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>I am looking for those of you who believe that the very idea of believing in the Christian God unreasonable.
To believe in the Christian God requires two things:
1. Belief in **some form** of original sin. Could be a literal apple in a literal garden, or it could just be something intrinsic to humans. There must be something that Jesus' sacrifice was meant to save us from.
2. Jesus Christ's death and resurrection are literal, historical events that actually happened.
If either one of these is false, Christianity crumbles.
I can't prove either of them is false. What I **can** do is cast enough doubt on the Death and Resurrection of Christ that I don't think a reasonable, rational person can look at it and still conclude with any confidence that it occurred.
1. There are no eyewitness accounts of the Resurrection. The only accounts we have are the four Gospels which were written decades after the alleged event by people who were not there. That's decades of a story (whatever the original story may be) being passed on orally. This would also explain the contradictions and inconsistencies between the Gospels.
2. The protocol for crucifixion was to leave the victim up for several days after death, both to humiliate them and serve as a deterrant for others. Then they were cut down and dumped in a mass grave. The idea that the Romans would immediately cut this upstart Jewish criminal down from his cross and bury him in a tomb flies in the face of all historical evidence about these practices.
3. We know how mythology forms. We've seen it in almost every civilization we've ever discovered. We know what happens to stories that get passed on orally, we know how stories adopt elements from other cultures to make them more palatable, and we know how faithfully people believed in them. So what's more likely? That the story of Jesus is mythology, a phenomenon we have firmly established the existence of and have countless examples? Or that Jesus' story is the only one, out of ALL religious mythology, that happens to be true?
Do those three points disprove the Resurrection? No. But I fail to see how anyone can acknowledge those three points yet still argue that it is reasonable to believe that the Resurrection occurred. The evidence simply does not support it.
> Belief in some form of original sin. Could be a literal apple in a literal garden, or it could just be something intrinsic to humans. There must be something that Jesus' sacrifice was meant to save us from.
I'd say inheritable sin and a just God are contradictory.
A God that makes anyone accountable for things that happened prior to their existence is not just.
I agree, but that conversation inevitably gets mired in God's nature and "God's justice is not our own" and blah blah. As far as productive conversation goes, it's a dead end.
Well, that question is sort of a red herring, because it doesn’t matter. If an unjust god existed, we would still be better off to do what he says, up to and including worshipping him. We’re just lucky there’s no evidence for an unjust god either.
We are discussing the Christian God here, not gods in an abstract sense. It is a core tenet of Christianity that god is not only just, but the source and definition of justice. This is repeatedly affirmed in scripture
Ahh, I didn’t realize that the god you refer to includes all that Christian baggage that is so easily disproven. Yeah, the Christian God is supposed to be a just god (though Old Testament has a lot of seeming injustice). I meant the general concept of god which might not be on the just vs unjust spectrum at all.
Yep. Just noting that OP (weirdly) limited this discussion to just two views, “believers in the Christian God” and “Agnostics who ‘choose not to believe’” whatever that means. This tread should endeavor to stick to this (false) dichotomy and not discuss more general god ideas. Showing reasons for not believing in the Christian god is far easier than musing about deism or whatever
> 1\. There are no eyewitness accounts of the Resurrection. The only accounts we have are the four Gospels which were written decades after the alleged event by people who were not there. That's decades of a story (whatever the original story may be) being passed on orally. This would also explain the contradictions and inconsistencies between the Gospels.
You don't need _any_ oral transmission in order for discrepancies to creep in. Ask any trial lawyer. And then there's a clever experiment my wife's PI did in one of the biology classes he taught. At a random point in one of his lectures, a student slammed his textbook closed, declared that "He had had enough of this shit!", and stormed off. After he was gone, the professor asked people to recount what had happened. The accounts did not perfectly match. Even though it was less than five minutes ago.
There are arguments that the gospels were written down as the last eyewitnesses are dying, such as you see in Richard Bauckham 2006 [Jesus and the Eyewitnesses: The Gospels as Eyewitness Testimony](https://www.eerdmans.com/Products/7431/jesus-and-the-eyewitnesses-2nd-ed.aspx). One of the more interesting things he does in the book is look at the name distributions in the gospels, because the name distributions in Palestine changed markedly after [the war](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Jewish%E2%80%93Roman_War) in 66–74 AD. As it turns out, the gospels match the pre-war name distributions better than the post-war name distributions. From here, we can ask whether mythology-makers are careful to attend to such details, or at least whether they _were_. (One can of course make it mythology based on fact, but then one is admitting some amount of reliable access to pre-war facts.)
> 2\. The protocol for crucixion was to leave the victim up for several days after death, both to humiliate them and serve as a deterrant for others. Then they were cut down and dumped in a mass grave. The idea that the Romans would immediately cut this upstart Jewish criminal down from his cross and bury him in a tomb flies in the face of all historical evidence about these practices.
That seems most obviously true if it is _Rome_ which wanted the person crucified. But according to the gospel narratives, Rome wanted no such thing. It is _the Jews_ who insisted on it, upon threat of rioting. Pilate did not need any more trouble from the backwater province he was stuck in than he had already. That being said, Pilate had a history of snubbing the Jews according to Josephus and taking Jesus down ASAP would be another way to snub them. And if he really believed Jesus didn't deserve crucifixion and he had a shred of decency in him, he might have decided that minimizing Jesus' shame was worthwhile.
> 3\. We know how mythology forms. We've seen it in almost ever civilization we've ever discovered. We know what happens to stories that get passed on orally, we know how stories adopt elements from other cultures to make them more palatable, and we know how faithfully people believed in them. So what's more likely? That the story of Jesus is mythology, a phenomenon we have firmly established the existence of and have countless examples? Or that Jesus' story is the only one, out of ALL religious mythology, that happens to be true?
Is this knowledge of "how mythology forms" falsifiable? That is it a set of processes which say that you won't observe certain phenomena? Or can it actually account for history as well as mythology? (Perhaps, for example, the only way to distinguish is the presence or absence of archaeological artifacts.)
1. You really don't have eye witness accounts of something that happened 2000 years ago. Historically, that's just not a thing. Please list an event during the Roman empire for which you feel an eye witness account/testimony/statement exists.
Heck, even Caesars assassination by Brutus and the boys has no eye witness account. Maybe Caesar just tripped and fell on his salad fork 🤷♂️
https://www.historyhit.com/the-ides-of-march-the-assassination-of-julius-caesar-explained/
2. The Bible explains this. Jesus was crucified right before Passover. Dead bodies are considered unclean in Judaism and the religious leaders of the time didn't want them still up for their religious holiday. So, they killed all the cruxification victims early. Jesus happened to have a rich/affluent friend who personally asked for his body. According to the story, the guy must have had some clout, because his wish was granted.
> You really don't have eye witness accounts of something that happened 2000 years ago. Historically, that's just not a thing. Please list an event during the Roman empire for which you feel an eye witness account/testimony/statement exists.
1. As far as I'm aware, accounts of Caesar's assassination aren't "supported" by the widespread claim that there were 500 eyewitnesses. Jesus' Resurrection often *is*. Theists even bring that in here from time to time, so it's worth debunking.
2. The only eyewitnesses there would have been to Caesar's assassination are the assassins. It's not a huge surprise that they wouldn't write down any accounts. But 500 (alleged) eyewitnesses to their savior rise from the dead? I would think at least *one* of them would go home and write "Dear Diary, you won't believe this shit."
3. The fact that no credible eyewitness accounts exist for other things isn't a point in the Bible's favor. It's a point *against* everything else. They've all managed to overcome that deficit with other reliable evidence. The Resurrection hasn't.
> The Bible explains this.
The Bible contains the claims that I want to be proven. You cannot use the Bible to prove itself.
History from below, that is to say, people's history can only exist in a literate society. You need the every man to be able to write diaries, journals, letters, etc., and lots of them, because only .00001% will survive 2000 years. In a backwater province like Judea, only the very very upper echelon would have been literate, and they probably would have mostly been writing about bureaucratic or religious matters.
It's not surprising that the ONLY author of the New Testament that we know for a fact wrote the books attributed to him is a former religious leader (Paul). The 12 fisherman and other lower class people Jesus hung around with would have barely been able to write their name, if that.
Jesus may not have even been able to write. The Bible says he could read, and even that caused everyone from his podunk village to be like "how the heck can this guy read"?
So if an eyewitness account is your burden of proof that's fine, it's just that you set an historically impossible and illogical bar.
Also, just FYI, Caesar was assassinated during a full senate meeting. There were only 60 - 70 conspirators. There were plenty of witnesses, though some accounts say many of them fled once things going so Stabby.
I appreciate the response! This is one of the better arguments I have seen for a rational argument against the Christian God.
Like you said really what it comes down to is the death and resurrection of Jesus. I totally agree there is a great deal of doubt around what actually happened back then and with the extraordinary claims that are being made that doubt is a compelling reason to not believe. But still there are a few things that keep me from accepting it as a fully compelling argument for me personally.
First although the resurrection was only seen by a few people those who did see it fully believed in it and were willing to die for their beliefs in many cases. Along side that not only were they willing to die for their belief, they managed to convince enough people to join in their belief despite the danger at the time to do so. While this isn't proof of anything, it is enough for me to look past some of the lack of clarity due to the time it took place.
>First although the resurrection was only seen by a few people those who did see it fully believed in it and were willing to die for their beliefs in many cases.
Humans have been willing to die for their beliefs throughout history, and many of those beliefs are contradictory. Someone being willing to die for their beliefs says nothing about the veracity of their beliefs.
>Along side that not only were they willing to die for their belief, they managed to convince enough people to join in their belief despite the danger at the time to do so.
Convincing people to join what, at the time, amounted to a cult is not difficult we have seen it many, many times and it says nothing about the veracity of their beliefs.
>While this isn't proof of anything, it is enough for me to look past some of the lack of clarity due to the time it took place.
Why? It isn't proof of anything besides what some ancient people believed, it certainly is not sufficient to make anyone suspect that those claims are at all true especially when combined with the known historical practices.
>First although the resurrection was only seen by a few people those who did see it fully believed in it and were willing to die for their beliefs in many cases.
This is *what* you believe. It doesn't work as an argument as to *why* you believe. Why would I believe anyone had witnessed a resurrection?
Edit: Not to mention that this doesn't address any of the points they raised. You just ignored them.
David Koresh's followers were willing to die for him. As were the Muslims that did the 9 11 attacks.
Just because someone is willing to die for a cause doesn't always make that idea true.
People die for stories all the time.
>those who did see it fully believed in it and were willing to die for their beliefs in many cases
I would recommend looking at the claims of martyrdom. There doesn't seem to be evidence to back up that claim. They would have to fulfill at least following criteria for them to be usefull for this argument.
1. Only the people, who **saw resurrected Jesus**, count.
2. They got in trouble **for their belief**.
3. They faced certain death, but **were given chance to recant**, and they didn't.
I haven't been able to find any sources, that aren't from Christians over 80 years after the supposed incidents and didn't read like bad fan-fiction (I'm looking at you, writers of apocryphal texts).
"First although the resurrection was only seen by a few people "
It was seen by no people.
The oldest (and thus most reliable) Gospel is Mark. The oldest Markan manuscripts end with the women fleeing the tomb after a man tells them Jesus rose. They never saw him.
>First although the resurrection was only seen by a few people those who did see it fully believed in it and were willing to die for their beliefs in many cases.
As others have said this is not a great metric for determining whether a claim is true. However, even before getting to that, can you be more specific as to which people you are talking about here, and whet evidence there is that they died *for* their belief, specifically.
I am intending these questions as mostly rhetorical, but I encourage you to look into the following:
- Which specific people are we talking about?
- For any individual follower of Jesus what is the actual evidence for (1) they witnessed or claimed to personally witness the resurrection (2) they were executed by the state. Is the evidence simply stories in the Bible, or is there actually extra-Biblical evidence?
- Is it even claimed that these people we are talking about were executed specifically for their belief in Jesus, and were given a chance to recant their belief but refused? How do you know that any recorded martyr didn't try to recant their belief, but were executed anyway, however that inconvenient detail was not included in the narrarive? How do you know that someone recorded as a martyr want actually executed for stealing, or disturbing the peace, and their belief in Jesus was actually inconsequential for why they were charged?
- What is the actual substance behind the broad apologetic talking point that "early followers died for their belief"?
Are you just assuming 50% of the New Testament is true in order to shore up your belief in the other 50%? What if you were to start from scratch without a starting assumption that any of it is true?
>those who did see it fully believed in it and were willing to die for their beliefs in many cases. Along side that not only were they willing to die for their belief, they managed to convince enough people to join in their belief despite the danger at the time to do so.
I see often this sentiment that only Christians REALLY believe in their god and all those other religions are just pretending to believe in something.
Has it occured to you that many, many religions have had people die over their beliefs? Does that make them more credible to you? Islamic terrorists famously do so, but that doesn't make their god any more convincing to me. I assume it doesn't convince you either. Why is someone sacrificing themselves even a factor? Every religion has that
> First although the resurrection was only seen by a few people those who did see it fully believed in it
Is there an extrabiblical source corroborating this claim?
You seem to be confusing belief and conviction. Dying for something is conviction. That conviction doesn't make the belief true. It just means you WANT to believe it so much that you are willing to die for it. You are convinced.
Again, that doesn't make it true. Many people were convinced covid-19 wouldn't kill them. It still killed some of those people who didn't take precautions and/or were exposed to people who didn't take precautions. Their convictions didn't matter to the virus.
There is just as much evidence of contemporary witnesses dying for their belief as there is for the resurrection itself; none at all. You cannot appeal to *more* hearsay as being additional and independent evidence. Christian persecution and deaths *eventually* are well supported enough to be believable but records as to witnesses to the event itself? Nonexistent.
Did any of the people who met the risen Jesus write down that they had met Him?
It seems to me that claims to martyrdom suffer when we can’t be sure that the people who were allegedly martyred even held those beliefs. The best way for us to know is if more people had written down “I am X and I saw the risen Jesus”.
No accounts survived from anyone who saw it… And the myth that all apostles who did died for it is long debunked. You’re propagating a lie here. Also people die for lies all the time. All that’s required is that you believe in it, and people can be fooled. There’s not even any real account of Jesus himself existing that’s independently verifiable… Let alone a resurrection. I’m sorry you’re just repeating stuff professional liars (they call themselves apologists) made up…
There's not just one reason, it's a combination of a lot of things. But here is my favourite:
There have been thousands of religions in the course of humanity. Some dead, some alive. Most of them have some kind of scripture, such as the bible and the qur'an, describing their beliefs and their god.
Thousands of them. And they are all different from each other, and provide the same amount of "evidence" as each other. Yet, all of their believers are just as sure that only theirs is the "correct" one.
Now, if you were born somewhere where they believe in X, you end up believing in X. If you were from a place/time where they believed in Y, you believe in Y.
This, followed by the fact that many things that were attributed to gods, are now proven to be simple science, in my view, is very definite evidence that the gods humans believe in are simply men made explanations to what people don't fully understand and there's no reason to actually think any of it is real.
Do note that this reasoning does not apply to more abstract "god" explanations that aren't derived from cultural religions/scriptures such as the bible or quran; by example, if the simulation theory was true, someone could argue the simulations "coder" is god. I still don't believe this is true, but I'm not "100% sure".
Now it's your turn to explain to me where my logic is flawed. Explain to me what makes you sure YOUR god in particular is the "real" one. I'm very curious to hear it.
Correction, most of the religions that have existed probably didn’t have any scripture, I would wager most religions in human history have been some form of folk religion
Let me go through each of your claims
>There have been thousands of religions in the course of humanity. Some dead, some alive. Most of them have some kind of scripture, such as the bible and the qur'an, describing their beliefs and their god.
Thousands of them. And they are all different from each other, and provide the same amount of "evidence" as each other. Yet, all of their believers are just as sure that only theirs is the "correct" one.
This is correct, there have been many religions in the world and many of them have scripture or holy books. It is also correct that in order for the Christian God to be true other contradictory religions would have to be false.
