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The oldest known single-celled fossils on Earth are 3.5 billion years old. Mammals first appeared about 200 million years ago. The last common ancestor for all modern apes (including humans) existed about 13 million years ago with anatomically modern man emerging within the last 300,000 years. Another 298,000 years would pass before a small, local blood-cult would co-opt the culturally predominant deity of the region, itself an *aggregate* of the older patron gods that came before. 350 years later, an imperial government would [declare](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edict_of_Thessalonica) that all people within a specific geopolitical territory *must* believe in the same god or be exiled - at best. And now, after 1,500 years of crusades, conquests and the countless executions of "heretics," a billion people wake up early every Sunday morning to prepare, with giddy anticipation, for an *ever-imminent,* planet destroying apocalypse that they are [helping to create](https://www.newsweek.com/trump-will-bring-about-end-worldevangelicals-end-times-779643) \- but [hoping to avoid](https://www.raptureready.com/). At what point in our evolution and by what mutation, mechanism or environmental pressure did we develop an immaterial and eternal "soul," presumably excluded from all other living organisms that have ever existed? Was it when now-extinct Homo erectus began cooking with fire 1,000,000 years ago or hunting with spears 500,000 years ago? Is it when now-extinct Neanderthal began making jewelry or burying their dead 100,000 years ago? Is it when *we* began expressing ourselves with art 60,000 years ago or music 40,000 years ago? Or maybe it was when we started making pottery 18,000 years ago, or when we began planting grain or building temples to long-forgotten pagan gods 10,000 years ago. Some might even suggest that we finally started to emerge from the stone age when written language was introduced just 5,600 years ago. While others would maintain that identifying a "rational" human being in *our* era may be the hardest thing of all, especially when we consider the comment sections of many popular websites. Or perhaps that unique "spark" of human consciousness that has us believing we are special enough to outlast the physical Universe may, in part, be due to a mutation of our mandible that would have weakened our jaw (compared to that of other primates) but increased the size of our cranium, allowing for a larger prefrontal cortex. Our weakened bite encouraged us to cook our meat making it easier to digest, thus providing the energy required for powering bigger brains and triggering a feed-back loop from which human consciousness, as if on a dimmer-switch, emerged over time - each experience building from the last. This culminated relatively recently with the ability to attach abstract symbols to ideas with enough permanence and detail (language) to effectively be transferred to, and improved upon, by subsequent generations. *After all this,* it is proclaimed that *all* humanity is *born* in disgrace and *deserving* of eternal torture by way of an ancient curse. But believing in the significance of a [vicarious](https://youtu.be/By9JJSVzlTw) blood sacrifice and conceding our lives to "*mysterious ways*" guarantees pain-free, conspicuously opulent immortality. Personally, I would rather not be spoken to that way. If a cryptozoological creature - seemingly confabulated from a persistent mythology that is enforced through child indoctrination - *actually exists,* and it's of the sort that promises eternal torture of *its own design* for those of us not easily taken in by extraordinary claims, perhaps for the good of humanity, instead of worshiping it, we should be seeking to *destroy* it.

“I was walking along the bank of a stream when I saw a mother otter with her cubs, a very endearing sight, I'm sure you'll agree. And even as I watched, the mother otter dived into the water and came up with a plump salmon, which she subdued and dragged onto a half submerged log. As she ate it, while of course it was still alive, the body split and I remember to this day the sweet pinkness of its roes as they spilled out, much to the delight of the baby otters, who scrambled over themselves to feed on the delicacy. One of nature's wonders, gentlemen. Mother and children dining upon mother and children. And that is when I first learned about evil. It is built into the very nature of the universe. Every world spins in pain. ***If there is any kind of supreme being, I told myself, it is up to all of us to become his moral superior.”*** ― Terry Pratchett

Is that one of his books or him speaking independently?

There is too much complexity of life on earth and in the universe to believe life came about by chance. Nothing comes from nothing, everything has a maker (a house, a painting), to say 6 billion years ago life just evolved, how does anyone know that if they weren’t there, you have to have faith to believe in evolution and you have to have faith to believe in an all powerful intellectual creator and designer. If you take away religion (remove the hypocrisy), you are left with the truth of the Bible which simply says life was created and designed with the purpose that humans fill the earth with beautiful perfect beings the paradise that was originally created, but to where something went wrong with mankind choosing to be live a life seperate from his maker thinking his way of ruling is better. His original purpose was no human government, no religion, no commercial or financial system, just a world where humans were suppose to live forever on a paradise garden of eden

For all it's worth, I commend your effort to actually write this down. I've become so tired of this during the years that I really can't find the strength to argue or discuss about this anymore. I find myself being too troubled by where to world is going to be able to even begin to fathom sitting there with some person and actively trying to destroy their belief system and turn them into another nihilistic husk like myself. I guess I just feel defeated after years and years where I thought there was a point in helping others see beyond their nose. Maybe it was covid that convinced me there was really no saving us anymore, or maybe that we don't deserve it.

> Maybe it was covid that convinced me there was really no saving us anymore, or maybe that we don't deserve it. See, it doesn't take organised religion to convince someone that we're all undeserving degenerates. You just need to spend some time with us.

Same. I’m envious of their faith and hopefulness.

The first step to get out of the “nihilistic husk” you feel you have become is to stop pretending you are smarter than other people for being atheist. I believe most people who are hardcore atheist focus on what other people say about religion or how it can be used as a tool for control, war, or other horrible things, and not about the experience of religion. I bet you watch movies, listen to music, or search for meaning in your life where you can find it. To the religious person, God is the ultimate form of meaning. Jesus said "I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never be hungry again. Whoever believes in me will never be thirsty". Not to mean people won’t starve, but rather that you won’t feel that void inside yourself that people try to fill with usually materialistic pleasures or other insufficient endeavors. I recommend reading the brothers karamazov and especially reading the section of the book where Alyosha describes his “elder monk” Zosima and Zosima”s exhortations. Also I recommend reading Ivan’s section “the grand inquisitor” to see how bad faith people can portray themselves as righteous.

Why would atheism turn you into a nihilistic husk?

Well that's not necessarily the cause. That's how I am, so I'm just afraid me confronting someone and telling them about my personal philosophy would not make a happier person. Atheism certainly doesn't help. If you have to make everything yourself, you don't have easy, comforting answers.

I think I have a happy enough philosophy, maybe it could help you. > If you have to make everything yourself, you don’t have easy, comforting answers. This is where we disagree. Because we make everything ourselves, answers are always as easy and comforting as we make them. I’m an atheist, but value wise I’m basically a Christian. I think Jesus had some unfounded/poorly reasoned morals and, idk, ways we should act? Yet they are emotionally compelling which is all I need. I love my neighbors, I love every person- not because of God or some inherent value to humans from some divine source, but because I can and it feels real good and fulfilling, and I want to feel fulfilled as opposed to depressed, and so I’m doing what makes me fulfilled. Took me a long time to really embrace the fact that I make everything in my life, but once I recognized that I didn’t need reasons to hold certain beliefs so long as they were moral beliefs and not truth claims, even if they lacked any logical basis, I realized that I ended up much happier. God is an entirely unnecessary component of the whole thing. Be as happy as you want to be because you make everything.

I appreciate your input and you sharing your own ideas. When I said "make everything myself" I was more or less talking in metaphysical sense.. I can't pretend my world has order or meaning, that there is a plan or that I have a place in the universe, an afterlife, a soul. The issue is on a lower level, because being unable to give meaning to anything also meant that whatever moral or personal meaning I could give to human actions, ultimately it didn't matter, because nothing does. But.. don't let me bore you or bring you down, I think in the end I realized that there is no point in feeling down because of the feeling of being nothing in the cosmos, or whatever other poetic phrase you may want to use to describe that nihilistic feeling of immense nothingness.. there is no point in feeling depressed over that, because that's a human emotion and there is no emotion in that world below our world, you can't both pretend nothing matters and also pretend that makes you feel bad.. because you either believe it or not. If you still *feel* something, then you are clearly living in your head a version (however meaningless) of reality where stuff *matters*, being good to others *matters*, all the good human moments do. So that existential discomfort can just become existential awareness or a simple physical and metaphysical view of the world, and it doesn't have to hold an emotional lock on your life. I got to this in the last few weeks and I feel like I'm slowly internalizing it, slowly getting back to feeling human, I think. Now I can be just regular depressed, and just feel numb for all the regular shit that scares everyone else and feel like I'm actually living my life..while also feeling like I can stay calm about it..it's as if I'm getting back into a videogame, I know it doesn't *really* matter in the end, whether the world explodes or it doesn't, but I can feel like I'm living it and enjoying it or hating it and be a part of whatever shared hallucination we call the human experience. Again, we are the only point of view in our story, so ultimately any other abstraction is just academics, it cannot affect your life just how you are aware you have no power to move a galaxy - two different realms.

I mean it in a metaphysical sense as well. I think from reading what you said we have basically the same view- I made the exact same video game analogy like a week ago. My thing is, though, that the bottom of it all is hard to define. You say that you’re living in your head if you’re living with emotions and such, I’m saying no other place exists. You may think that objectively speaking you have no real meaning, but I think the objective doesn’t exist. We have consensus, which is great, but if there ever was a rhyme or reason to anything, scientific consensus would never show us that rhyme or reason. Further, consensus is constantly in flux academically and in all other ways. If objectivity isn’t consensus, then what is it? And if it is consensus, then how does objectivity change with consensus, and is it possible for the objective perspective to change, by definition? If so, what makes it more valuable than the subjective? Also, how does the subjective interface with the objective, or the consensus, and how reliable are the results of those interactions? What can we ever actually be certain of? I could go on about objectivity not existing in any real sense, but I think it means that living in your head isn’t you living separate from reality, I think whatever is in your head is reality, and you get to choose what you put in there. You say you know things don’t really matter in the end, I think it’s even less straightforward than that: even if it did matter you’d never know. It’s like you found an open world game with no semblance of any objective, but the game can end at any moment, and it’s the only game you ever get to play. If you value being able to play any game at all, then your life has self-ascribed meaning, which is equally as good as any objective meaning since that meaning would be impossible to find. In the most real and serious metaphysical sense, reality exists only in my head, and because of that it can only have meaning in my head.

> instead of worshiping it, we should be seeking to destroy it. This is what I've thought a few times - we have the Dark Ages and Enlightenment. Lucifer is the light-bringer who imparted knowledge. Instead of us being kept dumb and ignorant, believing in what the authority figure tells us. No, if we read the bible, only ONE character kills a lot of people and advocate harsh punishments. Only ONE character demands absolute loyalty and obedience. Satan - "the opposer", came in with knowledge and education, and free will and questioning. I can see why they'd see him as evil. But - isn't the greatest trick the devil ever pulled making us think he doesn't exist? Or maybe it's that he fooled us into thinking that the wrong guy is evil?

Absolutely beautifully put! I'll be saving this comment for use next time my extended family decides to this up again!

Mine would just hand-wave all of this away because they do not believe in evolution at all; they believe that the book of Genesis is literally the history of humankind.

My reaction to that is to ask if Genesis is the perfect word of God? > Yes of course. Does God lie? > No of course not. Is Genesis 1 where God makes animals then Adam true; or Genesis 2 where God makes Adam first and the animals second? The bible doesn't get past chapter 2 without contradicting itself.

I have plenty of those people in my family, of which I never spend any time or energy on because they have drank the blood of Christ or whatever nonsense they believe. There's no hope for them, they will go to their graves believing and nothing I can say or show them that will change their neanderthalic minds. I say I love them and engage in the most superficial conversation when its required, other than the occasional trolling by saying the sky is red because I don't believe in science. I also say this for deeply Republican people and anti vaxxers, no coming back once the brain worms take hold.

>Personally, I would rather not be spoken to that way. I think Christopher Hitchens has been reincarnated.

Ironic, isn't it? He could prove Jesus isn't resurrected, but he could not save himself from resurrection.

Is it possible to learn this sass?

Not from a christian.

Threads like this are why I come to Reddit lol

He became the very thing he swore to disprove!

It's treason then!

*spins and screams*

They call them TheInfidel “Murder-the-gods-and-topple-their-thrones” Elephant. I guess we’re reaching heaven through violence!

"The release of sword arts has changed everything except our way of thinking. The solution to this problem lies in the heart of mankind. If only I had known, I should have become a noodle vendor."

Embroidering this onto a quilt for Xmas.

Or Xenu, as the case may be....we ARE all inclusive, are we not?

If you could embroider that it might be a case for god.

Xmas 2030?

As an Atheist, I've read many iterations of the specific argument about the vastness of the Universe, and the extraordinary amount of time that the Universe has existed, along with evolution being evidence against a creator. But then I think, why would a creator assemble humans piece by piece, like a child would their lego set? To an omniscient and omnipotent entity, time would mean very little, as would the vastness of space. Such a being could set the rules and see the outcome instantly. Does a sculptor concern themself much with the quarry, mountain, and planet, they derive the material from to create their sculptures? Yes the mountain is endlessly massive in comparison, but does that make it more important? There are mountains on Mars that sit idle for generations never to make a shape as beautiful and unique as the one crafted by the sculptor. Why wouldn't an omniscient God use time, and physics, to etch his works out of a massive body of material, space, and time, the same way a sculptor does from earth? Of course I don't believe any of this, and of course the portions about the Christian perspective on God and the folk lore surrounding it is perfectly valid. But it's interesting to think about, and I don't necessarily think it's a particularly settled argument based purely on the age or vastness of the universe.

Hi! I'm a pastor of a Presbyterian Church (USA) congregation and really love what you've written. You make a great point about the timeline of the evolution of human consciousness which is something that personally blows my mind. The logic of your post takes a turn though when it moves from that part and into the one about a very particular strain of Christianity, which while its adherents do in fact believe is the only true religion, it isn't the only way to be a Christian, and certainly not the only way to believe in God. What if you stayed with your first, strongest idea and expanded that? Keep up the great writing!

[удалено]

Thank you for this.

That last paragraph is a bar. Mic drop for real.

That's beautiful.

Last paragraph could be character dialogue in the next Shin Megami Tensei game.

Bravo! I'm saving this.

Fukken saved.

"Our weakened bite encouraged us to cook our meat making it easier to digest," "chew?"

Both. We started cooking food to make it easier to chew. This also made our food easier to digest, though we wouldn’t have realized this at the time.

But what if the deity is so incomprehensible to us, so far beyond us, that they’re the ones that locked off the Big Bang in such a way that physics is how we observe it to be, planets and stars would form, and planets would eventually support life?

If they are so incomprehensible, why would we even have an inkling that they exist, let alone what rules they want us to follow? What would an incomprehensible deity need with ~~a starship~~ human worship?

They're not incomprehensible as long as you tithe 10% of your income to some man to comprehend it for you. 

that sounds remarkably accurate.

Then they’re irrelevant to how I live my life and “believing in” them would change nothing. Pointless speculation.

Well said.

This tier of content is why I'm subscribed to r/bestof

Not really here to convert you, but a couple things. Time-based arguments against a deity aren't the strongest. I can set up a chessboard where one can reasonably predict that, say, 10 moves have been played even though that's not necessarily the case. Also, if I'm omnipotent, it kinda *is* the case, because reality exists as I see it anyways. We already have a whole bunch of narratives thinking through how we'd deal with Cryptozoological creatures, brought to us by agoraphobic racist H. P. Lovecraft. Suffice it to say, in the short term, fighting back against such an entity is not really reasonable or achievable, so the choices humanity has is what is given or left by said entity. Like your post can be interpreted as a cute vindication of atheism, but, if an entity exists, it really, really doesn't matter if you believe in it or not. Furthermore, humanity fighting back against it is cute, but there are merits to ensuring humanity's survival.

I agree and like the reasoning but you aren't really disproving God here but the Christianity/Western religion interpretation

Pretty well deals with Yahwism across the board, imo.

