As I was writing my last article, I included so many God arguments that I later decided to remove them and post them in a separate article.
Without delay, here are some of my favorite God Arguments.
1. I know God exists. If you disagree, prove otherwise. Oh you say you can't prove God doesn't exist? That's because you know he does!
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. This is the way the real world and science work. When you say God exists, you are making an extraordinary claim; therefore, the burden of proof is on you to back up your claim. A position that God doesn't exist is not a "belief," it's the standard position we all start out with until we're indoctrinated into religious schools of thought. People aren't born believing in Jesus. They start out atheist: lacking belief. There is no counter-claim necessary. Nobody has to prove the tooth fairy doesn't exist either.
2. The vast majority of the world believes in God. This supports the universal truth that God is real, otherwise it makes no sense that so many people would believe.
Just because a majority of people believe something does not make it true. There was a time when everyone believed the earth was flat, or that the Earth was the center of the universe and everything revolved around it. As our understanding of science and the universe expands, it illuminates the irrationality of many early beliefs. We no longer believe that lightning is caused by the god Zeus waving his scepter. We understand that there are reasons for earthquakes and weather events that have nothing to do with anything supernatural, even though in past times, people were convinced God was at the control panel actively making these things occur, and the weather could be controlled by making sacrificial offerings of humans or other creatures. All sorts of things were commonly accepted as reasonable and acceptable, such as slavery, that we now recognize were unreasonable and unacceptable. If history has taught us anything, it's that just because a large group of people believe something is moral or truthful, does not make it so.
3. You must believe in God/Jesus. It's your only hope for salvation. We are all doomed if we don't accept Jesus as our personal savior. It says so in the Bible. If you want to live forever and avoid suffering, you must accept God.
Christianity and most organized religions exist mainly due to the Argument from Coercion. The crusades were basically one big argument from coercion: convert or be killed. Needless to say, that's a very effective argument. In modern society, the need to get along with others in the community (which often involves participating in religious rituals or identifying yourself as subscribing to the dominant theology in the area) is also a form of coercion.
Fear has always been a big-time motivational force, but it usually doesn't turn out helpful in the end. There's an easier way to avoid hell and eternal suffering: not believing in it. Then you don't have to give a tithe to the church, subvert your personal responsibility, cultivate an innate sense of insecurity, guilt, and self-loathing, and support institutions that have oppressed, abused, and murdered people in the name of God since their inception.
4. Something can't come from nothing, Cosmological Argument, Every effect has a cause, First law of thermodynamics proves God exists. Everything that exists in our world is the result of some sort of "first cause" which brought about its existence. Therefore, there must have been a force which created the universe. That "first cause" is what we call God.
Like many arguments of this nature, theists make a special pleading to exempt God from their argument. If everything that exists must have a cause, who created God? Variations of this argument employ the first law of thermodynamics to imply that God has always existed because the first law of thermodynamics says matter can neither be created nor destroyed. Nice notion, but it still doesn't prove there's a God. It merely suggests there's more for us to understand, and every day scientists get closer to addressing these issues without referencing God or anything supernatural.
If there's a recurring theme in any of these arguments, it's that theists pick and choose which tenets of science they want to embrace (the ones that help prove their claims) and ignore all the rest as if they don't exist. These theories are part of a complex interconnected system. It's intellectually dishonest and unethical to ignore evidence that counters your supernatural claims. The First Cause Argument ignores huge amounts of contradictory evidence, as do many of the arguments herein.
5. God is real because the Bible (or whatever sacred text you believe in) says so. Why would so many people write so much about God if it wasn't true? What about all the miracles that were "documented" by historical writers? There is too much evidence here to dismiss.