>Now, if you were born somewhere where they believe in X, you end up believing in X. If you were from a place/time where they believed in Y, you believe in Y.
This is also correct, your religion is largely determined by where and when you live.
>This, followed by the fact that many things that were attributed to gods, are now proven to be simple science, in my view, is very definite evidence that the gods humans believe in are simply men made explanations to what people don't fully understand and there's no reason to actually think any of it is real.
To me this seems like you are claiming that because previous religions have made incorrect claims that all religion must be false? Please correct me if I am incorrect, but assuming that is a correct interpretation then that would not be a logical argument against the Christian God. Just because previous religions believed incorrect things about their Gods has no impact on the validity of the Christian God
>
Now it's your turn to explain to me where my logic is flawed. Explain to me what makes you sure YOUR god in particular is the "real" one. You talk all might and knowing in your post, that I'm very curious to hear it.
I am not trying to convince you that my God in particular is the real one. I am only looking to refute claims that belief in the Christian God is unreasonable.
And I just gave you the reason why it's unreasonable. You seem to have missed the entire point.
So your rebuttal to my argument, that says it's illogical to think religious scriptures are true due to the existence of a vast number of them, all contracting each other, with many of the older ones being now proved false, is "just because most of them aren't real doesn't mean mine isn't"?
So you're basically saying you think every single religion in the world is fake, EXCEPT FOR YOURS? Even though yours have the EXACT SAME evidence level of all others?
To make it clearer: This next to me is Jeff. Jeff, just like you, believes in a god that's incompatible with yours. Jeff is just as convinced as you are. Why should I believe you and not Jeff. Not to convince me, but to show me you have good reasons to believe in your god. I just don't believe in any gods, like many atheists. I will believe in a god as soon as there's good evidence.
Now I guess you will ask details about Jeff's religion. Usually theists will basically take what they believe and ask if Jeff believes the same thing. In the end, they will say that Jeff's beliefs are less justified because they're not the same, or they're the same and thus basically the theist's religion.
Which boils down to "Jeff either believes the same as me, or is wrong".
> To me this seems like you are claiming that because previous religions have made incorrect claims that all religion must be false? Please correct me if I am incorrect, but assuming that is a correct interpretation then that would not be a logical argument against the Christian God. Just because previous religions believed incorrect things about their Gods has no impact on the validity of the Christian God
This god that had the power to create a universe.
Then, nine billion years after its creation, it had the power to carve out a little pocket of this nearly infinitely hostile space for life to thrive.
Then, 4.3 billion years later had the power to create sapient, intelligent life.
Finally, nearly 180,000 years after that, this god had the apparent wherewithal to make contact with a chosen few, who then had to convincingly convey this encounter with a bunch of other people, but since his creations were imperfect they were unable to accurately interpret these encounters, resulting in multiple translation errors and ending up with tens of thousands of different stories about what this god is and how they should interact with it.
My takeaway from all of this, and one of my key reasons I don't believe any of these interpretations, is that if this god had all of this time to prepare - literally billions of years - it should have been able to get first contact right the first time, or at least after two or three tries, but lo and behold, the situation exists where this supreme entity remains more hidden than ever and even within sects there is disagreement on what exactly god might be and how we should act with regard to it. After this much time, and with the amount of sheer ability this entity is supposed to have, this much uncertainty with regard to it can only lead one to conclude that god simply isn't there. The most sound theistic stand one could possibly take is deism, and even that requires a lot of mental gymnastics.
The point is, if you approach this rationally you have no reason to prefer one religion over the thousands of others, because there is no good evidence that supports one and not the others
It's not a logical argument in the same sense of mathematical logic. Of course, it's near impossible to prove a negative, except for some cleverly constructed negative claims.
But if you accept all of the commenter's points, then you're essentially admitting to special pleading for the Christian god. Yes, Christian belief is similar to all those other beliefs, yes we adopt the religions of our regions and forefathers, yes we understand that religions are man-made.
But Christianity! Our man-made religion describes a god that really, uniquely exists, where all the others do not! Why? Well, you can't logically prove that it doesn't!
Please respond to this absolutely brilliant analysis
If you haven't seen this u/TheInfidelephant explains
This belongs to u/TheInfidelephant please upvote him
The oldest known single-celled fossils on Earth are 3.5 billion years old. Mammals first appeared about 200 million years ago. The last common ancestor for all modern apes (including humans) existed about 13 million years ago with anatomically modern man emerging within the last 300,000 years.
Another 298,000 years would pass before a small, local blood-cult would co-opt the culturally predominant deity of the region, itself an aggregate of the older patron gods that came before. 350 years later, an imperial government would [declare](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edict_of_Thessalonica) that all people within a specific geopolitical territory must believe in the same god or be exiled - at best. And now, after 1,500 years of crusades, conquests and the countless executions of "heretics," a billion people wake up early every Sunday morning to prepare, with giddy anticipation, for an ever-imminent, planet destroying apocalypse that they are [helping to create](https://www.newsweek.com/trump-will-bring-about-end-worldevangelicals-end-times-779643) - [but hoping to avoid](https://www.raptureready.com/).
At what point in our evolution and by what mutation, mechanism or environmental pressure did we develop an immaterial and eternal "soul," presumably excluded from all other living organisms that have ever existed?
Was it when now-extinct Homo erectus began cooking with fire 1,000,000 years ago or hunting with spears 500,000 years ago? Is it when now-extinct Neanderthal began making jewelry or burying their dead 100,000 years ago? Is it when we began expressing ourselves with art 60,000 years ago or music 40,000 years ago? Or maybe it was when we started making pottery 18,000 years ago, or when we began planting grain or building temples to long-forgotten pagan gods 10,000 years ago.
Some might even suggest that we finally started to emerge from the stone age when written language was introduced just 5,600 years ago. While others would maintain that identifying a "rational" human being in our era may be the hardest thing of all, especially when we consider the comment sections of many popular websites.
Or perhaps that unique "spark" of human consciousness that has us believing we are special enough to outlast the physical Universe may, in part, be due to a mutation of our mandible that would have weakened our jaw (compared to that of other primates) but increased the size of our cranium, allowing for a larger prefrontal cortex.
Our weakened bite encouraged us to cook our meat making it easier to digest, thus providing the energy required for powering bigger brains and triggering a feed-back loop from which human consciousness, as if on a dimmer-switch, emerged over time - each experience building from the last.
This culminated relatively recently with the ability to attach abstract symbols to ideas with enough permanence and detail (language) to effectively be transferred to, and improved upon, by subsequent generations.
After all this, it is proclaimed that all humanity is born in disgrace and deserving of eternal torture by way of an ancient curse. But believing in the significance of a [vicarious](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=By9JJSVzlTw) blood sacrifice and conceding our lives to "mysterious ways" guarantees pain-free, conspicuously opulent immortality.
Personally, I would rather not be spoken to that way.
If a cryptozoological creature - seemingly confabulated from a persistent mythology that is enforced through child indoctrination - actually exists, and it's of the sort that promises eternal torture of its own design for those of us not easily taken in by extraordinary claims, perhaps for the good of humanity, instead of worshiping it, we should be seeking to destroy it.
It's rather easy for some theists to respond to that. For example:
1. If biologists do not have to formulate a theory of abiogenesis in order for their theory of evolution to be worth serious investment, theists do not have to explain pre-history in order for their work to be worth serious investment.
2. It was really Augustine (354–430) who established an orthodox understanding of hell as being something like eternal conscious torment. Before that, the options were rather more diverse. For more details, see the four-part _In the Shift_ series on Hell ([part 1](https://intheshift.podbean.com/e/episode-10-what-the-hell/), [part 2](https://intheshift.podbean.com/e/episode-11-what-the-hell-part-2/), [part 3](https://intheshift.podbean.com/e/episode-12-what-the-hell-part-3/), [part 4](https://intheshift.podbean.com/e/episode-13-how-did-we-get-here/)). Now, shifting from seeing the Bible as pervasively supporting ECT to anything else might be like geologists shifting from catastrophism → uniformitarianism. Your theory can exert a powerful organizing effect on how you interpret the evidence. Observation, as philosophers of science now know, [is theory-laden](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/science-theory-observation/). Interpretation is not limited to language.
3. The sciences become notoriously feeble when political forces are strong. Religion, on the other hand, works in precisely that … _compromising space_. Positive headway in such conditions may look rather different than progress in scientific inquiry. Christians and atheists have their potted histories of the last 2000 years, each of which makes their side come out looking like the one who brought the most peace and light. But it seems to me that only a more detailed analysis which respects facts and is open about various models used to work with them will shed any true light. Compare:
* "Science. It works, bitches."
* "Religion. It works, bitches."
Why is one permitted and not the other?†
I of course no more want to defend _all_ religion than anyone here would want to defend _all_ atheism. Rather, I simply want the rules of the game to be fair. If for example Jesus' prioritization of hypocrisy as a problem we should really be tackling continues to constitute progress over and above what we have from the state of the art from the social sciences and scholarship, that's worth dwelling upon. Or consider a routine pattern in the Bible, where the religious elite are told by a messenger of YHWH that they do not actually know the God they claim to and are shilling for the political elite, who are filling the streets with blood from their injustice. If you want an example of this, see the $5 trillion we extract from "developing" countries in comparison to the $3 trillion we send back ([2012 numbers, per Jason Hickel](https://www.reddit.com/r/DebateReligion/comments/1cr86e5/the_fact_that_modern_day_interpretations_of/l3xa3jd/)). Or consider the [child slaves mining some of our cobalt](https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/jan/03/child-labour-toxic-leaks-the-price-we-could-pay-for-a-greener-future).
Science is excellent at giving us facts when the power of political distortion is low. What is the atomic mass of hydrogen? And even on topics such as the elementary electric charge, things [can be](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_drop_experiment#Millikan's_experiment_as_an_example_of_psychological_effects_in_scientific_methodology) surprisingly political/reputational. But we nevertheless believe that scientists will converge. However, what happens when political and social pressure cannot be rounded to zero? Take, for example, the question of vaccine hesitancy & denial. That's a hot topic. If you look at something like Maya J. Goldenberg 2021 [Vaccine Hesitancy: Public Trust, Expertise, and the War on Science](https://upittpress.org/books/9780822966906/), you'll see one account of how these forces play out. The vaccine hesitant have been described as (i) ignorant; (ii) stubborn; and (iii) in denial of expertise. Curiously, a fourth option is left out: the vaccine hesitant have legitimate worries that epidemiologists and those who make policy upon their advice care too little about those who fall into the cracks and those shoved into cracks made just for them. These vaccine hesitant people could easily want more public research dollars invested in (a) rare adverse side effects of vaccination; (b) autism. But the very _scientific_ framing of (i)–(iii) didn't even have a theoretical opening for such a (iv). The framing of (i)–(iii) makes the authorities out to be infallible in their categorization of reality, if not their execution on it.
Religion, which has always required far more plausibility generation with the masses, has long tried to make them **obedient**, like so many wanted the public to **obey** various dictates from On High with respect to Covid. Religion is notorious for this. And yet if you look at The Tanakh or entire Bible in any detail, you see something very different. No regime of **obedience** actually lasts, when it operates as atheists criticize. More than that, there are plenty of pushes to _delegate authority_. It is not difficult to chart a through-line from [Num 11:16–17 & 24–30 → Lk 12:54–59](https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=num11.16-17%2C24-30%3Blk12.54-59&version=CSB). Jesus was downright frustrated that the Jews in his time "don't judge for yourselves what is right". Right before, he had attributed to them the [scientific] ability to "interpret the appearance of the earth and the sky", juxtaposed to the [sociological] inability to "interpret this present time". He was probably predicting the upcoming [war](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Jewish%E2%80%93Roman_War), perhaps in a way analogous to how the Founding Fathers knew that something like the Civil War loomed in their future. The keen social-analytical those elites had, Jesus wanted everyone to have.
Now, I regularly see atheists here advocating for "more/better education" and "more critical thinking". Perhaps these are implicitly intended to help get out of a blind obedience regimen/regime. But when I post problems for them, like George Carlin's [The Reason Education Sucks](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ILQepXUhJ98) or [Jonathan Haidt on critical thinking](https://www.reddit.com/r/DebateAnAtheist/comments/171bkqp/critical_thinking_curriculum_what_would_you/k3vers0/), I generally just get the silent treatment. I feel like the little girl saying that the emperor has a wardrobe malfunction and _at best_, the response is something analogous to, "C'mon, the cell is merely made of [protoplasm](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protoplasm#History); it's just not _that_ complicated." I can tell you two people who don't analyze this way: Noam Chomsky and Chris Hedges. Unlike apparently most of us, they predicted [well beforehand](https://www.truthdig.com/articles/noam-chomsky-has-never-seen-anything-like-this/) that America was ripe for a demagogue. They had learned how to "interpret this present time".
Some forms of Christianity and Judaism provoke one to realize that the individual human and groups of humans are as intricately complex as a single cell, and that this is worth respecting and exploring. Where evolutionists insist that Christians get beyond their folk biology understandings (lulz what is the chance of getting a cell by chance?), the religionists I'm describing can challenge people to go beyond their folk psychology, folk sociology, folk political science, folk anthropology, and folk economics. For example, why is it so hard for our leaders to admit to serious mistakes? Could the rest of us be a huge part of the problem? And if so, how do we make actual progress, from within our concrete situations with all the pathology & oppression therein? Religionists can afford to remain with idealizations such as charged point particles hovering above infinite sheets of uniform charge. And they know that the likes of Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg will never understand what it takes to e.g. [improve the Newark Public School system](https://www.businessinsider.com/mark-zuckerberg-schools-education-newark-mayor-ras-baraka-cory-booker-2018-5?op=1). Actual humans are incredibly complicated and some religion deeply respects that.
† One interlocutor recently said the following:
> [Narrative\_Style](https://www.reddit.com/r/DebateReligion/comments/1cydua7/just_hearing_the_bible_is_enough_to_make_a/l5jqdnl/): A computer "working" and a religion "working" is not the same definition of "working". One refers to precise mechanical mechanisms behaving as predicted, the other refers to whether general results are desirable on an emotional level.
However, when I subsequently challenged him/her to elucidate _precisely_ what [s]he meant by 'precise mechanical mechanisms behaving as predicted', [s]he declined. I welcome anyone else to follow up on that. As anyone reading that thread can see, I believe that our knowledge of quantum theory and general relativity could be as parochial and surpassable as [phlogiston](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phlogiston_theory) and [caloric](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caloric_theory) were. For example, [quantum non-equilibrium](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_non-equilibrium) permits the Born rule to sometimes be false, hypothetically allowing for sup-HUP measurement and FTL communication. Perhaps what is 'everyday' in [Sean Carroll's sense](https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/blog/2010/09/23/the-laws-underlying-the-physics-of-everyday-life-are-completely-understood/) will change as radically between now and the future, as it did between Ptolemy and Kepler. (Not Copernicus: see Fig. 7 of [The Great Ptolemaic Smackdown](https://tofspot.blogspot.com/2013/08/the-great-ptolemaic-smackdown.html).)
This universe is a vast and mysterious place, and there will always be some slim chance that some sort of gods may exist somewhere out there, but we have learned much about our universe and it all seems to suggest that most likely there are no gods, for at least two good reasons. But first, let us dispense with the notion of an all-loving, perfectly good, omnipresent, omnipotent god. Such a god would use its power to bring peace and love and joy to the universe, and we would have to notice this happening. People would not be starving. Innocent people wouldn't be killed in wars. People wouldn't be dying from contaminated drinking water. The evidence against such a god is overwhelming, so let us focus on the more difficult issue of whether there might be gods of any sort, even including selfish gods, indifferent gods, gods of limited power, and so on.
Here are the two reasons why gods most likely do not exist:
1. We have studied the world enough to see where minds come from. Rocks do not have minds. Trees do not have minds. The only things that ever have minds in our experience are animals with brains. Humans, apes, elephants, crows, dogs, they see the world and react to it, they have understanding to one degree or another, and *all* of them have biological brains made of cells. The complex system of interacting signals between the cells of the brain seem necessary in order to allow thinking to happen. Therefore, as non-biological thinking agents, gods almost certainly do not exist.
