exquisitely designed pieces of intricate molecular machinery, made up altogether of one hundred thousand million atoms, far more complicated than any machine built by man and absolutely without parallel in the non living world.The probability of a single protein molecule being arranged by chance is 1 in 10(161), that's a one followed by 161 zeros.

*R.C. Sproul once said, "For the materialist, chance is the magic wand to make not only rabbits but entire universes appear out of nothing." Adding, "If chance exists in any size, shape or form, God cannot exist. The two are mutually exclusive." As Dr. James Coppedge, an expert in the science of statistical probability, puts it, "Chance requires ten billion tries on the average in order to count to ten." In an experiment using ten similar coins, numbered one through ten, chance will succeed on the average only once in 10 billion attempts to get the number one followed in order by all the rest. Copeland explains that if a person could could draw and record one coin every five second day and night, it would still take more than fifteen hundred years for chance, on average, to succeed just once in counting to ten. He goes on to demonstrate the difference intelligence makes by documenting that a child can do in minutes what chance would take a millennium to do.

Answer 4

A:

There is a philosophical argument called the problem of evil and suffering. The problem asks if God is all-powerful, all-knowing, all good, and the sole creator of the world, then why is there evil and suffering? The problem can only be resolved if at least one of these propositions is false. Therefore if God is all-powerful, he is either not all-knowing and is therefore unaware of all the evil in the world, or he is not all-good and is unconcerned about all.

If God can not be considered all-powerful, all-knowing and all good, then perhaps he is not a god at all. Perhaps he was created by man to meet a perceived spiritual need. In fact, we even know from recent Archaeology that the early Hebrews were inherently polytheistic - not backsliders who were so weak they would worship strange gods, but people who strongly and sincerely believed in a pantheon of gods. It makes sense that more recent spiritual beliefs are less likely to be true than ancient ones, so if there is a God, he is just one of the gods in the early Hebrew pantheon. Or perhaps all the Israelite gods were created by man.

A further argument against God is that, with the advances in science, we no longer need a creator. God was an explanation, but we now have knowledge about evolution and the origins of the universe and do not need supernatural explanations for these.

Answer 5

There are many. A few are:

1. If evolution can be proven not to be gods work, then why does he create everything else. Atheists believe that this proves that god doesn't exist.

2. Scientists have come up with the big bang theory.

Answer 6

There is no proof that any god exists.

Just because Man doesn't have an answer to question about the universe, it doesn't give him the right to come up with a supernatural answer. It's really okay to simply leave the blank as it is until a real answer is found. If you fill in the blanks with "god made it happen," then there's no reason to keep discovering, is there?

Answer 7

There are many convincing arguments that God does not exist. Using The Bible, here is a list of ten things we can use to prove God does not exist:
1) From evidence in the Bible itself, the Hebrew people did not believe in one God until about 500-600 BCE. If the people who gave us Judaism and whose successors gave us Christianity and, indirectly, Islam, did not believe in one God, then neither should we.

2) Much of the Old Testament evidence for God is based on older, pagan myths. Unless we believe that God is the moon god of the ancient Middle East, the Bible does not support his existence.

3) God is too inconsistent to be real. The God of the J ("Yahwist") source was anthropomorphic with human characteristics, while the God of the E ("Elohist") source was transcendent and feared by his people. A God that is so different, depending on the region from which the tradition arises, is not a real God. The God of the P ("Priestly") source was remote and unmerciful. Second Isaiah, writing during the Babylonian Exile saw God as loving and forgiving. Once again, a God that is so different, depending on the author, is not a real God.

4) Much of the "historical" content of the Old Testament has been disproved by archaeological research. If the "historical" events did not happen, then the associated revelations and miracles did not happen. The evidence for God ceases to exist.

5) Much of the Bible that supports the existence of God consists of forgeries, interpolation or attempted repetition of misunderstood material from older books. Example: The Book of Daniel, a vivid account that "demonstrates" the existence of God, allegedly from the time of the Babylonian Exile, is a forgery (or, at best a novel) from the second century BCE. The reference from Matthew's Gospel to the supposed prophecy of a virgin birth is (i) a misunderstanding arising from a known faulty translation from Hebrew into Greek; (ii) knowingly taken out of context.

6) Prayer has never been shown to change the course of events or improve the well-being of sufferers. Even blind trials, with terminally ill hospital patients, have shown no statistically significant difference in outcomes. If God is said to have intervened in human affairs, why does he never do so now?

7) There are, and have been, many other religions equally as old as Judaism (on which Christianity is based). They have never been proved as less worthy than Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Some have been suppressed by military force or persecution, but that is not proof that the victor is more real. If there is a god, we can not possibly know which one is the true god.

8) Many of the concepts that we accept as part of Judaism and/or Christianity can be shown to have been adopted during or after the Babylonian Exile, based on Zoroastrian beliefs. If God is real, arguably his real name is Ahura Mazda.

9) The concepts of heaven and hell entered Judaism and Christianity from Zoroastrianism. Prior to this, the Jews believed that the fate of all the souls of the dead was to enter into a joyless state called sheol. What does God do, if he neither intervenes in human affairs, nor punishes the wicked or rewards the good?

10) The two separate and very different creation stories in Genesis (1:1-2:4a and 2:4b, following) both say that God only fashioned the world. The waters, the dry land and the wind were pre-existing. Even in the Bible, God's role in creation was minimal, whichever story we prefer to believe. So, God not only does not intervene in human affairs, reward the good or punish wrongdoers, he did not even create the world out of nothing.

Answer 8

The primary argument that God does exist should be incontravertible evidence in the Bible. However, no such evidence is to be found, so we must look for secondary evidence.
Many people say that the complexity of the universe is reason to believe in a creator god. However, even if rational, this argument does not tell us which of the myriad creator gods is the one that exists. Nor does it tell us who created the creator god, since he or she must also have been enormously complex.

