Arguments for the non-existence of God.

Great Debates
1

I find the whole “atheism is the most rational belief state” thing rather tiresome, even if true. Theists have had their fun, I want my fun too. I thus seek interesting arguments for the non-existence of God. Not necessarily good ones, Gods or arguments, mind you.

Let me illustrate what I am after. The following looks like a good argument for not-God.

[QUOTE=Andruil]
Absence of evidence IS evidence (not proof) of absence and that should be enough to swing your belief-meter to atheism.
[/QUOTE]

But I am after just that little bit more; some evidence beyond absence. I am half serious with this topic; I think that given all the interesting arguments for God, there might be a lot of interesting ones against God, too. But I am also just interested to see what people can come up with.

I offer, then, the following arguments for the non-existence of God, or at least some sorts of Gods. I make no claim of originality.

Any God worth its salt would be rational, moral, and powerful enough to prevent evil. There is evil. So there is no God worth its salt.

The Christian God does not exist, the Hindu God does not exist, the Sikh God does not exist. By induction on Gods, no Gods exist.

Everything we know of has a contingent cause. By induction on causes, every cause is contingent. So there are no non-contigent causes; but God is a contingent cause. So God does not exist.

Time is non-descrete. So there may be no first moment of time. Clearly, the universe is trying to avoid certain cosmological arguments. It wouldn’t need to if God existed. So God does not exist.

ETA: Wrong forum, I thought I was in GD. Can I get this moved there?

2

Okey-dokey.

Colibri
General Questions Moderator

3

If God exists, God must either be caused, or be uncaused. If God is caused, then it cannot be an uncaused cause, and so we have reached a contradiction with most definitions of God. Therefore God is uncaused. If God is uncaused, then, there being no constraints imposed by a cause upon the caused, the properties of what is caused is unconstrained. Therefore if God exists, its properties are completely arbitrary. Constructing a correctly weighted statistical measure is beyond the scope of this proof, but roughly speaking God is as likely to be a teapot as a thousand hydrogen atoms, as likely to be an all-powerful being as a quantum field, as likely to be a jelly bean as a hula hoop. Less roughly speaking, the set of Christian Gods (and other similar propositions) is measure zero. Therefore God does not exist.

4

Are you interested in arguments against deities in general, or specifically against the Abrahamic conception of an omnipotent-omniscient deity?

5

I had a fairly liberal conception of God in mind. I didn’t make it explicit, but the God “refuted” in the arguments put in the OP was not the same God from argument to argument. In general, I had in mind some sort of truly-ruly ultimate being, where that ultimateness could lie in the features you mention, but it could also be a prime mover/first cause/, or some other similar sort of thing. If it is the latter one might get worried if one ought call that God, but that doesn’t worry me here. Reason being is simply that I think an argument against such a thing would be quite interesting, in the same way that arguments in favour are. However, I didn’t mean to extend out to beings like Thor, for instance.

6

Putting faith in its place - YouTube <- Worth watching for this conversation

How are we supposed to disprove something which is completely outside of our understanding in the first place?

7

Lots and lots of arguments…

Again the “omnipotent, omniscient” God, the simplest argument is that the terms themselves are self-contradictory. Such an entity cannot exist, any more than a square triangle or an odd number divisible by two.

(However, this doesn’t matter. God doesn’t have to have infinite power. Simply having the power of a trillion trillion galaxies would serve admirably!)

Against lesser gods, the best argument simply is that no one has ever seen 'em. Nobody has ever seen Zeus, Osiris, Odin, or Jehovah. This is where the “Invisible Pink Unicorn” and “Flying Spaghetti Monster” metaphors arose. Anyone can describe a god, but without evidence, it’s just words. Shifting the burden of proof is a wimp-out, but so is saying “Finuka Disposes!”

8

Pretty much all non-deistic god beliefs make some sort of predictions, either about how the world was or how it would be. Examples are the Exodus, the Flood, and the imminent return of Jesus. While in science falsified predictions sometimes wipe out a hypothesis and sometimes require changes to it, inspired predictions don’t get to be wrong so easily.

You can’t refute god belief that makes no predictions - but you can ignore it, since it by definitions is equivalent to no god belief in terms of what actions it should inspire.

9

With apologies to Joel Cohen and his sources who proved the following theorem for Alexander the Great, I present a proof that God does not exist and that God has an infinite number of limbs.

http://www.fortfreedom.org/b19.htm

This proof works only for the Christian God. A generalization for all other gods is left as an exercise for the reader.