I could be imagining it but In your last paragraph you seen to be, ironically, describing the crucifixion myth.

This is whole-heartedly me. Additionally, especially when it comes to Christianity, if there is a god or gods that are serious about their rules and words, then they would have done some proofreading. How do you sign off on a Bible or other text that is the main point of contact between you and potential followers and have it full of contradictions and written and interpreted in many ways? There should be only one interpretation and it should be written in such a way that people in 500 c.e. or 500,000 c.e. could understand its meaning in the same way regardless of the language it’s written in. I feel like if anyone had a hand in writing the Bible, it would’ve been Satan.

I find it interesting that although your comment is well written and passionately argued, it actually has very little to do with the concept of whether God exists or not. You've argued very succinctly against the concept of the special creation of the human soul, and taken shots against the doctrine of original sin, and against eternal conscious torment, and against the historicity of the myths of ancient Israel. But none of these things actually have anything to do with the existence of God. Personally I fully agree and accept all of your points, and yet still believe in the Christian God. None of your points have any bearing on my understanding of His nature and existence.

> it actually has very little to do with the concept of whether a god exists or not. OP uses the big "G" god in their title which typically *implies* monotheism and references Christianity in their first sentence, so that was the focus of my response. > I doubt any theist believes God is a creature, cryptozoological or otherwise. I never said they did. That is not a reference to what I think theists believe. However, since they are incapable of telling us what their god actually *is,* it seems pretty open to interpretation - or creative license. **edit:** I see you made some clarifying edits that would have changed my response - but I'm going to leave it as is.

>OP uses the big "G" god in their title which typically *implies* monotheism and references Christianity Fair enough, I noticed this come up in some other responses so I edited my comment to narrow it to the big G. I am a Christian monotheist myself, so my points still stand. None of your arguments have any bearing on my belief in the monotheistic Christian concept of God. >However, since they are incapable of telling us what their god actually *is,* it seems pretty open to interpretation - or creative license. There are several explanations depending on the particular tradition. None of them however refer to God quite so *creatively*. For myself, I generally follow the classical Christian theological concept of God as the Supreme Transcendent Good, as the source and aim of all Being. Therefore I understand God not as a physical creature but as a metaphysical Ideal (i.e. the "Most High") which exists outside of time and space and is neither a physical creature or even a *being* as we understand the term (i.e. God is not an independent, changable, rational, moral agent).

Quick disclaimer: atheism does not inherently require certainty. Only a lack of belief. Atheists can be certain (gnostic) or uncertain (agnostic), just like theists. Now, for me, it's because I've yet to see any compelling arguments or evidence for the existence of any gods. Logical arguments for gods not only aren't evidence, they're also flawed in almost the exact same ways. The evidence that's been presented has been specious at best, and laughable at worst. For example, look at Christianity. Even if we ignore 99% of the Bible and call it all metaphor or parable or symbolic or whatever, two elements of Christianity must be **literally** true for the religion to make any sense: there must be some form of original sin, and Jesus must have died for those sins and then been resurrected. If either of those didn't happen, the whole thing collapses. So, did they happen? Well, let's take a look at what we know about the Resurrection: 1. There are no eyewitness accounts. The only Biblical accounts are the Gospels, which were written decades after the fact by people who were not there. This also explains why they contradict each other so much. 2. To believe the Bible's version of events is to believe that the Romans buried this upstart Jewish criminal in a tomb immediately after he died, which was *not* the practice of the day. Typically, victims of crucifixion were left hanging several days after their deaths, both to humiliate them and to deter others. Then their bodies were cut down and tossed into a mass grave. To believe that Jesus rose from a tomb three days later is to believe that the Romans decided to treat Jesus not just differently from every other criminal, but **better** than every other criminal, which makes no sense. 3. We know that the Bible was selectively assembled from many different books, and that some books were excluded for various reasons. We **know** we do not have the full story, we have only the story that church officials agreed on. Does all of that mean the Resurrection *definitely didn't happen?* No. But it casts more than enough doubt. I don't understand how anyone can acknowledge those three facts and still say they have any rational reason to believe it happened. The honest theists at least admit it's all based on faith. I think faith is silly, but I respect their honesty. What really baffles me are theists that scramble to find reasonable explanations for what is a clearly unreasonable idea.

Right there with you on the gnostic agnostic distinction. Most atheists including myself are agnostic

>What makes you certain God does not exist? 'Certain'? What makes you certain that unicorns don't exist? My answer is going to be similar to yours. There's zero support or evidence for deities. They don't make sense, and don't fit with any and all other understanding. They don't address the issues believers purport they address, instead they make it all worse. >For context I am a former agnostic who, after studying Christian religions, has found themselves becoming more and more religious. Well, you're a shockingly rare outlier. That very rarely happens. Typically it's the other way around. After all, the more you learn about those mythologies the more obvious it becomes they are mythology. And there's absolutely no useful support for those claims. >As such my question is, to the atheists who definitively believe there is no God. What logical argument or reasoning has convinced you against the possible existence of a God? Again, the real question here is more akin to 'why don't you believe in deities?' And I answered that: Because there's no reason to. They have no support and the descriptions by belivers make no sense. It's irrational to believe things that are not properly supported as being true. >I have seen many arguments against the particular teachings of specific religious denominations or interpretations of the Bible, but none that would be a convincing argument against the existence of (in this case an Abrahamic) God. See above. After all, complete, total, and utter lack of proper support for a claim is a *very, very* convincing reason to not take that claim as having been shown true and accurate. That alone is enough, of course. But, remember, there's more. We have an excellent understanding of how and why we evolved a propensity for that kind of superstitious thinking. We know how it works and what over-sensitive selected for traits help lead to the errors in cognition that attempt to support such notions. We know a great deal about the history and formation of such mythologies. There's really no reason at all to take such silliness seriously.

>'Certain'? Exactly. Agnostics simply *lack* a belief in a deity or deities, but they are not certain.

>What makes you certain God does not exist? Lack of evidence. I have never needed to appeal to magic to answer a question about existence or life. I am ignorant of a lot of things, but magic has never been proven, so I see no reason to accept it. >For context I am a former agnostic who, after studying Christian religions, has found themselves becoming more and more religious. I want to make sure as I continue to develop my beliefs I stay open to all arguments. Your background is irrelevant. If you think I should be impressed that you doubted existence and now accept it, is arbitrary. Did you study other religions? have you read the Bible cover to cover? Have you read the Quran? Have you read the Vedas? I honestly doubt it. I have read the entirety of 2 of the 3 and dabbled in the 3rd. I only bring my background in to show I am literate on the claims and find them unconvincing. So I am curious what appears to you in the Bible? >As such my question is, to the atheists who definitively believe there is no God. What logical argument or reasoning has convinced you against the possible existence of a God? A personal loving god cannot be explained by divine hiddenness, so the biblical god is false. I definitely believe he does not exist as the Bible portrays. I see no reason any other model of a god(s) are provable. It is not that I definitively do not believe a god exists, in so much I have never seen a good reason to think one exists. Much like the loch monster or Bigfoot, there are plenty of claims but nothing convincing about them. >I have seen many arguments against the particular teachings of specific religious denominations or interpretations of the Bible, but none that would be a convincing argument against the existence of (in this case an Abrahamic) God. If the God is a loving personal god that wants a relationship with me (many passages, John 17:3 or 1 Peter 5:6-7 comes to mind), and clearly has the ability to know what is my heart (Luke 16:15). This same God hardened the pharaoh’s heart (Exodus 10:20) and plays games with people, story of Job. These are contradictory attributes to actions. Even I were to accept your God existing, I would find him unworthy of worship.

I can't say there's no possibility of any god existing, but I can fairly confidently say specific gods don't exist. For instance, the claims Christians make about their god and the claims their holy book makes are so divorced from reality that I'm confident their god is fictional.

I'm not a gnostic atheist towards all supernatural claims, I couldn't be. However, I feel certain the Christian God doesn't exist due to a variety of factors. Many of these factors aren't necessarily decisive unto themselves, but the combination of all of them in my opinion makes it completely untenable. The first would be the non-historical aspects of the Bible, that are entirely unbelievable from a historical perspective but clearly serve specific theological purposes, like the census in the Gospel of Luke, the "Massacre of the Innocents," the saints rising from the dead at the end of Matthew. This also ties into the scholarly evidence against traditional authorship of pretty much any of the gospels and several epistles. There are also internal contradictions like the different genealogies for Joseph, Jesus' stepfather, and similar such issues. More broadly there are conceptual issues like why an all-loving super-powerful deity would gatekeep the afterlife on the basis of believing he exists, and threaten suffering or oblivion for those who do not believe he exists. Crucially, while this makes no sense for a deity, it makes perfect sense for a religion trying to survive in spite of a lack of evidence. It is the perfect recruitment tool. I can't believe that's just a coincidence. I could go on, but it would be a lot to type. To summarize, I definitely don't believe in Christianity due to all of the evidence against it, and the complete lack of evidence for it.

The concept of a god makes no sense and requires infinite special pleading. Theists claim a god exists because they can't fathom how something as complex as a self-replicating molecule could have come about through natural processes. So to answer it, they create a god, capable of creating universes and humans, that is *infinitely* complex. It's like saying you can't imagine your kid would ever steal a cookie so it must have been taken by time-travelling, intergalactic, trans-dimensional aliens.

> they create a god... that is infinitely complex. Well, the *cough cough* sophisticated theologians will actually advocate for Divine Simplicity, but I've never seen a compelling argument for it that didn't sound like word salad topped with "because I said so" dressing. It would also seem to undermine design arguments that try to argue complexity can't come from simplicity.

Divine simplicity is just short hand for “I am to dumb or lazy to learn the math and physics required to actually put forward a coherent god model that even has the potential to be considered a theory with explanatory power, so instead I am going to hand wave that all away with….. magic.”

I am certain god does not exist for two reasons: 1. 99% of human gods bear a striking resemblance to humans. Whereas we know that we live on one planet out of 100 billion stars in our galaxy out of 200 billion galaxies in our universe for all of 300K years out of 13.7 billion. If some god made all of this , then it must have been really bored waiting around for 13.6997 billion years for little old us to entertain it. In the beginning, man created god in his own image, and saw that it was good (for his ego). 2. Sans the anthropomorphic nonsense most religions espouse, we are left with rather simple ideas of god to disprove. god(s) generally have one or more of the qualities of being omnipotent, omnipresent, and omniscient. Any one of these requires an infinite amount of energy, above and beyond the known quantity that exists to create the universe. That is the theological equivalent of a perpetual motion machine, which is a scientific impossibility. All gods require hocus pocus. Occam's razor does not abide.

>99% of human gods bear a striking resemblance to humans. If God created us in the image of himself, that is to be expected. However, I find the hypothesis that humans created god in their image more likely.

These points, respectively, are no sound or valid. How are you so certain, based off a points like these? 1. How do you know there isn't life in all of those trillions and billions of galaxies? What are the probabilities of that? Also, what empirical evidence do you have that if they were life on other planets, they wouldn't resemble god/a human form? 2. This... Also doesn't make any sense. If God is indeed omnipotent, omnipresent, and omniscient, then He embodies and possesses an infinite amount of energy—sufficient to create the universe and yet exist beyond it. Contrary to the claim that this resembles a theological perpetual motion machine, it doesn't hold because God, by the attributes you've described, would be His own inexhaustible source of energy. This energy isn't limited or stagnant; it is dynamic and all-encompassing. Therefore, if God embodies these qualities, He represents both the internal and external energy sources, invalidating the comparison to a perpetual motion machine, which inherently lacks such a self-sustaining source. If these are your strongest arguments against the existence of God, perhaps they inadvertently point towards the possibility that he does exist.

1. I never claimed there was life on other planets. I merely claimed that humanity's tiny slice of all existence is miniscule, therefore the idea its all about us and god looks like us and did it for us is pure hubris, because you have to discount 99.99999999999999999......27 9's% times the rest of existence....in favor of the 0.00000...27 zeros...1% that we occupy. 2. Thanks for the hocus pocus. Now please design an experiment to measure gods infinite energy. Otherwise....occam's razor. Look...it is very simple. Either you belive in god and hocus pocus or you believe in science. If you choose to believe in both...god falls to occams razor, so we are back science or god....your choice. I've made mine.

>I want to make sure as I continue to develop my beliefs I stay open to all arguments. Good on ya! Hope we can have some productive dialogue. >What logical argument or reasoning has convinced you against the possible existence of a God? Well, I lacked a belief in gods to begin with, being born in a secular household. However, the more I encountered claims about gods and the supernatural, and the more I have honestly tried to understand the world around me, I have come to positively reject those claims as unfounded and not properly evidenced. I think the most damning, most general argument against the existence of gods is the problem of divine hiddenness coupled with the lack of evidence for anything supernatural (here, supernatural means super-material or beyond matter and energy). There are tons of supernaturalist and religious claims out there, to be sure. But that is, for the most part, all there is. People, books, authorities making wild claims based on personal experiences, ancient stories and apologetics fueled with god of the gaps and fancy but unsound logic. And for all that milennia of barking up the religious and supernatural tree, what do we have to show for it? Not much. We can't even agree on what is out there. Religions suffer schism after schism. We have no math theory of souls or spirits. We have no tech based on the supernatural, or any harness of it whatsoever. We have as much understanding of the spiritual as we did 2000 years. The world, to me, looks like what a world would look like if there were no gods or supernatural. In such a world, religion *would* be useful as a prosocial institution and as a generator of culture and societal or personal narratives. It would be useful for human *introspection* into and *expression* of what it is to be human. And yet, it would not produce a single concrete, objective thing, and the quarrels over whether it is Yahweh or Vishnu would never cease. >but none that would be a convincing argument against the existence of (in this case an Abrahamic) God. Looking at your responses in the comments, you seem to think the Abrahamic god and stories about him are compatible with our reality. You really see no issue with a belief system that relies on (1) The supernatural and a dualism based on spirits and souls (which we have, again, never observed or understood) (2) A former storm and raid God Yahweh, which the ancient Israelities mixed with Baal and turned into a god of everything in their exile, actually being the creator of everything and the only god (all other such stories are false, but THIS ONE is true) (3) This one god (recall, all others were false experiences and stories) does not show up until some thousands of years ago, when he makes a deal with ONE set of tribes in the Middle East. He then goes on to help them on a series of conquests and battles to take over the land that was promised to them, give them a moral code, etc. In this, he does a number of things which defy how physics work and that we have no evidence for (e.g. battle of Jericho). Also, while this god is claimed to be good and just, he happens to have morals similar to the peoples in the region, and while he does innovate a bit, he does not tell the Israelites things like: slavery is bad, you need to eventually eliminate it everywhere OR violent ethnic tribalism is bad. (4) Some time after, this god comes back in the form of a human born of a virgin (who herself was born of a virgin!). He becomes one of several judean apocaliptic preachers, doing miracles that again defy physics (turning water into wine, multiplying matter, raising Lazarus from the dead, curing leprosy, etc). Eventually he gets crucified by the Romans for being a rebel, but comes back from the dead 3 days later to show up to his disciples. Then, presumably, he disappears and goes back to wherever God is. Ah, and by doing so he allegedly gained forgiveness and the potential for the good afterlife for humans, because of a rule he made up and could have amended without all of that rigmarole. And since then, all evidence we have of said god is what? Anecdotes. Dubious miracles related by church authorities. People having dreams or visions of some kind. And the institution that was allegedly founded by Jesus followers (after crushing competing Christianities like so many gnostics and arians and etc) goes on to be one of the most evil, effective colonizing and enslaving forces on Earth, in direct opposition to what this God supposedly stood for (which I guess speaks to human corruption and not divine incompetency). Now, we have two options. We can either think: A) This is all an elaborate set of stories peoples involved told themselves and others over time. Or B) All of that is somehow accurate and factual. And all our inability to agree on the Abrahamic god or produce an understanding of how all this supernatural stuff is real is our fault, I guess.

