God doesn’t exist:

It is possible that God exists, but it’s also possible that the Sasquatch exists. Seeing as there is no evidence of the Sasquatch, it would not be folly to say that “the Sasquatch doesn’t exist”. Similarly, there is no evidence of God. We demand evidential support of all conclusions that people come to in life with the sole exception being in the realm of religion, of which there is very little evidential support. I see no reason why religion should not adhere to the same principles as every other thing we experience in life, and so I say that God does not exist.

I have heard it argued that the existence of life in itself is enough evidence to believe in God. I do not believe this. Although I believe that it is reasonable to hypothesize that a higher power created life, there is no evidence in support of this hypothesis and there is no reason to believe that this hypothetical higher power is God, whether it be the Hebrew Gog or any other God.

There are a number of arguments brought up against this assumption that God doesn’t exist by theists, and I will cover as many of them as I can think of below:

On Religion Based on Faith and Scripture:

Most modern philosophers that believe in God do not attempt to ascribe reason to the belief of God (and if they do, they usually fail), but they say belief in God and religion depends on Faith in God and Faith in the scripture. To me, this seems a little silly.

The gospel tells a story of Jesus and a few men that he meets. He asks the men to follow him, but the men say that they wish to say goodbye to their families. Jesus tells them that they must follow him without saying goodbye for he is the Son of Man.

Is this the sort of Faith that religion should be asking of people? Surely, if a man walked up to us today and told us he was the Messiah, only the stupid would follow him, and whatever organization he attempted to bring about would be labeled as a cult. Why should it be any different just because Jesus existed 2000 years ago?

Humans are not asked to believe in anything other than religion based purely on Faith, and I don’t see any possible reason for religion to be different from every other aspect of life. Sometimes, we do believe a friend if he tells us a piece of information, but that is based on previous experience. We learn to trust our friends through experience, and sometimes, we learn that the trust is misplaced.

Certainly, everyone has put faith in a friend and had it backfire on them. I do not see why the scripture should be any different. For every piece of history that we learn from our education, events are researched and confirmed from a number of sources. This is not done with religious texts, we have no reason to believe the scripture is accurate. Certainly, from the events told in the Torah and the Bible, we have very little reason to believe that the scripture is true. Events within those scriptures seem to break the laws of nature that we have learned through personal experience and empirical research, thus, they probably didn’t happen. Likewise, the insistence of scripture (whether it be Jewish, Christian, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, etc.) that there is a God is also probably inaccurate, as there is no accountability of its accuracy.

On Religion Based on Personal Well Being:

My mother, a church-going Catholic, often tells me that “It doesn’t matter what you believe as long as you believe in something”. To me, this seems silly and irrational. If it doesn’t matter what I believe in, how can anything I believe in be of any significant consequence? To believe in something for the sake of believing in something defeats the purpose of believing in anything at all.

It is true, however, that many people find peace and security in religion. Religion gives them a sense of purpose, or as Freud called it, an “oceanic feeling”. To me, this seems as though people intentionally delude themselves in order to be happy, which is wrong. They are like Don Quixote, who convinced himself he was a knight errant and achieved some sort of satisfaction and contentment out of it, but in reality, he was just a madman.

On Religion Based on Moral Necessity:

I forget who said it, but a philosopher justified religion by saying “If there is no God, anything is permissable”. This brings up a good point, if an ultimate moral being doesn’t exist, then humans cannot be held accountable for immoral actions. While I believe it is true that we are not punished by a transcendent being for our actions, I do not believe that the non-existence of God thrusts the world into a state of moral ambiguity.

Indeed, the maxim “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you” is a brilliant piece of practical philosophy. Of course, those who study philosophy know that is flawed (thanks to Immanuel Kant, among others), but if ordinary people who did not study philosophy followed this maxim, there would be very few problems in the world. However, I do not believe religion is necessary to create moral laws for people to follow. Reason in itself should be able to create a necessity of following certain moral codes of conduct.

People will ascribe to the laws of morality for two reasons: empathy for others and fear of others. Humans, if they use reason properly, realize that it is not right to intentionally harm other humans. This counts as empathy towards others, people realize that they would not wish to be harmed and so they do not harm others. Unfortunately, through experience, we know that not every person uses reason to its fullest extent, and often people will harm others. Thus, out of fear, humans enter into social contracts. That is, we give up some of our freedom to harm others in order to be protected from the harm that others may cause us. Thus, empathy puts pressure on us to be moral and fear creates, through social contracts, certain moral laws that we must follow.

