God Still Doesn't Exist

 

I argued in <this post> that God doesn't exist. I was recently looking at some Wikipedia entries on the existence of God, and had a few more thoughts to share.

The starting position of other atheists should be that there is no God, and it is the obligation of the theist to tell us about a God and some of its properties and give evidence for its existence. The burden of proof is on them. There are some "strong" atheists who argue how there couldn't possibly be a God where the burden of proof is reversed, but that is not a position I care to defend. But many atheists enter the debate as if they were on equal footing. Socially and politically, this is true, since lots of human beliefs and human institutions are based on religion. But logically, it is not true. The atheist seeking truth can sweep aside culture and require that theists start from zero and tell us about their God.

Theists don't want just any God, they want a personal God who cares about us and our concerns and is to a considerable extent knowable by us. "God exists, therefore Lutheranism is the one true faith!" is I hope a joke, as there is quite a large gap in the reasoning there.

Suppose you accept that there must be a first cause to the universe, and therefore God must exist. We would have no reason to think that this God has anything to do with humanity. Certainly if you think God is the cause of the Big Bang, which formed billions of galaxies, numbers alone suggest that we don't have much of God's attention, if indeed he was inclined to care about any entities like us at all.

I argued before for why <personal experience was a poor reason to believe in God>.

Another sort of argument is that humans have a universal tendency to believe in God, that there is a "God-shaped hole" in every person. It should instead be called a "belief-in-God shaped hole". We have a great many tendencies that are common but false. See for instance some <cognitive distortions>.

Another argument is that religion is helpful. It has led to people doing good works, and it may be correlated with happiness, notably in today's USA. Many things that are useful are not true. For instance, a belief by young children that their parents' beliefs are correct might be one -- true or not, the parents' beliefs got them far enough to have children. Another might be the belief that one's own country or people is greater or better than all the others. This is usually useful to one's own people. Whether it leads to greater overall total happiness is debatable but not clearly false. If you think of competing companies in a given field, employee belief that their company is best might lead to harder work in all such companies and an overall better result for society as they compete.

You can approach life from many perspectives. The one I favor most often is, "However inconvenient or depressing it may be, what is true?" But there are others. One is something like, "let's find common ground and try to get along with each other." It's not a bad idea. I am what I call a "friendly atheist", because I don't feel the need to twist people's arms to make them give up their religion and see the truth of atheism. If their religion gives them a comfortable place to live and does no harm, why rock the boat? I draw the line at religions that constrain the lives of other people. Theocracies are an obvious example. If one can deter such believers at all, it should be sufficient for them to ask if their conception of God is so obviously correct that they should constrain the behavior of other believers who share most of their beliefs. There is no need to get them to consider becoming atheists, which would likely be a far more radical change for them.

With truth in mind, a quip comes to my mind... "The existence of God is fake news." Of course it trivializes a long-standing and important question, but it's also an honest reaction of an atheist, where an old truth can be expressed in a new metaphor.

Another snarky internal reaction I sometimes have to a statement about God is, "Who?" This reflects the idea that the burden of proof is on the theist, and until proven otherwise God is a fiction. Also, there are so many different conceptions of God I don't even know which fiction the speaker is professing to believe in.