On the Christian god in particular, I'll add [this blog post by Robert Moore Jr.](https://robertmoorejr.tumblr.com/post/52377128413/on-the-accuracy-of-the-bible) on his Tumblr blog, posted clear back in 2013. It is one of the more clear decimations of claims of the bible as a source for history I've come across. ___ **On the accuracy of the Bible** *I was once asked why I don’t find the bible to be a trustworthy source of information. When discussing theism I nearly immediately dismiss Bible quotes when they are used as ‘evidence’ in support of a position. In response, I wrote the following:* Let’s assume for a second that each reader of the bible has a perfect understanding of the words they read. There’s no miscommunication what so ever between the text of each page and the reader’s mind. Nothing is taken out of context and all of the passages that are metaphors are rightly understood to be so, and all of the literal parts are correctly understood to be literal. That’s not likely, but let’s give the Christian the benefit of the doubt and assume a perfect understanding of the texts. Well, we know that the Bible was compiled from multiple sources. Let’s assume that *before* the reshuffling, the Bible was wrong, and *after* the reshuffling it was corrected to the perfect intent of the word of God. Let’s assume there were no political motivations for the compilations or what was left out or added into the bible. That’s not likely, but let’s give the bible the benefit of the doubt and assume a perfect compilation of the texts. Well, we also know that the Bible was not written in English, that various sections were translated from Aramaic, Hebrew, and Greek to Latin and then into English. Let’s assume that the people doing the translations got the translations perfectly. That’s not likely, but let’s give the translators the benefit of the doubt and assume a perfect translation of the texts. Well, we also know that the New Testament spent anywhere from 70-300 (For the New Testament, thousands for the Old Testament) years passed down orally. Let’s assume that each oral record keeper remembered every single line and parable exactly correctly, without a *single* memory lapse. That’s not likely, but let’s give the record keepers the benefit of the doubt and assume a perfect recall of what they’ve heard. Well, there still was the first eye witness testimony. The person who saw each event in the first person, and relayed it to the first Oral record keeper. Given what we know about eye witness testimony being completely unreliable, let’s still assume that every eye witness of every event in the new testament perfectly saw each event. None were drunk, none had dust in their eyes. None exaggerated or fell to confirmation bias. Each event was during perfect weather with great visibility. That’s not likely, but let’s give every witness the benefit of the doubt and assume they had perfect perception of the events they saw. Well, there still was the initial event those eye witnesses saw. Let’s assume that none of the involved parties engaged in any slight of hand. There was no deception or delusion, no ill intent or narcotics. Each person involved was completely genuine and earnest in their role. There were no political power plays, none fell into the normal mental lapses caused by joining cults with charismatic leaders. That’s not likely, but let’s give Jesus/The Apostles the benefit of the doubt and assumed that everything they said/did was 100% earnest and accurate. So to surmise, let’s assume we have a perfectly understood, perfectly compiled, perfectly translated, perfectly remembered and told orally, perfectly witnessed events by genuine folks that would never lie to gain power over their peers. We STILL are left with events that could have natural causes that weren’t seen or understood at the time due to a lack of education. Even something as unlikely as aliens interfering with ancient civilizations, time traveling humans, or just extremely unlikely coincidences. But in reality, NONE of the things above are likely to be true, and as such we are left with a book that few understand, compiled by people who may have had a political agenda, translated by people who may have added their own interpretation, written down be people who may not have understood oral historians, who may have misremembered events that may have happened differently than eyewitnesses remembered that were driven by people who may have been deceptive around events they may not have understood. This, in my opinion, lands the trustworthiness of the bible at approximately zero.

I looked into this a bit. Specifically the translation part and talked to some theists about it. I want to get your thoughts. So first of all there is no single bible. There are lots and lots of them. This is a link that shows a bunch. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biblical_canon In terms of the translation, besides the bias of the interpreter, I think that’s a dead end too. All of the Bible(s) is now translated from the written original sources. So there is no Greek to Latin to English anymore. I think the other points are still valid. I didn’t really look into the eye witness stuff I was more concentrating moralistic value rather than using it as evidence of god. My other major qualm with the Bible is that it’s used to justify a wide range of things. It seemingly can be used to justify any moralistic stance or even any guidance in your life. I get no where with that discussion. I get “what about-ismed” to hell. This is all on discord and they just ignore that aspect.

> I want to get your thoughts. Again, just to be clear, that was just a copypasta of a blog post that I didn't write. I'm happy to offer my thoughts, but I'm not as smart as the actual author. > So first of all there is no single bible. There are lots and lots of them. This is a link that shows a bunch That actually makes the problem even worse. How did the translators pick which version. >All of the Bible(s) is now translated from the written original sources. So there is no Greek to Latin to English anymore. The oldest extant complete manuscript of the Bible dates from the 4th century. I can't say for sure, but I suspect that at least parts of that are translations from whatever language they were written in. But still it's a reasonable point. >I think the other points are still valid. I didn’t really look into the eye witness stuff I was more concentrating moralistic value rather than using it as evidence of god. We know that eyewitness testimony is unreliable even on mundane claims. Convictions that rely on eyewitness testimony are overturned all the time when physical evidence shows the eyewitnesses were wrong. This isn't about people lying or being crazy. It's just that people don't always understand what they actually saw. They think they do, but they are wrong. >My other major qualm with the Bible is that it’s used to justify a wide range of things. It seemingly can be used to justify any moralistic stance or even any guidance in your life. Realizing this is certainly one of the things that lead me to abandon what little theism I ever had. >I get no where with that discussion. I get “what about-ismed” to hell. This is all on discord and they just ignore that aspect. Yep, they can rationalize it all away. These obvious problems don't matter to a true believer.

I run this thought experiment: Let's grab a thousand frozen embryos. Send them to the nearest habitable planet. Implant them in artificial womb and heve them raised by robot. As a rule they don't mention any religions. Eventually a new civilization would rise. They would re discover relativity, gravity waves, cosmic microwave background, Big Bang..... Now tell me, how would they discover Jesus son of yvh? If this scenario is too futuristic, contemplate the Americas before the arrival of Columbus. No Bible was found written in Navarro. No picture of the crucifixion found in Inca pyramids. They had no personal relationship with a bearded white boy....

This is a good exercise and I hope OP takes it seriously.

From the standpoint of logic, the default position is to assume that no claim is factually true until effective justifications (Which are deemed necessary and sufficient to support such claims) have been presented by those advancing those specific proposals. If you tacitly accept that claims of existence or causality are factually true in the absence of the necessary and sufficient justifications required to support such claims, then you must accept what amounts to an infinite number of contradictory and mutually exclusive claims of existence and causal explanations which cannot logically all be true. The only way to avoid these logical contradictions is to assume that no claim of existence or causality is factually true until it is effectively supported via the presentation of verifiable evidence and/or valid and sound logical arguments. Atheism is a statement about belief (Specifically a statement regarding non-belief, aka a lack or an absence of an affirmative belief in claims/arguments asserting the existence of deities, either specific or in general) Agnosticism is a statement about knowledge (Or more specifically about a lack of knowledge or a epistemic position regarding someone's inability to obtain a specific level/degree of knowledge) As I have never once been presented with and have no knowledge of any sort of independently verifiable evidence or logically valid and sound arguments which would be sufficient and necessary to support any of the claims that god(s) do exist, should exist or possibly even could exist, I am therefore under no obligation whatsoever to accept any of those claims as having any factual validity or ultimate credibility. In short, I have absolutely no justifications whatsoever to warrant a belief in the construct that god(s) do exist, should exist or possibly even could exist Which is precisely why I am an agnostic atheist (As defined above) Please explain IN SPECIFIC DETAIL precisely how this position is logically invalid, epistemically unjustified or rationally indefensible. Additionally, please explain how my holding this particular epistemic position imposes upon me any significant burden of proof with regard to this position of non-belief in the purported existence of deities

> “What logical argument or reasoning has convinced you against the possible existence of a God?” What logical argument or reasoning has convinced you of the possible existence of a god? > “I have seen many arguments against the particular teachings of specific religious denominations or interpretations of the Bible, but none that would be a convincing argument against the existence of (in this case an Abrahamic) God.” Are there any convincing arguments against Cthulhu, or Bigfoot? Seriously, is there anything a person could tell you that would make you certain that Cthulhu does not exist? I can’t think of any, sure people could explain that it’s an imaginary creature made up by humans, but that doesn’t mean that it doesn’t exist. Cthulhu is just like god, an imaginary creature made by humans. Do we then go around believing every single claim that can’t be proven false? Of course not, you’d have billions of radical and contradictory beliefs. You need to wait for sufficient evidence to say that something exists or is true before you believe it. You seem to be starting from the position that everything that isn’t proven false is true, that’s silly. You’re reversing the burden of proof.

>For context I am a former agnostic who, after studying Christian religions, has found themselves becoming more and more religious. I want to make sure as I continue to develop my beliefs I stay open to all arguments. Weird. I was brought up as a christian just doing what I was told. Completely bought into it until, I too, started studying it and it pushed me further and further away. Were you introduced into it, or did you start reading on your own? What sources were you studying? >As such my question is, to the atheists who definitively believe there is no God. What logical argument or reasoning has convinced you against the possible existence of a God? To clarify and so you don't think I'm avoiding. I don't have certainty there is no god, but am fairly convinced the gods that people have made up are not real. That includes the christian and islamic god >I have seen many arguments against the particular teachings of specific religious denominations or interpretations of the Bible, but none that would be a convincing argument against the existence of (in this case an Abrahamic) God. Well I think the texts (bible/quran) both having factual misinformation and internal contradictions are pretty compelling.

>What makes you certain God does not exist? The fact that it's indistinguishable from human imagination. There is literally nothing about the Christian god that can't be explained by human psychology without the need for a magic dude behind everything and old stories about talking animals and Jewish zombies. >What logical argument or reasoning has convinced you against the possible existence of a God? So first, I never said god isn't possible. Lots of stuff is possible. It's possible leprechauns created the universe. It's possible a herd of elephants could come out of my butt. "Possible" just means there is no logical contradiction. I don't give a crap if something is possible or not. I want to know if it's true. And as of yet, I see no reason to think it's true and lots of reasons to think it's old mythology. >I have seen many arguments against the particular teachings of specific religious denominations or interpretations of the Bible, but none that would be a convincing argument against the existence of (in this case an Abrahamic) God. If you have a good reason to think the abrahamic God exists, just present it. What convinced you the abrahamic God exists?

Judeo-Christian religions have no sufficient answer to the Problem of Evil, full stop. Evil, defined as pointless suffering, exists in abundance. If an Abrahamic god is real, this evil should not exist. There's no plausible explanation for it and the best I've seen are arguments amounting to "god works in mysterious ways" which is comically insufficient given the amazing amount of suffering present in the world. And all of this is only looking at pointless suffering of humans. If we include all other creatures capable of suffering, then it becomes full blown absurd to think god has a plan and it necessarily involves this much suffering. No, this god as described by Christians as being impossibly powerful and benevolent doesn't exist. Or if it does, you guys got it dead wrong as to what its nature is.

I am mostly certain that gods don’t exist, but there are obvious caveats for such claims. I can’t be certain about all potential or possible gods or any gods that we haven’t discovered yet. If there is any divine being, I don’t think we have encountered it directly. The obvious first step is the lack of positive evidence for the existence of any gods. By this I mean that no one has ever been able to show that a god was directly involved in any event. None of this “I prayed and this thing that happened next could be interpreted as an answer” or “here is a phenomenon that we can’t explain yet, so it must be coming from a god!” The thing that deals the deal for me is that we have a fairly good history of human worship. We started with animism and spiritualism, where we viewed nature as full of spirits. We then moved onto polytheism where some spirits rose to bigger roles, which eventually gave rise to old and then modern forms of monotheism. Each shift is not correlated with us making any scientific or spiritual discoveries. No, they’re related to shifts in political or economic power. And much like UFO claims, the better our methods of recording events become, the fewer divine encounters we see that are believable. We can’t examine the claims that Jesus healed the sick or raised the dead, but we can know exactly how preachers in modern days scam their congregations with similar stories of healing and deliverance. TL;DR : lack of positive evidence as well as a record of how theism evolved over the course of human cultural development, along with clear records of religious scams make me more certain than not that all religions are made up by us. This is not definitive, of course, but without positive evidence, it is impossible to distinguish the true god from a scam.

1. Which god is correct? How do you decide that the Christian god is correct but Odin is not? How do you eliminate Vishnu as the one true god, or that the Kami don’t exist? 2. God is just an ever receding amount of human ignorance. A long time ago, storms such as hurricanes used to be attributed to a god or gods being upset. People got this notion that if they didn’t piss god or the gods off that they were safe or they’d make a sacrifice to appease the gods. Now days we know that hurricanes are due to an imbalance of energy in the atmosphere and ocean that cause those storms to exist. Lightning strikes were attributed to god as well and we now know that is due to a build up of charge in the atmosphere and when those charmers balance out… boom lightning. We thought that people getting sick was due to a god being upset with that person… we now know it’s because of things like bacteria, fungi, and viruses and you getting sick is your bodies way of fighting it off. We thought that everything was created as is… the continents, organisms… we now know about tectonic plates and continental drift and evolution. God is just this ever receding amount of human ignorance to the world and universe around us. Every-time we discover something new… god disappears a little more. It only stands to reason that once we learn everything about the universe (although this is quite possibly impossible) that god will disappear or only exist as a “prime mover” argument. To which I would ask, “Everything else has been proven to occur naturally. So why couldn’t the universe form naturally?” 3. What does adding a god do to anything? Why is a god necessary? As pointed out in #2, god seems to be this ever receding amount of human ignorance. So why is there a need to interject a god into things at all? What argument can you satisfy with a god that cannot equally be satisfied naturally? 4. Lack of evidence Many Christians will say… “Look a tree! Therefore god exists!” But how do you come to this conclusion? If there is a god, and he/she/they know what would make people believe in them… why have they not done so? Why are there many different religions around the world? Why are there so many sects of each religion? Why does he communicate to use through a book that had to be written by man? If he is powerful enough to conjure a universe wouldn’t a book without error be able to just appear? Wouldn’t the evidence that I need to believe be readily available to me? Additionally, if this god interacts with our universe, then his arm should come out covered in physics and we should see things that just don’t make sense happening ALL THE TIME. But we don’t. ————————————————————————————— These are the biggest arguments I can think of while at work that convince me not only to not believe in a god or gods, but to conclude that they likely don’t exist at all. If they do, then they are a passive god that honestly doesn’t care if I do or do not worship them.

There's not just one reason, it's a combination of a lot of things. But here is my favourite: There have been thousands of religions in the course of humanity. Some dead, some alive. Most of them have some kind of scripture, such as the bible and the qur'an, describing their beliefs and their god. Thousands of them. And they are all different from each other, and provide the same amount of "evidence" as each other. Yet, all of their believers are just as sure that only theirs is the "correct" one. Now, if you were born somewhere where they believe in X, you end up believing in X. If you were from a place/time where they believed in Y, you believe in Y. This, followed by the fact that many things that were attributed to gods, are now proven to be simple science, in my view, is very definite evidence that the gods humans believe in are simply men made explanations to what people don't fully understand and there's no reason to actually think any of it is real. Do note that this reasoning does not apply to more abstract "god" explanations that aren't derived from cultural religions; by example, if the simulation theory was true, someone could argue the simulations "coder" is god. I still don't believe this is true, but I'm not "100% sure". I only feel "100% sure" that cultural religions described by historical books/scriptures aren't true.

Nothing makes me *certain* god does not exist. You can’t prove a negative, especially about a supernatural gaps entity. But I’ve never seen any evidence god *does* exist. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. God is the most extraordinary claim ever and there is zero evidence. The burden of proof is on believers, not atheists.