This argument depends upon a presupposition, that the "authority" being referenced is accurate or legitimate. That remains to be seen. Any critical examination of sacred texts such as the Bible clearly show it to be riddled with inaccuracies and contradictions. Using the Bible as any authoritative reference is dubious at best. Since most of these scriptures are the de-facto, almost exclusive evidence of God's existence, using them as a reference amounts to a circular argument. Christians point to the numerous "eye-witness accounts" of Jesus' resurrection in the Gospels as "evidence" that this really happened. But the gospels themselves are riddled with contradictions, and were written decades after the events supposedly took place. It's not unreasonable to consider many of these sources unreliable. You could likewise argue that the overwhelming amount of literature making reference to vampires proves they are real characters that truly do or did exist. Or maybe not. Maybe Jesus, like Count Dracula, Zeus or Santa Claus, was simply a popular mythological figure about which people made up stories?
It's worth noting that the Flying Spaghetti Monster is another manufactured myth which relies on the Argument from Authority, by claiming certain substantiating references are indeed authoritative, when in reality, they are just arbitrary claims. In time, no doubt, as more people embrace the amusing notion of FSM, we'll begin seeing them use the Argument from Popularity as well.
6. I know god exists because I can feel him. I know it in my heart; he talks to me; I feel his strength and existence flow through every fiber of my being.
The problem with the Argument from Personal Experience is that it's personal. Whatever you feel is not something that anyone else can feel. Therefore it is meaningless and inconclusive. I can find somebody who thinks he saw Elvis in Starbucks last week. That doesn't mean Elvis is alive. It means he was deluded. Any claim that cannot be tested or subjected to some sort of independent verification is not a meaningful, legitimate claim. I have no doubt you feel the presence of god, but this can also be explained rationally from a psychological perspective via various concepts such as the power of suggestion, lucid dreaming, hallucinations, mental disorders, etc. Personal "feelings" are not evidential.
7. The second law of thermodynamics says matter inevitably becomes entropic (spreads out in chaos) and this defies the observation on Earth where we see, things becoming more organized. Therefore God is responsible.
What is the likelihood that humans would have turned out the way they have? It's improbable that humanity (or any other impressive life form) arbitrarily came into existence.
Imagine a wind whipping through a warehouse of airplane parts and blowing the pieces around until they form a perfect, functional 747 jet? That's what we are talking about in terms of the likelihood man "just happened" on Earth. A similar story involves monkeys being given typewriters and eventually writing all the works of Shakespeare.
This argument works because those making these claims deliberately leave out a critical aspect of the story: No scientist ever said everything happens randomly or arbitrarily. How things evolve, change or become something new and different can be explained using processes such as Natural selection.
This argument ignores glaring facts in the equation. The second law of thermodynamics applies to a closed system, but the Earth is not a closed system. The entire universe is expanding and entropic. Theists ignore this fact. When employing the Argument from Improbability to the concept of evolution, theists also deliberately ignore the process of natural selection, which clearly demonstrates that the evolutionary process is anything but random and arbitrary. In any case, even if the Argument from Improbability were true, it wouldn't prove the existence of God. Theists also employ the Argument from Ignorance to arbitrarily suggest Godidit! whenever something appears they can't explain. The bottom line is that just because something seems impossibly unlikely to naturally occur, that does not mean it is impossible. In most cases, many of these "improbable" happenings do indeed have clear scientific explanations that theists conveniently ignore.
Another variation on the Argument from Improbability centers around talking about how "perfect" the Earth, our bodies, the universe, etc. is:
Yes, if the Earth is so "perfect" how come the majority of it is covered with water and uninhabitable by humans? How come we weren't born with gills? If the universe is so perfect, why are there so many planets that are totally inhospitable to humans? Why doesn't the moon have an atmosphere? The "perfection" spin doesn't work.
8. French philosopher Blaise Pascal reasoned that it was a "safe bet" to believe in God just in case he was real. What's the harm? If you believe and he doesn't exist, you don't lose anything, but if you don't believe and he does exist, you lose big time.
Most theists have reasoned that Pascal's Wager makes sense. The problem is, it is a fool's bet. If God is really omnipotent, then surely he knows that your beliefs are not sincere, that you're just playing the odds. Beyond that, Pascal's Wager does not address the more substantive question of which God you should believe in. Do you believe in Christ, or Xenu, Mithra, Saturn, Buddha, or Allah? What if God's real test was to see who would defy convention and refuse to believe and those were the ones who get to heaven? The permutations in this equation are endless, which proves that Pascal's Wager is a total waste of time. Like all the other arguments, theists will disagree, but only because they've manufactured their own set of rules that convinces them that their reasoning makes more sense. It doesn't though.
