Here’s my view on why God doesn’t exist, with a little help from Hitchens, Dawkins and Gervais along the way. If you can spare 5 to 10 minutes of your day to read, I can assure you it won’t be wasted.
I won’t be trying to prove that God isn’t real, because something that’s asserted without any evidence can’t be truly disproved. Santa Claus and unicorns for example. So I’ll be just persuading you to believe otherwise and not to be ignorant in the face of all the evidence. I’m open minded so if you proved beyond doubt that there was a God I’d have to believe you. But on the other hand a Christian wouldn’t comprehend the thought of God not being real therefore close minded & susceptible to believe anything.
Why don’t you believe in God? I get that question all the time. I always try to give a sensitive, reasoned answer. This is usually awkward, time consuming and pointless as people end up becoming ‘offended’, just ask my dad. People who believe in God don’t need proof of his existence, and they certainly don’t want evidence to the contrary. They are happy with their belief. They even say things like “it’s true to me” and “it’s faith.” I still give my logical answer because I feel that not being honest would be patronizing and impolite. It is ironic therefore that “I don’t believe in God because there is absolutely no scientific evidence for his existence and from what I’ve heard the very definition is a logical impossibility in this known universe,” comes across as both patronizing and impolite. This article will be stating scientific facts that contradict religious preaching. Science seeks the truth. And it does not discriminate. For better or worse it finds things out. Science is humble. It knows what it knows and it knows what it doesn’t know. It bases its conclusions and beliefs on hard evidence, evidence that is constantly updated and upgraded. It doesn’t get offended when new facts come along. Believing in something doesn’t make it true. Hoping that something is true doesn’t make it true. The existence of God is not subjective. He either exists or he doesn’t. It’s not a matter of opinion. You can have your own opinions. But you can’t have your own facts.
The rise of Christianity is the obvious place to start, (I’ll forget that the bible references to the world being only 6000 years old, I don’t think you need convincing of that false claim). Lets say our species have been on the planet 100,000 years some scientists claim it’s a much as 250,000 but I’ll stick with the former. So being a Christian you have to believe that for 98,000 years our species (the homo-sapiens) suffered and died , mostly in child birth. Then having a life expectancy of around 25 and then dying of disease, mostly of their teeth. Also suffering with famine and wars, heaven watches over with complete indifference, and then 2000 years ago thinks, “well that’s enough of that, it’s time to intervene”. Oh & the best way to do this is having someone claim to be the son of God, and lets do this in one of the poorest & less civilised parts of the middle east. Also lets not appear to anyone in power or of high standing in society, lets take on some simple, illiterate and very superstitious fishermen. This is nonsense and can’t be taken seriously by any thinking person. Religion was just our first attempt at grasping reality because of human nature, wanting to know where we came from, why is the sky blue? And so on.
The reason why religion is so flawed though, is because it poses more questions than it answers, and therefore makes it implausible as theory of the origin of our universe. A lot of questions arise from the ‘stories’ in the bible, 2000 years ago you may have believed it but now it’s just sensible to question them. Take Noah’s Ark for example, if you’re a Christian you have to take this story seriously but the questions that arise from it are unanswerable and farcical. Noah was to build a boat that could accommodate his extended family, somewhere around 50,000-75,000 species of birds and animals, and nearly one million species of insects. The ship, we are told, would be constructed to survive an upcoming universal flood aimed at destroying every other person and animal on earth (even those within the sea were said to have been destroyed – which makes me wonder where Noah put the whales). How did all the animals get to the boat? How did they live on the boat without fighting and killing each other? How did they survive on the boat in the same habitat? (kangaroo & penguin for example).
How did he have food to keep them each alive for the duration of the journey? All be it a little far fetched now, lets say they all survive the flood. Starting again would be impossible if there’s two of every animal, inbreeding while reproducing would cause extinction of an entire species, as would eating one another. Now this being only 2 thousand years ago with the human population being down to double figures, it’s incredible that somehow now the population is near 7 billion. Black, white, orient and everything in between, Noah must have had one incredible family. The bible being a scripture for the origin of Christianity has a lot of inexcusable tales to believe to be true, the virgin Mary, a talking snake and the parting of the red sea to mention a few more impossible truths. We know now that the laws of nature cannot be moved or questioned, yet to keep the bible and Christianity plausible, it’s put down to a ‘miracle’ to prove something you otherwise couldn’t. So surely these miracles occurring and taking place around that time should have beyond doubt proved that he was the son of god. Yet he couldn’t convince everyone that he was the messiah and was crucified for blasphemy.
