Best and worst arguments against the existence of God

[Antonio the Sixth]

Every thesis needs a good antithesis. We got some interesting discussions (and some... odd ones) from this thread, so let's see if we can do as well for the other side.

As I mentioned there, the strongest "argument" (again, understood fundamentally as an emotional appeal rather than a logical proof) against the existence of God is the Problem of Evil. It is an inescapable reality of the human condition that shaped all of our lives in some ways, and that few can seriously contemplate without being severely affected by. And fundamentally, all the attempts to explicitly reconcile a benevolent, omnipotent God with a world where cruelty and injustice are everywhere fall flat. The free will argument seems to work at first glance, but it only sidesteps the problem. Whether our will is free or not once created, it was nevertheless created by God in the first place, meaning that He set the parameters for how our will might express. And He gave us the capacity to experience suffering in all its infinite nuances. Honestly, the Calvinists have it right that if God is truly omnipotent and omniscient, then he must have willingly destined us for whatever fate awaits us, in both this life and the next. The other main retort is to simply assert that God knows best, and that we can't possibly hope to understand His designs and should just trust that they're for the best. That's how Job ends if I remember correctly. This, frankly, strikes me as an unacceptably authoritarian reflex. Some might be comfortable with that, but I've always believed that the powerful ought to account for their actions. With great power comes great responsibility, right? I don't see why this logic should be reversed when we get to absolute power. Besides, once again, God chose to create us with the desire to understand (if you want to argue that the desire to understand was a result of biting the apple, fine, but then he still gave Adam the willingness to bite the apple - you just can't get away with it), so why wouldn't He give us the faculty to do so? Ultimately, the best we can do here is believe that all our suffering is necessary to our moral edification in some way, and that we all will be compensated for it in the afterlife. I'm sure there are sound arguments theologians can make to the effect, but I can imagine it will ring a bit hollow to someone who's experienced a great personal strategy.

This is the best argument against the existence of God (defined as an omnipotent, omniscient, benevolent creator with personal characteristics) in generic terms, but there's another argument that's very meaningful to me, because it is the one that first made me lose my faith. That is, the strongest argument against any given religion being the definite, complete truth is simply the fact that so many people around the world believe in a different one. Can I seriously believe that I, unlike the vast majority of humanity, am among the select few who Figured It Out? Even at 12, it struck me as hopelessly presumptuous. All the more so once it became clear how much one's religion is determined almost entirely by background factors. If there was a singular Truth, surely an Indian or a Chinese would be as likely to arrive to it than a European or an American? Of course, this argument can be turned against atheists just as easily - they make equally strong claims to knowing The Truth and are an even smaller minority! So tl;dr, that's how I became agnostic, and I've never been convinced to budge from that basic stance ever since. There is an alternative, of course, which is to embrace a form of ecumenism that accepts all or most religions as containing at least some kernel of truth and arguing that we're all trying to reach one single fundamental truth through different paths. This attitude can present its own pitfalls, of course, but it can't be dismissed so easily.


Now, the worst arguments. The worst of the worst has to be the sophomoric logical gotchas on the family of "can God create a rock so heavy He couldn't lift it?" These are basically the atheist's equivalent of the Ontological Argument, as both work by setting up their terms speciously such as to presuppose their own conclusion: the Ontological Argument by defining God as something that must exist, these gotchas by defining omnipotence as entailing power over oneself. Both are utterly devoid of substantive content and uninteresting even by the standards of silly logical games. If you want an answer, then the answer is obviously no: God can create a rock of whatever weight He wants, but that won't stop God from being able to lift it later if He so wishes. You'd have to be a complete imbecile to think this is a limit on His power somehow.

To take a slightly more serious argument, though (or at least one that's frequently trotted out by people who ought to know better), another one that really need to die is the idea that Modern Science^TM somehow disproves God. Never mind that almost all the most brilliant scientists throughout history (including plenty in the past century and decades) were fervently religious and couched their research in specifically religious terms. Never mind that there are countless religious transitions that emphasize understanding the natural world as a way to better understand God. Never mind that, when it comes to the fundamental questions of our existence, all science can really do is climb up a ladder of infinite "why"s (a valuable task, but not one capable of filling existential void). Never mind that there are plenty of areas of life where Science^TM will do nothing for you whereas religion can actually help. This obsession with pitting Science^TM against religion is a particularly toxic product of the absurdity of religious discourse in America and other Anglo-Saxon countries that distracts from actually important and interesting debates.

[Antonio the Sixth]

I don't really agree with your 1st paragraph.  The existence of randomness or statistical processes and entropy in life isn't incompatible with God.  Those processes still had to start somehow.   If there was no sense of free will or creativity, if we were all stuck on train tracks fulfilling some Darwinian imperative as efficiently as possible, that world would be a stronger argument against God, and  for that matter against any transcendent meaning to consciousness.  The fact that we can consciously deviate from the plan vs. following a natural process in lockstep suggests the existence of the supernatural, even when that  deviation produces evil.   

