Though the history of the philosophy of
religion has been dominated by attempts to prove the existence of God, there
also exist a number of arguments that seek to disprove theism. These range from a priori arguments that the concept
of God is logically incoherent, to a posteriori arguments that the world
is not the way that it would be if God existed. The atheistic proofs section
surveys these arguments for atheism.
Within the Arguments for Atheism section,
the arguments are arranged under the following headings: “The Presumption of
Atheism”, “The
Problem of Evil”, “Problems with
Omnipotence” (including the paradox of the stone), “Problems with
Omniscience”, “Heaven
and Hell”, “Immortality”,
“Petitionary Prayer”, “The Argument from
Autonomy”, and “The
Psychogenesis of Religion”.
Atheists often suggest that theirs is the
default position, that there is a presumption of
atheism. This places the burden of proof on the theist; if the theist is
unable to make a persuasive case for the existence of God, then the atheist is
justified in his atheism. The case for the presumption of atheism may be made
in two ways, one resulting in a presumption of weak atheism, and the other in a
presumption of strong atheism.
The problem of evil
is the problem of reconciling the existence of an omniscient, omnipotent and
benevolent God with the existence of a world full of evil and suffering. If God
is omniscient then he knows how to bring it about that there is neither evil
nor suffering. If God is omnipotent then he is able to bring it about that
there is neither evil nor suffering. If God is benevolent then he wants to
bring it about that there is neither evil nor suffering. But if God knows how
to, is able to and wants to bring it about that there is neither evil nor
suffering, then why does he not do so? The simplest answer is that God does not
do so because he does not exist. This is by far the most popular argument for
atheism.
The doctrine of divine omnipotence
is the doctrine that God is all-powerful. It is sometimes argued, however, that
the concept of omnipotence is paradoxical, logically incoherent, and so that it
is logically impossible that there be any being that is omnipotent. This position,
if it can be sustained, precludes the existence of God.
The doctrine of divine omniscience
is the doctrine that God is all-knowing. The doctrine of divine omniscience,
though, faces several philosophical objections; there are a number of arguments
in the philosophy of religion that purport to demonstrate that God cannot
possibly know everything. These include arguments that the doctrine of divine omniscience
is logically incoherent, that it is inconsistent with the further Christian
doctrine of divine impeccability (i.e. the doctrine that God cannot sin), and
that it is refuted by the fact of human freedom. If any of these arguments is
successful, then there can be no omniscient God.
The doctrine of divine justice is
also subject to criticism. First of all, it appears to conflict with the idea
that God is forgiving. A just God sees that each person gets what he or she
deserves; a forgiving God sees that some people’s sins go unpunished. Second,
the Christian view of heaven and hell appear in many ways to be unjust. Hell,
for instance, appears to inflict an infinitely great punishment upon those who
are sent there. How, though, can any finite sin deserve infinite punishment?
Just punishments and rewards are proportionate to the badness or goodness of
the person that deserves them. Heaven and hell though, are all or nothing. They
therefore cannot be just.
Even if we can make sense of the justice of
heaven and hell, there remains a further problem: immortality.
Death, by definition, involves the destruction of a person; if a person is not
destroyed by death then they did not die. Once destroyed, though, it is unclear
whether a person can be recreated. It is possible, no doubt, for there to be a
subsequent person, like to them in every respect, but there is no reason to
think that that will be the very same person that died, rather than merely a
replica of them.
A further doctrinal problem with
Christianity concerns petitionary prayer, prayer in which we request that God
do something for us. God’s omniscience implies that he will already have taken
all of the information about our needs and desires into account when deciding
what to do. His benevolence implies that he will act in our best interests
unless there is a good reason not to (and if there is such a reason, our
prayers will not remove it). Prayer, then, should never change God’s mind; petitionary prayer shouldn’t ever work.
The argument from
autonomy is the argument that the existence of morally autonomous agents is
inconsistent with the existence of God, and so that the fact that morally
autonomous agents do exist disproves the existence of God. God, if he exists,
is worthy of worship. If a being is truly worthy of worship, though, then he is
entitled to our unconditional obedience. Moral agents, however, cannot be
required to give unconditional obedience to any agent. Moral agency requires
autonomy, and so the idea of a moral duty to give up one's autonomy is
incoherent; in giving up one's autonomy one would cease to be a moral agent so
would cease to have moral duties at all. We cannot, therefore, have a duty of
unconditional obedience to any agent, and there therefore cannot be any agent
that worthy of worship. There can therefore be no God.