Pascal's Wager is an argument designed to encourage belief in God as the most rational choice on the basis of self-interest, but this argument starts from the premise that we can never prove that God exists.

Others say that they have personally experienced God. Nearly always, these miraculous accounts do not tell us how real the experience was - did God appear physically in person and do something to prove conclusively that he was the God that he appeared to be; was the experience just a vivid vision, perhaps a hallucination or dream; or was it just a vague feeling of being in the presence of someone special?

Answer 9

There are tens of proofs for God's existence. These have been recorded for centuries and are easy to look up. However, this subject ultimately becomes one of personal belief, since our possession of free-will mandates that it be possible to put forth arguments (fallacious or not) against every one of the proofs.
Here are a few.
1) Teleological Argument: The universe has definite design, order, and arrangement which cannot be sufficiently explained outside a theistic worldview. (This is how Abraham, without benefit of teachers, came to reject the chaotic world-view of idolatry and the possibility of Atheism.)From the complexities of the human eye to the order and arrangement of cosmology, the voice of God is heard. God's existence is the best explanation for such design. God is the designer.Is there evidence against Evolution

God's wisdom seen in His creations

More about God's wisdom

2) Anthropic Principle: The laws of the universe seem to have been set in such a way that stars, planets and life can exist. Many constants of nature appear to be finely tuned for this, and the odds against this happening by chance are astronomical.

3) Sensus divinitatus: The innate sense of the divine exists within all people. People and cultures of all time have, by instinct, sensed a need to worship something greater than themselves. No ancient societyever existed that did not believe in a supernatural power.

4) Tradition: There are events in human history which cannot be explained without God. Many people have their subjective stories that bend them in the direction of theism, but there are also historical events such as the Giving of the Torah to over two million people at Mount Sinai, which are underpinnings for the belief in God.

5) Pascal's Wager: Belief in God is the most rational choice due to the consequences of being wrong. If one were to believe in God and be wrong, there would be no consequences. However, if one were to deny God and be wrong, the consequences are eternally tragic. Therefore, the most rational choice is not agnosticism or atheism, but belief in God.

6) Logic. Why is there reality rather than nothing? Aside from God's creating it, there are only five options:
a) The universe is eternal and everything has always existed.
- Even atheists have abandoned this possibility, especially because it would violate the Second Law of Thermodynamics.

b) Nothing exists and all is an illusion. There is no reality; there is only nothing.
- This possibility, it should be obvious, is completely self-defeating. In order to even make such a proposition, the subject has to exist in some sense. If all is an illusion, where did the illusion come from? Even the solipsist, who does not believe in the existence of other minds, has to explain the genesis of his own mind.

c) The universe created itself. This is the idea that the universe and all that is in it did not have its origin in something outside itself, but from within.
- Like with the previous two, this makes a logical absurdity. It would be like creating a square triangle. It's impossible. A triangle by definition cannot be square. So creation cannot create itself as it would have to pre-date itself in order to create.

d) Chance created the universe. The odds of winning the lottery are not very good; but given eons of time, everyone will win. While the odds of the universe spontaneously appearing are not minuscule, could it happen, given enough time?

- This option is a dishonest sleight of hand that, like "survival of the fittest," amounts to nothing, because it implies that "chance" itself has quantitative causal power.
The word "chance" refers to possibilities. It does not have the power to cause those possibilities. It is nonsense to speak of chance being an agent of creation, since chance is not a force. "What are the real chances of the universe being created by chance? Impossible. Chance is incapable of creating a single molecule, let alone an entire universe. Why not? Chance is no thing. It is not an entity. It has no being, no power, no force. It can effect nothing because it has no causal power within it. It is a word which describes mathematical possibilities which, by the curious flip of the fallacy of ambiguity, slips into the discussion as if it were a real entity with real power, the power of creativity." (R.C. Sproul, Not a Chance. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 1999.)

e) The universe is created by nothing. Simply put, nothing created the universe.
- The problem here is that it is either a repetition of option "a" (the universe is eternal) or fails due to the irrationality of "d." In our current universe, the law of cause and effect cannot be denied by sane people. While we often don't know what the cause of some effect is, this does not mean that there was no cause. When we go to the doctor looking for an explanation for the cause of our neck pain, we don't accept the answer "There is no cause. It came from nothing."

Now, the other side of the Question: why might people notbelieve in God?

1) Peer influence. In high school, for example, the one or two religious believers in a class may be subject to ridicule.

2) Convenience; desires. No one wants "bothersome" rules, or limitations to their personal pleasure. We see how lack of self-discipline has led to epidemic obesity, drunkenness, divorce rates, violence etc.

3) Lack of proper information. People have inaccurate notions about God, religion and belief. They've picked up tidbits, jokes, and "sound-bites," and on such solid authority they dismiss the entire topic.

4) Unfortunate experiences. Many have had personal hardships, or a harsh religious upbringing or education, and as a consequence may retain an unhappy feeling towards belief, without realizing that emotions and proofs are two different things.

5) Many think that science, and specifically Evolution, have proved that there is no God. They don't comprehend that even if Evolution was an unquestionable fact, it would not automatically follow that God isn't there. They also seem unaware that there are a significant number of highly-qualified scientists who do not believe in Evolution.

6) Intellectual laziness. Many people have simply never delved into the subject, to see if God's existence can be convincingly demonstrated.

7) Stereotyping. People call us "religious nuts," "Bible-thumpers," etc.; so the average layperson may get a negative feeling toward all belief, not realizing that he/she should first look into the existence of God in principle, before necessarily looking into religion.

Answer 10

The arguments that God does not exist is usually fronted by atheists who believe that once we die our lives end there.