I gave my child free will(or as much free will as I thought he could handle as he grew up)…but that doesn’t mean I would put a loaded gun on the kitchen table and leave him alone with it with nothing more than a vague “if you touch that something really bad is going to happen!”, and I wouldn’t have him assassinated by wild animals if he badmouthed me, and I wouldn’t give up on him and drown him and his pets if he disappointed me. If your god actually existed, the humane thing to do would be to start establishing “Battered Human Shelters” for his victims.
in my opinion the best argument against God is the argument that he’s just one of many possibilities, and therefore unlikely to be true.
when you think about it, God is a gimmick answer. people wonder what created the universe and so forth and so naturally people think “It was made by something that’s capable of doing it.” it’s not really a real explanation. it’s not even a satisfying one.
and, of course, if you’re not going to ask where God came from, you have to wonder why you’re invoking God to begin with. why not save a step and just assume reality has always existed then?
there are all sorts of real-world arguments against him. our world falls in line with what you would expect if there were no God.
at some point though people invent gods because it’s the intellectual response to the physical fear of death. we’ve also got a built-in desire to seek safety, for being taken care of, and a God makes us feel this.
anyways though for most religious people their beliefs aren’t based in argument or reason, so it usually does no good. it doesn’t matter how much evidence you have, you can always say your god is above it. that, of course, results in an unfalsifiable god.
the next step is to point out why an unfalsifiable belief is a poor idea. the flying spaghetti monster is unfalsifiable too and yet you don’t believe in that, so why god? if your belief is one possibility of many, and there’s no way to prove him right one way or the other, do you really think it’s that likely to be true?
i think most people understand this but don’t care. they LIKE believing in their gods and quickly reject any reason that chips away at it. it’s a desired self-delusion.
If you provide them with the garden variety kind of free will, sure. But if creatures were given the same free will as God afforded himself, then you’re wrong. Creatures could be internally and externally free but logically determined to do what is right (as is God). Given this, creatures could have free will (at least, the kind of free will that God has) and yet by necessity do what is right all the time.
Look for Quentin Smith’s version of the Logical Problem of Evil in the webs, if you would like to get a better understanding.
The truth is a human told what God was supposed to have said in the Bible, but it cannot be proven that God said or did anything. One takes the word of some human so the belief is in a human not God!
One can prove that a human said ,wrote, or taught something though.
For me the best argument is how human God is. He’s petty, vindictive, insecure, judgmental, easily angered, jealous etc. It is so obvious that people created God in their image. If God truly inspired or wrote his holy texts, you’d think he could do a better job not making himself look like a giant douche.
You lost me. Wouldn’t things look the same if God – being petty, vindictive, insecure, judgmental, and so on – created us in His image?
If I recall correctly, Adam and Eve were created in God’s image,to be perfect like him. However He gave them free will and they chose to disobey him which resulted in Adam and Eve being cast out of Eden which resulted in the above characteristics and more.
Of course this gets into the whether God is truly omnipotent and how could a perfect being create an imperfect creation. Then if Adam and Eve were perfect how could they choose to act imperfectly by disobeying God by eating from the Tree of Knowledge…
My copy of Genesis certainly has the bit about God creating man in His image and likeness, but I don’t see any “be perfect” stuff thereabouts.
True, God only says his creation is “good”. But it does say that Adam and Eve were without sin, didn’t judge and didn’t know evil etc. As a child, attending Catholic then later Episcopal Sunday school and talking with more conservatively religious people I come away with the impression that they were like God, ie perfect. Only after they chose to disobey were they stripped of their perfection.
It almost doesn’t even go that far; there’s a quick “and God saw that it was good” after every preceding step, but it’s specifically absent right after He makes people in His image and likeness. (We do later get a catch-all follow-up regarding “every thing that he had made, and, behold, it was very good” – but AFAICT that at best just puts 'em on a par with whales and grass and fowl and the rest, each of which previously got a separate “it was good” all to itself.)
As a Jew, I didn’t come away with that impression. 
First, it is not at all clear that angels have free will. Even Satan. He knows God exists, he knows that prophecy is true, he knows that he is going to lose. If he had free will he must be a total moron, because anything with the slightest bit of intelligence would have quit long ago. If you believe in Satan, you must believe he is forced to do what he does.
He isn’t in Genesis, by the way. The snake is just a snake with legs. Calling the snake Satan is just goyisher retconning.
As for evil, we don’t have to worry about free will. God built a world where hundreds of thousands of innocent people get drowned by tsunamis. If the world were a product it would get recalled so fast your head would spin. Either he couldn’t do better, and so is incompetent, or didn’t care to do better, and is evil. And don’t tell me this is the best of all possible worlds, unless you tell me why every baby killed in the floods had to die.
This works well in disputing an “omni” God. How could an entity be so miraculously omniscient as to have created quarks, electrons, atoms, chemical elements, gravity, etc. – but can’t control his own temper? It doesn’t add up. Such a God clearly has no “knowledge” about the state of his own intellectual and emotional processes.
However…it doesn’t work in refuting a lesser God, such as Zeus. Yeah, Zeus is an angry, vindictive, horny, drunken stinkard. But since “all wisdom” and “all knowledge” and “all good” haven’t been attributed to him, well, that just appears to be the way he is. Bummer for anyone nearby him when he goes on one of his little rampages.
This shows they didn’t really have free will, also that if God knew all things he would have known they would disobey him. So he was playing games or didn’t really know what they would do. The disobedient act was trying to know the difference between good and evil, to me that doesn’t make sense, why not teach them the difference and also tell them the consequences ahead of time?
My personal view is that so far, no concept of god has been presented to me that I find plausible, therefore, I don’t accept any of the concepts of god that have been presented to me as true. This, I’m told, makes me a “weak” atheist.
The biggest one I’ve heard argued, of course, is the Christian god. He is generally referred to as all-knowing, all powerful, and all loving.
All knowing: If God is all-knowing, he supposedly knows the future (various scriptures attest to this). If God knows with 100% certainty what’s going to happen, then it’s impossible to surprise him. For instance, if God knows with 100% certainty that I’m going to type this post, then it’s impossible for me to not type this post, or else I’d surprise God.
All powerful: Rather than go with the whole “Can God create a rock so powerful even he can’t lift it” paradox, I think that this is actually tied to all knowing. Not only can I not surprise God (by not typing this post), he can’t prevent me from typing this post, or else he proves himself wrong (and thus, not all knowing). If God cannot act to change the future, then he is limited, and thus, not all powerful.
All loving: According to the bible, God is responsible for setting up the rules and the punishment for breaking them (eternal torment). Given that I cannot do something to surprise him (that is, choose not to sin, if he already knows that I am going to), and he himself cannot prevent me from sinning (or else he is not all knowing), then he can’t be all loving, either. How could someone who is all loving punish an individual forever (not just for a moment, but literally, forever) for doing something that neither the individual nor God can prevent?
Basically, this is why I don’t believe that the Christian god is real - it’s too implausible. The Jewish god and the Muslim god are the same one as the Christian one, so I reject those as implausible as well.
Marc
According to the Bible God also regretted creating man, so he had all die except a few from one family, and I wonder why it doesn’t mention saving any children!
Fish gotta eat.