9. The most common analogy used to illustrated the Argument from design is the "watchmaker argument". If you found a watch on the ground, you never met the watchmaker, but you know from its design, the beauty of it; the way each piece was intricately designed to work together, that this watch had a creator. Theists point to the human body; the precise way each of our organs work with each other and claim it's the most amazing "creation" of all, and surely there was some sort of creator behind it.
This most famous argument for God is also the easiest to completely deflate. If anything sufficiently complicated must have a creator, then who created God? It's as simple as that. However, when you point out this flaw in theist logic, they commit another logical fallacy: special pleading to claim that God is the exception to the rule and doesn't need to have a creator.
Furthermore, every example to date a theist can make to suggest that humans are too complex to have "happened by accident" (another false claim) has been debunked by scientists. The famous Dover trial put the argument from design on trial and the theists failed miserably to prove their case.
Now I'll focus on some of my favorite Atheists arguments against God.
1. The fundamental argument for atheism is that there is no evidence or proof for God. There is no solid or tangible evidence for God nor a logical argument for God. The existence of God is taken on faith and not by evidence.
Without delay, here are some of my favorite God Arguments.
1. I know God exists. If you disagree, prove otherwise. Oh you say you can't prove God doesn't exist? That's because you know he does!
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. This is the way the real world and science work. When you say God exists, you are making an extraordinary claim; therefore, the burden of proof is on you to back up your claim. A position that God doesn't exist is not a "belief," it's the standard position we all start out with until we're indoctrinated into religious schools of thought. People aren't born believing in Jesus. They start out atheist: lacking belief. There is no counter-claim necessary. Nobody has to prove the tooth fairy doesn't exist either.
2. The vast majority of the world believes in God. This supports the universal truth that God is real, otherwise it makes no sense that so many people would believe.
Just because a majority of people believe something does not make it true. There was a time when everyone believed the earth was flat, or that the Earth was the center of the universe and everything revolved around it. As our understanding of science and the universe expands, it illuminates the irrationality of many early beliefs. We no longer believe that lightning is caused by the god Zeus waving his scepter. We understand that there are reasons for earthquakes and weather events that have nothing to do with anything supernatural, even though in past times, people were convinced God was at the control panel actively making these things occur, and the weather could be controlled by making sacrificial offerings of humans or other creatures. All sorts of things were commonly accepted as reasonable and acceptable, such as slavery, that we now recognize were unreasonable and unacceptable. If history has taught us anything, it's that just because a large group of people believe something is moral or truthful, does not make it so.
3. You must believe in God/Jesus. It's your only hope for salvation. We are all doomed if we don't accept Jesus as our personal savior. It says so in the Bible. If you want to live forever and avoid suffering, you must accept God.
Christianity and most organized religions exist mainly due to the Argument from Coercion. The crusades were basically one big argument from coercion: convert or be killed. Needless to say, that's a very effective argument. In modern society, the need to get along with others in the community (which often involves participating in religious rituals or identifying yourself as subscribing to the dominant theology in the area) is also a form of coercion.
Fear has always been a big-time motivational force, but it usually doesn't turn out helpful in the end. There's an easier way to avoid hell and eternal suffering: not believing in it. Then you don't have to give a tithe to the church, subvert your personal responsibility, cultivate an innate sense of insecurity, guilt, and self-loathing, and support institutions that have oppressed, abused, and murdered people in the name of God since their inception.
4. Something can't come from nothing, Cosmological Argument, Every effect has a cause, First law of thermodynamics proves God exists. Everything that exists in our world is the result of some sort of "first cause" which brought about its existence. Therefore, there must have been a force which created the universe. That "first cause" is what we call God.
Like many arguments of this nature, theists make a special pleading to exempt God from their argument. If everything that exists must have a cause, who created God? Variations of this argument employ the first law of thermodynamics to imply that God has always existed because the first law of thermodynamics says matter can neither be created nor destroyed. Nice notion, but it still doesn't prove there's a God. It merely suggests there's more for us to understand, and every day scientists get closer to addressing these issues without referencing God or anything supernatural.