THE PEJORATIVE CALCULUS

Lemma 1. All horses are the same color (by induction).

Proof. It is obvious that one horse is the same color. Let us assume the proposition P(k) that k horses are the same color and use this to imply that k + 1 horses are the same color. Given the set of k + 1 horses, we remove one horse; then the remaining k horses are the same color, by hypothesis. We remove another horse and replace the first; the k horses, by hypothesis, are again the same color. We repeat this until by exhaustion the k + 1 sets of k horses have each been shown to be the same color. It follows then that since every horse is the same color as every other horse, P(k) entails P(k + 1). But since we have shown P(1) to be true, P is true for all succeeding values of k, that is, all horses are the same color.

Corollary 1. Everything is the same color.

Proof. The proof of lemma 1 does not depend at all on the nature of the object under consideration. The predicate of the antecedent of the universally-quantified conditional For all x, if x is a horse, then x is the same color,' namely is a horse’ may be generalized to is anything' without affecting the validity of the proof; hence, for all x, if x is anything, x is the same color.

Corollary 2. Everything is white.

Proof. If a sentential formula in x is logically true, then any particular substitution instance of it is a true sentence. In particular then: for all x, if x is an elephant, then x is the same color' is true. Now it is manifestly axiomatic that white elephants exist (for proof by blatant assertion consult Mark Twain The Stolen White Elephant’). Therefore all elephants are white. By corollary 1 everything is white.

Theorem 2. God does not exist and he has an infinite number of limbs.

Proof. We prove this theorem in two parts. First we note the obvious fact that preachers always tell the truth (for preachers always take a stand, and therefore they cannot lie). Hence we have the true sentence, `If God exists then he made the Nile turn red. But, we know by corollary 2 everything is white; hence God could not have turned the Nile red, even with help from Moses. Since the consequent of the conditional is false, in order for the whole statement to be true, the antecedent must be false. Hence God does not exist.

Preachers also tell us that Jesus is God and that Jesus has two legs. Jesus is omniscient and thus forewarned. It is axiomatic that `forewarned is four-armed.’ This gives him six limbs, an even number, which is certainly an odd number of limbs for a man or god. Now the only number which is even and odd is infinity; hence God has an infinite number of limbs. We have thus proved that God did not exist and that he has an infinite number of limbs.

10

…To which I merely say, GIGO.

11

Here you go. There are infinite mutually exclusive possibilities for god or gods, such as the Christian god. For any one of these to be true all the others would have to be false. For one specific one of these to be true would be infinitely unlikely. Mathematically .0000X1 where X is infinite 0’s is the same as 0. So if anyone asks me if their God exists I can answer, “No. There is zero chance your god exists.”

12

This argument would be equally valid if I replace “God” with “you” and use it to prove that you don’t exist.

13

Ah, but you’re sidestepping what’s meat and drink for a particular mindset: claims that you’ll suffer eternally – or enjoy an endless paradise – in the afterlife, depending on whether you do the god’s bidding here and now. That prediction ain’t falsifiable until right after you die, and so can inspire actions while you’re still alive.

14

Problem with this is you are using rules that God created for us to constrain God.

15

Wait, are you saying that logic is invalid when talking about god?

16

The best I can come up with for now is because their is evil in the world. Although that just means that there may be a god not worth worshiping.

17

you tell me

[QUOTE=John 6:19]

When they had rowed about three or four miles, they saw Jesus approaching the boat, walking on the water; and they were frightened.
[/QUOTE]

18

..I’ll take that as a no then.

See, what bugs me about this line of reasoning is that you’ve completely cut off any and all ground upon which you could possibly stand. You can’t deal with god through logic. What’s worse, because god is on a plane of existence separate from ours, you can’t use evidence to prove him either (although empiricism requires logic anyways, making it kind of a moot point). So god is completely and utterly outside of the realm of our understanding…

…Making whatever you or anyone else believes about him at best completely unfounded (a random guess, essentially) and more realistically completely false!

So, you wanna assert that god is beyond the reach of logic again?

19

From what I have seen and experienced what you say is actually true, God is not reached by human logic or by human reasoning, so those lines of proving God does not exist can’t work, but by meeting God (which negates Him on a separate plane, but puts us on a dual plane, our free will to live without God or to include Him, which is our free will decision).

So if you chose the plane where God does not exist, He does not. Perhaps that is the best argument for God’s non-existence.

20

I’m not questioning god, I’m questioning your faith. Specifically, if you admit that god is untouchable by human reasoning, how can you possible claim that your faith is correctly held?