Continuing on from last week I’m listing some of the more common reasons why many people fail to believe in gods or God. So far I’ve talked about different kinds of atheism, about how evidence and how it does not lead to God and about how God isn’t necessary to living. Alone each of these reasons may not be sufficient to reject belief in God in the face of the reasons that people do have for belief.
This week I’ll look at some of the common proofs of God’s existence and try to explain why they are not convincing enough for me and many other atheists to make that leap of faith. This time I want to start off by saying that I accept that these arguments are enough to convince some, they just don’t convince me.
The Argument from Design
Mike alluded to this back in the discussion about evidence when he talked about the totality of existence being evidence for God.  We live in a universe that seems perfectly suited to life. It is beautiful and apparently orderly, at least the rules of physics remain orderly wherever we look. Surely such a wondrous thing is proof of design? If we can infer design then there must be a designer and only God could have designed it.  The argument for design says that the universe exists so God must exist.Â
On the face of things this seems pretty reasonable except that the universe isn’t that beautiful or that orderly. Look at evolution for example and you see massive waste with evolutionary dead ends seeing the extinction of 99% of all life that has ever lived on this planet. You see carnivores that have to kill in order to survive. You see lives snuffed out for no reason. You see suffering and death, destruction and torture at every turn. Human beings, supposedly the pinnacle of God’s creation, are wrought with flaws too numerous to mention. We are less created in God’s image than thrown together out of whatever working parts could be found.
However, even if the universe were a perfectly ordered and beautiful thing, and I’m not disputing that we can see beauty and order within it, even if it were perfect, why should there be a designer? Modern science has shown us that natural explanations exist for a wide variety of thinks we once thought of as designed. Laws are devised to explain the effects of gravity, theories are formed that explain natural processed like evolution or the chemical imbalances in the brain that lead to some mental illnesses.
The “Ontological” Argument
The ontological argument uses logic and reasoning based on an a priori proof proposed by Anselm of Canterbury way back in the 11th century. It is an argument that seeks to put God in a place where He is necessary for existence.
Ever since I first heard this I’ve always disliked it. I find it childish and silly and I really don’t see why anyone takes is seriously.
The First Cause Argument
Unlike the ontological argument I actually like the first cause argument. Among my “real life” friends who hold to no particular religion but retain a belief in a mysterious “something” the first cause is a favourite reason. “Well something must have started it all off” they say and they are quite correct. If everything has a cause then the universe must have a cause. isn’t it fair to say that this cause must be God?
Actually, no. If you want to put God up as a first cause then that is just begging the question of who or what caused God. If everything needs a cause then so does God. If God doesn’t need a cause then why does the universe? Saying that God is uncreated and perfect, that He somehow lives outside of the universe and outside of time, well, that isn’t satisfactory. It’s just begging the question again. If God was already perfect then what reason did he have for creating the universe?
Also, if the universe was caused why does that mean that God was the cause? Perhaps Odin was the cause, perhaps Ra, perhaps some unknown, natural process. There is room for doubt and lots of it.
Posted in A Cacophony of Posts, Jason | 48 Comments »I had no need of that hypothesis. (“Je n’avais pas besoin de cette hypothèse-là ”, as a reply to Napoleon, who had asked why he hadn’t mentioned God in his book on astronomy.)
- Pierre-Simon Laplace
Leading on from last week where I tried to provide an explanation for a lack of belief due to a lack of compelling evidence, this week it is a lack of necessity.
I’m sure that anyone who has kicked around religious debates for more than a few months will be familiar with William of Occam and his eponymous razor. The principle of Occam’s Razor is to explain a phenomena with as few assumptions as possible and to remove those elements that make no difference to the explanation.  “Entities must not be multiplied beyond necessity” is one of his ideas.
So, when we examine a phenomena, we do not count God in the hypothesis. not because God is not there or because God is there but because the presence or absence of God makes no difference to our examination. It has been said that you cannot put God in a test tube but the nature of an infinite being is that you cannot keep God out of a test tube either. By not counting God into hypotheses we are left to other devices to explain them. An atheist like me extends the idea and discounts God from all things as unnecessary.
Perhaps one day I will be confronted with a question that needs God to explain it.  Science is such a satisfactory way of explaining things in the universe that has no need for God and I am happy to accept that sometimes I don’t have enough information to provide an answer.  Yet, since we can explain so much with the tools of science then we don’t need to call on God to explain things.
Does this prove God doesn’t exist? Not at all. What it shows is that the assumption that God exists isn’t needed. If the assumption isn’t needed then why not abandon it?Â
William of Occam, a Franciscan monk, would not agree. The presumption of God was the very best way of explaining the universe in the 14th century. In the 21st century we have other tools at our disposal. Tools that make the God hypothesis unnecessary.
Posted in A Cacophony of Posts | 9 Comments »“What Can Be Asserted Without Evidence Can Be Dismissed Without Evidence”?
Christopher Hitchens
One reason that people have for being non-believers in God is a lack of evidence to support belief in God. This is obviously a different thing than positive evidence against something. The burden of proof, as they say, is on the claimant. Many times I have talked about evidence with theists and non-theists and always we return to the issue of faith.  A theist must have faith that their god is the true one despite a lack of supporting evidence. An atheist may dismiss the theist’s claims because the evidence is weak or, at the very least, unreliable.
I would suggest that we must start from the presumption of disbelief. I do not believe in unicorns, dragons, cosmic teapots, talking animals and a whole plethora of others things not because I have evidence that they do not exist but because I have no evidence that they do. The same holds true for belief in gods of any kind. Furthermore Christians feel precisely the same way about Odin, Ra, Quetzalcoatl, Oghma and all the other gods that human beings have believed in throughout history.
There are reasonable objections to this. People accept many things as true without insisting on good evidence and even in the face of contradictory evidence sometimes. I accept that a coin toss will have exactly a 50% chance of landing heads or tails even when I’ve managed to throw ten heads in a row. Empirical evidence suggests the coin will land heads on each toss but I do not accept this because I know that this is simply a statistical abnormality.
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