If there's a recurring theme in any of these arguments, it's that theists pick and choose which tenets of science they want to embrace (the ones that help prove their claims) and ignore all the rest as if they don't exist. These theories are part of a complex interconnected system. It's intellectually dishonest and unethical to ignore evidence that counters your supernatural claims. The First Cause Argument ignores huge amounts of contradictory evidence, as do many of the arguments herein.
5. God is real because the Bible (or whatever sacred text you believe in) says so. Why would so many people write so much about God if it wasn't true? What about all the miracles that were "documented" by historical writers? There is too much evidence here to dismiss.
This argument depends upon a presupposition, that the "authority" being referenced is accurate or legitimate. That remains to be seen. Any critical examination of sacred texts such as the Bible clearly show it to be riddled with inaccuracies and contradictions. Using the Bible as any authoritative reference is dubious at best. Since most of these scriptures are the de-facto, almost exclusive evidence of God's existence, using them as a reference amounts to a circular argument. Christians point to the numerous "eye-witness accounts" of Jesus' resurrection in the Gospels as "evidence" that this really happened. But the gospels themselves are riddled with contradictions, and were written decades after the events supposedly took place. It's not unreasonable to consider many of these sources unreliable. You could likewise argue that the overwhelming amount of literature making reference to vampires proves they are real characters that truly do or did exist. Or maybe not. Maybe Jesus, like Count Dracula, Zeus or Santa Claus, was simply a popular mythological figure about which people made up stories?
It's worth noting that the Flying Spaghetti Monster is another manufactured myth which relies on the Argument from Authority, by claiming certain substantiating references are indeed authoritative, when in reality, they are just arbitrary claims. In time, no doubt, as more people embrace the amusing notion of FSM, we'll begin seeing them use the Argument from Popularity as well.
6. I know god exists because I can feel him. I know it in my heart; he talks to me; I feel his strength and existence flow through every fiber of my being.
The problem with the Argument from Personal Experience is that it's personal. Whatever you feel is not something that anyone else can feel. Therefore it is meaningless and inconclusive. I can find somebody who thinks he saw Elvis in Starbucks last week. That doesn't mean Elvis is alive. It means he was deluded. Any claim that cannot be tested or subjected to some sort of independent verification is not a meaningful, legitimate claim. I have no doubt you feel the presence of god, but this can also be explained rationally from a psychological perspective via various concepts such as the power of suggestion, lucid dreaming, hallucinations, mental disorders, etc. Personal "feelings" are not evidential.
7. The second law of thermodynamics says matter inevitably becomes entropic (spreads out in chaos) and this defies the observation on Earth where we see, things becoming more organized. Therefore God is responsible.
What is the likelihood that humans would have turned out the way they have? It's improbable that humanity (or any other impressive life form) arbitrarily came into existence.
Imagine a wind whipping through a warehouse of airplane parts and blowing the pieces around until they form a perfect, functional 747 jet? That's what we are talking about in terms of the likelihood man "just happened" on Earth. A similar story involves monkeys being given typewriters and eventually writing all the works of Shakespeare.
This argument works because those making these claims deliberately leave out a critical aspect of the story: No scientist ever said everything happens randomly or arbitrarily. How things evolve, change or become something new and different can be explained using processes such as Natural selection.
This argument ignores glaring facts in the equation. The second law of thermodynamics applies to a closed system, but the Earth is not a closed system. The entire universe is expanding and entropic. Theists ignore this fact. When employing the Argument from Improbability to the concept of evolution, theists also deliberately ignore the process of natural selection, which clearly demonstrates that the evolutionary process is anything but random and arbitrary. In any case, even if the Argument from Improbability were true, it wouldn't prove the existence of God. Theists also employ the Argument from Ignorance to arbitrarily suggest Godidit! whenever something appears they can't explain. The bottom line is that just because something seems impossibly unlikely to naturally occur, that does not mean it is impossible. In most cases, many of these "improbable" happenings do indeed have clear scientific explanations that theists conveniently ignore.