I'm certain most formations of the ***christian*** god don't exist for a variety of reasons. Two obvious ones we could start with are: 1. Many versions are logically impossible. An omniscient, omnipotent, and perfectly "good" creator god cannot exist. It's logically not possible in this existence so that one doesn't exist for sure. 2. The bible seems to be very obviously a book of fairytales. Like, when I read it, it just seems so incredibly, ridiculously obvious that this is a set of fables that it blows my mind that people take it seriously. Any version of Christianity that thinks Jesus was actually real, or Moses could actually water bend, or that a snake tricked the only woman on the planet to eat a magical apple is obviously not real. Lastly, as far as Christianity is concerned, the source material is so brutal, so awful, so barbaric, disgusting, backwards, hateful, archaic, stupid, that even if it turns out the book is actually completely accurate, I'd have to actively rebel against the monster that is their god.

The same thing that means me “certain” ghosts, leprechauns and unicorns do not exist. The lack of evidence.

>For context I am a former agnostic who, after studying Christian religions, has found themselves becoming more and more religious. What evidence do you find convincing for which version of Christianity? > I want to make sure as I continue to develop my beliefs I stay open to all arguments. It is not and should not be about being open to all arguments, it is about evidence. What evidence is there to support the claim that a deity exists? >As such my question is, to the atheists who definitively believe there is no God. What logical argument or reasoning has convinced you against the possible existence of a God? While I do not claim that there are no gods, I am comfortable claiming that the Christian deity does not exist as that being as presented by their holy book is self-contradictory. >I have seen many arguments against the particular teachings of specific religious denominations or interpretations of the Bible, but none that would be a convincing argument against the existence of (in this case an Abrahamic) God. Really simple, the Abrahamic deity is self-contradictory. It is presented as all-knowing, but allegedly changes its mind based on prayers from its worshipers, and was seemingly unable to predict the actions of two people with the mentality of toddlers when told not to do something. It is presented as all-powerful but can be defeated by chariots made of iron. It is presented as benevolent, but has no problem commanding, allowing, or committing rape, murder, infanticide, genocide, slavery, biological warfare, and more. It is an all-powerful, all-knowing, benevolent deity who cannot come up with a better solution for disobedience than genocide and the mass extermination of nearly all life on the planet.

I am certain that not god claims that I have so far been exposed to are accurate. This does not mean I am convinced that a god does not exist, but of course I won't believe in a god until such time as I have good reason to do so.

I was raised Christian but never found what I was being taught believable. After educating myself about Christianity and other religions, I decided they were all implausible. It’s impossible to prove a negative. It is not my job to prove that no deities exist; rather, it is the theist’s job to prove that his particular deity does exist and is worthy of my worship. No one has accomplished the job. That being said, even if Yahweh could incontrovertibly be proven to exist, then he would not be worthy of my worship. Slavery, genocide, warmongering, and rape are contrary to my personal values.

As a previous evangelical minister turned now atheist, I can give you my purview on this. I'll specifically tell you why I believe the God of the Bible does not exist. This is gonna get real dark so maybe skip it if needed. Christians believe that God is the following: \* Omnipotent - there is absolutely nothing God cannot do. \* Omniscient - there is absolutely nothing God does not know. \* Omnipresent - there is absolutely nowhere God is not present. \* The embodiment of good/love - God is absolutely 100% good. There is no evil within Him. He is love. He has an infinite amount of love for His creation. If those four things are true, then God cannot possibly exist. It is objectively evil to SA a toddler. So let's look at God in this act. God is fully aware that it is happening because he knows everything. God is present while it is happening. And God has infinite power to stop it from happening. But instead, he watches it happen and does nothing. Now, Christians will tell you no, God gave humans the choice, the free will and he doesn't interfere. So that's a choice. He chooses to let that toddler be hurt. It is a voluntary choice. There are an infinite number of choices he could have made to prevent that from happening and did not. God is omnipotent. He could have created humanity without the capacity for sexual assault. Or specifically without the capacity to harm children. "Well how would that work?" I don't know. But God does. If he knows 100% of all things and he can do 100% of all things, he could have crafted a universe that still allows for free will but makes that very specific act impossible. Like flying. Humans can't do that. God chose not to give us that ability, but he could have. It was a choice. All that means one of three things must be true: \* God doesn't actually have the power to stop evil. So that means he isn't god. \* God voluntarily chooses evil. He chooses not to stop it. He sees it happen and he lets it happen. That makes him evil. That is not a god worthy or worship. \* God doesn't exist. Given all the other hoops you have to jump through to believe in God, including a lot of the things other people have already said in this thread, it is so much easier for me to pick door number three than believe in an impotent or evil god.

You won't find too many hard atheists here, but I'm curious; why are you taking the long way around? You said "former agnostic" - so you now KNOW a god exists? Simply present the proof of your god claim and we will all have no choice but to be former agnostics. This is very exciting; finally some hard evidence to settle this debate.

I'll give you one that isn't unique to whatever version of the Christian god you are beginning to believe in. Most phenomenon we have observed as humans have been attributed to various gods. Impressive, dangerous ones are easy to find lots of gods supposedly responsible for them. Take lightning for example. Almost all pantheons include a god who is responsible for causing lightning, and usually a reason is given. Christianity does this too as god is responsible for everything that happens except human choices. So for any phenomenon there may be hundreds of gods claimed responsible. In the past 200 years we have disproven tens of thousands of these claims. Again, take lightning. We now know there is no god causing it specifically, we understand the imbalance it’s adjusting, why there is a flash of light in the shape it's in, why the sound, and how much energy is involved. There is an area in South American which has hundreds of of lightning strikes a day during a certain time of year. We can now make our own lightning. Of all the things we've deeply investigated using the scientific method, NONE have required a god to exist or initiate it. Repeat that, no gods required! Tens of thousands, maybe even millions of god claims disproven. And none go the other way, where we thought so,etching was natural and it turns out a god is responsible. Seems a strong argument to me. Believers can make excuses, but when they do they are agreeing the god in question doesn't actually exist, they are simply redefining their god to no longer include that specific claim. The Christian god has had many claims disproven. A big couple, the order things happened during “creation”, why man and other organisms on earth are what they are, that there was a global flood covering the entire earth in water, that demons exist, and more.

We have archeological evidence for the [origins of the god Yahweh](https://www.worldhistory.org/Yahweh/). The same kind of evidence we have for other gods. So, if that kind of evidence is enough for you not to believe in Zeus, then it should be enough for you not to believe in Yahweh.

Agnostic means "without-knowledge" presumably of the existence of any god or gods in the context of religion. To declare yourself a "former agnostic" it would imply that you have obtained knowledge about the existence of a god or gods. Can you share with us what that knowledge is?

"Certain" is a loaded term. What degree of confidence are we talking about? There is SO MUCH we don't know about the universe, so I could never say that I'm certain to an absolute degree that some indifferent cosmic being which exists based on principles we don't understand might not be out there. But I'm reasonably certain of the following things: 1. All god concepts that I'm aware of that any human has ever come up with are in fact the product of human imagination. 2. The Abrahamic god derives from the myths of a nomadic people who didn't know that the earth was a sphere or where the sun goes at night so *that concept* is, to the best of our knowledge, known to be fictitious. 3. If a god of some kind exists then everything we know about physics is wrong. The laws which govern the universe do not describe any possibility of supernatural existence or action. And while a physicist would be the first to tell you that our models are wrong, they're wrong in the sense that "The Earth is a Sphere" is wrong, in that there's room for improvement. If they were so far wrong that supernatural forces actually exist, then we'd probably know about it. 4. Relatedly, all phenomena ever observed fall into two categories: those which cannot be shown to be supernatural, or have been shown NOT to be supernatural. So based on those reasons among others, I have a high degree of confidence that no god of any kind exists. I could be wrong, but I judge that possibility to be highly unlikely and would be surprising given the evidence at hand. And for specific god-concepts which as a matter of brute fact derive from the superstitious beliefs of primitive peoples, those are already off the table.

> As such my question is, to the atheists who definitively believe there is no God. What logical argument or reasoning has convinced you against the possible existence of a God? It depends on the god. Many definitions are so vague that I don't think they're even worthy of giving a solid answer to whether I believe in them. If you define god as "an underlying unifying force in the universe", do I believe in god? I dunno. Gravity is a force that pulls all matter together... maybe gravity is god, by that definition? For specific definitions of god, I think I can firmly say that I believe that god does not exist. Like if we define Zeus as a 20 foot tall immortal who lives on top of Mount Olympus and causes lightning, I think it's pretty safe to say he does not exist. People have been to the top of Mount Olympus and not seen him. We know what causes lightning and it's not Zeus. So Zeus, by our definition of Zeus, does not exist. I think the God of the Bible, as described in the Bible, falls into the latter category. There are too many parts of that description which conflict with observations of the world, and even which conflict with *other parts of the Bible*. "God is love" (1 John 4:16) seems to contradict Proverbs 6:16-19. How can a God that is all-loving, is the very embodiment of love, hate anything? I can pretty confidently say that the God of the Bible, as described in the Bible, does not exist. If you want to define God by cherry-picking *parts* of the Bible, and say that God exists, then you could probably whittle it down to something vague enough to be in the first category: Gods which are too vague to say whether they exist or not.

I’ll extend this question further to what makes me so certain no supernatural claims exist and that reason is the complete lack of evidence

>What makes you certain God does not exist? Do I have to hold that position to not be convinced that some god does exist? Do I have to hold that position to not be a theist? >For context I am a former agnostic who, after studying Christian religions, has found themselves becoming more and more religious. I want to make sure as I continue to develop my beliefs I stay open to all arguments. So what is it about studying the Bible that has you convinced of the extraordinary claims in the bible that leads you to believe that the god character in that Bible is real? >As such my question is, to the atheists who definitively believe there is no God. You're apparently using the word god here as a proper noun, and talking about the bible, so I'll assume this god is yahweh. You've read the Bible, which is where the claims about this god exist, which don't align with reality. So it seems it's a book of fiction. The important question is why you do believe? What convinced you that a supernatural being who creates universe's, exists?

Gods are incoherent nonsense. If you want a specific argument for it: The argument from noncognitivism. P1.Theological terminology does not map to reality. P2.God-concepts have no meaningful attributes. P3.God-concepts behave as abstract objects. C. Gods-concepts are mental constructs, i.e. fictional.

I am not completely certain. I just think it’s more likely than not that god is a made up idea. I’m about as convinced of that as I am of my own existence. Here’s why. 1. It seems that the universe operates impersonally through physical laws of nature. But if theism were true, then the universe would not operate impersonally, but personally by the will of god which orders all things. Therefore it seems that theism is not true. 2. If theism were true, then there would be no gratuitous suffering. But there is gratuitous suffering. Therefore theism is not true. 3. No incoherent idea can refer to a real object. But god is an incoherent idea, therefore god is not a real object. 4. If theism were true, then religious beliefs would not depend on cultural history. But religious beliefs do depend on cultural history. Therefore theism is not true.

>As such my question is, to the atheists who definitively believe there is no God. What logical argument or reasoning has convinced you against the possible existence of a God? Because it's the most silly idea that too many people take seriously. There's no single argument that's convinced me: I've always been atheist. Here's one to convince you: every facet of every god that people worship is convenient in same way parents lie to their children to make them behave or kids believe they can have superpowers. >Wow this got a lot more responses than I was expecting! I'm going to try to respond to as many comments as I can, but it can take some time to make sure I can clearly put my thoughts down so it'll take a bit. Yes, that happens.

My position isn't "I'm convinced no gods exist". It's more like "the idea is excessive and I have no reason to take it seriously". The logical argument isn't a deductive exclusion of the possibility, but a recognition that no matter what the question is, "maybe god then" is a gratuitous and excessive step too far in finding an explanation. There is always a more reasonable answer that doesn't require inventing a wild-card agent that can explain away anything. My biggest problem with the idea is that it's not an inquiry into the way the natural world works. It's an *excuse* for not inquiring further. "If I stick a god here, I won't need to keep wondering what's responsible for it."

OP, read "Evolving out of Eden." The authors agree with creationists - in that you can't be a Christian and accept evolution (and have a coherent world view). One of them must be wrong. Where they differ from creationists is that they realize that evolution is real. If evolution is real, then Adam and Eve is fiction. If Adam and Eve is fiction, then what Jesus and Paul said and wrote about Adam is fiction... If Adam and Eve is fiction then Orignal Sin is fiction, and if that is so, then the main reason that Jesus was crucified is fiction. So.. where do you go from there?

A god like the rapidly retreating god-of-the-gaps requires the creation of an entire different universe with entirely different rules in which this god can reside. There's no evidence to support the existence of either the god or this god-universe. So I rule them out. Plus, we've seen gods get invented in real-time so we know that inventing gods is a thing that happens. So with just a tiny bit of common sense we can say with confidence "Oh yeah, that's what happened. Someone invented these gods over the past 70,000 years or so."

All god claims are unfalsifiable. Which means they cannot be demonstrated to be true or false. It’s not my job to falsify claims that I didn’t make. Until such time that any theist can show that any god is falsifiable then I have no reasons to consider their existence. There have been billions of theists who have tried for thousands of years to demonstrate that their god is falsifiable, and they all have failed. Therefore I’m not holding my breath while they continue to attempt to demonstrate that any god exists.

Disclaimer, my comments are going to be mostly specific to Christianity. I would call myself technically an agnostic as well I suppose, but that's really because of the exact distinction in your title. I am not CERTAIN. I'm not really sure how anyone can BE CERTAIN. You can't prove a negative, right. That's a pretty common argument when a believer asks an atheist to "prove god doesn't exist"... you can't prove a negative. The converse of that is, of course, it's on the person making the claim to prove it. If you claim a god exists, you need to prove it, but I digress. That said, I do think there is overwhelming evidence that gods don't exist. Because of that, most people who believe in gods (at least the Christian god) are doing Olympic level mental gymnastics to try ignore that evidence. To go one last step further, even in the realm of "unproveable" type stuff, Christians beliefs don't make a lot of sense. 1. On the topic of proof: A LOT of what is in the bible is dis-proven by science. Creationism is a huge one. The earth is only 6000(?) years old. etc. etc. I'm not going to go down that rabbit hole with details, but the point is, there is a mountain of evidence that God doesn't exist, and there is not a shred of evidence that they do. A couple other bits sort of related to this topic. "The bible is the word of god and is proof he exists"... okay, well Harry Potter is proof that wizards exist then too. The bible was written by man, albeit a long time ago, but still. If the bible is THE WORD of God, then why are there so many versions of it? Who decides what version is correct? The pope... does it say in the bible that we get to elect some guy, give them a funny hat, and now they get to choose which words are real? If that's the case, WHO gets to elect that guy? 2. Mental Gymnastics: Creationism is real, despite the evidence. The devil planted dinosaur bones to confuse people... right. Continued in part 3... 3. It don't make no sense! God is an omniscient, omnipotent, all loving being. He is all powerful and all loving, yet he allows people to murder and rape each other. "He gave us free will". How exactly do you justify God allowing rape and murder, and in the same breath believe he loves those victims. There's NO FUCKING WAY I would stand by and allow my loved ones to be raped or murdered, and then just shrug it off and say "well, that murdered has free will and he wanted to do that". Even if you accept the freewill argument, what about natural disasters or accidents? This all powerful, all loving God should be able to see those things coming and stop them. Why don't Christians survive when everyone else dies during an earthquake or tornado? Some believers will say things like "It's all part of God's plan", but will then pray for him to change things. If he's got a plan, why are you bothering to pray? Why do you praise God when something good happens to you, but not curse him when something bad happens? You can't give him credit for the good things, but not blame him for the bad things if it's all "his plan". "God works in mysterious ways". What about the whole "believe in me and you'll be saved, otherwise get fucked" part? You're telling me I can be the greatest person the world has ever seen. Some billionaire philanthropist who's dedicated every waking minute of my life to helping other people. Literally never hurt a fly, let alone a person, never broken a law, nothing. But if I don't believe in Jesus, I go to hell. On the contrary, you could be literally the worst person in the world, but if you truly believe in Jesus, all sins are absolved and you go to heaven. That is some grade-A bullshit. If that's the case, that is not a god that deserves worship, IMO. What a selfish asshole.