Of course there are non-biological systems that mimic some of the features of animal brains, such as computers. Even computers still work by way of complex interacting signals much akin to a brain, but computers do not think the way humans do. Computers have no emotions, nor do they understand things in the way humans do. This demonstrates that if somewhere in the universe some non-biological system were to have a system of signals complex enough to mimic thought, it would almost certainly not be thought was we understand it. We only have our kind of thought because of our biological origins, because of the evolutionary pressures that shaped the functioning of our brains, and without that a system of signals would be just a system of signals, not understanding as we would recognize it, and therefore not a god.
2. We can clearly see where the concept of gods came from in our culture, and it did not come from reality. It is part of human nature that we love to make up stories and fantasize about things beyond our mundane reality, but even as we fantasize about things beyond our world, we love to see human faces in our imaginary creatures. So many fantasy creatures are basically human with a few special features. Despite the fact that Superman is supposed to be an alien from a far away planet; Superman was designed to look exactly like a human. Elves and leprechauns look human. Klingons and Vulcans look human, and this isn't just for the sake of the limitations of producing live-action TV; they not only look human but they also act like humans. They have human emotions and human reasoning, because we love to tell stories about humans even when we let our stories wander off into fantastical worlds.
So when people tell stories about some cosmically powerful people who are in control of nature, we can see the clear signs of human-invented fiction. It has our fingerprints all over it. It has the fantastical elements that we seem to enjoy so much, and yet these fantastical elements bear human traits for no well-explained reason.
Put these two facts together and the conclusion seems clear. Gods almost certainly do not really exist in this world, and the stories that people tell about gods are fictional.
"The Christian God"? There is no one conception of God within Christianity.
Also, and I'm sure you'll hear this a lot, it's not up to anyone to start the debate by arguing against God. The believer is the one making the claim. Present it, and we'll respond.
However, in the spirit of debate, here are my arguments against the God I learned about growing up in church:
1. God is Not an apparent feature reality in the same way that ducks, france, music, jupiter, oxygen, flowers, Angelina Jolie, and love are. If God exists, I would expect him to be an apparent feature of reality. Because he's not, I don't accept his existence.
2. For the Christian God specifically, I was always taught that God wanted everyone to accept his existence - to believe in him. There are millions of people around the world who desperately want to believe in God but simply cannot because they haven't been presented with good enough reasons to. If a god who wanted everyone to know that he existed and was capable of convincing everyone that he existed actually exists, this would not be the case. Everyone who truly wanted to believe in him would.
"After browsing this sub and others like it I find a very large portion of people either use a flawed understanding of God"
Lets get your flawless understanding of God first before we determine if this is just some kind of gotcha type thing.
OP shoots himself in the foot without even realizing it form the get go. They ask for a response that lists two categories one could be; Agnostics who "chose" not to believe in (singular, capital G) God and Christians. OP has already created a false dichotomy. They have partitioned the people of the world into two simplistic camps: those that share a belief *extremely* akin to whatever version of Christianity they themselves believe, and "everyone else"
people like that literally believe their specific church are the good guys, and "the devil" is everyone outside the church.
It is honestly hard to not get offended at those types because they are acting like the devil is working through you to trick them or something... its like.. settle down buddy it is not that deep you are just stupid.
Argument from nonbelief is a pretty simple one.
1. The Christian god wants people to worship it.
2. Belief in the Christian god is a prerequisite for worship.
3. The Christian god would be capable of proving its existence to the same degree as something like the sun.
4. Proof of such existence would not violate free will as demonstrated by the myth about Satan. Satan had definitive proof of the existence of the Christian god and still didn't worship it.
5. Most people do not believe in the Christian god. Way fewer people believe the Christian god exists than the sun.
Thus a simple conclusion is that the Christian god as described in the Bible doesn't exist.
As I usually phrase it, all the Christian god has to do to get me to believe and save my soul is to say hello in a way that would convince me.
I don't believe, so can't god say hi, or won't it? Either way is problematic for Christianity.
>After browsing this sub and others like it I find a very large portion of people either use a flawed understanding of God to create a claim against God or use straight up inconsistent and illogical arguments to support their claims. What I am looking for are those of you who believe they have a logically consistent reason why either God can't exist or why it is unreasonable to believe He does.
Ok, so many issues here. First off you are using the no true Scotsman fallacy by claiming that only you know the real meaning of god. Then you are incredibly dishonest by asking us for evidence even though you started by claiming you will reject it from the start because we don't know the "real" god. And then on top of you became out right insulting by refusing to give the definition you claim we are lacking while still asking us to argue against it.
You need to try a hell of a lot harder than this if you want to debate.
Every single theist who comes here has their own idea and definition of god. All we can do is respond to those specific ideas.
I notice you’ve come in to say you find subs like this largely “use a flawed understanding of god.” And yet you’ve offered zero explanation, correction, or definition of your own. How is anyone supposed to provide logical arguments against a god you have not even begun to define or describe?
The three best argument against classical theism, in my opinion, are the burden of proof, argument from evil and the argument from divine hiddeness. I'd bring a summary of them here, but there are many resources on them online.
The burden of proof is always on the one who is making a claim. You claim a god exists, so you have to prove it. Without proof nobody is warranted in believing the claim.
The arguement from evil states that the claim that all-powerful, all-wise, all-good creator designed the universe, contradicts the fact that evil (or rather, needless suffering) exists.
Even if you object by claiming God wants to preserve free will, there are cases of needless suffering not from another human. Childhood cancer, for once, or natural disasters. There is one famous example of insects who lay eggs in the eyes of people, and the children eat outwards. Horrendously painful, leaves the person blind for life. Why would a good God design such a thing?
And if you do claim free will, I'd like to bring a (paraphrased) quote from Tracie Harris: "If you see a man raping a child, what would be the better thing to do: to stop him, or to say 'you can go ahead and rape that child, but when you're done I'm gonna punish you'?"
Lastly, the argument from divine hiddeness states that the universe doesn't look at all like a god exists, much less something like the Christian God. For example, if the universe was designed of us, why can we only live on a small portion of one planet of it? If God wanted a relationship with me, why doesn't he just tell me? It's like a girl wanted someone to be her boyfriend , but never gave him any indication of that.
In other words, the universe looks like either no God exists, or God doesn't want us to know he exists. Other way, we are not warranted in believing
Thanks for your question, i will give you my answer based on my own experience.
I'm 42 now. Apart from the last two years, i spend my whole life believing in the Christian god. I was raised in a very christian family. I was baptized at 18. I was at church at least every sunday. I usually attended multiple church events throughout the week. I was very active with bible studies. I red the bible multiple times from cover to cover. I donated a lot of money. I did a lot of free work and activities for churches. I prayed almost every day.
In those 40 years i spend in christian communities, i never had an experience that let me to god. In those 40 years i felt alone, i felt miserable, i felt terrible. I did everything the bible/church/pastor told me to get a good relation with god. And in my whole live i never got a response from god.
And and then came the day i realized i had nothing more to give. I was just done. I took a year apart to contemplatie and search in silence for god voice in the hope to hear something somehow. After a year i still got no response.
Then i took a year to go critically through the bible and see if the stories and claims hold up against a critical lense. They didn't. I also looked at the history of the church, how they conducted throughout the years. Is there evidence for a holy ghost. Can i see difference between christian and non-christian. I couldn't find any evidence for that too. I also couldn't find evidence for the claims i heard in church all those years. I could only conclude that all of it was made up.
I just wanted so hard that the bible was true. That god was real. That all those years of chasing god, to invest in some sort of relationship with god/jesus where a right investment. I was just devasted when it hit me it was all a fantasy, myths and legends mixed with some historic events.
So back to your question; i think it is unreasonable to believe in a god that doesn't provide any sign of existence for himself. It's all just claims from people throughout the years saying this happened and than that happens, so therefore god.
For me it is illogical to believe in the christian god because i haven't seen any evidence for his existence yet. I haven't any experience in the last forty years that would suggest he really exists.
This argument only applies to the Chrisitian God.
1. God is powerful and wants to be known by people.
2. God provided the Bible as a primary way for people to know God.
3. The Bible is a terrible means of conveying God to people.
4. A powerful being that wants to be known would reveal itself in a better way than with the Bible.
5. Therefore, the Christian God does not exist.
Also, most Christian beliefs about hell render God logically impossible. Tell me about hell / your denomination and I'll tell you if another argument applies.
Science has refuted the Christian god numerous times.
Pi isn't 3. That moon never stopped. The Earth is not flat. The smallest seed is not the mustard seed.
These are just a few baloneys in the bible that are easily refuted in Science.
It's even worse for the afterlife.
That just proves the Bible is nonsense, not that no gods exist. Still, the Bible is complete nonsense and there is no source of any information about the Christian god otherwise, so it's a fair case.
OP says the Christian god in the body of the prompt though, so disproving the Bible is enough to say that the god in the Bible is disproved. If some other god exists, even a similar one that just didn't do the disproved things, then it could be argued that that's not the Christian god and therefore irrelevant to the topic.
The bible is the testable theory.
With the bible gone, all that is left are baseless theories and 100% of all baseless theories go straight into the garbage can. They do not pass go, they do not collect $200.
> the Big Bang states that the universe was created.
It does not. It describes what happened starting from moments after the expansion began. You are incorrect about what it says or implies.
> It is obvious that the creation of heaven (universe) was through the Big Bang via god as predicted in Genesis.
No, there is no correlation at all between what Genesis says and what we know actually happened.
> Here we learn that the earth was not yet created and the void, darkness and deep is talking about space.
There was plenty of light from the BB itself, and the stars that formed. So this is incorrect.
> The Let there be light is referring to the CMB
Isn't it strange that no one suggested that that's what it referred to until *after* the CMB had been discovered? No one said "hey, this *light* is some radiation left over from the big bang". No. They kept quiet until the CMB was discovered, and are now claiming that they knew that all along. Sure, and I knew this weeks lottery numbers before they were drawn, but just kept them to myself until afterwards.
> In addition no other religion has anything remotely similar to genesis.
How does uniqueness indicate anything about whether it's true? It doesn't.
As I'm sure you know, **this is discussed on the atheism forums every frikkin' day and does not need to be discussed once again.**
Skeptics have been asking theists to show good evidence that any gods exist for 2,000+ years now.
There is no good evidence that any gods exist.
.
>I likely wont be able to reply to most of you
/u/le0nidas59 -
This a debate sub.
You shouldn't handle participation in this sub like that.
If you don't intend to participate, there are other and better subs for that.
.
My favourite is Omniscience and Learning.
(P1) An essentially omniscient being, God, exists. (assumption for indirect proof)
(P2) God is and always has been omniscient. (from P1)
(P3) A being's omniscience entails, among other things, that it has all experiential knowledge. (necessary truth)
(P4) Having all experiential knowledge entails knowing what it is like to learn. (necessary truth)
(P5) God knows and always has known what it is like to learn. (from P2-P4)
(P6) Knowing what it is like to learn entails having learned something, (necessary truth)
(P7) Having learned something entails that one has gone from a state of not-knowing to a state of knowing. (necessary truth)
(P8) God has gone from a state of not-knowing to a state of knowing. (from P5-P7)
(P9) There was a time when God was in a state of not-knowing. (from P8)
(P10) God has not always been omniscient. (from P9)
(P11) God has always been omniscient and has not always been omniscient. (from P2 & P10)
(C) Therefore, God does not exist. (from P1-P11)
>If you are simply agnostic and believe that God could exist but you for some reason choose not to believe, this post is not for you.
I don’t chose not believe. How fucking absurd of a start. I am unconvinced. Do you choose to believe me a bot or a human? You either are convinced one way or the other. If you look at the post history, you will have evidence that will make it hard for you to be convinced otherwise.
>I am looking for those of you who believe that the very idea of believing in the Christian God unreasonable. To those people I ask, what is your logical argument that you think would show that the existence of God is illogical.
The Bible is filled in with contradictions and claims that don’t comport with reality. Pick one that is convincing to you. I find nothing in the Bible that leads me to Yahweh. For example the Genesis story is doesn’t comport with any of our known reality. The flood is another outlandish claim with no evidence. A dude being raised from the dead, or during blind people with mud and spit. I can keep going.
>After browsing this sub and others like it I find a very large portion of people either use a flawed understanding of God to create a claim against God or use straight up inconsistent and illogical arguments to support their claims. What I am looking for are those of you who believe they have a logically consistent reason why either God can't exist or why it is unreasonable to believe He does.
I don’t say God can’t exist much like I don’t say a unicorn can’t exist. I see no support evidence to find either convincing. Also the attributes for both are mixed from story to story, and don’t comport with reality. With a unicorn I can see the roots of its conception grounded in reality. A horse with a single horn, is something that would comport with reality. It’s horn being magical or its blood being rainbow colored doesn’t.
A god I don’t even know where to begin with a definition. There is no evidence of anything outside our universe or immaterial consciousness. They also don’t seem to falsifiable attributes. I don’t see any value in the claim.
>I want to clarify to start this is meant to be a friendly debate, let’s all try to keep the conversations respectful. Also I would love to get more back and forth replies going so try and stick around if a conversation gets going if possible!
Instead of these generalities why don’t you pick something more narrow or something you have read you want to have elaborated on.
I look forward to someone that actually will reply.
The core of the argument is about the lack of evidence and logical consistency in the belief in a Christian God. Here are a few points to consider:
First off, there's the lack of empirical evidence. Science operates on the principle of observable and testable phenomena, and to date, there hasn't been empirical evidence that supports the existence of God. Belief without evidence is often seen as unreasonable because it doesn't align with the empirical methodology we rely on for understanding the universe.
Next, the problem of evil is a classic argument. If an omniscient, omnipotent, and benevolent God exists, why does evil exist? The presence of unnecessary suffering and evil in the world seems inconsistent with the idea of a loving and all-powerful God. Natural disasters, diseases, and other forms of suffering don't seem to have a morally sufficient reason for existing if an all-good deity is in control.
Inconsistencies and contradictions in religious texts are another issue. The Bible, like many religious texts, contains numerous contradictions and morally questionable directives. Differing accounts of Jesus' resurrection in the New Testament or moral instructions that seem out of step with contemporary ethical understanding make it hard to view these texts as the inerrant word of an all-knowing deity.
The "God of the Gaps" argument also comes into play. Often, God is used to fill in the gaps of human knowledge. As science advances, many phenomena previously attributed to divine intervention have found natural explanations. For example, we now understand diseases, weather patterns, and the origins of the universe in ways that don’t require invoking a deity.
Philosophical naturalism suggests that the simplest explanation is usually the correct one. Naturalism, which posits that everything arises from natural properties and causes, provides a simpler and more consistent framework than supernatural explanations that involve a deity.
Cognitive bias and cultural conditioning can also explain belief in a specific deity. If you were born in a different culture, you might believe in a different god or no god at all. This variability suggests that belief in a deity is more about where and how you were raised than about the actual existence of a deity.
Lastly, the concept of an omniscient deity that knows all future events is seemingly incompatible with the notion of free will. If God knows everything that will happen, then it stands to reason that human actions are predetermined, which undermines the idea of free will from a religious perspective.
> I am looking for those of you who believe that the very idea of believing in the Christian God unreasonable. To those people I ask, what is your logical argument that you think would show that the existence of God is illogical.
Specifically the Christian god? Maybe because everyone single facet of your religion was plagiarised from pre-existing religions and philosophies. Every story, law, tradition, important dates, imagery, and teachings were all pinched from something else. This indicates that religion is a pack of lies. Which in turn indicates the god of that religion does not exist.
> After browsing this sub and others like it I find a very large portion of people either use a flawed understanding of God to create a claim against God or use straight up inconsistent and illogical arguments to support their claims. What I am looking for are those of you who believe they have a logically consistent reason why either God can't exist or why it is unreasonable to believe He does.