I'm not sure how this is addressing my point. My point isn't that "free will" (and we do need to come back to how that is defined, because a lot of definitions are completely incoherent) is incompatible with God. My point is that however "free" our will is, it is still exercised within certain parameters that must have been set by God in the first place. Our will doesn't exist in a vacuum, but is conditioned by all sorts of material and conceptual features of our existence. Our instincts do exist and affect us in certain specific ways, as does our environment and everything else that structures how we relate to each other. Even if we were to grant that God does actually play dice when it comes to our wills and that somehow makes us free (a truly bizarre idea in my book - I never understood why people feel randomness is more freeing than strict causality), He still got to choose if He threw a d6 or a d8 or a d20.

Ultimately, God's omnipotence means something very clear. It means nothing in the universe can happen without God's assent, whether active or passive. Any deviation from this must necessarily be a limitation on God's omnipotence (which honestly is fine by me, it's actually the simplest and most honest answer to the Problem of Evil, but would cause serious problems in the vast majority of schools of thought in Abrahamic faiths). But if we are to call God all-powerful, then he is necessarily all-responsible, and frankly we'd have every right to take Him to court.

[Antonio the Sixth]

I think you guys are making things a little more complicated than necessary. The best argument against the existence of any deity is that all arguments proposing their existence either fail to pass empirical demonstration or are by their very nature unfalsifiable. Those are the two logical criteria that lead people to reject beliefs in almost every other matter of an assertive nature, and it's patently simple to invoke for gods as well.

I'd say this is an extremely weak argument, actually. Falsifiability is a criterion for the validity of scientific arguments, but science is only a sliver of the realm of human inquiry. There are plenty of extremely important areas of life of which we can only speak in unfalsifiable terms. Moral, political, philosophical, even in some cases historical and cosmological arguments very often are beyond any human ability to test. If you want to go the hardcore materialist route and say all these arguments are worthless, fine, but you have to accept that for the vast majority of us, these questions matter and are worth discussing regardless of whether they can be tested in a lab or not (actually all the more so because they can't!).

[Antonio the Sixth]

I think you guys are making things a little more complicated than necessary. The best argument against the existence of any deity is that all arguments proposing their existence either fail to pass empirical demonstration or are by their very nature unfalsifiable. Those are the two logical criteria that lead people to reject beliefs in almost every other matter of an assertive nature, and it's patently simple to invoke for gods as well.

I'd say this is an extremely weak argument, actually. Falsifiability is a criterion for the validity of scientific arguments, but science is only a sliver of the realm of human inquiry. There are plenty of extremely important areas of life of which we can only speak in unfalsifiable terms. Moral, political, philosophical, even in some cases historical and cosmological arguments very often are beyond any human ability to test. If you want to go the hardcore materialist route and say all these arguments are worthless, fine, but you have to accept that for the vast majority of us, these questions matter and are worth discussing regardless of whether they can be tested in a lab or not (actually all the more so because they can't!).

Why would the universe reflect human enquiry? Science is at least a measurable and testable 'language' of the universe. Because we can observe it, it reflects on us and we can reflect back on it. Other intelligent entities are likely to have this relationship with it too. But there's nothing to suggest that the philosophical questions we can ask of ourselves or construct and discuss with people like us have any bearing on the universe.

If humanity woke up tomorrow and had lost the basic understanding of mathematics and had no texts to refer to we would be able to figure it out again. There are times where various understandings have been effectively lost. But if humanity woke up tomorrow with no knowledge say of Christianity and no Bible or associated texts that understanding would never come back. There's no ability to 'retread' thousands of years of lost events. No way to 're engage' with concepts like the resurrection or the trinity. Or the divinity of Jesus.

We could ask the same question about god, as we do with mathematics, but unlike mathematics the universe would not give us the same answer (whatever of the current answers those who believe in god subscribe to) a second time if we 'lost' the first.

For me, that's because theres no answer. Because it's the wrong question.

That sounds a bit more like the second argument I developed in the OP than like what I'm talking about here. I'm not saying that the relevance of metaphysics to our human lives is proof that this or that religion is true (obviously I wouldn't do that, since I'm agnostic). What I'm saying is that the relevance of metaphysics to our human lives (and all the other subjects of study I described!) shows that we cannot and must not limit ourselves to studying what the small sliver of human thought that we happen to be able to empirically test. It might well be that "the universe" (or rather, the sum of our observations of the universe - as Kant made clear, we know nothing of the universe in itself) has nothing else to tell us beyond this sliver, but that's not going to stop us from trying to figure it out anyways. No one can possibly go through their lives caring merely about empirical facts without any consideration of abstract, non-empirical concepts. The former wouldn't even make sense to us without the latter.

[Antonio the Sixth]

Forgot to mention it back then, but I recently got reminded about the Euthyphro dilemma and how people use it to argue against Divine Command Theory, and that makes my list of worst arguments. It's not that it isn't worth discussing at all - it's an interesting conversation-starter for a lot of metaethical debates - but treating it as the ultimate gotcha that's supposed to Demolish Christians With Facts and Logic is really dumb. There are valid theological frameworks that embrace either side of the dilemma (though I have to say, people who take the pure "it's moral because God wills it" side creep me the hell out), or, as seems wiser to me, argue that they aren't as mutually exclusive as they look, because this kind of causal logic breaks down when we're talking about the creator of everything. It's possible to poke holes in many of these arguments, but that requires quite a bit more subtlety that going "muh Euthyphro, checkmate theists".

[Antonio the Sixth]

Can people here read a f**king thread title? We have another thread about arguments FOR God's existence. It's not this one.