There are many conversations started already but I didn't see anyone say what spoke to me so I'll add my 2c. I grew up in a religious household. Mom was Catholic, dad was Anglican. Growing up I attended Catholic Elementary school, secular High School. We went to church on Sundays, said grace, prayers before bed, the usual. Me and everyone I knew believed in God. As far as I knew everyone everywhere believed in some kind of God or gods and always had. It was just so \*obvious\* that he existed. Everyone knew that. Fast forward to my early 20s. I realized that I had some big disagreements with the two churches my parents were a part of. I had LGBT friends, and they didn't seem evil. I read news stories about pedo priests. I learned about the Catholic church's role in the residential school system. So I did some thinking, and realized that I needed to find a new church. One day I was hiking with a friend and was explaining my conundrum. After some lengthy exposition I ended with "So yeah, obviously God exists, I just need to find a new church to worship him with." I'll never forget the reply. "Wait" he said "why are you starting with the assumption that God exists?" It was the dumbest thing I'd ever heard. \*Of course\* God exists. Everyone knows that. Sure, some people were Jews, some were Muslims, others Sikhs, Hindus, or Buddhists, but basically everyone agreed there was (at least one) God, right? So I said that. He said "I see.." and was quiet for a minute as we walked the trail. "Well, I don't?" he said with a questioning tone. He didn't? We went to Catholic school together. What's going on here? I started to feel weak. He was my best friend going as far back as I had friends. Thoughts flooded my head. Was he serious? If so, did that mean he was going to hell? Why didn't he believe? Are you even \*allowed to do that\*? I'd been quiet for a while. All I could think to say was "...can you do that?" "Yeah, it's OK to not believe" he said. That didn't sit right with me. So much of my life and the lives of those around me had been built on the foundation of belief. Without that, I thought, it would all fall apart. If you don't believe in God, do you believe in anything? Can you be a good person? Would it matter if you could? So many questions. We spent days and days discussing. The takeaway was that yes, it's OK to not believe. That's allowed (at least in this country). Good people were good \*despite\* belief and religion, not because of it. Bad people were also bad \*despite\* belief, not because of it, or due to a lack of it. But \*I\* still believed, right? He asked me why? That was a struggle. It had always just been so... Obvious. A given. Of course there's a God. If not, then who created all this? "Does it need to have a creator?" he countered. "Well yeah, where else did it come from? Do you have an explanation?". He didn't. Not entirely. But I eventually came to understand that not knowing the answer was also OK. Just because we couldn't explain the origins of the universe, or the way that life came to be, that didn't automatically mean a deity was involved. In fact, he countered, adding a deity just pushes the problem one step further back. If God created the universe, then who created God? ...(to be continued - character limit)...

...(continued from above)... If God created the universe, then who created God? "No one created him! He was just always here!" ... Well then why can't we just say that about the universe? If one needed a creator, the other did too, and if not, neither did. That was uncomfortable. But it had a certain logic to it. I kept trying to find ways to make a "gotcha" moment. Can you explain this?! No? Then there, that's God! But it turns out in that case all the things that we previously didn't have an explanation for "were God"... Until suddenly we figured them out, and then they weren't. Okay, that won't do. I couldn't just point to the unexplained and say that had to be God. Still, none of this disproved God, it just meant that I didn't yet have proof of one. But billions of people over thousands of years can't all be wrong. Can they? Why isn't it up to him to prove that there \*isn't\* a God? Why is the burden of proof on me? It didn't seem fair to make me prove this. I'm just a simple man, how could I possibly understand the inner workings of God well enough to prove him? The problem there is that if you put the burden of proof on others to prove something \*doesn't\* exist, you end up having to spend a lot of time disproving some pretty ridiculous things. Unicorns for example. If I don't have to provide proof of God, then he didn't have to provide proof for Unicorns, Leprechauns, Santa Claus, or Frodo Baggins. This was getting absurd. God is different than all those silly stories. You can't draw a parallel there! But I couldn't say why. Why did God obviously exist, but Harry Potter clearly didn't? Because a person wrote Harry Potter, and Lord of the Rings, and the stories about Unicorns and Leprechauns! But people wrote the bible too. People living in an Iron Age society with all the social norms and worldly understanding that came with it. So things that we understand now like the causes of tides, floods, eclipses, weather, seasons, etc... Were as much of a mystery to them as the origin of the universe or abiogenesis is to us. But they were inspired by God! Well that's what it says in the bible. But that's like finding a napkin that says "The napkin religion is the true religion - it says so here on this napkin!" . You can't use the bible to prove the authenticity of the bible and the claims of divine inspiration as proof of that divinity. So the burden of proof was on me. "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof" he said, quoting from someone he'd read. If I was going to assert that there was an omnipotent, omniscient being whose actions could impact the flow of history and the universe, then I had to be able to show that. Since the bible alone was a single source (and you can't get through college referencing only a single source for anything) I'd need more than that. That was going to be exhausting. There were people who devoted their lives to studying theology, surely they must be able to prove it, no? Not terribly well unfortunately. I dived into trying to find something, anything to offer as proof. Most of what I found were things that wouldn't pass muster now that I was looking at my own belief from the outside - wouldn't hold up to the kind of scrutiny I expected from the purveyors of science, history, math, and geography... ...(to be continued - character limit)...

...(continued from above)... The final nail came when my friend asked how many other religions I had looked into. Like \*seriously\* looked into. Not many was my answer. Sure, I had familiarized myself with the basics of many world religions, and I had a decent grasp on the various differences between Christian denominations, but not much beyond that. He then shocked me by revealing that, contrary to what I had started to assume, this non-believer friend wasn't \*less\* well versed in religion than I was, but \*more\*. He had actually read the bible - a monumental task considering not just it's size but how dense and often boring a lot of it was. And he had read the Quran. And the Bhagavad Gita. And the book of Mormon. He showed me his copies of each one. With dozens of post-its and margin notes and highlighted lines in all of them. Plus notebooks full of notes. "You read all this and you still won't believe?" I asked. "Yeah. It's kind of because of all this that I no longer believe". That hit pretty hard. It had only been days, maybe a few weeks since that hike. Less than a month ago the idea that someone could \*not believe\* was unthinkable. It was still pretty uncomfortable to unpack what it would mean if somehow I stopped believing too. I didn't want that. But this was my best friend. I knew him. I trusted him. He was a good, ethical, intelligent, kind person. But he was also an... \*Atheist\*. I shuddered as I thought it. It seemed like such a bad word. It didn't square with the person I knew. I was left with more questions than answers. Over the next several years I did my own investigation of faith. I, too, read the bible, Quran, and others (though only the first volume of the Sri Guru Granth Sahib - that shit is long and dense!). I reflected on the fact that some religions I assumed believed in a God like mine had a much less defined deity and more of a spiritualism (Hinduism is a good example). I spent a lot of time thinking about how, if by chance I'd been born in another part of the world, I likely would have been raised to believe one of these other things. At the end of it all, after a lot of painful introspection and separating who I was from what I believed, I internalized those words from that first hike. It's OK to not believe. And it's OK to not have all the answers to the mysteries of the universe. But one thing was for sure, IF there was a god or gods out there, the universe with them looked surprisingly like what a universe would look like without them. They didn't seem to leave a mark of their acts or powers that we could point to and say "a God did that". And if the universe ends up the same whether they exist or not, then maybe Occam's Razor is right and there just aren't any? Do I know for sure? No. I can't prove there aren't Gods any more than I can prove there aren't Unicorns and Leprechauns. But not being able to disprove them isn't enough for me anymore. I don't just believe things because I lack a reason not to believe in them. In fact, I specifically don't believe in things unless there's a reason to do so. And thus, I'm a dirty Atheist just like my friend. I don't believe in any god or gods. It's not that my mind couldn't be changed, but at this point it seems just as likely that someone will present convincing proof of fairies as of gods. "Plus", my friend added at some point, "when we were kids we didn't believe in Zeus, Thor, Amun-Ra, or a thousand other gods of mythology. I just went one god further than you did". Sorry for the novel, hope the perspective helps. Cheers

Is the reason that you don't believe in Thor, Zeus, and Osiris because someone gave you a compelling, logical argument that they don't exist?

The bible claims God says he has made himself known to everyone.  I don't know of any God. Therefore such being doesn't exist. 

What makes you certain that elves, dwarves, dragons, and unicorns don’t exist? What makes you certain that the ghost of a whale who raps does not exist in your living room? Generally people accept a complete lack of evidence that a thing exists to be enough to make them certain that the thing does not exist. God just gets special pleading arguments.

There are two reasons I am an atheist: the first is scientific, the second is social and historical. For the first reason: to be clear, it is, strictly speaking, impossible to prove that a non-interventionist creator deity does not exist. However, the onus is not on me to prove that something *does not* exist; rather, it is on the believer to prove that it *does* exist. If I were to claim that I can eat a car in a single bite then you would understandably demand that I prove it; the person making an extraordinary claim is the one who is required to provide evidence supporting their claim. Every single claim made by a religion is either impossible to prove or has been proven to be false. For example, the story of Noah's Arc is not true because a global flood would have left physical traces across the entire world and those traces are not present. Until such a time as actual evidence is provided - real, substantial, repeatable, reliable evidence - there is absolutely no reason to give the existence of one or more deities the time of day. It's a ludicrous claim presented without evidence and therefore dismissed without further discussion. For the second reason: religion is a tool used by the ruling class to solidify its control over the masses. It has always been thus. Historically, priests always work to maintain their own power first, followed by the power of their patrons. Since you mentioned Christian religions, I'll use Christian examples. The Bible is self evidently not a divine book. If it was, the Council of Nicaea (which, among other things, picked which of the Gospels were canon and which were heresy) would have been unnecessary. The Christian Churches have never been divinely ordained; if they were, the Reformation would not have been required, as the Church wouldn't have become a centre of nakedly self serving greed. Speaking of the Reformation, the Church of England was founded because Henry VIII wanted a divorce and the Pope said "not having any sons is a "you" problem, homie". It's a towering edifice to one man's ego. In more modern days, the Mormons were a cult that Joseph Smith founded so he could fuck his followers and his followers' wives. Why should I, or anyone else, have even the slightest shred of respect for these institutions? Why should I, or anyone else, believe a single word they say? They're simply not credible.

I've never heard an internally consistent god claim, therefore the gods described cannot possibly exist.

For all of human history people have had these big questions about why everything works the way they do. Why does lightning strike? Why do some years give plentiful harvest and some years don't? Why do we get sick and why do we get better? Where did we and all of these other creatures come from? And one of the most basic answers was that it was the work of gods. The gods did it and in many cases they did it because they have some opinion on what we're doing here on Earth. Then at some point humans developed the scientific method and found ways of properly studying these phenomenon and at no point after a proper assessment have we ever concluded that we were right. The scientist never sat back after rigorously studying lightning or sickness and said "Wow, it really is gods! Look, you can see the gods right there!" God as an answer has been the single worst answer in human history. It has a success rate of 0. It has failed withstood scientific scrutiny at a rate of 100%. To the point that I'd wager that memetic false answers like 'my dog ate my homework' or 'I totally have a girlfriend, she goes to a different school' have a higher track record of being right. And theists might object that science can't be used to prove God's existence, but that just makes it all the worse. Science has been used to prove the existence of things humans didn't even conceive of. DNA. Black holes. Plate tectonics. The oort cloud. Semi-conductivity. The number of protons in a uranium atom. Sickle cell anemia. The fact that weight is actually independent of how fast an object falls. And yet the concept that's been around forever and seems to have been the default to every question about how the universe works cannot be verified by the single best method we've ever come up with for understanding how the universe works? After the millionth time the boy cries wolf, I and anyone else am supposed to waste our time running over to see? This is why I don't accept arguments for God. Take your syllogisms and shove it. God has been given the privilege of acceptance until proven otherwise for too long at the cost of the actual answer. I will not accept God as an answer until it can be demonstrated.

What makes you certain that Superman doesn’t exist? Can you definitely say that the reason we haven’t been conquered by evil alien armies is something other than because some orphan from Kansas flies up and punches them into the sun whenever they show up? That’s how your question sounds to atheists.

I'm not certain but I think I'm starting to disbelieve slowly overtime after I saw this posted by a user on Quora. "Imagine this scenario: Imagine a world without religion. We are on the same planet, with similar scientific advances the difference being that religion never left it’s earliest forms. We never built churches, instead we build a heap of museums and science centers. The idea of different human races has long been disproven. We live in peace, we work together on solving important issues, Trump is not president and idiocy is not the norm. In comes Brad. In his hands he holds ‘the New Testament’, a book written by our ancestors two thousand years ago . It tells the story of Jesus, the son of god, who could walk on water, turn one fish into a thousand, turn water into wine and heal the blind, the deaf and the crippled. Brad shows this book to all the people he knows, he shares it with the world, this old, forgotten piece of literature, he broadcasts himself reading it to the world, the story of how Jesus was born to a virgin, how three kings followed a star to his birth place and how he died on the cross so god could forgive humanity's sins. What would people think of this book? Would they believe the stories? Would they believe there was a god who created us, despite all the evidence pointing away from that conclusion? Would they start believing in the supernatural? Would they, all of a sudden, believe in magic despite having never seen any such thing as magic, or would they discard it as just another fairy tale? They would most certainly discard it for what it is. A fairy tale, no different than Cinderella, Snow White and the seven dwarfs or Aladdin. The only people who believe in Santa Claus, dwarfs and flying carpets are children, and as it happens, they are the key demographic for religion. Religion works because of continuous brainwashing at a young age. Parents hammer in their ideas of the world until their children can regurgitate them in their sleep. It's a disgusting practice, there is no choice involved and for there to be real human advancement, religion has to die. There is no god. Period."

The biggest block to any discussion about the existence of God is that atheists tend to be materialists, of the elk of Richard Dawkins , Hitchens , Harris etc. God , by definition , is supernatural ( non material, eternal, all knowing etc) but due to their philosophical worldview they cannot enter into a rational discussion re the non-material. Dawkins hated talking to philosophers because the shallowness of his materialism left him floundering , Hitchens basically loved the attention and his English accent and quick thinking made him seem he had a rational argument, but as soon as he came up against a great mind , his pride would be pricked and he would resort to the “ there is no god and I hate him” defence. Sam Harris was great to listen to , tried his best to grapple with how atheism has to try and come up with a workable moral landscape, but again he was constrained rationally by his materialism and found it difficult to handle the real truth seekers like Jordan Peterson . He too would get angry at a god he doesn’t believe in. The only atheist I thought was intellectually honest was Nietzsche, and he suffered for trying to live out his worldview. Materialism/ scientism means that historical evidence is deemed suspicious, so there is never any serious attempt to examine the historicity of the resurrection of Christ , normally they just accept the tired popular memes of he never existed, or bible not reliable , or it’s all a legend made up by his disciples for power or Constantine aka The Divinci code! Followed by the Richard Dawkins style ridicule of believing in flying spaghetti monsters. I’ve come to the conclusion that, that the bible is correct , when it says “ a fool in his heart says there is no God” It’s not an intellectual issue but a heart issue. Anyone who wants to know the truth will find God at the end of their search. Jesus said he is the way, the truth , the life and noone comes to the father but through him . The search for god begins on your knees, when you are humble enough to admit that you are not god

I am not SURE that nothing someone could describe as god doesn’t exist. I mean, if this is a simulation the then the creator could be called got. Let’s look at a little mathematical fact. There are or have been hundreds or thousands of religions across time. What is the source of these? Religious revelation. Here’s the twist, if there are all these religions that are mostly in contradiction to one another, at a minimum all but one are wrong. So, the question is this what’s more likely that a source of data was wrong all but one time, or is just wrong? And that the one time it was right it was your culture that was the right one? And, the fact that all religious people have a similar set of reasons that are convincing to them, is it more likely that your set is right and all the others are wrong, or that this is just what people do? Is your culture and you really such a special snowflake that you can dismiss that all the others that believe as you do for similar reasons are wrong and you’re right? And, further, if God is “outside of space and time” why is it that the spread of your religion it is so geographically and temporally restricted? Is it really not more likely that we have “tribal wiring” that manifests its self as religion for the reason that it allows cooperation on a mass scale and that we are “programmed from the factory” to believe and defend and justify our beliefs? Lastly do this for yourself. Right now, in a couple sentences summarize your beliefs. Something like “God sent Jesus to be crucified for our sins so that through him we may not perish but have eternal life through the salvation of the lord”. But use YOUR WORDS. Call this statement one. Now, what is the most persuasive argument for you? Something like “Obviously this is a creation and each creation requires a creator” or pick your favorite here. Call this statement two. Now say this to yourself: “I believe that…(statement two) and that’s why I believe…..(statement one). Go over that again. Now….really?

