Aug
20
Space Cowboy asked:
I don’t care if you believe in God, I just want to know what you think the best argument you’ve heard against his existence. For the sake of this question, assume that God is:
1. Eternal, or at least as old as the universe
2. Omnipresent, or at least capable of being many places at once
3. Omnipotent, or so powerful that we wouldn’t understand his limitaions
4. Sensient (no Hagelian “Geist”, I mean a god that knows he exists and that he is God.)
5. Purposeful.
6. Not “created” or “evolved” or other things that would make him just a better version of us.
I don’t care if you believe in God, I just want to know what you think the best argument you’ve heard against his existence. For the sake of this question, assume that God is:
1. Eternal, or at least as old as the universe
2. Omnipresent, or at least capable of being many places at once
3. Omnipotent, or so powerful that we wouldn’t understand his limitaions
4. Sensient (no Hagelian “Geist”, I mean a god that knows he exists and that he is God.)
5. Purposeful.
6. Not “created” or “evolved” or other things that would make him just a better version of us.
I am also asking the opposite question, and I would appreciate people answering both questions.
I actually asked the opposite question as a different question:
http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index;_ylt=Ag.2XwmaMxhO4elIql.fKDrsy6IX?qid=20060710180340AAKJGw5
So there is 10 points available for both answers if you answer the question in both places!
Comments
16 Responses to “What is the best argument against the existence of God?”
If god created everything at the same time, then Adam/Eve would have to have every known disease, and all of the unknown ones, too. Otherwise they wouldn’t exist today.
I guess god would explain the creation of the universe, though. . .How did the big bang start from nothing?
The best arguement I ever heard on this subject was ” I don’t WANT to believe in God”. It’s hard to argue with that…
It’s just so illogical. I mean, personally, I’d love to believe in God. I just don’t see how, with your given criteria of God, anyone could just be like, “Oh, yeah, no question about it.”
I know there’s gaps in evolution, and I’m not saying there is no God. Just, if you think about someone who’s been around forever. He’s always been there, infinitely. That just seems so impossible.
Lots of people say “Oh, God makes the impossible possible.” But if you leave out what he can do, it makes it hard to believe that anyone or anything could ever do something like that.
he is woman with open legs or man caring his????????
We have five senses. None of which can detect a god.
So that leaves history books. We either believe them or we don’t.
Many people prefer not to, and many people prefer to.
As for an argument for a God.
mathmatically it is impossible for the universe and all the complexities of
life as we know it to have come about by sheer accident.
Personally I have no qualm in beleiving that God was a super technological
being. The result would be the same as believing he did everything using magic. We are here. We live.
Occam’s razor.[1]
The god is simply unnecessary to explain anything. So why assume its existence?
Question 1: The platypus
Question 2: Anything painted by Van Gogh
ok wat is to say the bible wasnt written by a crack addict? we have no proff of him existing and if he was all powerful and mad humanity and wanted ppl to belive in him how come when the native were in america they didnt even think about it until the settlers cam along ?
also u can prove the bible is wrong and im about to
there are 3 races in this world caucazoids mongalozids and negrozoids. now if adam and eve were the first humans y r there 3 races its imposibe say adam was a caucazoid and eve a mongoilde then where did negroids come from ? also it would take more then 2 ppl to populate the world and in the bible isnt there something saying u shall not fuck u own blood or something like that? well then y would got make 2 ppl repopulate the world just so they could go against the bile? and where was the bible when adam and eve we on earth?
i believ we all evoulvoved from something what it was i dont know but who cares life is wat YOU make it not some god or a fucking book
The best argument against the existence of God is the inability for their to exist a “nothing”. If God created all, there would have to have been a time when there was nothing in existence. Contrary to all science we have seen, and most debate over opposites, there does not exist the possibility if a complete void in the universe or in time.
the present republican administration.
god can be anything, believing in it or not would not make a difference ignorant for believing and ignorant for not it goes both ways. and atheism also goes beyond its limitation of not-believing.
to be save is someone that enlighten you from your own ignorance.
Problem of Evil.
If God is all-powerful then he can’t be benevolent.
If he’s benevolent than he can’t be all-powerful.
Nor both.
Direct Causation.
If there is exactly one and only cause, vis., God, then the effect must be contained within the cause. But to separate the part from the whole, there must be something else, i.e. proximal causes. Or something outside God’s power.