Being a Christian requires you to believe a lot, and requires a great amount of faith as of having no evidence that there is actually a god. So a lot of questions posed by atheists get answered by, “it’s god’s plan”. Well to be honest I don’t think it’s a very good plan seeing that 99% of species that have lived on earth have become extinct, based on fossil records. Also to think that God made earth with us in mind (each and every one of us) is a very arrogant and presumptuous opinion. If the entire population was to be wiped out tomorrow by a freak natural disaster, disease or even a man made weapon do you think the world would stop turning just because we’ve died? No of course not, eventually new forms of life would grow just like it did after the dinosaurs became extinct. In-fact around 70,000 years ago the human race was near extinction. The population at that time had been gradually reduced to small isolated groups across eastern and southern Africa, apparently because of massive droughts lasting thousands of years, some plan! Why would an ever loving god create such horrible diseases such as cancer, aids and smallpox, to mention a few. Is this gods plan? It begs the question if god is all knowing and all powerful, why didn’t he have a better one?
The Christian arguments for design are another farcical approach to how we arrived here. The Bible says God created the universe in six days. If you believe this to be a literal story, I can’t help you. I’ll just tell you that everything we know from science, which includes a vast amount of provable facts and testable evidence, tells us that it has actually taken many billions of years. It is neither my job nor my goal to teach you astronomy, physics, geology, chemistry, and biology. Suffice it to say that they are all pretty much in agreement on this stuff. If you don’t believe me, you’ll have to study it for yourself. Again, my point here is to simply tell you why I don’t believe in your God, and it starts right here in Genesis. Adam is said to have been formed by God from “dust from the earth”.
Adam lives in The Garden of Eden. Adam eventually grows lonely, so God causes a deep sleep to fall upon Adam, and removes a part of his ribcage. And creates Eve. God forbids Adam and Eve from eating the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge, warning that they will die if they do. So along comes a talking snake, the snake tempts Eve into eating the forbidden fruit, and she gives the fruit to Adam too. They become aware of their nakedness, and when God sees the clothes they have made for themselves, he knows they’ve disobeyed his command. God expels them both from the Garden of Eden and curses them. Now any intelligent person can look at the evidence science is putting forward to how the universe started and the fossil records that clearly show there was life on earth long before humans (it doesn’t claim it knows everything yet, it’s only 100’s of years into researching it) and you can take the evidence from the bible and make an informed decision. Now obviously to believe the bible you need an enormous amount of faith and maybe even be a little gullible. But is this really what we want to teach kids in school? So lets go with the presumption that it was created by God, he’s a little wasteful isn’t he? Why bother creating the millions of other planets out there? Just the handful of planets in our own solar system we can know are either too hot or too cold to enable any form of life, so why would he even bother?
Scientists have proved through telescopes that there are hundreds of millions of stars out there, most of them twice as big as our sun and millions of other planets that are in the distance. This seems a lot of excess baggage in our galaxy if god only created the earth for one reason. To inhabit life for us. Something more Christians have stumbled upon is the existence of dinosaurs, not only does the fact that they roamed the earth 65 million years totally contradict Christian theory of creation and age of the earth. But they are not even mentioned in the bible but once, you’d think the largest ever animals on earth would have had a slight reference right? Christians are not displaying critical thinking, not using their mind. Most are also uneducated as to the world’s cultures and history. It is not a sign of great intelligence to believe blindly what someone else has told you is true, especially when such beliefs basically condemn hundreds of millions of other people.
Religion in my mind is without a doubt man made, without us god wouldn’t exist. The fact that there are so many other religions to chose from backs up this point, and for anyone to have the audacity to say my religion is the right one and yours is wrong is a very ignorant person when there’s no evidence to back either sides argument. Another reason why religion is false is because you don’t have a reasonable choice, it’s something you’re born into. 95% of religious people are born into due to location. Ask yourself a question if you we’re born in America to white parents, what is the chance you’d have found Allah? Or if you were born in Afghanistan, what is the chance of you finding Christianity? If religion is true, shouldn’t you have an even chance and choice of finding what religion you see fit and make a decision for yourself? If it was true, parents in some cases wouldn’t have to force their children to become religious.