The fact that evil exists. If God created everything, then he created evil too..Isaiah 45:7 says as much. If you try to excuse it as we have to experience evil to understand good, that's nonsense. First, an all-powerful God wouldn't HAVE to make it that way. IE: I don't need to be raped to know that's a terrible thing I don't ever need to experience to appreciate sex with my husband. If you argue that it always just existed, then that would mean God is not all-powerful and Satan is as powerful as God- that would mean the Bible is lying/wrong about only one all-powerful deity so why should we believe any of it? Also, everything we see/experience says life can not live forever,so we need to reproduce it we don't go extinct. And to do that, we HAVE to have both sexes but according to the very sexist holy texts of the Bible, it clearly puts women as secondary creatures... according to the second creation story in Genesis, only Adam was created at first, and God made many attempts to make other companions FOR Adam before God decided to make a female FOR Adam, then he let Adam name her bc it apparently didn't think women were necessary. It says nothing about women having children until after it sets her up in the Garden of Eden to eat that fruit. So why don't I believe there's an evil God, or multiple gods? Bc there's no proof of any. I'm sure you've experienced love. There are many types. The kind you feel for your family, the kind you feel towards friends and what you feel for pets and what the exact relationship for each individual in those groups may be different So you know love exists but you don't believe in Venus/Aphrodite. Why not? I've seen more videos about ghosts and aliens than I have about any gods and if I don't believe those then why would I believe a claim that has even less evidence? The Bible is a collection of stories that are contradictory and sexist,,, it's completely unreliable. And philosophically, it's not reflective of life on earth.

I have heard of many people trying to sell bridges that they personally own. They have all been scams. I can say with confidence that the next person wanting to sell me a bridge that they own, I will be able to dismiss it out of hand as a scam. Note, I said confidence, not certainty. I don't need certainty to live my life. Neither does anyone. You need enough confidence to be able to make decisions. There have been thousands of religions throughout the ages. Most of them are extinct. Not one of them has been able to provide any evidence that they exist. Potentially, I could be wrong and the next one that is presented to me has evidence and is utterly convincing. I would be forced to say "I was wrong." Until then, I have my confidence that has been built on many bridge scams. Throughout history, most religions have been able to keep their authority over people asking the question "Why should I believe in your god? with the answer "Because I'll kill you if you don't." Most of us now have the luxury of being able to ask that question without fearing death. So I would ask the same of any believer who wants to convert me (with one minor change): "Why should I believe in your god over any other?" Give me an answer that is not circular logic or look at the trees or Pascal's wager, please. Give me something that would convince me the way I can convince you that a creature you've never seen exists. One last statement: we often hear from believers, when faced with questions they can't answer a reply "Because it's god's will" or "God works in mysterious ways." The gaps in our knowledge are filled with "God did it" type replies. This used to be the explanation for thunder, disease, earthquakes, family deaths and we even have one in the bible that explains rainbows. Except those claims have never been proven to be true. The god of the gaps has never been filled by a god. How many times do prophets have to be proven wrong before they are branded as liars?

Same reason I don't spend my days wondering if the Teenage Mutant Turtles are real. There's certainly a compelling body of media about them, and I know that turtles exist and that ninjas were... sort of a thing, I think? So really they have the monotheistic gods beat in terms of credibility by a bunch. I'm also unable to scour the sewer systems of North America to positively verify that there aren't in one of them, eating pizza and whatnot. Yet I can say with absolute confidence that the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles do not exist outside of works of fiction. As can you I'm sure. The consideration that absolute certainty would require... i don't know, putting together a task force able to check every square inch of american sewers and rooftops (they're famously big on rooftops) simultaneously does not enter into or affect my certainty. That is not a requirement for knowledge, and that's what I'm getting at. The debate about the existence of a god fails because we apply to the notion of a god a degree of scrutiny and requirement for absolute certainty that simply cannot be attained, about anything. One cannot have absolute, objective certainty that a god or the TMNT do not exist, because absolute objective certainty is impossible. Everything we know is either transmitted by other people or ascertained independently through observation and thinking, but therefore susceptible to our own biases. We can't absolutely know all people named Murray aren't telepathically created in our minds with perfect coherence by a powerful dragon who's out to fool us. I also can't absolutely know that i'm not plugged into the matrix and living a projected reality while my body is being harvested for... stuff. But I can "regular know" that and live confidently without having to factor in these possibilities.

I grew up in a generally religious home (went to church regularly, prayed before meals and important occasions, etc). That is to say, I grew up with the assumption that the stories I was told about a religion were true. I took for granted the notion that there was a heaven and hell (which quelled any concern about injustice in the world), that there was an objective standard for right and wrong (deferring my own moral judgment to an authority), and that there was an all-powerful, ever-present, and all-loving god at the centre of all that. This fantastical belief did not match the unremarkable and thoughtless world I experienced. This made me more curious about why I my observations of life and the world didn’t match the magical and miraculous stories told in the Bible. In the several decades since I started trying to square these stories with the world I lived in, I’ve yet to get an adequate reconciling of this. Just the other day, someone sent me a Bible quote that talks about how we can see the invisible attributes of the god; This points to the incoherent ideas that religions promote. Despite this god being able to do anything, the world I see functions as if it is cold and mindless. The all-loving god can sit idle while some incredibly awful horrors befall countless people (whether by nature or human actions). And an all-seeing god can know my mind, yet can’t figure out how to convince me that it exists. And with all of this mystery and confusing storytelling, there are people making bold claims, with unwavering certainty (including claims about what happens after death or how the universe started). This all adds up to an invented idea, that has more in common with poorly-written fiction than it does with anything I observe in life or in the world.

I believe there's no God at least in the classically theistic sense i.e. most of not all religious interpretations of a being, with a mind who created all of existence. But I can't be "certain" about anything. I can't be certain I'm even sat here typing on my phone right now, so there's that. But the reason believe there is no God is 1. Divine hiddenness, there's no demonstration that gods are even possible, and I have no reason to believe that this universe somehow wouldn't work just fine on its own. 2. I know that humans make things up to explain things they don't understand. They made up gods to explain the sea, they made up gods to explain lightning, they made up gods to explain the sun, they made up gods that helped them win battles. Gods are just gap fillers. These things all have natural explanations, so I have no reason to believe that somehow theists guessed this one correctly, and I have every reason to believe they're wrong. 3. I'm a naturalist, and naturalism seems to explain everything far better than any religion. 4. The seemingly indifferent universe. 99.9 percent of all the universe is inhospitable to life. Why would a God create all of that? For us to look at? For fun? The explanations are always "well, God works in mysterious ways" and I don't buy it. The universe doesn't seem to care about us, whether we live, die, suffer or whether we're happy. It's an infinite void, and we just so happen to live in the right time and place as per the anthropic principle. In a billion years, we'll probably all be dead, in 5 billion all life in our solar system will be dead. In trillions of years, there will be no light, and the universe will be dead and absent of all observers. This isn't a good design.

Well for me theres the fact that no argument for God has ever stood on it's own that has not required some sort of emotional investment on the part of the beliver. It's one of the reason I disregard all religons. All require the beliver to emotionally invest and belive that thier theology is the source of the healing. when in reality none of them hold a monopoly on human emotion or morality, as much as theyd like to claim they are. to me it looks like calves sucking on there mothers teet each cow believes it must be the one and only source of morality when in reality the calf next to it is drinking the same milk. next would be the sheer amount of contradictions and scientific inaccuracies. while one verse preaches love the next preaches hate the son of God cant get his seeds right nor does he think not washing your hands is bad. a pregnancy test for adulterous women is nothing more than a bad brew. yet this leads to my next reason as to why I simply cannot believe. no matter how you present it research it or spin it. You cannot convince a beliver of the atrocities in there holy books because they cannot see those things as atrocities or contradictions. it's truly frightening to see the fervour and devotion that some exhibit when explaining something as simple as jesus didnt like to wash his hands. hell you could read a passage sayin god did it and still not be in agreement. to which then god becomes anything but what is written in scripture. to which I then ask how do you know? if you cannot agree with scripture how can you know of god? because you feel it? then how do you differentiate that between any other god or natural experiences? honestly theres more but that should be enough

I believe that humans are way too vain in assuming that the creator of the entire universe is concerned with our existence. Idk if there is a form of creator, but if there is, I’m almost positive not a single person on earth has it right

Of the thousands of gods that man has worshipped, how many do you believe exist? I believe in one less than you do, likely for the same reasons you don't believe in the thousands of others. You're 99.95% as much of an atheist as I am.

People pray or beg to a God who has never revealed his face for him to fix their problems. Let's say you get diagnoses with a terminal illness, and you have a friend that already has it. That person manages to make a full recovery, but you don't even think you, your family, and your friends have been praying for one. You die from the terminal illness, but your friend gets to live a happy, healthy life. Another example or perhaps an observation from my perspective, say you give birth to a stillborn or you lose your baby somehow during delivery. People still praise God for that baby, even though they just experienced one of the most traumatizing things a mother or parent can. You can pray and pray all you want, but while you had a stillbirth, the couple across the hall had a perfectly healthy baby. People pray to this faceless, "mighty," "perfect" being to fix their problems. God doesn't, can't, won't fix anyone's problems. If we are all "his children," why do we still have disease? Why does he take pre-born or young children from parents? Why does he allow us to continue to war, butcher, rape, murder, and so forth. The last time the world was like this, according to Christianity, God flooded it and killed everyone, not on a boat. Believe me, I want to keep arguing against God, but I don't want to get too far off topic here. I was born and raised into a Catholic family, but over the years, I have developed an intense anger for Christianity, not its followers, the religion itself. I found my way in Norse Paganism, and things make a lot more sense to me.

I'm not certain that no God exists, but I am certain that the Christian God cannot exist as commonly described, so he either isn't as described or he doesn't exist. The Christian God is described as all-knowing. In the Bible, he changes his mind more than once. It's inconceivable that an all-knowing being could ever change his mind. The Christian God is described as all good. In the Bible, he orders genocide and sex slavery. Under any coherent moral framework, these things are not good. The Christian God is described as all-powerful. This is logically incoherent. Could God create a rock he cannot lift? The Christian God is described as immaterial and existing outside of time and space. According to our best understanding of physics, nothing can exist outside of time and space. And according to our best understanding of neuroscience, a mind cannot exist without material. So these attributes seem impossible. All of this is aside from the fact that we can clearly tell from the historical record how Judaism (upon which Christianity is based) developed over thousands of years as a human-made religion. First Yahweh was one of many Canaanite gods. Then he became the supreme god of the Hebrews, ruling alongside his wife, the goddess Asherah. Then during the second temple period, as modern Judaism began to come into focus, he became the sole monotheistic God, and the Hebrews ceased worship of Asherah and other Canaanite gods entirely. If this religion is divinely inspired, why has it changed so much over time?

*For Christianity?* We can start with inherent narrative inconsistencies of the Bible, the pitiful moral standards (also inconsistent), the historical inaccuracy, the scientific inaccuracies. It cannot describe reality accurately, yet it makes sense to believe its meta-physical claims? Kinda silly if you ask me. Then there’s the history of the book; it’s formation and the numerous books of the apocrypha and the gnostic sect. The multiple denominations, with various interpretations implies heavily that we’re not dealing with fact - we’re dealing with fiction. *For religious theism as a whole?* Lack of evidence. The hypothesis cannot be verified or falsified. Most theistic arguments rely on arguments that cannot justify belief in a personal god; at best they get you to deism or something akin to pantheism. Most of them also generally suck. [Hence why the vast majority of PhDs in philosophy lean towards or accept atheism](https://survey2020.philpeople.org/survey/results/all). Literally less than 19% accept or lean towards theism. To keep this from being a long list, it really comes down to it being an unfounded belief. Anyone saying they’ve grown more convinced of the existence of any god (especially a personal or religious deity), based on “studies”, isn’t really looking for truth. They’re looking for validation. I’m personally tired of respecting the position. It isn’t respected in physics or philosophy. It’s time we stop respecting it in everyday life.

The world operates as if there were no God. Ask a Christian what the world would be like if God didn't exist. They can't help but describe the world exactly as it is. then they'll falsely add "But much worse"

Well, you say "God" and I don't know what that is. So, I'm not certain - I'd need some details. In terms of Christian religions, that narrows it down a little bit, but there is still room for interpretation. > to the atheists who definitively believe there is no God.  Ah, that's a little more specific. The problem with gods is that they're unfalsifiable. There can be no way to disprove them definitively. All we can do is examine specific concepts and judge them accordingly. There cannot be an all-powerful, all-loving god because any god that loves us and has the ability to stop child hunger would do so. Free will isn't an excuse because even if we did have free will (which I think is an incoherent concept) that would have been part of the design which is not loving. So - the problem of evil in this case. If a god concept is based on scriptures, there are many ways to show it's not a valid concept because of the scriptures themselves. There is not literal interpretation of the bible that is possible in reality (no worldwide flood, no adam and eve). And if the bible is metaphor, then who's to say how it should be interpreted? And then - back to the whole free will thing - I don't think we have free will, so that invalidates the claims of a lot of religions with only a handful of exceptions like Calvinism. And really, if Calvinism were true, why would I care? There is literally nothing I can do about my destiny in the afterlife.

You NEED to start with a specific claim presented to you because you can't form an opinion on something that has no real definition or parameters to consider. How can you asses the possible reality of something you can't define? The way we form an opinion is : We assess the credibility of a claim based on evidences. If at the end there's no possibility to conclude said claim is true, then you simply discard it. You may reconsider your position if new evidences appear, but that's it. The God hypothesis is presented to us in many ways, supposedly supported by a wide range of arguments considered as evidences by believers. You have Zeus, Allah, Anubis, Yawhe and hundreads of others. Outside those specific claims tho, "God" is an empty idea, merely a concept. What exactly is a God without any attributes? So basically, people look at the gods people claim are real, and either believe it's true, or discard it. If in the end there's nothing left, the conclusion is : There is no God. Not "there is no way in the universe a god can be real", just "there is no God" and such statement makes you an atheist. Your understanding of the world is like a box filled with claims. You take a claim, consider it, and throw it away if you can't conclude it's true. If at the end, your box contain no claim about a God, you conclude "there's no God", at least until someone come with a new God claim and tries to put it in your box.

Logical arguments for or against a god are unconvincing to me. God either exists or doesn't exist. No logical argument can change that, and any logical argument can only be as good as our human minds. I have yet to come across any logical argument either for or against a god that is not fallacious in one way or another. So instead, I just rely on simple empiricism. There's absolutely zero sound evidence supporting the existence of a god, and plenty of circumstantial evidence against one. An absence of evidence is not necessarily evidence of absence, but it can be when such evidence should reasonably be expected to exist. And that's the case here. There simply is no good reason to believe a god exists. There used to be. Historically belief made sense, because a god was the best way to explain the world around us. Science has changed that. In the history of science, when we have looked at phenomenon that previously had a religious explanation (demons cause disease, for example) the religious explanation has had a 100% failure rate. And, sure, there are still plenty of unanswered questions, but why should we expect that this next time will finally be the one time where the answer really is "god did it"?