Another variation on the Argument from Improbability centers around talking about how "perfect" the Earth, our bodies, the universe, etc. is:
Yes, if the Earth is so "perfect" how come the majority of it is covered with water and uninhabitable by humans? How come we weren't born with gills? If the universe is so perfect, why are there so many planets that are totally inhospitable to humans? Why doesn't the moon have an atmosphere? The "perfection" spin doesn't work.
8. French philosopher Blaise Pascal reasoned that it was a "safe bet" to believe in God just in case he was real. What's the harm? If you believe and he doesn't exist, you don't lose anything, but if you don't believe and he does exist, you lose big time.
Most theists have reasoned that Pascal's Wager makes sense. The problem is, it is a fool's bet. If God is really omnipotent, then surely he knows that your beliefs are not sincere, that you're just playing the odds. Beyond that, Pascal's Wager does not address the more substantive question of which God you should believe in. Do you believe in Christ, or Xenu, Mithra, Saturn, Buddha, or Allah? What if God's real test was to see who would defy convention and refuse to believe and those were the ones who get to heaven? The permutations in this equation are endless, which proves that Pascal's Wager is a total waste of time. Like all the other arguments, theists will disagree, but only because they've manufactured their own set of rules that convinces them that their reasoning makes more sense. It doesn't though.
9. The most common analogy used to illustrated the Argument from design is the "watchmaker argument". If you found a watch on the ground, you never met the watchmaker, but you know from its design, the beauty of it; the way each piece was intricately designed to work together, that this watch had a creator. Theists point to the human body; the precise way each of our organs work with each other and claim it's the most amazing "creation" of all, and surely there was some sort of creator behind it.
This most famous argument for God is also the easiest to completely deflate. If anything sufficiently complicated must have a creator, then who created God? It's as simple as that. However, when you point out this flaw in theist logic, they commit another logical fallacy: special pleading to claim that God is the exception to the rule and doesn't need to have a creator.
Furthermore, every example to date a theist can make to suggest that humans are too complex to have "happened by accident" (another false claim) has been debunked by scientists. The famous Dover trial put the argument from design on trial and the theists failed miserably to prove their case.
Now I'll focus on some of my favorite Atheists arguments against God.
1. The fundamental argument for atheism is that there is no evidence or proof for God. There is no solid or tangible evidence for God nor a logical argument for God. The existence of God is taken on faith and not by evidence.
- God can not be proven by science which is the main way we study and understand our universe or natural world. There is no theory of God
- There is no conclusive logical argument for the existence of God. His/her existence is continuously debated.
- There is no comprehensive definition of God. There are many definitions for the same God as there are many gods. This is problematic if one is to ascertain the characteristics of God to judge if God exists or not.
2. The paradox of omnipotence. We agree that a "married bachelor" can not exist because it is contradictory and self-refuting. An omnipotent God is self-refuting and contradictory.
- Omnipotence is the ability to do all things. To have all abilities
- However, some abilities are contradictory to each other. or some actions negate each other
- To sleep means you are not awake, for instance. You cant be asleep and awake at the same time.
- God has the ability to live for ever. Eternal life. However, that means that he can not die and he doesn't have the ability to kill himself
- God has the ability to be everywhere. he is omnipresent. However, that means that he doesn't have the ability to leave a certain place or the ability to be absent.
3. The Paradox of omniscience. Omniscience means knowing all things.
- If God knows everything, then he can not forget because the moment he forgets, he doesn't know everything. However, if God cant forget, he then doesn't know how to remember or recollect. If he can't recollect. then there is something he doesn't know- he doesn't know how it feels to recollect or remember something.
4. A Problem of tragedy, evil and natural disasters
- Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent.
- Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent.
- Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil?
- Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God?
5. Did God come out of nothing?
- "Something can't come out of nothing", the theist apologists commonly say.
- However, no one knows where God (at least the Abrahamic God) came from. The usual answer atheists get from the question is that God is eternal and didn't need a creator. However, this is a circular argument.
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