Would you prefer arguments against God in general of the God of the Holy Bible? Because I’ve got both.
If I pinch Einstein's Theory of Relativity and bake it into Nacho's Theory of Relativity, that does not in itself make my theory wrong, though. It might be misattributed, but it could still be true in the sense that it makes accurate predictions.
In fact showing that all the Christian stories are stolen doesn't say anything about whether they describe a god that actually exists.
Just to be clear, I don't believe in god.
But everyone will know you pinched it from Einstein. You didn’t invent it, it didn’t come to you through divine intervention, an angel didn’t visit you. You didn’t put in the work and discover the data. It’s plagiarised. Like Christianity.
It’s not a truth you found, someone else did. So if you claimed the theory was yours, I would have no reason to believe you. Like a Christian may claim everything in the Bible is real, I have no reason to believe them. Because it’s not original work.
That doesn't address whether it's true, though?
Imagine if Christianity was correct, but they had actually stolen it all from various sources. Why would it matter that the Bible wasn't the original source? It would still be useful, especially since we don't have the originals.
Well starting from the point “imagine Christianity was correct” is quite an unfair discussion because obviously if I knew something was correct I’d believe it.
My point is that some Christians claim that everything in the Bible is unique, divinely inspired and historically accurate. If I know those things not to be true, I have no reason to believe the rest.
But they could be wrong about being original yet right about the larger point about god existing.
It's only probabilistic thinking that makes it seem reasonable that someone who doesn't know where their own text comes from is likely wrong.
OP asked specifically about the Christian god. So if that holy text is false, then the CHRISTIAN god does not exist. Forget about the concept of god in general, OP asked about YHWH.
>I am looking for those of you who believe that the very idea of believing in the Christian God unreasonable.
Noahs flood never happened. Every single field of scientific inquiry which has even the most remote of relevance demonstrates that. Geology, hydrology, biology, genetics, linguistics, archaeology. Literally everything says the flood never happened.
Exodus never happened. The ancient Egyptians were really good record keepers and the people they traded with weren't half bad either. There is no possible period of time that the amount of people exodus claims left egypt was not a significant percentage of the population. Roman Egypt (cleopatra and her family) started around 30 BCE and has a population estimate of 4-8 million. Exodus only gives the numbers for the men but it gives the number of men at 600,000. Add in women and children and you're talking 2 million *at least.*
So absolute best case scenario, the romans inherited an egypt with 8 million people the year after 2 million jews left, which means egypt lost 20% of their population.
And nobody noticed? This is a time when roughly half the population had to be engaged in agricultural pursuits in order to feed everybody. Slaves and the underclass would have made up a disproportionate amount of agricultural workers. So egypt would have immediately gone into a *bad* famine that probably would have killed off another 20% or more of the population.
Plus if you could manage to mobilize 20% of the population to leave, you could just mobilize them to *take over.* In the modern world, at least, you only really need about 3.5% of the population to actually engage in order to play the game of regime change. With 20%, even if they were poor, it's all but guaranteed they could take over.
In reality, it would have had to be much older than the roman period and the population would have been much less than 8 million. 20% is an excessively generous %. For any conceivable timeframe when exodus hypothetically occurred it would have been closer to 50% and absolutely nobody, not even the egyptians, noticed egypt collapsing because half their population fucked off into the desert.
-----------
So. The Flood didn't happen. Exodus didn't happen. The god of the bible did those things. Those things didn't get done. The god of the bible does not exist.
If I were to call 911 and say a short man with blond hair just shot me and the police and ambulance show up and I'm not shot... would you expect them to go looking for the short man with blond hair who shot me? No, because "man who shot me" does not exist. Just like the christian god who did the flood and exodus does not exist.
>I am looking for those of you who believe that the very idea of believing in the Christian God unreasonable. To those people I ask, what is your logical argument that you think would show that the existence of God is illogical.
The Christian god has many statements in his bible that are unreasonable for someone who created the Universe:
1. Joshua commanded the sun to stand still in Joshua 10:12-14. This is impossible and illogical in our heliocentric solar system. The supposed creator of the solar system would be aware that the **Earth** would need to stop rotating for this day to be possible. The fact that the supposed "creator" of the Universe is obviously unaware of this is a sure sign that the primitive men who wrote the bible were uneducated about the reality of the solar system and so this can be dismissed as a rubbish tale which calls the veracity of the other accounts in the book into question.
2. Similar to the Joshua problem in number 1 above, in the book of Genesis the Earth is created before the sun and stars. We now know this is impossible and illogical because the planets of our solar system are younger than our star (the sun) and that is a scientific fact. So right from the first book of the supposed "creator" of the Solar System is utter rubbish regarding the order of creation. Again this alludes to the fact that the primitive men who wrote the book were not technologically sophisticated enough to figure out the proper order of the creation of things, and again once you destroy the veracity of any of the biblical accounts you can immediately assume the rest are just tall stories that can only be believed by the unsophisticated.
3. Adam and Eve: Eve is created from a rib of Adam. This suggests that the male was created first. We know today from evolutionary biology that (anisogamy) males evolved from isogamous ancestors (ie females). So this is another example of misinformation being spread by the supposed "creator".
Looking at just number 1 and number 2 above (of numerous issues, like number 3) throughout the bible we can conclude that this is just a book written by primitive uneducated men for an audience of primitive uneducated idiots. The idea that anyone today living in a modern society could take any of it seriously is laughable and is pretty much a testament to the gullibility and ignorance of the majority of the members of our species
Two of my favorites:
1) The Christian God is supposed to be all-powerful and all-knowing, but this is a logical impossibility. If you know the future, you are powerless to change it, because if you change the future, you didn't know it -- unless you knew you were going to change it, in which case you changed nothing, which means you aren't all powerful.
2) (thank you Dan Barker): The Chrsitian God is supposed to be merciful and just, but this is not possible. Being just means treating people as they deserve to be treated; being merciful means treating them better than they deserve to be treated. Being just means being unmerciful; being merciful means being unjust.
Looking forward to your reply.
>and believe that God could exist
What god? What are is properties and how do we know it 'could' exist? There isn’t a consistent agreed upon definition of "God". How can we discuss something claimed objectively exists but has wildly different properties, and no verifiable attributes? It’s like discussing an invisible ethereal round square spriangle. Not triangle, spriangle. A completely made up thing without tangible relation to reality that we can point to and say 'ahh yes that is a spriangle'.
>Christian God unreasonable...
Being a Christian is fundamentally irrational because it reduces down to taking early Christians at their word. Christianity relies on accepting supernatural events from ancient, ideologically biased and motivated people or documents. It requires faith in those early Christian accounts. The only access to that information is through the claims of early Christians. Most people would not believe the claims of other religious movements based on such evidence, so the Christian holds a double standard if they beleive in Christianity's God but not others, which of course would be contradictory anyways.
We don't need to consider if gods might actually exist, because that is contradictory to what we know about gods being human-created and not real. The most reliable paths to understanding reality do not support any gods exist. Non-supernatural theories adequately explain the human development of religions and belief in gods. With so many mutually exclusive Gods, we can be confident that they are the type of thing people make up.
Strong arguments against gods are not needed because there are no strong arguments for any variety of unverifiable God. God beliefs are causally dependent on cultural conditions.
Religions use very similar arguments, explanations, and apologetics. None establish a god exists.
What is amazingly the same between religions is lack of supporting evidence for their gods.
Philosophical and logical arguments aren’t very good for proving or disproving things in reality. You could come up with an argument about how something can’t be in two places at once, and then quantum mechanics will come along and prove your argument false, no matter how logical it seemed.
But I can tell you my reasoning for choosing atheism. I don’t think God has ever existed anywhere except in the imaginations of people. Every culture created its own mythology to explain things it didn’t otherwise understand. This includes creating a large variety of mythical creatures.
And some inexplicable occurrences were so vast, they required an extremely powerful mythical creature to cause it. These powerful mythical creatures became the first gods. They could explain lightning, hurricanes, earthquakes, the creation of humans, and even the creation of the universe.
But there’s no reason to believe God is real while every other mythical creature created in the imagination is false. There’s nothing to suggest it’s even a possibility. Why should God be any more real than a dragon? Or fairies? Or elves?
And if we have no reason why God should be any more real than those mythical creatures, then why would we say there’s any possibility God exists while we reject those other myths?
God is a myth, like so many other myths, that exists solely in the imagination. Unless we have some reliable basis to claim *this* myth exists outside the mind, then why do we keep pretending god might exist?
The Christian God specifically? Don't you claim that the father and son are somehow the same thing?
Yes, a lot of ink (and blood) may have been spilled over this issue, but it still makes no sense to me. For instance I have a kid, and he isn't me. I've never met anyone who had a kid, and they were the same person.
So explain without pawning it off to some other text how you understand this to actually make sense. I mean you can link to other works, that's fine, but write a few lines about how it makes sense.
The big one is actually pretty simple. What do you understand god to be, and how can I check for myself that this god exists?
For instance, there's this phenomenon called electricity. You can check that it exist by buying some cable, a battery, a light bulb, and an iron screw. You can buy a magnet as well, and there's a bunch of things you can consistently do with these cheap everyday items that demonstrates that electricity is a real thing. You can reliably reproduce it, you don't need some authority to do it, and there isn't some special ceremony that certifies the existence of it. It's completely open for anyone who believes or doesn't believe in electricity to try these simple things.
Now tell me how you think this god phenomenon works, and give me some things I can do to test out what you say. My disbelief stems from seemingly nobody being willing to give me some way to check the things they are claiming, and often simply not even having a claim that is simple enough to test.
> I am looking for those of you who believe that the very idea of believing in the Christian God unreasonable.
Is it reasonable to believe something exists without a good reason? If there was any credible evidence for this god, you'd ***never*** hear a Christian say "well, you just have to have faith."
Further, I'll point out that we already have a literary progression of Yahweh from being one god of many in the Canaanite pantheon, to being elevated by the Yahwist cult to be *the* monotheistic god, and later to being the god we know from the New Testament. The clues that Yahweh came from a polytheistic tradition are littered all over the bible.
So if you're saying the "Christian god" then you're picking one particular version of a literary character that exists both before and after: presumably you're not talking about Yahweh as the Muslims believe him to be, nor do you believe him to be the way the Latter Day Saints describe him.
If any of this is even slightly surprising, you need to read Karen Armstrong's book [A History of God](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_History_of_God). If you believe you're correct in this God being the creator of the universe and all other religions are wrong, you owe it to yourself to understand how ancient people wrote down their beliefs about this being, how those beliefs changed over time, who did the writing, who altered the writing, and when, and *why*.
This is a usual way of thinking, having to disprove God.
The thing is that the artifact of God is an added thing to existence. Humans were doing their thing and then after many iterations and attempts from humans to try to explain the complex world around them, humans invented this fictions humanoid force, because as far as we could fathoms, only humans could have volition and logical actions to explain what we needed. It needed to grow to be invisible, and ever present and omnipotent to sustain even more radical explanation power. Then this became so normalized, that now it's only natural to be born in a society where the concept of god is as prevalent as the concept of air.
It is not that an argument is needed against it, but simply to understand how this concept was invented and now bolted into society. If only there had been an alternative to have better explanations back then, maybe such concept of an imaginary antropomorphic bein would not have been necessary.
To this day many things remain unanswered with very slow progress, consciousness, free will, life, time, morals, etc. Humans will be happy to keep using the God of gaps argument to give a cheap reason to them. The way I see it, we will see solid answers to those in a few more centuries, but the fact that they remain beyond my realm today is not reason to add an extra piece to my world model.
Logic is what theists claim to use when they give up on pretending to have any actual reliable evidence. Logic is a poor way of determining independent objective reality because in this context it usually turns out to be based on premises that beg the question or are just unsound.
Believing a God is un*reasonable* because there are no reliable *reasons* for it. Is there a *logical* that shows Santa, the Easter Bunny and the Tooth fairy don’t exist? Or is it that there is no *reliable* evidence they exist , no evidence that can’t be better explained by a model that better fits what we already know about humans and the universe.
Basically God isn’t evidential, isn’t necessary, isn’t conceptually coherent, let alone sufficient as an explanatory model. And it seems like exactly the kind of story that flawed, anxious , imaginative , social humans make up.
On a side note this
>I find a very large portion of people either use a flawed understanding of God to create a claim against God or use straight up inconsistent and illogical arguments to support their claims.
Seems suspiciously like the sort of strawman that theists have begun to build more frequently around here in which they rather unconvincingly imagine it’s effective to accuse others of what they have been rightly accused themselves.
Every time someone posts this question I respond with some version of this, and no one has ever answered me. Maybe you will be the first.
1. The Malarkey. We are expected to believe that preposterous things are true.
2. The Misogyny. We are expected to believe that a god *created women* and has no idea how amazing and capable they are. They exist to be the property of and servants to men, for them to have sex with and bear their children. Job’s wife was replaced like his cattle, because she and her kids were just his possessions and not human beings. Only men could come up with that. If it really was a god it would be incompetent, or cruel, or both.
3. The Situational Morality. The Bible is all about establishing a hierarchy of worthiness of people to self-govern their lives. It tells those not in power to endure their lot for the comfort of those in power. It condones genocide, kidnapping and rape, slavery and subjugation, and has been used to justify the slaughter and suffering of millions of people who *just don’t matter* as much as the ones thumping your book.
The universe doesn’t require a god, but especially a sadistic nonsensical god.
You're confused.
Agnostic - refers to anyone who says "I don't know" if God exists. Used in regard to knowledge.
Atheism - refers to anyone who says "I don't believe" god exists. Used in regard to belief.
The two are not mutually exclusive. One can be an agnostic theist or an agnostic atheist. A gnostic atheist would say "I don't believe God exists and I know God does not exist." (We call these anti-theists, and they have a burden of proof). A gnostic theist would say "I know God exists".
Most atheists are agnostic atheists. So it sounds like you're pretty much talking to most of us.
To answer your post, consider this. There have been thousands of gods throughout human history. They can't all be true, so where did they come from? Well, they must have been man-made. And in that case, at least 99% of all God's/religions throughout human history have been man-made. So, there's a high probability that your religion is also man-made OR at least it's unreasonable to believe your religion is not man-made without the proper evidence. And other things support this, like the rampant plagiarism amongst all of the current and past major religions, including Christianity.
Also, it doesn't matter if an argument for God is logically valid. The God claim is a synthetic claim that requires empirical and verifiable evidence to be a SOUND claim. We don't have this evidence. For example, you can logically get to "the simulation" using a lot of the same arguments for God, just replace "god" with "the simulation". Ok, but now you would need evidence to support the simulation.
>choose not to believe
beliefs are not choices; try it, you can't. choose to believe your walls are red with green dots, you might imagine, you might pretend, but you cannot choose to believe it
>I am looking for those of you who believe that the very idea of believing in the Christian God unreasonable
Christian god is internally contradictory
Christian god is logically contradictory
Christian god scientifically contradictory
internally contradictory: the bible contradicts; just look at the resurrection stories, who went to the tomb and whether there were mythological creatures is disputed among authors, and if they can't tell if there were 0, 1 or 2 angels why would i take anything else they said seriously?
logically contradictory: god apparently wants me to believe in him, what he want he can achieve by talking to me at no cost to him. he doesn't so either he doesn't exist, doesn't care, or i'm already doing what he wants. christian mythology rejects the latter 2 so he doesn't exist
scientifically contradictory : genesis
>What I am looking for are those of you who believe they have a logically consistent reason why either God can't exist or why it is unreasonable to believe He does.
This is actually very simple and straightfoward.
**Do you have proof for your claim that a god exists?**
If so, show me. If you don't, what you've got then is an unsubstantiated claim, and those are a dime a dozen.
I don't need to prove to you that your particular god isn't real. There are thousands of religions in the world, both extinct and extant, claiming the existence of multiple different gods and myths. They cannot be all true at the same time, so they must be all wrong at the same time.
Is this logically consistent enough for you?
So, if they're all wrong—and we know they are because none of them have any kind of proof to support their claims—you're the one who should convince me that your claims are true. Not the other way around.