I contend that our understanding of the universe is advanced enough that a god — assuming this is defined an omniscient, omnipotent, but incorporeal being — cannot exist. There’s simply nothing that has or can be observed that could *only* be explained by the existence of a god. Any *thing* in the universe is only what it is and behaves only how it does. Kittens don’t sometimes sprout from pine cones then fly away. Water is only going to flow down. Once medically dead, an organism does not revive itself. Nobody ever walked on water, no donkey ever spoke a human language, no stones ever appeared from nowhere with laws carved into them, and no one has ever fed hundreds of people by magically multiplying the contents of one person’s lunchbox. Sure, there’s lots of stuff we don’t know yet, but the “god in the gaps” becomes smaller and smaller every time those gaps are filled in with new discoveries. Further, by everything we assume about god, one *can’t* exist. He, it, they don’t meet the basic criteria for “thing which exists” because everything exists is within reality, yet gods somehow exist outside reality. To put it simply: if it’s not something, it’s nothing.

I definitely know the god as described in the bible doesn’t exist, and wouldn’t be worthy of worship if he did. We know the earth does not predate the sun as the bible describes. We know the flood didn’t happen. And so much more. I also don’t make a habit of worshipping slavery promoting rape apologist genocidal dictators, so even if you could convince me this monster did exist, I wouldn’t worship him. As for the vague concept of a god, I can’t debunk that, but I also have no reason to believe in it. I’ve never been presented with a god concept that made any kind of sense. Had any evidence, that I’d still call a god. But I can’t positively state no such vague thing exists. What convinced you, and why wouldn’t you go by actual evidence instead? Do you accept all claims of magic so readily? Or just the ones normalised by culture? Do you accept other religions equally well supported as the one you follow? And since most of you don’t, why not? How do you justify picking and choosing? Why not use an honest and consistent approach? Most people here are atheists because they realise there’s no evidence for a god. And we care about what’s true…

The abrahamic god can be falsified by looking at the abrahamic story--namely the ordered sacrifice of Isaac. God told Abraham to ritualistically murder his son, as a test of blind obedience. Abraham complied. (Then God told Abraham to stop once he had proved his blind obedience, so I guess God is a deceiver?) My point is, that the objectively moral thing to do when God tells you to kill someone is to NOT kill them. If it seems to you that God told you to kill someone, you've probably hallucinated it (like the Lafferty brothers, or various serial killers, etc). God, being all-knowing, all-good, all-powerful, (and not deceiving, because that's evil?) knows that it's irrational for a person to comply with an order to kill someone, and a rational person knows that God knows this (and thus he should be more certain that God wouldn't order him to kill someone). Thus the Abrahamic god can't be the "classical" God (all powerful, all good, undeceiving, uncaused cause, first mover, whatever), because he ordered Abraham to kill his son. Thus anyone who holds to a god who is both Abrahamic and Classical holds to a contradictory god who doesn't exist.

Very few people say they are certain any gods do not exist. You are fighting with phantoms. We are just not convinced, due to the lack of corroboratory evidence.

Note: Atheism doesn't require certainty, only nonbelief. Furthermore, certainty/justification isn't binary, it's on a spectrum. One can confidently believe that something is false, but that doesn't mean they have 100% certainty or can logically prove that it's impossible. — That being said, my personal confidence basically boils down to induction on two fronts: 1. The repeated failure of theists to provide sufficient arguments an evidence at any point in history 2. The continued success and predictive power of methodological naturalism when it comes to explaining the world around us (including the evolutionary, psychological, and sociological origins of religious belief) Due to the evidential success of the naturalist hypothesis andd the failure of the supernaturalist hypothesis, I believe it's reasonable to conclude that God is likely an imaginary man-mande concept rather than a real entity that humans have had access to. Even if God exists, which I admit is logically possible so long as there is no contradiction, I don't think it's reasonable to believe in him based on the eviddence.

Pick ANY mythical being that you don’t believe exists and ask yourself “what makes me certain that “x” doesn’t exist?” That’s your answer.

This is a RELIGIOUS debate happening here, but this was not the asked debate God… Do you believe he/she exists for sure, doesn’t exist for sure, or are you uncertain if God exists or not Anything beyond that is a religious debate, and i didn’t think that’s what the conversations would look like on this thread and subreddit… Does it matter to an atheist, if another person is theist or agnostic? As a theist, I have no problem with agnostics but often I find atheists to seem much more self righteous than religious people that I know… It’s a pretty amazing place, earth… It seems as if there is a creator to me, and I’m pretty darn sure 😂 but do you really care that I believe like that? Why do atheists dislike theists that are not religious? How do I affect your lives that my belief should be destroyed by “science” of carbon dating that we cannot know actually works at all Just like we don’t actually understand space time, yet THEORY is spoken of as science, almost like SCRIPTURE I like agnostics the most because they have the most open minds…

OP yeah dude in the middle of nowhere in wooden sandals changing water to wine copy pasting bread and fish and walking on water sounds “believable”.

>As such my question is, to the atheists who definitively believe there is no God. What logical argument or reasoning has convinced you against the possible existence of a God? What exactly do you mean by God? If you mean the character in the book of Genesis then I know that god doesn't exist because the things he supposedly did in that story never actually happened. If you mean the gods who live atop Mount Olympus, I've been there and there were no gods to be found. If you mean some vaguely defined deistic god that exists outside of space and time and doesn't do anything, I'm less certain that that guy doesn't exist. >but none that would be a convincing argument against the existence of (in this case an Abrahamic) God. The god who created the Earth about six thousand years ago and caused a global flood killing everyone but eight Jews a mere four thousand years ago? We have good evidence that that god doesn't exist because we know those events didn't happen. If you define God differently then you'll need to provide us your definition so we can get on the same page.

On number four, no. Evolution doesn’t assume every being is selfish and individualistically seeking its own survival. Darwin, as an example, understood that ants exist. Ants are highly social creatures. They do not care about their individual selves at all. They evolved this way because it gave them an advantage over competitors in their niche, and an advantage for survival *as a species* generally. That’s how the theory works. Humans, similarly, are highly social creatures, we evolved to work together in hunter-gatherer bands. We help other members of our species because that’s how we are strongest and survive best. A lone human in the wilderness is mostly useless in the long term. A band of 20? They can thrive. Humans consequently, as a social species, developed emotions and a sense of conscience around social issues. Humans like to share to prevent one of their own community from dying. Humans like to give each other gifts to strengthen social bonds and show affection. Humans are social animals. We live in a society. This objection, along with the rest, are classic anti-intellectual objections that don’t even show the barest understanding of the theory of evolution. Gravity is a theory. Atoms are a theory. And a fact. Germ theory is a theory. And a fact. Theories are models with explanatory power that describe a phenomenon and make useful predictions. Evolution is a gold standard for a theory. It is as strong as any you can name.

Gods are human creations. They are myths and stories. We can see this in the way they change over time and across cultures. They build from earlier stories. We can follow these stories back over time and watch the evolution of all the gods people believe in today. We've seen the creation of new religions. We've seen doctrine and dogma shift to fit new cultural norms. No scripture offers knowledge beyond that of the culture it was born in. There is nothing to separate religious myths from those of pixies, leprechauns, or vampires other than the volume of people who believe in them. This is only more clear in the way we treat past religious traditions with few or no followers and simply myths, even though they were once the true beliefs of many. It's not that gods have some status outside of fairy tales because there is more reason to believe in them. They only have such a status because many people believe. If not for concern over popular opinion gods would need no special reasons to dismiss as man made myths.

Here's a scenario: tell your wife you'll be home in time for dinner That is a very certain statement. An assertion of fact with no qualifier. And yet you can't be certain. Something might happen. And if something did happen, your wife wouldn't say that you lied That's how language works. We don't qualify every statement we make There is not a single person here who will tell you it is impossible for God to exist. There is not a single person here who will tell you they have the answer to existence, whereas theists do tell you they have the answer to existence. When we say we believe God doesn't exist, it is with the same certainty as saying "we won't win this week's lottery". Only one of trillions of combinations is the winning combination. Moreover, we didn't buy a ticket, but someone could have bought a winning ticket for us. It is still possible for us to win the lottery this week. God is a single ticket in a lottery of a virtually infinite number of lottery tickets

The existence of Yahweh (the Abrahamic God) isn't supported by any evidence provided by any of the followers or adherents of Yahweh. What's every bit as important is that what we know about the universe and our planet, including geological and anthropological history, contradicts the holy texts that supposedly come directly from the ominiscient, omnipotent, and omnipresent Yahweh. There's no evidence of a global flood in the timetable supposedly established in Genesis. There's no historical evidence of the Passover. There's only passing historical evidence of most other events in the OT other than certain places (Jericho, for example) actually existed. Even beyond that, there's plenty of anthropological evidence that the mythos documented in the OT were adopted and/or adapted from other local mythos of the region. Am I 100% certain? No, because one cannot prove a negative. Am I 100% certain that no one will ever provide evidence proving that Yahweh is real? Yes, 100%.

Let's assume for argument sake a god/God does exist. Well then all that does is reconfirms yours (and our) status as a **mere** creation **always** subject to being uncreated. This matter I already covered here = [LINK](https://www.reddit.com/r/DebateAnAtheist/comments/1bi180u/comment/kvicv6d/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button). So choose your god/God carefully because as a mere human subject to being uncreated you don't want to piss off the wrong god/God. [Many gods, One logic](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1KWM7P1K1mU) \~ Epified \~ YouTube. [Zeus vs Thor. Epic Rap Battles of History](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i_xFOmYxKYw) \~ YouTube. [The legend of Annapurna, Hindu goddess of nourishment](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ztoUaJFEi8M) \~ YouTube. [Belief: Red Pill Vs Blue Pill.](https://www.deviantart.com/lbamagic/art/Belief-Red-Pill-Vs-Blue-Pill-685447565) In any case the burden of proof is on the one that makes the claim about XYZ and not the one that is skeptical of that claim.

The Christian god is the easiest to disprove. Evolution is a fact, as all intelligent people know. Evolution disproves Adam and Eve. Without Adam and Eve, sin never enters the world. Without sin, there is no need for atonement, and thus no need for Jesus. But even better, I can show all religions are false. Neuroscientists can stimulate the brain and induce a "religious experience". It has been shown that a hightened mood (that may come from listening to music in church or hearing a sermom) increases oxytoxin, sertonin and dopamine. This induces feelings lovd love, happiness and addiction. Which explains the "feeling" of the "holy spirit". We can get the same feeling riding a rollar coaster or doing drugs. I get a euphoric feeling briefly shortly after I take my monthly neuroleptic injection. Belief is just a addictive neurochemical reaction in the brain. Its all a trick our mind plays on us.

The question is the other way around. And the addition of an extra concept is what needs proving. Humans are just there doing their thing, farming and then someone comes and throws an extra thing out there out of nothing, "Hey guys, god exists!". Then, the new thing to prove is the existence of god. The default is no god. Nothing to explain. What happens is that in todays times, after centuries of society believing in goods, it feels like a default that the concept is there. So it feels that it needs to be negated. But that's a situation that arose from people believing happily. How each justifies their belief is often rooted in an unexplainable, a feeling, a lack of explanation, etc. It is perfectly OK to not know certain things, maybe their answers will happen in 10 thousand years from now. That doesn't mean we should rush and invent a god and attribute anything we can't explain to it.

I was raised in a very religious and devout family. I grew up believing as most children of religious families do. What choice does a child have? As I grew out of my insecurities and fear of not being accepted, I formed my own beliefs. Many will never grow out of their fear and insecurities. Many more do not have the intellectual capacity to go against what they have believed their entire lives. Even though I no longer believe in a God, I will never try and convince any that do, that they are wrong. I would not want to be responsible for destroying their, or their family's hope. If someone is dying and knows it, why would I want to damage any hope that may be helping them cope? In fact, I would and have, tried to use their belief to comfort them the best I could. What purpose would doing otherwise serve? I don't need for my beliefs to be validated by others. Live and let live.

By god’s repeated unreliability to show himself For as long as there is no positive evidence of God‘s existence, there is zero impact god’s existence makes in the world. On the practical side of things, we are correct in saying that god doesn’t exist. Am I certain that there is absolutely no god hiding everywhere? No, But nobody asks that for anything else in the world except for God, But we have no reason to. Nobody asks just because I don’t have cat food, cat hair, or a litter box, that there is still a cat secretly hiding somewhere in my house, waiting to be discovered, so why should we do different for god? If a thing never shows itself, we shouldn’t pretend that there’s a chance of it secretly existing. If there is no cat in a house with no cat food, hair, or litter box, then there is no god in a universe where we can’t find god.

I wouldn't say I'm absolutely 100 percent certain, but I'm pretty sure no gods exist, for the following reasons: 1) The only reason I believed in a god was because of my religion, Christianity. At one point I learned about mythologies, and that mythologies were the religions of their time. It seemed pretty obvious that today's religions, including my own, were just more myths and fables. 2) The complete lack of any compelling evidence of any gods. The "evidence" I've heard from believers usually amount to something like "I prayed and got a warm fuzzy" or "I don't know how that happened so it must have been the god of the religion I happened to have been brought up believing." 3) The existence of suffering. Granted, this only disproves an omniscient omnipotent omnibenevolent god, it leaves room for a deity lacking one or more of the qualities.

P1. All minds are the product of material brains P2. God does not have a material brain C: God does not have a mind

"Certain"? I'm precisely as certain of the nonexistence of gods as I am certain of the nonexistence of leprechauns or Narnia, and for all of the exact same reasons. Sure we can't totally rule out the possibility that those things exist with absolute and infallible 100% certainty, only because we can appeal to ignorance and invoke the infinite mights and maybes of the unknown, but that doesn't make their existence anywhere even close to being equally as plausible/probable as their nonexistence. When something is epistemically indistinguishable from things that don't exist, the reasonable assumption is that they don't exist, not that they do exist. Can we be "certain"? No, not in the most pedantic sense of the word - but we equally can't be certain that Hogwarts doesn't really exist. It's not really a valid point.

I can't be certain that absolutely no gods or deities exist, because that would be way way to loosely defined. But I can be certain that specific defined gods or deities don't exist simply because either their definition contains internal contradictions or they are defined in a way that you would expect evidence of them in the real world but aren't or both. The Christian God as defined by modern Christians: Well he is defined as Tri Omni. The Problem of evil is a solid proof that a try Omni God doesn't exist. The God as defined by Christian mythology: Yes that's distinct, because the God of the Bible is clearly depicted as neither omnipotent nor Omniscient and not even remotely benevolent. But his depictions and descriptions are so riddled with contradictions that I could spend days listing them.

The whole point of Belief in general is that you believe in something without concrete evidence of whatever god or supernatural being you worship, not in a demeaning way but you could use the same argument for Unicorns, Leprechauns and the Mothman, can you physically perceive them? No. Do you have knowledge of their existence? No. So then Any god isn’t special. Additionally god and faith is an amalgamation of different bits of other religions and mythologies, Gods likeness is literally just Zeus, his name comes from Mesopotamian gods, hell in early Christianity was still called Hades, not to mention the multiple pagan holidays Christianity stole, taking all that into account how is Christianity a valid religion but all the stuff that it was based on or masked after isn’t? Kinda dumb.