We can’t credit any of these religions, past or present, as being more credible than the others simply because of the faith of the adherents. We can’t rely on adherents’ willingness to die for their faith. We can’t rely on claimed changes in people’s lives or the good works they do on account of their religion. None of them have arguments which are superior to any other. None have supporting evidence which is stronger than any other and any religion which insists on the need for “faith” has no business trying to make itself out to be superior on the basis of evidence anyway. There is such a diversity in these religions and they are all contradictory to one another. To put it simply: they can’t all be true, but they can all be false. Christianity still only slightly remains the largest but Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Sikhism, Judaism are all still growing. Religious people often claim that they have found God an experienced him, then they are welcomed and called great. But on the other hand if someone claims to have had an experience with an alien it’s a different story he becomes socially unacceptable and he’s laughed at. Even though both people have the same amount of evidence they had an experience, and both feel very strongly about it Christianity for some reason claims the higher moral ground. I would have to agree with Ernest Hemingway when he said,
“All thinking me are atheists, a man is accepted into a church for what he believes and he is turned out for what he knows.”
Now back to the diversity and the crazy amount of religions and different gods there is to chose from, and why each religion claims superiority over all others. I think Christopher Hitchens hit the nail on the head with this quote;
“If you understand why you dismiss all other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours”.
Even Christianity has different branches that don’t agree on certain things. Catholic, Protestant, Mormonism are 3 of the major ones. If you can’t agree on your own religion how is it even a creditable faith in the first place? If a Christian or a Muslim question my position on Atheism. I’ll point out that they are nearly as atheistic as me. I don’t believe in 100 gods, and they don’t believe in 99. Being a non believer Christians often look onto you as silly or pity you, but for me it’s the other way round. I feel free knowing what I know about the universe. Reason and logic help me in everyday situations, I don’t have to look to the bible to see what I should do. I make my own decisions. Two hands working can do more than two thousand clasped in prayer.
After researching Christianity it makes me wonder is the god of the bible even worthy of worship? He kills all the first-born of Egypt, mainly for something that he himself makes a pharaoh do (Exo 7:13 and Exo 13:15). He seems to endorse slavery (Lev 25:44-46), rape (2 Sam 12:11), murder (Lev 20:9) and the slaughtering of those who aren’t a part of his chosen people (Deu 2:21). He makes bears rip apart 42 children, simply because they mocked a prophet (2 Kin 2:24). I could go on for a very long time just listing the atrocities that the god of the Bible has committed or endorsed, and it boggles the mind that anyone would want to worship him.
Before I conclude there’s a series of questions that I’d like you to ponder if you could.
- Christians commit to the idea that god is an all powerful being. But this is a logically impossible statement to make, and I will prove it; Can god make a rock so heavy that he can’t lift it? If so then he isn’t all powerful.
- If you believe in creation, that the universe must have had a creator, who created the creator?
- If god helped Jesus heal a blind man, why not heal blindness?
- Can you think of a question that science has had the answer for, but then religion provided the better or correct answer?
And last but not least..
- If the idea of God always being there and ever present is correct. If you were never told about him or never read about him, how would you have figured it out?
In conclusion, as an atheist, I see nothing “wrong” in believing in a god. I don’t think there is a god, but belief in him does no harm. If it helps you in any way, then that’s fine with me. It’s when belief starts infringing on other people’s rights when it worries me. I would never deny your right to believe in a god. I would just rather you didn’t kill people who believe in a different god. Or stone someone to death because your rulebook says their sexuality is immoral. I find it strange that an all-powerful all-knowing being would also want to judge and punish people for what they are. I can’t definitely prove that a god can’t possibly exist. I have, however, looked into several religions, and can argue that their gods are implausible or simply impossible. The main reason people latch onto religion is out of fear or a reason for life. I don’t need a reason for my existence, just a reason to live. And imagination, free will, love, humour, fun, music, football, beer and pizza are all good enough reasons for living for me. On a lighter note there is one question that I often think about that I can’t answer, If god made me, why did he make me an atheist?
Our Unguided Existence 