Very simply, it is the “argument from evil”. The simplest form of the argument goes like this:
1. If God is omnipotent, then he has the power to prevent evil.
2. If Good is omnibenevolvent (all Good), then he has the will to prevent evil.
3. Evil exists.
4. Therefore, either God is not omnipotent or he is not omnibenevolent.
5. But by definition God is omnipotent AND omnibenevolent.
6. Therefore, there is no God.
Many attempts have been made to refute this argument, but none of them work. Some people tried to deny that Evil exists. Fat chance!
Some denied that there was any evil except human evil, but that God ‘permits’ human evil because of free will. Apart from all the problems of free will this introduces (God could have made us so that we were at least tempted to do good instead of evil), you still have an argument from suffering through disease, natural disaster, chance accidents, injury, deformity, etc.; which is enough to bring about God’s downfall.
Some have argued that God is not omnibenevolent; that all the suffering, deformity, etc. is either deserved or part of God’s inscrutible, mysterious ‘plan’. These replies won’t work. The fact that there is undeserved suffering is plain, and requires no elaborate, subtle or intricate explanation. The saying “God works in mysterious ways” is just a cop-out. It is like insisting, “I’m still gonna believe in God no matter what the evidence is.” Mysterious ways are superstitions, plain and simple.
If god created us in the image of himself, why is it that we still have evil within us? Why are we less perfect than god if perfectionist is what we were meant to become.
Probably the best argument against God goes something like as follows:
Defenders of a good, all powerful, and all knowing God have to explain why two kinds of evil exist, not just one. The two kinds are chosen evil (rape, torture, murder, etc.) and unchosen evil (diseases, natural disasters, etc.).
First they will say chosen evil must exist so that we can have free will. Okay, let’s allow them that. Score a point for their God.
Next they will say that unchosen evil must exist so that we can appreciate the good – that good cannot exist except in contrast with evil. There are two things wrong with that answer. First, it admits that God is incapable of creating a world in which good is absolute (non-relative). Second, even if we allow them the claim that good must be relative to evil, the question remains why *so very much* evil is necessary to make us appreciate the good. To say that there needs to be as much unchosen evil in the world as there is so that we can recognize and appreciate the good is like saying that we could not tell the difference between black and white in a picture unless at least half the picture was black.
As a last resort, they will say evil does not exist – that what seems an evil is only an absence of good. This is like saying that there is no black paint on the canvas, there is only an absence of white paint – accepting it as an answer requires one to wilfully insult one’s own intelligence.
This is called The Problem of Evil.
Another argument con God:
God has perfect knowledge, which must include knowledge of all that is going to occur in the world He created. Yet we, His creatures, are claimed to have free will, the ability to choose whether or not we will do something. But it cannot be possible that we have free will if our creator made us while having complete foreknowledge of all that we will do. It is not possible because there could not be such knowledge unless all our behaviour is pre-determined, and if all our behaviour is pre-determined we do not have free will. Therefore, such a God does not exist.
This is called The Problem of God’s Foreknowledge.
Finally, look at what’s involved in theism (that is, belief in God). We assume that because the world contains persons the origin of the world must be some kind of person (whom we call call God) – but that does not follow. Granted that the world developed or evolved from some fundamental set of principles, and that process gave rise to persons, it does not follow that the original principles were laid down by a Person (God). There might be a God, but that God is or was a Person is an unwarranted assumption. And a grossly arrogant one.
I wish that the questioner had phrased the question as: What is the best argument for, or against, the existence of God? so that all the answers could be together in one place. There are two sub-questions of interest, which I will address in turn:
1. Did a God create the universe at the Big Bang, and define the rules by which it works? This one is unanswerable: there is no data available, and neither the affirmative claim nor the negative claim can be demonstrated in any way. Therefore, we can draw no conclusion, and our lives will be completely unaffected as a result.
2. Is there a God which is tinkering with the universe now, to influence the outcome of human events? There is absolutely no evidence to support such a conclusion (and plenty of evidence against it — e.g., the laws of physics, which admit of no such tinkering are valid throughout the universe); moreover, there is no way to demonstrate that there is not. This latter point means that any claim of the affirmative conveys no information: it can predict nothing. Hence the question is only of philosophical interest.
There will be some who read this and claim: But the Bible says …. To any such person, I can only say, any book which contains dozens of internal contradictions, and hundreds of discrepancies with known fact, can hardly be considered a reliable guide to much of anything.