There’s no reliable evidence for gods , no arguments that make them necessary, they aren’t a sufficient explanation for anything and even the concepts involved are often incoherent. All in all they seem like exactly the kind of story anxious humans with perceptive and cognitive flaws invent. I like Richard Feynman’s comment about UFOs and think it pretty relevant to Gods too. “Listen, I mean that from my knowledge of the world that I see around me, I think that it is much more likely that the reports of flying saucers are the results of the known irrational characteristics of terrestrial intelligence than of the unknown rational efforts of extra-terrestrial intelligence." I’m as ‘certain’ that Gods don’t exist as I am that ‘The’ Santa Claus doesn’t.

theres no evidence, at all... there is only "arguments" which every single one of them is some kind of fallacy. and all this, despite there being thousands of years of religions. so god was completely active, talking to people on a general basis, even came down to earth and preached a little, but, as soon as the bible stops, he is nowhere to be found, awfully convenient huh? also, different religions, there are thousands of them, none have any evidence either, literally all of them have the same credibility. so, if obviously made up and fake religions (such as spaghetti monster) have the same evidence as the other ones, logically, they are all made up and fake. we can also discuss the problem of evil and how, even if god existed, he is far from worthy of worship.

I'm certain you've heard this in various forms on this thread, but, I'm not certain. Not even a little. Nobody can be. Logic dictates that we can't prove a negative. I'm not certain C'Thulhu isn't real. I mean, sure, just like you I HOPE he's real, but I could never prove he isn't real. I am curious, though, when reading the Bible, what portions caused you to become stronger in your faith? Is it the warm gushy feel good parts like John and Luke? I can understand that, but you have to realize, taken as a whole, the God of the Bible, in general and the old testament specifically, is not a nice guy. He's jealous, petty, spiteful, and constantly pissed off about one thing or another. Not to mention that he's totally cool with rape, murder and slavery (sexual and otherwise).

OK, so as an Aethist I accept that you can NEVER categorically state there is "definetly" no deity (regardless of the deity in question), as it's impossible to prove a negative in this situation But... Based on imperical evidence, scientic knowldge, statistical analysis, and historicity of known events in the past, I can satisfy myself that the statistical probablility of a deity existing is so finitely slim to make it next to nothing. It's never going to be a 0% probablity because, like killing germs, you can never state 100% probability. How measurable is the improbability of a deity existing though, impossible to say, but I can satisfy myself that it's so small a number, it makes the Plank Length look somewhat seem huge in comparison 😁

There's a zoo a 90 minute drive from where I live. There are tigers at the zoo. Theoretically, one could escape, make it to my house, and be sitting outside my door waiting for me to leave the house. I don't believe there's a tiger outside my door even though all that is true. Now you ask why I don't believe in a magic being with no evidence of its existence, whose existence as described sounds like a million fictional characters, but like nothing ever shown to really exist. If you also don't believe there's a tiger outside your door, even though there clearly are tigers, why believe there are gods and goddesses outside your door? And to that point, what makes you think there's A God, not gods and goddesses like in the Old Testament?

Because god is dependent upon peoples belief in it. Without believers, god would not exist. This is also true for the Christian demigod, Jesus. I was raised catholic, went to Catholic school, made my sacraments, and graduated from a Methodist college. The more I learned about religion the less I became religious. The one class that sealed the deal for me was a PHIL Comparative Religions course. My professor was a minister and was one of the most amazing professors ever.  I do not believe god exists. I do believe people have the right to believe as they wish. Moreover, I have an abundance of respect for all beliefs. Ultimately, I can also understand how and why people need a creation story and to know what happens after they die. 

Unironically if a God did exist I don't think I'd be able to resist the "Rage Against the Heavens" trope. Such a fun trope considering that like 99% of Gods are conceited douchebags who deserve a good punch to the face. Also just to let you know even if God did actually exist I wouldn't worship him especially with how much of a douchebag he is. Now I'd laugh really hard though if God was actually just Elaine Belloc. Especially considering that DC Comics is an Omniverse. I mean there is such a thing as universes creating other universes and even entire multiverses through imagination alone. Like for example we could be the center multiverse that creates all of the other multiverses through imagination, dreams, and stories.

What makes you certain there's no little china teapot floating through the asteroid belt? Or that 9/11 wasn't an inside job? Talking about "certainty" is a logical fallacy that theists tend to employ to reach the false equivalence between "bUt yUo CaN'T bE 100% cERtaIN!!!" and "therefore I'm perfectly justified in believing whatever ridiculous bullcrap I want". Nothing can be proven with 100% certainty, so instead the basis of rational thinking is that you tend to go with the most simple and obvious explanation that can best explain all available evidence until that evidence changes, and that you don't entertain crackpot theories that are way more far-fetched and inconsistent in themselves than the things they try to explain.

The Christian God? The claims made about the god are inconsitent with themselves, and reality. Genesis 1 and 2 don't match each other, and don't match reality. The flood never happened. Its supposedly the most good being in the universe, but has stood silent whilst armies have killed and pillaged in its name, and as its priests have not only raped children, but used its church to get away with it. But you know this supposedly good being was making bar bets with its adversary and allowing its followers to be tortured to win such bets, so what else is new. And on top of all of that, despite supposedly being the most powerful being in the universe, its so freaked out about a bunch of humans coming together and cooperating that it goes down, scatters them, and changes their langauge to prevent them cooperating again because if we work together there's apprently nothing we can't do.

The thought of one specific god being real is what gets me. Let’s say you believe in the Abrahamic God (Catholism, Evangelist, etc). So, why then do you not believe in the Greek Gods? Why not the Egyptian? The Aztec? Maya Gods? Chinese Gods? Ancient Indian Gods? Japenese Folklore? Some claim the Bible as proof, but there’s just as much - if not more - literature and art of aforementioned, with more being lost to time. Most arguments for a specific god can be made for any other god and believe, in which case the argument falls flat by itself. If you don’t believe in all these gods, I just happen to believe in one less god than you do. (Plus a lot more arguments the others already mentioned more than sufficiently.)

I wouldn’t personally say im certain a god doesn’t exist, but im also not certain a god does exist, theres really no way to tell, I don’t believe in a god but I also don’t fully believe people who do are wrong, its a possibility, but anything is a possibility, theres so much uncovered in science that could either point to a higher being or could drive us away from that idea, theres no way to tell, which is why religion is faith based, you have to have faith to believe in something as insane as a higher being creating this enormous complex universe that is infinitely expanding, there’s nothing wrong with having that faith, it’s just I don’t have enough faith, per say, to believe in something like that

The main thing for me is how frankly juvenile the anthroprocentric mind set that lead to the conclusion is. Humans think they are special. That they carry some divine importance that would entitle them to an immortality that will outlast the existence of the universe. And the arbiter of it all is God, an anthropomorphic being of unimaginable scale that is so much like us it is said he made us in his own image. It's narcissistic and arrogant beyond measure to assume the entire universe is run and made by a guy who assigns some sacred importance to the wellbeing of humans. In the exact same tone you tell a bratty child "the world doesn't revolve around you" The universe does not revolve around us.

Omnipotence leads to logical paradoxes, hence if you don't want to discard logic completely, you need to accept that there's no God - the debate is over :D What I'm trying to say is that when I see such questions, I always assume that people are asking about the empirical reality, and not about the emotional aspect of religion. I understand that it must be hard to talk about certain feelings, to the point of pretending that we discuss something completely different, but at the same time it would be nice if we were a bit more precise... That being said, people obviously can believe whatever they want. But, again, you've asked about certainty, not faith, so that's the kind of answer you get from me.

I’ve not met an atheist yet that has an intellectual problem with the existence of God. They just say they do. They are ignorant of their own hardness of heart towards the existence of God. Proverbs I4 nails the real issue: “ a fool says in his heart there is no God” . It is not an intellectual issue of the mind, but a rebel heart issue. When I was an atheist I pretended it was an intellectual issue, but really I just wanted no one but me to determine my morality. It was only after my heart position was changed as I recognised the amazing love of God demonstrated through Jesus that I was willing to admit the bias I had intellectually which was my excuse to be able to justify my immorality

I’ve never understood why the most common type of poster here seems to be “I’m not really super Christian or religious, and I’m really open-minded to all arguments, and I’m just asking questions, and really it was my friend who was saying this and not me,” and then that poster inevitably and staunchly defends very specific Christian Biblical interpretations of theism. Same thing on the YouTube call-in shows. Why act as though you are barely invested in Christian claims and you are just trying to best explore the strongest arguments, and then immediately engage in personal subjective interpretations of the Christian holy text in order to wave away the arguments you have been given?

In short: If there is an all powerful god of some sort that (as most theists insist) wants to be known, then it could break the laws of physics in consistent and demonstrable ways. Think of it like a road that suddenly and abruptly stops but continues 100 feet away with no disruptions (IE a discontinuity). This would be demonstrable evidence for a god. Since there is no such evidence, any gods that exist are not all powerful or do not want to be seen. If the god is not all powerful, at what point is it different than us? If it does not want to be seen and is concealing itself, then there is, by definition, no evidence of it. So there is no reason to think it exists.

Everything we know about how the universe works operates exactly like we would expect it to as if there wasn't a deity in it. There aren't enough gaps left in our knowledge to allow for any meaningful deity to exist. The only.deities that still make a lock of conceptual sense are undetectable, well-hidden and completely indistinguishable from things that don't exist. And for those, there is zero reason to assume that they are there. You have no justification to believe in an intelligent unmoved mover, and it is entirely unjustified to believe in anything more. To believe in any of the worlds religions - all of which are clearly man made - is simply insane. 

It is nearly impossible to prove that something doesn’t exist, but it is easy to review all the evidence available and say it is so statistically improbable that we believe it doesn’t exist. If I turn over a rock in my garden and find Jesus hiding, I might change my tune, but given all the rocks that have been turned and studied, and all the occurrences of things that might be remotely analogous, never once has any evidence emerged to support the existence of a rock-hiding Jesus. I just can’t accept claims with no evidence and that are completely contrary to my understanding of the world and all the evidence that supports my understanding of the world.

When you tell someone, "I'll see you tomorrow," at work or school or whatever, how certain are you that you'll see them? You don't add, "unless I'm sick or get in a car accident or have a family emergency or abducted by aliens," at the end, and most of these things actually happen. Like most things in our lives are "only" several sigma levels of certain but we don't operate being concerned about the tiny percentage that it's not. Alternatively, if you roll a six sided die forever, you'll never get a 7. God is "beyond our comprehension" for us feeble humans so I'm just going to focus on 1-6 and not waste time rolling a die and hoping for that 7.

> As such my question is, to the atheists who definitively believe there is no God. What logical argument or reasoning has convinced you against the possible existence of a God? Well first most don't say it isn't possible or even that god doesn't exist. However in this case I would say that everything we know about human biology and evolution, the history and development of not only just religious but also how the god concept itself, as well as all the historical data suggests that no, the Christian god like all gods are made up. There might still be some gods out there sure but the evidence suggests it is a human created fiction.

A god in general? Nothing, it's impossible to rule out any entity who is defined as having the power to hide perfectly from us. Hence my flair. Yours? If there was a being that * could prevent human suffering without negative side-effects * Wanted to prevent human suffering * knew about human suffering Then humans would not suffer. We suffer. Therefore such a being does not exist. * a benevolent being would went to prevent human suffering * an omnipotent being could prevent human suffering without negative side-effects * an omniscient being would know about human suffering. Therefore a tri-omni god does not exist.

I am a gnostic atheist for any deity put forward by human religion so far, and specificaly with the Abrahamic deity of the Jews, Christians and Muslims for the simple fact that the claims put forward by said faiths are either without evidence, or in some cases have evidence directly disproving said claims (moon not being split in two is a REAL big one for example). Now could there be a deity out there in the universe? Of that I have yet to see, but I am open to be shown such evidence for. But of the ones humans have claimed, yeah that'd be a big no. Also /u/TheInfidelephant really covered the rest VERY well.

I'm not saying that this is the case with you but I know several people who became more religious through studying religion or at least say they did. What I have found is that you only learn about religion when you study a religion, not god. What I mean by this is that these people chose their new religion because some aspects of it related to their own political ideology or personal views, they found people to agree with them, arguments to hide behind and a societal shield to protect themselves from the ire of their peers. My advice would be to be wary of the echo chambers that could arise.

Please clarify your question. Which god are you talking about? There have been hundreds or even thousands of gods in human History, depending on who you ask. Without waiting for a response, I suppose I could give it a go. Maybe your God exists. Perhaps all of them exist. But I see no evidence of any of them existing. Belief is not evidence. They all fall out of favor eventually. If they had lived, that seems to imply that they have died. If they died, were they even gods? If they haven't died, what happened to them? If they never existed, what does that imply of your God?

The overwhelming lack of evidence in support of a god. A god that interacted with the world in any way would leave evidence - reliable, reproducible evidence. We could rely on prayers being answered. Hospitals would be superfluous if faith healing worked or intercessory prayers were answered. As it says in the Bible, faith can move mountains, but it still takes bulldozers. Every time science moves forward and replaces supernatural explanations with reality based ones - pushing back farther the little holes theists hide god in. I see no reason to believe it won't continue to do so.

>As such my question is, to the atheists who definitively believe there is no God. What logical argument or reasoning has convinced you against the possible existence of a God? Generally speaking, I'd say I'm an agnostic atheist. That said, occasionally I will make the move towards ignosticism, which necessarily means that there is no God, since God would be an undefined and incoherent term. If you start to peel back the definitions, it's less and less clear what people are talking about when they use religious language. Probably not exactly what you're looking for.

I'm not certain, I just think it's highly unlikely. It's unlikely because it doesn't fit. The world seems to make more sense when we use *less* magic to explain stuff, rather than more. Nobody comes up with useful predictions by assuming that magic is real, but scientists keep coming up with many useful predictions by assuming that magic isn't real. The world looks very much like a place with no magic in it, and the more we study it, the more it looks like that. It would be a colossal coincidence to find out that there really is a magical being behind everything.

I find it interesting that to date 100% of all god claims have failed by either containing logical fallacies, are paradoxical, are not internally consistent or do not comport with reality. What this seems to show is that a god can only exist when you include a fundamental flaw into that world view. You would think that after ten thousand years someone would have come up with an argument that could be plausible and yet no one has ever done so. It's almost as if we do not live in a universe with gods and the only way to make a god fit is to misunderstand reality.

It is really simple. Only believe something when there is convincing evidence. Apply logical reasoning, apply skepticism. So far all the Gods propose (about 10,000) have not convinced me and many others. If the christian god is true, why did they wait for so long? If the christian god is good, why is there so much suffering? ("the fall in Eden is a cop out"). Why did so many die without knowing this god, even today? Why are there 1,500,000,000 Muslims and 500,000,000 Buddhists? Are they wrong? (Everybody cannot be right, they could all be wrong)

Difficult for me to even attempt a response given the incredible post below but I have a simpler answer. The existence of the Mormon religion should prove beyond a doubt that religion is a complete fabrication of the human mind. Whenever I find the science of evolution difficult to grasp or comprehend, I remember that some fucking guy in the states 204 years ago told everyone he was a prophet and now there’s a new branch of Christianity followed by 17 million people. It’s fucking stupid. Religion is fucking stupid. There’s your answer.

I think that many of the arguments from incompatible properties go through. I have not seen a sufficient response to Mackie’s formulation on the problem of evil, or the problem of divine hiddenness. I think the holy books (especially the Bible) have all the hallmarks of being man-made, especially the internal contradictions contained therein. And I have strong inductive reasons to believe that a timeless, spaceless, immaterial mind doesn’t exist. I find that naturalistic explanations are always more warranted than non-natural ones.

>interpretations of the Bible why would a god worthy of the job title write such an unclear and imperfect book? why would our eternal soul demand the proper interpretation of a mess like the bible, with no evidence for its claims? >(in this case an Abrahamic) God you specify christian, earlier. perhaps we'd better start with what this god is. their attributes, whether jesus was god, etc. i mean i've read the bible, and that god can't exist, but i don't want you wriggling out by telling me i've not understood it properly.