Arguments for the non-existence of God.

Great Debates
41

Of course God doesn’t exist. I don’t care what religion your talking about, there is no tangible entity that could call itself supreme to human beings.

The fact that religion is intangible and God can’t be seen or touched proves that it’s all an ideology. Everyone has access to God and the only tangible things related to God are manifested in man-made objects like bibles, churches, mosques, prayer beads, red buddhist monk robes, etc.

I cant believe that an argument against or for God is still being entertained in our age, much less on this site of high-brow contributers. Focusing on disproving the idea of God is like trying to prove that Furbies invaded from Mars before we had written history.

God is widely accepted as an ideology of our past, that brought people together, gave them a set of codes, and above all (no pun intended ;)), to serve as the pinnacle force that would reinforce those codes by providing faith, fear and love. Promises of bounty if one follows the code, you might as well be asking if heaven exists, or the Easter Bunny.

The point of disproving God is a vain one. God is something of our past (if you are enlightened, like me) and to attempt its disprovalwith calculus or scientific trial is disrespectful, in my opinion, disrespectful to our ancestor who were brought together
by God, building and innovating civilization so that you, sophists, mathematicians and
scientists could play with abstract ideas with complex mechanisms that we callequations.

Dont hate God believers for being ignorant, they are just in a lower stage of development, or understanding than you are. They are holding on to the ways and codes that seem more clear to them, and power to them because those codes enabled human civilization to develop enough to provide us with this wonderful chat board. ( i dont think jesus’ internet connection was fast enough to connect here, it was probably made out of wood, lol!)

42

Given that you can’t believe something which is clearly and observably true, why should I care about your inability to believe in God Himself? :stuck_out_tongue:

43

Pronoun trouble! I was talking about me proving that you exist, not you proving to yourself that you exist. Your consciousness isn’t real to me.

Something along the lines of: There are infinite mutually exclusive possibilities for who or what you are. 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 Untoward Parable exists I can answer, “No. There is zero chance Untoward Parable exists.”

There are infinitely many possibilities, therefore none of them can be a reality? Sorry, the logic just doesn’t add up. (Besides which, mathematically “.0000X1 where X is infinite 0’s” makes no sense.)

44

True, but why believe in those unfalsifiable predictions when religions get all the falsifiable stuff wrong?

45

I already covered the you/me perspective. I know my consciousness is real, you know that these posts are going up and you are reading them. There are a few possibilities your observations about reality might support. I could be one person (vastly most likely), more than one person, a computer program or an alien of unknown characteristics that happens to have a reason to post on human forums about atheism. The number representation makes perfect sense, you probably wouldn’t express it that way in any math setting but it’s common sense what is meant(Arguing about style is pretty petty in any case).

46

The anthropic principle makes the logic add up. There may be infinitely many possibilities, but the anthropic principle ensures the self-selection of scenarios in which the probability is substantial that possibilities such as Untoward_Parable exist. The anthropic principle offers no such assurance towards the existence of God. And his mathematical statement “.000X1 where X is infinite 0’s” is a bit sloppy but correct in spirit. Another way of putting it is, like I did in my proof earlier in the thread, that the set of possibilities in which God exists is measure zero. That’s basically what he is saying.

47

First you have to define God. Once you’ve done that, you’ve proven that God does not exist.

On a different note, there is literally NOTHING that can disprove the existence of God/a god of some sort. If God is omnipotent, then he can both lift a rock he cannot lift and not lift a rock he cannot lift at the same time, thus avoiding silly logical jumbles. God can be his own cause and effect. Who says he has to obey natural laws?

The only thing you can really say is that there is no reason to believe. And there isn’t. All religion is obviously a fabrication of the human mind, which is why religions are different. If all societies came up with the same bible separately, then you might have my attention.

48

That’s my opinion, too, regarding any of the “omni”-defined Gods. The terms are, formally, self-contradictory, and thus, once you say, “He has all power,” you’ve said “He is a fiction.”

But as for “lesser gods without the law,” I dunno. I suppose a minor godling – sort of a Star Trek “energy being” – might be able to exist. I don’t see the definition, by itself, as enough to disqualify the entity from existence.

(But I sure don’t want him to come visiting… Ick…)

49

Following this line of thought; one might try to turn this into an argument against a casually efficacious God. The idea being that anything un-caused must be an abstract object of some sort. Similarly, that God qua necessary being cannot be anything interesting; God cannot have chosen this world because God does the same in every world, or some such. More needs to be said to get this to follow, of course.

Assume that there are a countably infinite possibilities, each of which are equally probable. Each possibility has an infinitesimal probability. An infinitesimal probability is equivalent to zero probability. So it is true of each possibility that it will not occur. So no possibility will occur.