The psychology of religion seeks to explain
how patterns of thought in the human mind give rise to religious belief, to
give a naturalistic account of religion based on human psychology. Psychology
is thus used to explain away religious belief. The most influential critics of
religion to have used this approach are Ludwig Feuerbach and Sigmund Freud.
A final critique of
religion comes from the field of memetics, and the
suggestion that there is a God meme. Memetics seeks to apply the theory of evolution not to
biological organisms but to ideas. Ideas, like animals, replicate themselves
and compete for survival. The same process of natural selection that ensures
that only the fittest animals survive will therefore also ensure that only the
fittest ideas survive. Fitness of ideas, though, need not be a guide to truth;
fitness is simply the ability to survive and reproduce. If the memetic critique of religion is right, then the success of
religion can be fully explained by its preference of faith to reason, and its
emphasis on evangelism.
http://www.update.uu.se/~fbendz/library/cd_impossible.html
Taken
from:
I
get a lot of comments about this essay (mostly rebuttals from christians). Unfortunately, I
don't have time to respond to them all, but I read them with great interest. I
used to have
1.
Introduction
2.
Perfection
seeks even more perfection
3.
Perfection
begets imperfection
4.
God
knowingly creates suffering
5.
Infinite
punishment for finite sins
6.
Belief
more important than actions
7.
Perfection's
imperfect revelation
8.
The
Omniscient changes the future
9.
The
Omniscient is surprised
10.
The
conclusion of the matter
Christians
consider the existence of their God to be an obvious truth. This assumption is
false, not only because evidence for the existence of this presumably
ubiquitous yet invisible God is lacking, but because the very nature Christians
attribute to this God is self-contradictory.
Many
Christians, as well as atheists, claim that it is impossible to prove a
universal negative. For example, while we may not have evidence that unicorns
or dragons exist, we cannot prove that they do not exist. Unless we have a
complete knowledge of the universe, we must admit the possibility that
somewhere in the universe, there might be such creatures.
But the claim that omniscience is needed to
prove a universal negative presumes that the concept which we are discussing is
logically coherent. If the attributes which we assign to a hypothetical object
or being are self-contradictory, then we can conclude that it cannot exist, and
therefore does not
exist. I do not need a complete knowledge of the universe to prove that cubic
spheres do not exist. Such objects have mutually-exclusive attributes which
make their existence impossible. A cube, by definition, has 8 corners, while a
sphere has none. These properties are completely incompatible -- they cannot be
held simultaneously by the same object.
I intend to show that the supposed
properties of the Christian God Yahweh, like those of a cubic sphere, are
incompatible, and by so doing, to demonstrate that Yahweh's existence is an
impossibility.
Christians
have endowed their God with all of the following attributes: He is eternal,
all-powerful, and created everything. He created all the laws of nature and can
change anything by an act of will. He is all-good, all-loving, and perfectly
just. He is a personal God who experiences all of the emotions a human does. He
is all-knowing. He sees everything past and future.
God's creation was originally perfect, but
humans, by disobeying him, brought imperfection into the world. Humans are evil
and sinful, and must suffer in this world because of their sinfulness. God
gives humans the opportunity to accept forgiveness for their sin, and all who
do will be rewarded with eternal bliss in heaven, but while they are on earth,
they must suffer for his sake. All humans who choose not to accept this
forgiveness must go to hell and be tormented for eternity.
These attributes of God are related by the
Bible, which Christians believe to be the perfect and true Word of God.
One verse which many Christians are fond of
quoting says that atheists are fools. I intend to show that the above concepts
of God are completely incompatible, and reveal the impossibility of all of them
being held simultaneously by the same being. There is no foolishness in denying
the impossible. Foolishness is worshipping an impossible God.
What
did God do during that eternity before he created everything? If God was all
that existed back then, what disturbed the eternal equilibrium and compelled
him to create? Was he bored? Was he lonely?