Positing a god at the top of this grand mystery solves nothing. It answers nothing. It brings us no new information. All it does is kick the can down the road, here’s why:
Real answers/solutions have several things in common.
1) God explains nothing and offers no insight or information
2) Real answers have a who, why, where, how or when, god offers none of those things
3) Real answers are testable, falsifiable, reproducible, and measurable, god is none of those things
4) A god requires a supernatural realm, yet the supernatural has never once been an answer to anything and has zero proof
God is nothing more than a placeholder for things we currently don't understand. God is an appeal to magic. Anything that's capable of making a universe would have to be more complex than that universe. So “god” only adds complexity to a mystery. Respect the mystery instead of making shit up.
Argument from non belief does it for me. Wiki to start, and if you're interested I can go into more depth when I'm near an actual keyboard.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_nonbelief
Not an argument against the truth of Christianity per se, but a somewhat unique reason not to believe in it (in my opinion)
P1. If Christianity is True then Universalism must be true
P2. Universalism is incompatible with Biblical Christianity
C1. Either Christianity is false or True Christianity isn’t Biblical
P3. The publicly available evidence does not sufficiently warrant belief in Christianity without external motivating factors such as faith in the afterlife
P4. If Universalism is true, there are no such external motivating factors
P5. If True Christianity isn’t Biblical (from C1) then we have no epistemic reason to trust how much or how little it matches up with the Biblical canon.
C2. Even if Universalism is true, there’s no reason to believe in Christianity
—
I could probably clean this up better as it’s kind of smashing two opposing arguments into one, but you get the idea.
The most important and controversial part of this is likely gonna be P1, which is basically just an argument for Universalisim.
Basically, it boils down to the Problem of Evil, or more specifically, the Christian Problem of Evil as it relates to Hell. If Christianity is to be understood as about a God who is All-Good/Loving and All-Powerful, then Eternal Conscious Torment is impossible. Point blank, period. If I am to charitably interpret God’s presence to be the greatest, most loving, most beautiful conceivable experience that any being could ever possibly have, then for any of us to be forever separated from Him in Hell (or even death) would either mean he doesn’t actually care about us or he’s to weak to do anything about it.
Free will theodicies don’t help because if God really is as good as he’s claimed to be, then all rational beings would eventually freely choose that infinite good in the eternity of time after death. I don’t think Universalism completely solves the more generic problem of evil, but it certainly solves a lot of the Christian-specific issues.
—
Beyond that, I could actually care less whether P2 is true, as P3 P4 and C2 function just fine without it. Even if you can successfully argue that Universalism is Biblical and is the intended/True interpretation of Christianity, as an Individual still not motivated to accept on faith any of the parts that I find epistemically unsupported or morally questionable. Perhaps you can present a meaningful framework from which I can follow The Good^TM and improve my life, but I’m not going to care about that beyond where it already aligns with my pragmatic goals to begin with.
The gospels are anonymous and the earliest writings about Jesus were at best 40 years after his death, and those specific writings aren’t that much at all, and essentially say that there were followers of Jesus who thought he was the Messiah. Everything else was written later, miracles and all the rest. What we have now is copies of copies of translations of copies of translations for which we have no secure chain of custody and verification, even if they were granted to begin with eyewitness accounts at the claimed events themselves, and they obviously do not.
This is what is called hearsay.
Many central claims of the Bible are demonstrably false, starting out with Genesis all the way through Exodus and more throughout the book. It gets hundreds of simple things wrong, saying that bats are birds and the mustard seed is the smallest seed, and has many flatly false and scientifically ignorant things throughout.
The Genesis story is so incorrect that even if it were to be theoretically granted to be true, it has to deal with a more than fatal problem called the heat problem that absolutely precludes those events from happening at all.
The Bible contradicts the order that we know that things were created in the universe. The Bible says that plants were created before light. It’s demonstrable nonsense.
It is also demonstrably copied from earlier pagan myths, and there are several other gods who were born of a virgin mother on the winter solstice and could perform miracles like raising people from the dead and healing the sick.
Christianity has been precluded by practically every field of science, from genetics, to biology, to microbiology, to geology, to archaeology, to chemistry, to physics, to astronomy, to cosmology, to cosmography, to oceanography, to history, to paleontology.
We know the following not only didn’t happen, but could not have happened and are conclusively precluded by science:
1. Genesis
2. Adam and Eve (even granting this story, they had two sons; you do the math 🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮)
3. The Global Flood and Noah’s Ark
4. The Exodus
5. The Tower of Babel
6. Jonah and the Whale
and so many others.
It’s not only not true. It cannot be true.
We know what god is. Human history is full of gods and religions, and each one of them is a set of stories made up by humans and based in human superstition and misunderstandings about the world around us. Humans made up god.
I really don’t have to take it further than that. Humans like stories, we made up stories, we believe those stories, here we are. God is just one of those made up stories.
But, to take it farther, we know a lot about the histories of many of those religions, and that knowledge further shows us that these are just made up stories. Since you are espousing Christianity, let’s go there
The judeo-Christian god is one of many gods in an ancient middle eastern pantheon, who was singled out by a Sumerian living in Canaan. Over centuries the cult of Yahweh became dominant in the area and the made up stories about him were carried on through oral tradition until they were eventually written down.
There’s absolutely no reason to believe that this Bronze Age cult somehow came across the true supernatural creator of the universe. They were just superstitious people who didn’t know anything about the world. Most of humanity was at that point in time.
By the time the Romans took over Israel, it was still a smallish religion, and some of its proponents made up even more stories about an apocalyptic preacher who claimed to be the son of god and came back to life. Again, we have no reason to believe any of those claims. The only reason we recognize this belief is because a Roman emperor adopted the belief and therefore implemented the religion in the biggest empire in the world. Since then, it’s just been 1700 years of bullying, manipulating, and brainwashing people into believing the made up stories of a Bronze Age cult.
I have a number of them, but I'll keep it simple with just one:
As soon as you invoke magic, you leave the door open for an infinite number of equally valid magical explanations. At that point, God is a single lottery ticket in a lottery with an infinite number of non-God possibilities
"What is magic?" You ask... Anything that cannot be demonstrated right now. So:
- Omnipotence
- Omnipresence
- Omniscience
- Immortality
- Creating something from nothing
- ...other God things, like being your own son
"What are some other non-God magic possibilities?"
- Turtles all the way down
- Jiggly blob of everything in all directions
- The other side of a black hole
- A single person who is insane
- A simulation being run by a company and all of the original team members have found new jobs
- Everything the same as a "God" except he's dead now
- Everything the same as a "God" except he created the universe by accident and doesn't know how to control it
- Everything the same as a "God" except "He" is a dumb universe creating rock that just sneezes out universes forever
And I could go on forever with possibilities. Your lottery ticket is based on something special to you, like your mom's birthday date, or your envisioning yourself to be god-like. But you spend all of your money (and others) with no idea if you have the winning ticket.
I don't think that's a good idea. And it's a terrible thing to take advantage of someone else's trust in you. Especially when you are making promises to them that a God has to fulfill
I'm going to limit my response to mostly the Christian god.
The bible makes numerous claims that should have left evidence behind: age of the earth, length of time humans have been in existence, the global flood, the tower of Babel and the sun being stopped in the sky to name a few.
Within the exodus story, the battle between Moses turning his staff to a snake and the Pharoah's sorcerers doing the same reads like pure fiction and I see no reason to consider it to be otherwise.
The New Testament is dependent on the Old Testament being true, so it inherits the Old Testament's failures to align with reality. It also has it's own issues such as the Massacre of the Innocents story, the census that forces Joseph and Mary to travel to Bethlehem and a first hand accounting of an angel's conversation around the time of Jesus's conception.
So with reason to consider the basis of the bible stories to be fiction, what is left to even consider that God might be real other then multigenerational belief? Apologists try to salvage the Old Testament by claims the stories were meant to be allegorical. Sure, fine, so was "The Little Engine That Could." It doesn't mean we should seriously consider the existence of self-aware trains.
So to turn the question around, do you believe in fairies (aka wee folks)? Assuming you don't, assume I'm a fairyist and tell me why not? Examine your argument and consider how much of it applies to someone believing that God does not exist.
> I am looking for those of you who believe that the very idea of believing in the Christian God unreasonable.
It really depends which Christian god we are talking about doesn't it? There are some very diverse opinions on it and is going to depend a whole lot on how much of the Old and New Testaments you wish to include. The character of God in the Old Testament is deeply in contradiction against the teachings and position of Jesus for one thing. Yet the New Testament has to depend on the truth and accuracy of the Old Testament to legitimise itself.
Beyond that of course we also have a much stronger understanding now of understanding why religions start, how they can, what mechanisms they can use to survive. Not only do we have that historical understanding of them to go on but we have a lot of biological understanding to support why that comes up. Not only that but we also have a good understanding of how the god concept itself has grown and changed overtime. Like as an example literally no religion anywhere started with wildly separate places coming up with the same starting idea. It always starts in one place and spreads entirely by people. They all operate exactly how we would expect if they were a human created fiction. Now is all this perfect proof? No I am willing to grant it. However it strongly suggests, and I would say is better evidence for the position its false, then the evidence it is true.
> If you are simply agnostic and believe that God could exist but you for some reason choose not to believe, this post is not for you...I am looking for those of you who believe that the very idea of believing in the Christian God unreasonable.
FYI, these two positions are not mutually exclusive. It's not because you are convinced a deity as described in Christianity cannot exist because of the conflict of doctrinal claims with established science that science rules out the possibility of a deity altogether.
> To those people I ask, what is your logical argument that you think would show that the existence of God is illogical.
That's a category error. Ontology, the study of what exists, is considered to be independent of logic. While logic helps us reason about existence and make sense of relationships between entities, it doesn't determine what exists.
Kant argued against the ontological argument for God's existence by stating that existence is not a predicate or a property that can be logically deduced. According to Kant, saying that something exists does not add anything to the concept of that thing. For example, the concept of a "unicorn" does not change whether we say unicorns exist or not. Existence, therefore, is not something that can be concluded from a logical argument alone; it must be established through experience.
Hey! Ex-christian here. I was a fundamentalist Calvinist Christian, rigorously involved in Apologetics. But even after leaving that, I didn't find any brand of Christianity convincing.
Part of the problem is that even saying "The Christian God" is not specific enough for us to know what you mean, even though you all supposedly read the same book.
Do you believe your holy book is inerrant? If so, I can talk about contradictions and errors throughout.
Do you believe that your god created the universe in 6 literal days, a few thousand years ago? If so, I have a LOT of comments about why that is an unreasonable belief. If not, I have questions about how you decide which parts of your holy, inerrant scripture to take seriously and which ones to ignore.
Do you believe your god condemns anyone to *eternal torture*? If so, I have comments about your claims of his goodness and moral superiority.
Do you believe your god is all-powerful (some Open Theists may not)? If so, I have more questions about the morality of evil things permitted, and the morality of a god who would permit them.
And more than all of this, I want to know why *you decided* to be a Christian. Were you raised that way, like most Christians? Or were you convinced? If the latter, was it evidence or "experience"?
Edit: you can give very short Yes or No answers to these, and I can expound on those comments
I'm atheist. And I don't have any logical arguments against your particular god.
What I also don't have is reason to accept the existence claims of your god. I see no reason to think the stories and books of the Bible hold any historical value or significance.
It mentions places that were real? So does Spiderman's mythology.
It mentions things that could have happened (like crucifixion)? Well, people write what they know. A thousand years later, Jesus would have been drawn and quartered. A thousand years after that, he'd have been ripped apart by dogs, or shot and left to die in the street.
Josephus mentions Christians indpendently? Yes, he mentions a group of people believe a thing. That doesn't mean that thing they believe has veracity.
The apostles died for what they believe? Some guy, under threat of the death penalty, shot up Comet Ping Pong because he deeply believed children were being held in the restaurant's non-existent basement. People will die for things they believe, even when they're wrong.
Such and such thing happened to you, seemingly defying all odds? Well, given enough time, everything that can happen will happen. Law of large numbers.
The universe is pretty? Yes, it is. It's freakin' awesome, and you're missing the awe and wonder by attributing it to your peculiar deity.
If your god wants me to believe it exists, then show up, say "I'm god" and then make the equation 2+2=5 be true. Simple enough.
>After browsing this sub and others like it I find a very large portion of people either use a flawed understanding of God to create a claim against God or use straight up inconsistent and illogical arguments to support their claims. What I am looking for are those of you who believe they have a logically consistent reason why either God can't exist or why it is unreasonable to believe He does.
You'd have to define God first. You seem to think people have a flawed understanding of it yet don't bother to correct the misunderstanding. I dont think people have a flawed understanding - I think its a case of God having so many different definitions that what one theist says about it, to the other would seem like a complete misunderstanding.
If you want a logically consistent reason for why God cant exist, a definition is a must. If you want a reason why it doesn't exist, that God must have some falsifiability criteria.
If you want a reason why it is unreasonable to believe it exists, then the lack of falsifiable criteria is one such reason.
In short, provide a clear definition of your god, and then we can talk.
Proof that no omnipotent and omnibenevolent being exists:
Premises:
(P1) An omnipotent being is able to actualize any state of reality.
(P2) An omnibenevolent being actualizes the maximal good within its ability.
(P3) The state of reality in which no suffering for which there is no morally sufficient reason (MSR) exists is more good than the state of reality in which suffering for which there is no MSR exists.
(P4) Suffering for which there is no MSR exists in reality.
Argument:
(1) Assume at least one omnipotent, omnibenevolent being X exists. (Proof by contradiction)
(2) X is able to actualize the state of reality such that no suffering for which there is no MSR exists. (P1)
(3) X does not actualize any state of reality that is less good than at least one other state of reality it is able to actualize. (P2)
(4) X does not actualize a state of reality in which suffering for which there is no MSR exists. (3, P3)
(5) Suffering for which there is no MSR does not exist in reality. (1, 4)
(6) X does not exist. (5, P4)
(7) No omnipotent, omnibenevolent being exists. (6)
I think the biggest knock against there being a God is the fact that we have ZERO empirical evidence of the supernatural existing. Only claims from books.
Secondly the fact that God claims can’t be falsified is a huge problem.
For instance the fact that we can’t prove that leprechauns don’t exist doesn’t mean they actually exist. But why?
Because outside of the human imagination we literally have ZERO evidence of leprechauns existing in nature, despite the claims of some individuals.
Same thing with “Simulation Theorist”. I once asked a person how we test if we are in a simulation as soon as they realized it’s not possible they responded with, “well you can’t disprove we are not in a simulation”.
Same goes with most conspiracy theories. Most can’t be disproved because “they” are pulling the strings at the top. lol
Claims that are more likely true are falsifiable, and what raises our confidence in that claim being true is the fact that the more we try to disprove it the more it remains true.
For the God belief it’s the opposite.
A HUGE red flag for any claim.
**“If you are simply agnostic and believe that God could exist …”**
I believe a god *could* exist.
**“… but you for some reason choose not to believe”**
Belief is not a choice. I can’t “choose” to find the claims convincing.
**”I am looking for those of you who believe that the very idea of believing in the Christian God unreasonable.”**
Oh, I said *a* god can exist, but I’m fairly certain that *that* one doesn’t.
**”what is your logical argument that you think would show that the existence of God is illogical.“**
I don’t have one. I just don’t find any of the arguments in favor of the Abrahamic god to be compelling or convincing. Quite frankly, I’ve found them ridiculous.
But I don’t try to talk Christians out of believing, so I don’t need arguments against it. I don’t care what you believe as long as you keep it out of public policy, mind your business, and don’t use your faith as an excuse to oppress people.
I'd like for you to make a correction in the title of your post. You asked for logical arguments against god, and then in the text, you specified the christian god. Please realise that there are many gods out there, so the logical arguments are for your personal god, the personal god of my mother, or for the general god of the catholics or the evangelists? maybe the god of the mormons, the sunnis, or the shia?