On the Origin of the Idea of God

Under all philosophically relevant religions today (other religions aren’t worth mentioning as they are obviously false), God is seen as a transcendent, non-anthropomorphic being. But this is not the same concept of God that existed in these religions upon their conception.

The idea of the Hebrew God was conceived in the Middle East at the same time as many cultures were still engaging in idol worship and other pagan rituals. In the beginning, the Hebrew God was very similar to these other false Gods. Remember that in the Old Testament, God punished the wicked, he cast Adam and Eve out of the Garden of Eden and marked Cain for killing Abel. God bargained and argued with Abraham over the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. God interfered with nature in opening the Red Sea for Moses and the Hebrews to escape from Egypt.

The original concept of the Hebrew God is as an interfering anthropomorphic God. One could argue that these are just stories told to teach people lessons and that God is not actually like that, but it is obvious from history that early believers did not see these stories in that way; they saw these stories as the absolute truth. The current idea of a transcendent, non-anthropomorphic God came from this idea of God as anthropomorphic and interfering. Without the original idea of an obviously false God of the scriptures, we would not have the more acceptable current idea of a transcendent God. Thus, if we were thrust into the world with our current level of rational capability and no previous conception of religion, we would not create the idea of God or the idea of a possible transcendent God.

Likewise, if we look at Eastern religions, Hinduism is similar to pagan religions in that it anthropomorphizes all of its Gods symbolically. Buddhism, as far as Buddhists believe in a “God”, all got their idea of the transcendent God from the original Hindu context. Thus, they are the same as Western religions in that the idea of a of a transcendent God was only created because of previous belief in an obviously false, anthropomorphic God. This is a way of “updating” religion, both Western and Eastern, in order to keep up with the modern age of reason and philosophical quandary.

Remember that there is no evidence of a transcendent God. Thus, although a transcendent God is possible, there is still no reason to believe in it; just like there is no reason to believe in a sasquatch. This argument gains strength when it comes to light that the idea of a transcendent God is not innate (as Descartes would have it), but comes from previous ideas of anthropomorphic Gods that could not possibly exist.

On The Origin of Christianity:

I can not speak of the origin of any other religions because my knowledge base is unfortunately limited mostly to Christianity, but I imagine they are not much different. The early days of Christianity, when thought about in modern terms, do not resemble a religion so much as a cult. The only difference being that the scriptures of Jesus did indeed preach tolerance and love, rather than the sort of morally wrong things taught by cults, but that doesn’t mean the origin of the religion was not based on false pretences and trickery.

I already gave the example of people told to abandon their families for Jesus in the section based on faith, but that is not the only thing that equates the origin of Christianity with being a cult. The people who followed Christianity went into a religion with no evidence of its truth and with the knowledge that they would be persecuted for their beliefs, which is a phenomenon similar to what happens when people enter cults.

People probably joined the religion in order to feel important. Christianity offered a special reason for people to feel important. Christianity offered a tangible, walking, talking “man-god”. Yes, theologians today offer all sorts of reasons as to why Jesus is not a “man-god”; there are many (relatively) reasonable explanations for the mixture of divinity and humanity within Jesus. Today, no one views Jesus as a “man-god”, but to the uneducated people of Israel that joined Christianity, a “man-god” is exactly what Jesus would have appeared to be.

In combining the perception of Jesus as a “man-god” with the fact that many believers followed him after hearing stories that he brought about miracles (none of which can be accounted for by history), one realizes that the organization of Christianity, in its inception, greatly resembled a cult. For an interesting read on how religion spreads from uneducated areas to educated areas (such as the spread of Christianity to the Greeks), you can read the section on miracles in David Hume’s An Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding, but that is not something that I will cover here.

Conclusion:

In the end, all of these arguments are somewhat irrelevant in that there is no evidence for God, therefore there is no reason to believe in him. Unfortunately, religion is so well-established in society that it is necessary to describe why people believe in something so unnecessary and why they are wrong in their beliefs. I hope I have offered a somewhat comprehensive overview of the subject, if anyone has anything else to add or discuss, please feel free to send me an e-mail, and I will try to cover it the best I can.

Alan is a contributing editor to Lintbox.  For more from Alan, click here.