God is supposed to be perfect. If something
is perfect, it is complete -- it needs nothing else. We humans engage in
activities because we are pursuing the elusive perfection, because there is
disequilibrium caused by a difference between what we are and what we want to
be. If God is perfect, there can be no disequilibrium. There is nothing he
needs, nothing he desires, and nothing he must or will do. A God who is perfect
does nothing except exist. A perfect creator God is impossible.
But,
for the sake of argument, let's continue. Let us suppose that this perfect God
did create the universe. Humans were the crown of his creation, since they were
created in God's image and had the ability to make decisions. However, these
humans spoiled the original perfection by choosing to disobey God.
What!? If something is perfect, nothing
imperfect can come from it. Someone once said that bad fruit cannot come from a
good tree, yet this "perfect" God created a "perfect"
universe which was rendered imperfect by the "perfect" humans.
The ultimate source of imperfection is God.
What is perfect cannot make itself imperfect, so humans must have been created
imperfect. What is perfect cannot create anything imperfect, so God must be
imperfect to have created these imperfect humans. A perfect God who creates
imperfect humans is impossible.
The
Christians' objection to this argument involves freewill. They say that a being
must have freewill to be happy. The omnibenevolent God did not wish to create
robots, so he gave humans freewill to enable them to experience love and
happiness. But the humans used this freewill to choose evil, and introduced
imperfection into God's originally perfect universe. God had no control over
this decision, so the blame for our imperfect universe is on the humans, not
God.
Here is why the argument is weak. First, if
God is omnipotent, then the assumption that freewill is necessary for happiness
is false. If God could make it a rule that only beings with freewill may
experience happiness, then he could just as easily have made it a rule that
only robots may experience happiness. The latter option is clearly superior,
since perfect robots will never make decisions which could render them or their
creator unhappy, whereas beings with freewill could. A perfect and omnipotent
God who creates beings capable of ruining their own happiness is impossible.
Second, even if we were to allow the
necessity of freewill for happiness, God could have created humans with
freewill who did not have the ability to choose evil, but to choose between
several good options.
Third, God supposedly has freewill, and yet
he does not make imperfect decisions. If humans are miniature images of God,
our decisions should likewise be perfect. Also, the occupants of heaven, who
presumably must have freewill to be happy, will never use that freewill to make
imperfect decisions. Why would the originally perfect humans do differently?
The point remains: the presence of imperfections in the
universe disproves the supposed perfection of its creator.
God
is omniscient. When he created the universe, he saw the sufferings which humans
would endure as a result of the sin of those original humans. He heard the
screams of the damned. Surely he would have known that it would have been
better for those humans to never have been born (in fact, the Bible says this
very thing), and surely this all-compassionate deity would have foregone the
creation of a universe destined to imperfection in which many of the humans
were doomed to eternal suffering. A perfectly compassionate being who creates
beings which he knows are doomed to suffer is impossible.
God
is perfectly just, and yet he sentences the imperfect humans he created to
infinite suffering in hell for finite sins. Clearly, a limited offense does not
warrant unlimited punishment. God's sentencing of the imperfect humans to an
eternity in hell for a mere mortal lifetime of sin is infinitely injust. The absurdity of this infinite punishment appears
even greater when we consider that the ultimate source of the human's
imperfection is the God who created them. A perfectly just God who sentences
his imperfect creation to infinite punishment for finite sins is impossible.
Consider
all of the people who live in the remote regions of the world who have never
even heard the "gospel" of Jesus Christ. Consider the people who have
naturally adhered to the religion of their parents and nation as they had been
taught to do since birth. If we are to believe the Christians, all of these
people will perish in the eternal fire for not believing in Jesus. It does not
matter how just, kind, and generous they have been with their fellow humans
during their lifetime: if they do not accept the gospel of Jesus, they are
condemned. No just God would ever judge a man by his beliefs rather than his
actions.
The
Bible is supposedly God's perfect Word. It contains instructions to humankind
for avoiding the eternal fires of hell. How wonderful and kind of this God to
provide us with this means for overcoming the problems for which he is
ultimately responsible! The all-powerful God could have, by a mere act of will,
eliminated all of the problems we humans must endure, but instead, in his
infinite wisdom, he has opted to offer this indecipherable amalgam of books
called the Bible as a means for avoiding the hell which he has prepared for us.