Something seems to have gone wrong here. There is some discussion of this in the (philosophy of statistics) literature. See, for a brief discussion, Hajek in “Conditional Probability” in Philosophy of Statistics, available at http://philrsss.anu.edu.au/profile/alan-hájek

50

Take it as an argument against a particular sort of God; the rational, moral, all-powerful sort.

Do you mean shift within a particular argument? If so, that isn’t good. But if you just mean that different arguments are arguing against different definitions of God, then I do not think that is such a problem.

51

As I argued in post 46 the anthropic principle comes to the rescue here.

52

In a one-on-one debate, such shifting is not to be tolerated, but in a thread such as this where one person asks the question but all like-minded but differing of definition judge the answer, such shifting is the norm, and as such makes an answer that is acceptable next to impossible. The exact nature of the deity to be disproved must be stated upfront by the describer of said deity, and aspects that contradict or add to this description should be ignored for the purpose of the thread, otherwise attempting to answer is a waste of time.

53

It might come to the rescue with regards to Thudlow Boink counter argument that the argument would just as well show that such and so doesn’t exist. I don’t think it comes to the rescue with regards to the form of the argument that I put; I put it in general terms, and didn’t restrict what was, or could be, in the possibility space.

Compare; there are 100 possibilities, equal probability. Each possibility has a probability of 1/100. 1/100 + 1/100… = 1. So the probability of 1 of these occurring (i.e. the disjunction of possibilities) is 1. All good, and exactly what we want.

But the argument put seems to mean that, where the possibility space is large enough, not only does each individual possibility have “zero probability”, so does the probability of any possibility occurring. By stipulation (I meant possibility when I said it), this cannot be right. So the argument has gone wrong somewhere.

54

You are describing a mundane and well-understood aspect of real analysis. See, for example, measure theory, and as a particular example the Lebesque measure and standard probability. The existence of calculus is but one counterexample to your argument. The successful application of continuous probability distributions are another.

ETA (to use your example): 1/x + 1/x + 1/x … = 1 as x->infinity is exactly what happens in calculus, despite the fact that 1/x -> 0 as x->infinity. That is what calculus is all about.

55

Untoward_Parable specifically had as the conclusion, for any particular God, that God has zero probability. That is fine. I thought you went beyond that; that there are no Gods (simpliciter) (you do just end with “therefore God does not exist”). On re-reading, maybe you didn’t intend to give as strong a conclusion as I attributed.

I was intending to give a paraphrase of your argument. (Well, really a ballpark argument that didn’t work; i.e. one that might not have fit what you said but which was similar and didn’t work.) Like I say, I think now I might have given a stronger conclusion than you intended to.

Right, so I don’t think we disagree. I think Thudlow Boink’s issue with the argument was just the same mis-reading I made.

56

My argument ultimately says that the probability of finding ourselves in a universe with any kind of God-like entity is infinitesimal. I grant you modal realism.

57

You don’t have to.

Your question is a trap.

You first assume a baseless claim, that some god exists, and then you ask people to argue against it, or even argue to support a negative claim.

Your request is equivalent to a request to prove that you don’t have 3 yellow butterflies flying around your head and beaming info into your brain directing your every move.

Your request is absurd and illogical.

58

Can you take me through the steps involved?

Lewissian modal realism? I don’t know what this has to do with the issue.

The natural option seems to me to be that there are (at least) denumerably many possible worlds with Gods. (Well, in the case where there is more than one world, but less than all the worlds.) I’d like to see the math where that ends up getting you an infinitesimal probability of being in one of those worlds.

59

I thought we might be edging into a technical issue of whether the probability is zero vs infinitesimal (both being equivalent for practical purposes), where we might stumble into frequentist vs bayesian and other distractions. Perhaps I misunderstood you, but I inferred you might be arguing from a non-frequentist modal realistic (Lewissian, yes) standpoint where calling the probability exactly zero doesn’t make sense. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, then never mind.

Well there certainly are denumerably many possible worlds with Gods. That of course doesn’t have anything to do with whether or not the set of possible worlds with Gods is measure zero, for a reasonably defined measure on the space of possible worlds. I cannot give you any sort of rigorous proof without you first very carefully defining the properties of the set of Gods you want me to disprove. Certainly you could always define “God” so generally as to be synonymous with nature, or at least generally enough that the set begins to accrue some heft. But a definition sympathetic to any of the mythological or biblical God(s) is so arbitrary as to be “obviously” measure zero compared to the set of all things. The counting can be done in a variety of ways, such as by mapping the qualities of Gods to things we know can be mimicked by computation, and then showing that even an absurdly weak upper bound gives the set measure zero.

60

And even more amusing than kanicbird misunderstanding of Clarke’s laws is the fact that Clarke was an atheist.