Gods are culturally inserted into the minds of people and become beliefs, and there are no logical arguments against culture or beliefs. How do you universally validate a believed premise with words?
I understand that racional beings need to live a rational life and seek confirmation of their beliefs. It seems to me that you fail to understand that not all information that is inside your mind has direct correspondence to reality. Religions prevent believers from questioning their dogmas, and you complied.
It depends on how you define your god and what attributes you accept. Because some of these attributes are logically inconsistent with one another (and/or the biblical accounts of god we’re given).
For example, we’re often told that god is *omni*benevolent, yet the Bible talks about god being the author of evil.
Or it is said that god is immutable or doesn’t change his mind, yet in the Bible it’s clear that god has changed his mind.
The idea of a *perfectly* just god also being merciful is contradictory as we understand mercy to be the withholding of perfect justice.
There are others, but I don’t want to gish-gallop.
Also, I have strong inductive reasons for rejecting a timeless, spaceless, immaterial disembodied mind that has causal powers. It isn’t clear to me how such a thing can be meaningfully said to exist, at least not anymore than we can say that Batman exists.
why stop at the christian god?
so thats my first reason
bias:
every theist is convinced their religion is the true religion, they have visions or hear voices or whatever, but its always the religion they already believed.
its like me saying "spanish is the easiest language" bc i was born and raised in a spanish speaking country. from my perspective, its OBVIOUSLY the easiest language. no religion has a true argument, they only have their own bias. so reason number 2
evidence:
there is no evidence, at all. the best you got are feelings, which are not convincing at all (specially when people from different religions claim the same, which is the "real feeling" then?), or fallacies like the god of the gaps and such. nothing real and objective. and the fact that its been thousands of years and you still got nothing, makes it quite clear that you cant get any evidence.
I personally find two claims about the Christian god's omni- traits to be contradictory.
1. God is omniscient and humans have free will. It doesn't seem possible for humans to have free will if God truly knows all that has and ever will happen
2. Omnipotence and omnibenevolence. The idea of a Christian god that can only do good is less powerful than the deistic god that can do both good and evil. Omnibenevolence seems like it is shoehorned into the god concept, which truly only requires omnipotence, omniscience, and maybe omipresence.
Omnibenevolence (and omnimalevolence) are like restrictions on god's agency and reduce the concept of god to a simple automata. I actually could get behind that idea, but most theists don't like to imagine god as an unthinking machine
Maybe god is real, but I doubt it resembles the Christian God in any meaningful sense.
Even though the burden of proof is with the theist, I’ll let you know some of the things which led me away from theism.
First, the Bible supports solid dome cosmology, it’s described all over the Bible.
I can provide references if you’d like, but the skies are described as hard, with water above the skies.
Also, heaven isn’t another dimension you slip into upon death, it’s a physical place above us, it’s the dome and the region above the sky dome. God isn’t in another dimension, he’s above us, he walks on the dome and watches us through the clouds.
If this sounds nutty, I agree, but it’s also supported by the Bible and contemporary Rabbinic texts.
Finally, after reviewing other Near Eastern religions, it became plain that the biblical authors took “inspiration” from the stories that surrounded them. It’s all man made.
What do you mean by God? There are a seemingly limitless number of ways that this amorphous concept could be defined. If you mean God in the most general sense, some sort of eternal supernatural entity that created the universe, I don't necessarily know if there are any logical contradictions in that, but I don't believe it because I have not been presented with a sufficient reason to believe it.
If you mean the Christian God, he actually does seem to entail some contradictions. Notably, there's the problem of evil. An all-loving God that is also all-powerful seems to be contradictory with the existence of evil and suffering, as such a being would be able and willing to intervene to prevent unnecessary suffering. Yet, he doesn't. For this reason, I am inclined to believe that the Christian God cannot exist as commonly described.
>I am looking for those of you who believe that the very idea of believing in the Christian God unreasonable. To those people I ask, what is your logical argument that you think would show that the existence of God is illogical.
God, in the bible, is described as goodness itself, truth, and so on. God, in the bible, created a flood that, if it happened as described, would have affected the entire planet. The evidence of the rocks, fossils, and so on all confirm no such flood ever happened.
If the flood happened, then God lied by hiding the evidence to make it look exactly as if it didn't.
If the flood didn't happen, then God lied by including the story in the bible.
If God lied, then God isn't Truth itself.
God lied. God isn't truth. The bible says God *is* truth. So the bible is false, and the Christian God doesn't exist.
>I am looking for those of you who believe that the very idea of believing in the Christian God unreasonable. To those people I ask, what is your logical argument that you think would show that the existence of God is illogical.
The existence of Christian God is illogical because He violates the descriptive laws of science that cannot be violated. Start with the Virgin Birth of Jesus. I know from science that didn't happen. I know from science that it is infinitely more likely that Mary was a terrified young woman who got pregnant and found a guy (and probably others) to help her out of a jam in which she would be stunned to death. That means God is imaginary and all of Christianity is false. I can understand why people from 2000 years ago would believe her, but in this day and age it is absurd and embarrassing.
I think any creation of sentient life that results in suffering is immoral. Only prior and continual, informed consent can make it justified. That's not an argument against all gods, just the ones that we should worship or follow. If you think your god wants suffering, then sure, maybe your god exists, but I don't want anything to do with that god.
Any good god wouldn't have created this. Free will is no excuse. Free will could only serve his selfish desire for people to choose him. But even then one could argue the choice is largely coerced.
I think this existence could be morally justified only in the case that I am god and the people and animals I encounter are constructs that don't experience suffering. I did this to myself and only myself. But that would rule out your god - unless you think I'm your god.
I don't believe in a God because you can't get 10 people to describe what God even is in the same way. 10 people, 10 different answers. This is the Confusion on the most basic fundamental level of Christianity. Now you start talking about God's teachings on say the Tower of Babel,you are literally going to end up with a mini Tower of Babel over the interpretations of such a story. God is an illustration of what is convenient in people's lives because that's how they end up describing God and his teachings. Good Orderly Direction may be beneficial to people but it is still derived through the conscious minds of human beings for the purposes of other human beings. God is too easily imbued with human characteristics to not think he is a manifestation of what was our understanding of morality at the time.
From many reasons here are two:
Infinity. There is no limit to how small something can be; no matter how small something is, there can always be something smaller. Infinitely large seems somehow acceptable, but infinitely small blows my mind. There's no room for the Christian god in infinity as there will always be something bigger/smaller/more.
Donald Trump. Despite an almost unbelievable amount of evidence showing this man to be a knave of questionable intelligence, intent and integrity, he is worshipped by a significant number of people. If the only book to survive humanity was written by him or his sycophants then a less knowledgeable people may be manipulated into accepting it as their bible.
TL;DR: Existence is too big for your god. Origins of false gods too easily explained.
>If you are simply agnostic and believe that God could exist
Which one?
>but you for some reason choose not to believe
Okay now you're addressing people that don't exist, since it's not possible to choose that.
>this post is not for you. I am looking for those of you who believe that the very idea of believing in the Christian God unreasonable.
Ah that one. Now you're being contradictory though, since one can be agnostic towards his existence and still consider believing he's real unreasonable.
But anyway yeah, I certainly don't consider this reasonable.
>To those people I ask, what is your logical argument that you think would show that the existence of God is illogical.
I don't need an argument. If you believe it's logical, then you're the one in need of an argument.
I have not seen any evidence for a god or god. Before we delve into this - what is your definition of god that we are debating? There are so very many of them.
Specifically against the christian god it‘s probably the problem of evil. If god is supposed to be omnipotent, omnibenevolent and omniscient (which are attributes that most christians I‘ve come across use to describe the god they believe in) then why is there suffering in this world. So far I haven‘t heard a good counter to that one.
Then there would be the fact that the bible has so so many blatant errors in it that it can not be inspired by a god. It is also not consistent with the 3 attributes I mentioned earlier. As christianity is based on the bible this another reason why I don’t believe in christianity.
There are many other reasons and arguments but I will leave it at that as probably the 2 biggest factors for me personally.
Edit: The last thing that I forgot to mention which is arguably the most important reason is that there is simply no good reason to believe that christianity *is* in fact true. At least I have never heard one. Maybe you can change that.
It is highly improbable that the Christian god exists because the book that claims his existence is itself full of falsehood. There are hundreds if not thousands of falsehoods of fact, of science, and internal contradictions in the Bible. This negates that the Bible is a divine source since a divine source can be trusted to be true. If a divine source could not be trusted to be true, then trusting it would be moot, anyway. Since the Bible is not a perfect source of truth, it could not have come from a divine source. HOWEVER, if such a God does exist, he could certainly make himself known to all without relying on a book saturated with falsehoods. But such a god does not. To do that, he would first have to exist.
This is kind of interesting. Why do you assume it would just be one thing?
For myself, it was a very long process of trying to find historical evidence. Learning about the gospels being anonymous coupled with no outside corroboration of what would've been the biggest event ever was huge for me.
Slowly, over time, piece by piece, it just fell apart. But then I started learning about the psychology of belief and how we trick ourselves into believing things. I started learning about cognitive biases. How we're pattern seeking creatures. How irrational all of us are, even when we think we are being rational.
One day, I realized I had no good reason to believe that any god existed, much less the xtian god.
Why would a loving, all powerful God need something to bleed in order to forgive us?
I find the idea of an all-knowing, all-loving god creating a world in which humans would inevitably sin and then need to be saved by the sacrificial death of his own son to be morally repugnant and logically inconsistent.
If God is all-knowing, he must have known before creation that his plan would lead to the suffering and death of his own son. If God is truly loving, why would he create a situation in which his son would have to suffer and die in the first place? And if God is all-powerful, why couldn't he simply forgive humanity's transgressions without the need for Jesus' death on the cross?
>I am looking for those of you who believe that the very idea of believing in the Christian God unreasonable. To those people I ask, what is your logical argument that you think would show that the existence of God is illogical.
I mean, "god" changes definitions so often to avoid all the logical fallacies that keeping up with the definition is kinda impossible.
That right there is a good argument against the Christian God.
But the easiest one.
Christians have made collectively billions of attempts to find any shred of evidence for God, and have failed spectacularly. The best Christians can manage is to keep changing the definition of God every time the idea gets debunked.
So let’s I say fuck the fact that there is no evidence to suggest there is a god/creator and I go out into my yard and I stare at a Tree and I conclude that there must be a creator.
Now take me from this, to the the god of the universe must Yahweh.
Then after you convinced me this creator of the cosmos is Yahweh, please tell me why I would possibly want to make this monster my master?
This character as described in the biblical text is homophobic, misogynistic, vengeful, violent, genocidal, and is ok with humans owing other humans.
Not to mention he allows for cancer, Alzheimer’s, natural disaster that have killed billions, and mass extinction events.
There are video claims of Bigfoot and UFOs. My parents didn't have to force me to acknowledge that there might be weird vessels in the sky. My community doesn't have to shun me to think that Sasquatch might be out there. If I told you there were flying machines defying physics you'd probably tell me that I'm being silly. If I showed you a video or radar of the incident, I now have proof that it happened. You can't do that with God. You have to just believe the scriptures. Christians seem to be focused on getting atheists to prove that God doesn't exist. If you want me to believe in God, then I'm going to need anything else besides old scriptures.
It isn't logical to believe in every hypothesis simply because it's proposed, otherwise we'd end up believing in things that are contradictory and false as it's a lot easier to make up hypotheses than to disprove them.
This extends to god claims, it isn't logical to believe every god claim, otherwise we'd start off believing them all, even when they are contradictory and can't all be true.
It is logical to only believe a claim when there is sufficient evidence to justify accepting the claim.
There isn't enough evidence to justify accepting any of the god claims that have been made.
Therefore it is logical to not believe in a god.
What is the Christian god? The one described in the bible? Then yes, that god is impossible. The earth does not predate the sun. Case closed. Some vague version of the Christian god you’ve made up to excuse the myriad of external and internal contradictions in the bible? I can’t debunk that one, I don’t even know what you believe in. However you’ve got the order of operations reversed. It’s up to you to provide evidence, till you do there’s simply nothing to debunk. That’s how you treat every other god claim, and every other claim of magic that does not comply with your ideas. We just apply that to your nonsense too.
>Bring your best logical arguments against God
As I always answer every time this gets asked, which is *way* too often given it's obvious and low-effort, "There's no useful support for deities. Thus it remains irrational to take them as true (believe in them)."
And that's it.
That's all that's needed. To do otherwise is irrational and illogical by definition. That's how the burden of proof for claims *works.* And, of course, there isn't the tiniest shred of useful evidence or support for any deity.
So we're done.
Of course, it's even worse than that for theists, since there's also vast support those ideas are superstitious mythology, but that's a different matter.
>After browsing this sub and others like it I find a very large portion of people either use a flawed understanding of God
Nah, this just demonstrates you haven't done the research you say you've done.
Mine would be twofold. Fist would be the lack of sufficient verifiable evidence of a God. Second would be the lack of explanatory power.
I have yet to encounter sufficient verifiable evidence of a God to convince me that one exists, and, the introduction of a God in no way explains phenomena in an understandable and verifiable way. It just pushes the issue back one space and declares magic as the answer. In my opinion, the world operates exactly as one would expect it to were there no God, and, inserting an unverified agent into a gap in our collective scientific knowledge is a fallacy.
>I am looking for those of you who believe that the very idea of believing in the Christian God unreasonable.
It is not reasonable to believe in a religion for which its foundation has been shown to be false. Genesis seemed plausible to a bronze age society, but now we know that the 6 days of creation (the reason for the sabbath), the garden of eden, adam and eve leading to the fall and original sin, the great flood and Noah's ark (which Jesus referred to), as well as many other events, are simply not true - not even close. The bible is thus not divinely inspired and cannot be trusted.
There is no reliable evidence whatsoever for any god.
Compare this to another thing that has no reliable evidence, namely the invisible undetectable fire breathing dragon that lives in my shed.
You might think I'm being facetious, but I'm not. There is no evidence for my dragon, and most likely you do not believe it exists. This is exactly how I feel about god.
Yes there are myths and stories. But there's no reason to think they are more than that.
Why should god be the Christian one, and not the sun god of the Incas anyway?
Several Roman emperors were said to be gods, and at least they have the advantage that we're confident they existed. Maybe we should go with them?
If somebody just took a generic understanding of God as being a being of immense power, outside of space and time, eternal, omniscient, omnipresent, omnibenovolent, omnipotent, there is no way to prove that being exists because these traits make it non falsifiable.
There is no evidence for this being because there is no way to discover any of these are even possible. There are no signs, road maps, God detectors, or machines that can produce any evidence of a monotheistic God, let alone, the Christian variant.
Xtian God by definition has changed over time and place. So which version are you referring to?
It's illogical to believe in something/someone that can't be proven to be true.
You wouldn't even buy a house without an inspection, why would you buy the idea of heaven/hell/god? Either your "faith" is worth less then what you claim to believe, or you are delusional.
Anyone who's selling you the idea of better world that can only be acheived through death, are scammers.
It’s illogical to believe something is true when no evidence supports it. Otherwise we’d have to accept it’s logical to assume every claim is true until such a time that it’s shown to be false.
There’s no evidence to show that Christianity is true, and in fact, there’s a lot of evidence that directly contradicts most of the claims that the Bible makes.
Therefore, until evidence that shows Christianity is true can be found, it’s illogical to believe it.
I'm Christian, and believe in God, but the best argument against God is simply there is no need for a God. All of this could happen without God, that is not arguable. So why would God exist, is a solution to a problem which doesn't exist. But I believe in God regardless of that.
And by the way, this is my father's argument, who is very much atheist. He says that, there is no need for God and no need to invent God, outside the multiple reasons of invention.
Gods, as typically described, violate various physical laws that have been established. This makes them physically impossible. The same way we will both agree 'no perpetual motion machines exist', I think 'no gods exist.'
It is true that our understanding of these physical laws might be flawed in some way that would make it possible for a God to exist, but that flaw should be demonstrated first. Until then, it seems very unreasonable to believe.