The perfect God has decided to reveal his wishes in this imperfect work,
written in the imperfect language of imperfect man, translated, copied,
interpreted, voted on, and related by imperfect man. No two men will ever agree
what this perfect word of God is supposed to mean, since much of it is either
self- contradictory, or obscured by enigma. And yet the perfect God expects the
imperfect humans to understand this paradoxical riddle using the imperfect
minds with which he has equipped us. Surely the all-wise and all-powerful God
would have known that it would have been better to reveal his perfect will
directly to each of us, rather than to allow it to be debased and perverted by
the imperfect language and botched interpretations of man.
One
need look to no source other than the Bible to discover its imperfections, for
it contradicts itself and thus exposes its own imperfection. It contradicts
itself on matters of justice, for the same just God who assures his people that
sons shall not be punished for the sins of their fathers
turns around and destroys an entire household for the sin of one man (he had
stolen some of Yahweh's war loot). It was this same Yahweh who afflicted
thousands of his innocent people with plague and death to punish their evil
king David for taking a census (?!). It was this same Yahweh who allowed the
humans to slaughter his son because the perfect Yahweh had botched his own
creation. Consider how many have been stoned, burned, slaughtered, raped, and
enslaved because of Yahweh's skewed sense of justice. The blood of innocent
babies is on the perfect, just, compassionate hands of Yahweh.
The
Bible contradicts itself on matters of history. A person who reads and compares
the contents of the Bible will be confused about exactly who Esau's wives were,
whether Timnah was a concubine or a son, and whether
Jesus' earthly lineage is through Solomon or his brother Nathan. These are but
a few of hundreds of documented historical contradictions. If the Bible cannot
confirm itself in mundane earthly matters, how are we to trust it on moral and
spiritual matters?
The
Bible misinterprets its own prophecies. Read Isaiah 7 and compare it with
Matthew 1 to find but one of many misinterpreted prophecies of which Christians
are either passively or willfully ignorant. The sign given by Isaiah to King Ahaz was meant to assure him that his enemies King Rezin and King Remaliah would be
defeated. The prophecy was fulfilled in the very next chapter. Yet Matthew 1
not only misinterprets the word for "maiden" as "virgin,"
but claims that this already-fulfilled prophecy is fulfilled by the virgin
birth of Jesus!
The fulfillment of prophecy in the Bible is
cited as proof of its divine inspiration, and yet here is but one major example
of a prophecy whose intended meaning has been and continues to be twisted to
support subsequent absurd and false doctrines. There are no ends to which the
credulous will not go to support their feeble beliefs in the face of compelling
evidence against them.
The Bible is imperfect. It only takes one
imperfection to destroy the supposed perfection of this alleged Word of God.
Many have been found. A perfect God who reveals his perfect will in an
imperfect book is impossible.
A
God who knows the future is powerless to change it. An omniscient God who is
all-powerful and freewilled is impossible.
A
God who knows everything cannot have emotions. The Bible says that God
experiences all of the emotions of humans, including anger, sadness, and
happiness. We humans experience emotions as a result of new knowledge. A man
who had formerly been ignorant of his wife's infidelity will experience the
emotions of anger and sadness only after he has learned what had previously
been hidden. In contrast, the omniscient God is ignorant of nothing. Nothing is
hidden from him, nothing new may be revealed to him, so there is no gained
knowledge to which he may react emotionally.
We humans experience anger and frustration
when something is wrong which we cannot fix. The perfect, omnipotent God,
however, can fix anything. Humans experience longing for things we lack. The
perfect God lacks nothing. An omniscient, omnipotent, and perfect God who
experiences emotion is impossible.
I
have offered arguments for the impossibility, and thus the non- existence, of
the Christian God Yahweh. No reasonable and free thinking individual can accept
the existence of a being whose nature is as contradictory as that of Yahweh,
the "perfect" creator of our imperfect universe. The existence of Yahweh
is as impossible as the existence of cubic spheres or invisible pink unicorns.
While believers may find comfort in being
faithful to impossibilities, there is no greater satisfaction than a clear
mind. You may choose to serve an impossible God. I will choose reality.
©
Chad Docterman, 1996