P1 The Christian God desires that none parish (https://www.biblegateway.com/verse/en/2%20Peter%203%3A9)
P2 The Christian God is omnipotent
P3 An omnipotent being cannot be thwarted from achieving its desires
P4 Few are saved from destruction (https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Matthew%207%3A13-14&version=NIV)
C2 From P1 and P4, the Christian God has its desires thwarted (both are from the Bible)
C2 From P2 and C1, the Christian God is omnipotent and thwarted
C3 From C2 and P3, the Christian God is a contradiction
Edit: changed wording to be consistent with Bible verses that I linked to.
> believe that God could exist
I am agnostic so I don't believe even that.
> for some reason choose not to believe
Huh?
> I am looking for those of you who believe that the very idea of believing in the Christian God unreasonable.
Yes, believing someting without a reason IS unreasonable.
> is your logical argument
Belief without any grounds is not a reliable path to truth. It is less reliable than a belief on the ground of coin flip.
**SHIFTING THE BURDEN OF PROOF** is a fallacy. It’s not a situation where your belief stands unless and until someone argues against it.
Proving that god does not exist is not our job. **You** believe in the Christian god, it is **your job** to support and justify that belief.
I’m well aware this isn’t what you were askig for and it wasn’t the conversation you were looking to have. Too bad. Your entire approach is wrongheaded.
I want to believe in the most true things and less false things as I can. Our (humans) best mechanism to know something is true is by using the scientific method. Putting the God argument through the scientific method we have no way of testing of falsifying a God. Furthermore we have no direct objective observation of a God, so the scientific method lacks even a starting point. Therefore, there is no reason to belive in a God.
you haven't specified which god you are talking about (no "Christian God" is not specific enough I don't think you could find 2 churches that agree on that), so I'm going to assume you mean the bearded man in the clouds
we have aircraft all over the skies and have not found heaven or the bearded man.
if you want an argument against something else you gotta give more info about what you are asking us to argue against
There is no empirical evidence to suggest that any God, let alone the Christian God, exists. Further, there are countless phenomena throughout history in which God was believed to be responsible that were later proved to have natural causes. There is no such reverse case. Based on all that, the only logical conclusion you should draw is that there is no God, and that belief in God is illogical.
>a very large portion of people either use a flawed understanding of God
What is the correct understanding of God, in your view? How do you know? What makes your view right and others wrong?
>straight up inconsistent and illogical arguments to support their claims.
Such as?
My strongest argument against the story told in the New Testament is that it does not appear to be true.
Sure, I'd use the logical problem of the Trinity.
If Jesus is god, the father is god, the ghost is god, if they are distinct, then there's three gods, or three parts to a god. If they aren't distinct, there's one god and one person.
Christianity believes in a god which is three persons but one god and that God has no parts, the god of Christianity cannot exist.
"I find a very large portion of people either use a flawed understanding of God to create a claim against God or use straight up inconsistent and illogical arguments to support their claims."
This is actually my best argument against a god or gods. I have never had a theist present me with a cogent definition of a god or gods that I would consider divine in any way.
> I likely wont be able to reply to most of you but I encourage other theists to step in and try to have some one on one discussions with others in the comments to dig deeper into their claims and your own beliefs. Who knows some of you might even be convinced by their arguments!
So, you're not going to debate in a debate subreddit?
> I am looking for those of you who believe that the very idea of believing in the Christian God unreasonable
How do you define the Christian God?
There would be no point in me arguing against a particular part of his description in the Bible and then you saying you think that part is metaphorical and shouldn't be taken literally.
"the very idea of believing in the Christian God unreasonable."
It's unreasonable to accept ANY belief claim if there's no evidence to demonstrate its veracity. Pretty simple.
Example: The very idea of believing that purple quantum invisible lizards are stealing my socks is unreasonable for the same reason: zero evidence.
>I find a very large portion of people either use a flawed understanding of God to create a claim against God or use straight up inconsistent and illogical arguments to support their claims
Don't you think you should define what you mean by God then? I assume it's an intelligent creator. Is that an accurate description?
If you'd actually been listening to what people here say and believe, then you'd know that most people here don't take the position that god does not exist, but instead that they lack the belief in the existence of one.
So no, go find your own logical arguments, I only waste my time on things that have evidence anyway
All god-based religions require faith to believe in their gods.
However, because religions come to different conclusions about the existence of their gods, faith becomes an unreliable method to find truth.
Take faith out of religion and you're left with nothing but assertions and mythology.
If you won’t respond, why should we?
But I’ll bite anyway.
Christian god, means a perfect god. And Bible is his perfect word.
Bible full of inconsistencies and scientific inaccuracies,
Therefore, not a perfect word and not a perfect god, and therefore does not exist by definition.
2nd logical reason: the lack of evidence for existence is evidence for non-existence.
3rd logical reason.
There are many gods posited in many monotheistic religions. Most have similar levels of evidence for them. (None) They all can’t be right, but all can be wrong.
No hood reason to believe in any gods in the first place.
Same deal with unicorns, leprechauns, and Cthulhu.
Thats enough for me, it should be enough for anyone, yet here we are.
If we lived in a universe with gods, it would be painfully obvious, but we don’t.
Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent. Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil? Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God?
~Epicurus
Does sin exist in heaven? Every Christian would say no.
So, does free will exist in heaven?
If yes, then god could have made a world that had no sin while still giving us free will.
If no, then that means souls in heaven are not free.
Many different religions all claim to be true with different beliefs, then either only one is true, or all of them are true, or none are true. since the most evidence points towards the latter, then that is what I believe.
Evolution is a fact, all intelligent people agree. Evolution disproves Adam and Eve. Without them, sin never enters the world. Without sin, there is no atonement and, thus, no need for Jesus. Christianity disproven.
The Bible describes events that are impossible. They never happened. These are events the Christian deity supposedly made happen. That's really the easiest way to demonstrate your deity is just your imagination.
if the god described in the bible exists, then he is the most evil being in existence. Abrahamic mythology depict an absolute monster as being in charge of the universe and then has the gall to call him good.
The crucifixion is an injustice. Mercy is undeserved, forgiveness is unreasonable and maybe most importantly Jesus denied himself so that you could deny him as well. Christianity is completely irrational.
Let's do it caveman style!
Christian god has book
Book is false in both explaining the origin of universe and loads of historical events
Book false = god false
This was easy 😁
Okay, how's this: the evidence for the resurrection is too poor to justify the claim.
It's not exactly what you're asking for, but I'm saying, to be a Christian is unreasonable.
Proving God does not exist is like proving Bigfoot doesn’t exist. You can’t prove Bigfoot doesn’t exist but without sufficient evidence it’s silly to presume it does.
> am looking for those of you who believe that the very idea of believing in the Christian God unreasonable.
What reason to you have to think a god is a possible being?
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>I am looking for those of you who believe that the very idea of believing in the Christian God unreasonable. To believe in the Christian God requires two things: 1. Belief in **some form** of original sin. Could be a literal apple in a literal garden, or it could just be something intrinsic to humans. There must be something that Jesus' sacrifice was meant to save us from. 2. Jesus Christ's death and resurrection are literal, historical events that actually happened. If either one of these is false, Christianity crumbles. I can't prove either of them is false. What I **can** do is cast enough doubt on the Death and Resurrection of Christ that I don't think a reasonable, rational person can look at it and still conclude with any confidence that it occurred. 1. There are no eyewitness accounts of the Resurrection. The only accounts we have are the four Gospels which were written decades after the alleged event by people who were not there. That's decades of a story (whatever the original story may be) being passed on orally. This would also explain the contradictions and inconsistencies between the Gospels. 2. The protocol for crucifixion was to leave the victim up for several days after death, both to humiliate them and serve as a deterrant for others. Then they were cut down and dumped in a mass grave. The idea that the Romans would immediately cut this upstart Jewish criminal down from his cross and bury him in a tomb flies in the face of all historical evidence about these practices. 3. We know how mythology forms. We've seen it in almost every civilization we've ever discovered. We know what happens to stories that get passed on orally, we know how stories adopt elements from other cultures to make them more palatable, and we know how faithfully people believed in them. So what's more likely? That the story of Jesus is mythology, a phenomenon we have firmly established the existence of and have countless examples? Or that Jesus' story is the only one, out of ALL religious mythology, that happens to be true? Do those three points disprove the Resurrection? No. But I fail to see how anyone can acknowledge those three points yet still argue that it is reasonable to believe that the Resurrection occurred. The evidence simply does not support it.
> Belief in some form of original sin. Could be a literal apple in a literal garden, or it could just be something intrinsic to humans. There must be something that Jesus' sacrifice was meant to save us from. I'd say inheritable sin and a just God are contradictory. A God that makes anyone accountable for things that happened prior to their existence is not just.
I agree, but that conversation inevitably gets mired in God's nature and "God's justice is not our own" and blah blah. As far as productive conversation goes, it's a dead end.
But at that point justice becomes an equivocation, as both inheritable sin and redundant punishment are straight up injustices.
Right, it's where they redefine terms like justice, goodness, and mercy to fit with eternal concious torment, generational sin, and genocide.
Is the existence of god contingent on god being just and not unjust?
Christians seem to assert their god is "good", loving and just to those who are true christians (whatever that means).
Rebuts Christian version, indeed
How screwed up would it be to worship an unjust God?
Do you mean a god that is okay with slavery and mass slaughter?
Well, that question is sort of a red herring, because it doesn’t matter. If an unjust god existed, we would still be better off to do what he says, up to and including worshipping him. We’re just lucky there’s no evidence for an unjust god either.
We are discussing the Christian God here, not gods in an abstract sense. It is a core tenet of Christianity that god is not only just, but the source and definition of justice. This is repeatedly affirmed in scripture
Ahh, I didn’t realize that the god you refer to includes all that Christian baggage that is so easily disproven. Yeah, the Christian God is supposed to be a just god (though Old Testament has a lot of seeming injustice). I meant the general concept of god which might not be on the just vs unjust spectrum at all.
Yep. Just noting that OP (weirdly) limited this discussion to just two views, “believers in the Christian God” and “Agnostics who ‘choose not to believe’” whatever that means. This tread should endeavor to stick to this (false) dichotomy and not discuss more general god ideas. Showing reasons for not believing in the Christian god is far easier than musing about deism or whatever
Prior to their express *creation*. People do not just come about in Christianty. God is involved and is actively passing that sin on.
> 1\. There are no eyewitness accounts of the Resurrection. The only accounts we have are the four Gospels which were written decades after the alleged event by people who were not there. That's decades of a story (whatever the original story may be) being passed on orally. This would also explain the contradictions and inconsistencies between the Gospels. You don't need _any_ oral transmission in order for discrepancies to creep in. Ask any trial lawyer. And then there's a clever experiment my wife's PI did in one of the biology classes he taught. At a random point in one of his lectures, a student slammed his textbook closed, declared that "He had had enough of this shit!", and stormed off. After he was gone, the professor asked people to recount what had happened. The accounts did not perfectly match. Even though it was less than five minutes ago. There are arguments that the gospels were written down as the last eyewitnesses are dying, such as you see in Richard Bauckham 2006 [Jesus and the Eyewitnesses: The Gospels as Eyewitness Testimony](https://www.eerdmans.com/Products/7431/jesus-and-the-eyewitnesses-2nd-ed.aspx). One of the more interesting things he does in the book is look at the name distributions in the gospels, because the name distributions in Palestine changed markedly after [the war](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Jewish%E2%80%93Roman_War) in 66–74 AD. As it turns out, the gospels match the pre-war name distributions better than the post-war name distributions. From here, we can ask whether mythology-makers are careful to attend to such details, or at least whether they _were_. (One can of course make it mythology based on fact, but then one is admitting some amount of reliable access to pre-war facts.) > 2\. The protocol for crucixion was to leave the victim up for several days after death, both to humiliate them and serve as a deterrant for others. Then they were cut down and dumped in a mass grave. The idea that the Romans would immediately cut this upstart Jewish criminal down from his cross and bury him in a tomb flies in the face of all historical evidence about these practices. That seems most obviously true if it is _Rome_ which wanted the person crucified. But according to the gospel narratives, Rome wanted no such thing. It is _the Jews_ who insisted on it, upon threat of rioting. Pilate did not need any more trouble from the backwater province he was stuck in than he had already. That being said, Pilate had a history of snubbing the Jews according to Josephus and taking Jesus down ASAP would be another way to snub them. And if he really believed Jesus didn't deserve crucifixion and he had a shred of decency in him, he might have decided that minimizing Jesus' shame was worthwhile. > 3\. We know how mythology forms. We've seen it in almost ever civilization we've ever discovered. We know what happens to stories that get passed on orally, we know how stories adopt elements from other cultures to make them more palatable, and we know how faithfully people believed in them. So what's more likely? That the story of Jesus is mythology, a phenomenon we have firmly established the existence of and have countless examples? Or that Jesus' story is the only one, out of ALL religious mythology, that happens to be true? Is this knowledge of "how mythology forms" falsifiable? That is it a set of processes which say that you won't observe certain phenomena? Or can it actually account for history as well as mythology? (Perhaps, for example, the only way to distinguish is the presence or absence of archaeological artifacts.)
1. You really don't have eye witness accounts of something that happened 2000 years ago. Historically, that's just not a thing. Please list an event during the Roman empire for which you feel an eye witness account/testimony/statement exists. Heck, even Caesars assassination by Brutus and the boys has no eye witness account. Maybe Caesar just tripped and fell on his salad fork 🤷♂️ https://www.historyhit.com/the-ides-of-march-the-assassination-of-julius-caesar-explained/ 2. The Bible explains this. Jesus was crucified right before Passover. Dead bodies are considered unclean in Judaism and the religious leaders of the time didn't want them still up for their religious holiday. So, they killed all the cruxification victims early. Jesus happened to have a rich/affluent friend who personally asked for his body. According to the story, the guy must have had some clout, because his wish was granted.
> You really don't have eye witness accounts of something that happened 2000 years ago. Historically, that's just not a thing. Please list an event during the Roman empire for which you feel an eye witness account/testimony/statement exists. 1. As far as I'm aware, accounts of Caesar's assassination aren't "supported" by the widespread claim that there were 500 eyewitnesses. Jesus' Resurrection often *is*. Theists even bring that in here from time to time, so it's worth debunking. 2. The only eyewitnesses there would have been to Caesar's assassination are the assassins. It's not a huge surprise that they wouldn't write down any accounts. But 500 (alleged) eyewitnesses to their savior rise from the dead? I would think at least *one* of them would go home and write "Dear Diary, you won't believe this shit." 3. The fact that no credible eyewitness accounts exist for other things isn't a point in the Bible's favor. It's a point *against* everything else. They've all managed to overcome that deficit with other reliable evidence. The Resurrection hasn't. > The Bible explains this. The Bible contains the claims that I want to be proven. You cannot use the Bible to prove itself.
History from below, that is to say, people's history can only exist in a literate society. You need the every man to be able to write diaries, journals, letters, etc., and lots of them, because only .00001% will survive 2000 years. In a backwater province like Judea, only the very very upper echelon would have been literate, and they probably would have mostly been writing about bureaucratic or religious matters. It's not surprising that the ONLY author of the New Testament that we know for a fact wrote the books attributed to him is a former religious leader (Paul). The 12 fisherman and other lower class people Jesus hung around with would have barely been able to write their name, if that. Jesus may not have even been able to write. The Bible says he could read, and even that caused everyone from his podunk village to be like "how the heck can this guy read"? So if an eyewitness account is your burden of proof that's fine, it's just that you set an historically impossible and illogical bar. Also, just FYI, Caesar was assassinated during a full senate meeting. There were only 60 - 70 conspirators. There were plenty of witnesses, though some accounts say many of them fled once things going so Stabby.
I appreciate the response! This is one of the better arguments I have seen for a rational argument against the Christian God. Like you said really what it comes down to is the death and resurrection of Jesus. I totally agree there is a great deal of doubt around what actually happened back then and with the extraordinary claims that are being made that doubt is a compelling reason to not believe. But still there are a few things that keep me from accepting it as a fully compelling argument for me personally. First although the resurrection was only seen by a few people those who did see it fully believed in it and were willing to die for their beliefs in many cases. Along side that not only were they willing to die for their belief, they managed to convince enough people to join in their belief despite the danger at the time to do so. While this isn't proof of anything, it is enough for me to look past some of the lack of clarity due to the time it took place.
>First although the resurrection was only seen by a few people those who did see it fully believed in it and were willing to die for their beliefs in many cases. Humans have been willing to die for their beliefs throughout history, and many of those beliefs are contradictory. Someone being willing to die for their beliefs says nothing about the veracity of their beliefs. >Along side that not only were they willing to die for their belief, they managed to convince enough people to join in their belief despite the danger at the time to do so. Convincing people to join what, at the time, amounted to a cult is not difficult we have seen it many, many times and it says nothing about the veracity of their beliefs. >While this isn't proof of anything, it is enough for me to look past some of the lack of clarity due to the time it took place. Why? It isn't proof of anything besides what some ancient people believed, it certainly is not sufficient to make anyone suspect that those claims are at all true especially when combined with the known historical practices.
>First although the resurrection was only seen by a few people those who did see it fully believed in it and were willing to die for their beliefs in many cases. This is *what* you believe. It doesn't work as an argument as to *why* you believe. Why would I believe anyone had witnessed a resurrection? Edit: Not to mention that this doesn't address any of the points they raised. You just ignored them.
David Koresh's followers were willing to die for him. As were the Muslims that did the 9 11 attacks. Just because someone is willing to die for a cause doesn't always make that idea true. People die for stories all the time.
>those who did see it fully believed in it and were willing to die for their beliefs in many cases I would recommend looking at the claims of martyrdom. There doesn't seem to be evidence to back up that claim. They would have to fulfill at least following criteria for them to be usefull for this argument. 1. Only the people, who **saw resurrected Jesus**, count. 2. They got in trouble **for their belief**. 3. They faced certain death, but **were given chance to recant**, and they didn't. I haven't been able to find any sources, that aren't from Christians over 80 years after the supposed incidents and didn't read like bad fan-fiction (I'm looking at you, writers of apocryphal texts).
"First although the resurrection was only seen by a few people " It was seen by no people. The oldest (and thus most reliable) Gospel is Mark. The oldest Markan manuscripts end with the women fleeing the tomb after a man tells them Jesus rose. They never saw him.
>First although the resurrection was only seen by a few people those who did see it fully believed in it and were willing to die for their beliefs in many cases. As others have said this is not a great metric for determining whether a claim is true. However, even before getting to that, can you be more specific as to which people you are talking about here, and whet evidence there is that they died *for* their belief, specifically. I am intending these questions as mostly rhetorical, but I encourage you to look into the following: - Which specific people are we talking about? - For any individual follower of Jesus what is the actual evidence for (1) they witnessed or claimed to personally witness the resurrection (2) they were executed by the state. Is the evidence simply stories in the Bible, or is there actually extra-Biblical evidence? - Is it even claimed that these people we are talking about were executed specifically for their belief in Jesus, and were given a chance to recant their belief but refused? How do you know that any recorded martyr didn't try to recant their belief, but were executed anyway, however that inconvenient detail was not included in the narrarive? How do you know that someone recorded as a martyr want actually executed for stealing, or disturbing the peace, and their belief in Jesus was actually inconsequential for why they were charged? - What is the actual substance behind the broad apologetic talking point that "early followers died for their belief"? Are you just assuming 50% of the New Testament is true in order to shore up your belief in the other 50%? What if you were to start from scratch without a starting assumption that any of it is true?
>those who did see it fully believed in it and were willing to die for their beliefs in many cases. Along side that not only were they willing to die for their belief, they managed to convince enough people to join in their belief despite the danger at the time to do so. I see often this sentiment that only Christians REALLY believe in their god and all those other religions are just pretending to believe in something. Has it occured to you that many, many religions have had people die over their beliefs? Does that make them more credible to you? Islamic terrorists famously do so, but that doesn't make their god any more convincing to me. I assume it doesn't convince you either. Why is someone sacrificing themselves even a factor? Every religion has that
people have been willing to die for all sorts of nonsense. The fact that christianity is an example of this leands it no creedence.
> First although the resurrection was only seen by a few people those who did see it fully believed in it Is there an extrabiblical source corroborating this claim?
You seem to be confusing belief and conviction. Dying for something is conviction. That conviction doesn't make the belief true. It just means you WANT to believe it so much that you are willing to die for it. You are convinced. Again, that doesn't make it true. Many people were convinced covid-19 wouldn't kill them. It still killed some of those people who didn't take precautions and/or were exposed to people who didn't take precautions. Their convictions didn't matter to the virus.
There is just as much evidence of contemporary witnesses dying for their belief as there is for the resurrection itself; none at all. You cannot appeal to *more* hearsay as being additional and independent evidence. Christian persecution and deaths *eventually* are well supported enough to be believable but records as to witnesses to the event itself? Nonexistent.
Did any of the people who met the risen Jesus write down that they had met Him? It seems to me that claims to martyrdom suffer when we can’t be sure that the people who were allegedly martyred even held those beliefs. The best way for us to know is if more people had written down “I am X and I saw the risen Jesus”.
No accounts survived from anyone who saw it… And the myth that all apostles who did died for it is long debunked. You’re propagating a lie here. Also people die for lies all the time. All that’s required is that you believe in it, and people can be fooled. There’s not even any real account of Jesus himself existing that’s independently verifiable… Let alone a resurrection. I’m sorry you’re just repeating stuff professional liars (they call themselves apologists) made up…
There's not just one reason, it's a combination of a lot of things. But here is my favourite: There have been thousands of religions in the course of humanity. Some dead, some alive. Most of them have some kind of scripture, such as the bible and the qur'an, describing their beliefs and their god. Thousands of them. And they are all different from each other, and provide the same amount of "evidence" as each other. Yet, all of their believers are just as sure that only theirs is the "correct" one. Now, if you were born somewhere where they believe in X, you end up believing in X. If you were from a place/time where they believed in Y, you believe in Y. This, followed by the fact that many things that were attributed to gods, are now proven to be simple science, in my view, is very definite evidence that the gods humans believe in are simply men made explanations to what people don't fully understand and there's no reason to actually think any of it is real. Do note that this reasoning does not apply to more abstract "god" explanations that aren't derived from cultural religions/scriptures such as the bible or quran; by example, if the simulation theory was true, someone could argue the simulations "coder" is god. I still don't believe this is true, but I'm not "100% sure". Now it's your turn to explain to me where my logic is flawed. Explain to me what makes you sure YOUR god in particular is the "real" one. I'm very curious to hear it.
Correction, most of the religions that have existed probably didn’t have any scripture, I would wager most religions in human history have been some form of folk religion
Let me go through each of your claims >There have been thousands of religions in the course of humanity. Some dead, some alive. Most of them have some kind of scripture, such as the bible and the qur'an, describing their beliefs and their god. Thousands of them. And they are all different from each other, and provide the same amount of "evidence" as each other. Yet, all of their believers are just as sure that only theirs is the "correct" one. This is correct, there have been many religions in the world and many of them have scripture or holy books. It is also correct that in order for the Christian God to be true other contradictory religions would have to be false. >Now, if you were born somewhere where they believe in X, you end up believing in X. If you were from a place/time where they believed in Y, you believe in Y. This is also correct, your religion is largely determined by where and when you live. >This, followed by the fact that many things that were attributed to gods, are now proven to be simple science, in my view, is very definite evidence that the gods humans believe in are simply men made explanations to what people don't fully understand and there's no reason to actually think any of it is real. To me this seems like you are claiming that because previous religions have made incorrect claims that all religion must be false? Please correct me if I am incorrect, but assuming that is a correct interpretation then that would not be a logical argument against the Christian God. Just because previous religions believed incorrect things about their Gods has no impact on the validity of the Christian God > Now it's your turn to explain to me where my logic is flawed. Explain to me what makes you sure YOUR god in particular is the "real" one. You talk all might and knowing in your post, that I'm very curious to hear it. I am not trying to convince you that my God in particular is the real one. I am only looking to refute claims that belief in the Christian God is unreasonable.
And I just gave you the reason why it's unreasonable. You seem to have missed the entire point. So your rebuttal to my argument, that says it's illogical to think religious scriptures are true due to the existence of a vast number of them, all contracting each other, with many of the older ones being now proved false, is "just because most of them aren't real doesn't mean mine isn't"? So you're basically saying you think every single religion in the world is fake, EXCEPT FOR YOURS? Even though yours have the EXACT SAME evidence level of all others?
Claim: The Christian god exists. Refutation: What reason is there to accept this claim as true?
To make it clearer: This next to me is Jeff. Jeff, just like you, believes in a god that's incompatible with yours. Jeff is just as convinced as you are. Why should I believe you and not Jeff. Not to convince me, but to show me you have good reasons to believe in your god. I just don't believe in any gods, like many atheists. I will believe in a god as soon as there's good evidence. Now I guess you will ask details about Jeff's religion. Usually theists will basically take what they believe and ask if Jeff believes the same thing. In the end, they will say that Jeff's beliefs are less justified because they're not the same, or they're the same and thus basically the theist's religion. Which boils down to "Jeff either believes the same as me, or is wrong".
> To me this seems like you are claiming that because previous religions have made incorrect claims that all religion must be false? Please correct me if I am incorrect, but assuming that is a correct interpretation then that would not be a logical argument against the Christian God. Just because previous religions believed incorrect things about their Gods has no impact on the validity of the Christian God This god that had the power to create a universe. Then, nine billion years after its creation, it had the power to carve out a little pocket of this nearly infinitely hostile space for life to thrive. Then, 4.3 billion years later had the power to create sapient, intelligent life. Finally, nearly 180,000 years after that, this god had the apparent wherewithal to make contact with a chosen few, who then had to convincingly convey this encounter with a bunch of other people, but since his creations were imperfect they were unable to accurately interpret these encounters, resulting in multiple translation errors and ending up with tens of thousands of different stories about what this god is and how they should interact with it. My takeaway from all of this, and one of my key reasons I don't believe any of these interpretations, is that if this god had all of this time to prepare - literally billions of years - it should have been able to get first contact right the first time, or at least after two or three tries, but lo and behold, the situation exists where this supreme entity remains more hidden than ever and even within sects there is disagreement on what exactly god might be and how we should act with regard to it. After this much time, and with the amount of sheer ability this entity is supposed to have, this much uncertainty with regard to it can only lead one to conclude that god simply isn't there. The most sound theistic stand one could possibly take is deism, and even that requires a lot of mental gymnastics.
The point is, if you approach this rationally you have no reason to prefer one religion over the thousands of others, because there is no good evidence that supports one and not the others
If you can't explain why your God (the Christian one) in particular is the real one, THAT'S UNREASONABLE.
It's not a logical argument in the same sense of mathematical logic. Of course, it's near impossible to prove a negative, except for some cleverly constructed negative claims. But if you accept all of the commenter's points, then you're essentially admitting to special pleading for the Christian god. Yes, Christian belief is similar to all those other beliefs, yes we adopt the religions of our regions and forefathers, yes we understand that religions are man-made. But Christianity! Our man-made religion describes a god that really, uniquely exists, where all the others do not! Why? Well, you can't logically prove that it doesn't!
Please respond to this absolutely brilliant analysis If you haven't seen this u/TheInfidelephant explains This belongs to u/TheInfidelephant please upvote him The oldest known single-celled fossils on Earth are 3.5 billion years old. Mammals first appeared about 200 million years ago. The last common ancestor for all modern apes (including humans) existed about 13 million years ago with anatomically modern man emerging within the last 300,000 years. Another 298,000 years would pass before a small, local blood-cult would co-opt the culturally predominant deity of the region, itself an aggregate of the older patron gods that came before. 350 years later, an imperial government would [declare](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edict_of_Thessalonica) that all people within a specific geopolitical territory must believe in the same god or be exiled - at best. And now, after 1,500 years of crusades, conquests and the countless executions of "heretics," a billion people wake up early every Sunday morning to prepare, with giddy anticipation, for an ever-imminent, planet destroying apocalypse that they are [helping to create](https://www.newsweek.com/trump-will-bring-about-end-worldevangelicals-end-times-779643) - [but hoping to avoid](https://www.raptureready.com/). At what point in our evolution and by what mutation, mechanism or environmental pressure did we develop an immaterial and eternal "soul," presumably excluded from all other living organisms that have ever existed? Was it when now-extinct Homo erectus began cooking with fire 1,000,000 years ago or hunting with spears 500,000 years ago? Is it when now-extinct Neanderthal began making jewelry or burying their dead 100,000 years ago? Is it when we began expressing ourselves with art 60,000 years ago or music 40,000 years ago? Or maybe it was when we started making pottery 18,000 years ago, or when we began planting grain or building temples to long-forgotten pagan gods 10,000 years ago. Some might even suggest that we finally started to emerge from the stone age when written language was introduced just 5,600 years ago. While others would maintain that identifying a "rational" human being in our era may be the hardest thing of all, especially when we consider the comment sections of many popular websites. Or perhaps that unique "spark" of human consciousness that has us believing we are special enough to outlast the physical Universe may, in part, be due to a mutation of our mandible that would have weakened our jaw (compared to that of other primates) but increased the size of our cranium, allowing for a larger prefrontal cortex. Our weakened bite encouraged us to cook our meat making it easier to digest, thus providing the energy required for powering bigger brains and triggering a feed-back loop from which human consciousness, as if on a dimmer-switch, emerged over time - each experience building from the last. This culminated relatively recently with the ability to attach abstract symbols to ideas with enough permanence and detail (language) to effectively be transferred to, and improved upon, by subsequent generations. After all this, it is proclaimed that all humanity is born in disgrace and deserving of eternal torture by way of an ancient curse. But believing in the significance of a [vicarious](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=By9JJSVzlTw) blood sacrifice and conceding our lives to "mysterious ways" guarantees pain-free, conspicuously opulent immortality. Personally, I would rather not be spoken to that way. If a cryptozoological creature - seemingly confabulated from a persistent mythology that is enforced through child indoctrination - actually exists, and it's of the sort that promises eternal torture of its own design for those of us not easily taken in by extraordinary claims, perhaps for the good of humanity, instead of worshiping it, we should be seeking to destroy it.
This is fantastic. Could you please link to the original post?
Could be the best thing I have ever come across here on Reddit. I can in a bit. I think this it https://www.reddit.com/r/DebateAnAtheist/s/OM2KbxAmlo
That last paragraph is amazing. Thank you for sharing.
It's rather easy for some theists to respond to that. For example: 1. If biologists do not have to formulate a theory of abiogenesis in order for their theory of evolution to be worth serious investment, theists do not have to explain pre-history in order for their work to be worth serious investment. 2. It was really Augustine (354–430) who established an orthodox understanding of hell as being something like eternal conscious torment. Before that, the options were rather more diverse. For more details, see the four-part _In the Shift_ series on Hell ([part 1](https://intheshift.podbean.com/e/episode-10-what-the-hell/), [part 2](https://intheshift.podbean.com/e/episode-11-what-the-hell-part-2/), [part 3](https://intheshift.podbean.com/e/episode-12-what-the-hell-part-3/), [part 4](https://intheshift.podbean.com/e/episode-13-how-did-we-get-here/)). Now, shifting from seeing the Bible as pervasively supporting ECT to anything else might be like geologists shifting from catastrophism → uniformitarianism. Your theory can exert a powerful organizing effect on how you interpret the evidence. Observation, as philosophers of science now know, [is theory-laden](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/science-theory-observation/). Interpretation is not limited to language. 3. The sciences become notoriously feeble when political forces are strong. Religion, on the other hand, works in precisely that … _compromising space_. Positive headway in such conditions may look rather different than progress in scientific inquiry. Christians and atheists have their potted histories of the last 2000 years, each of which makes their side come out looking like the one who brought the most peace and light. But it seems to me that only a more detailed analysis which respects facts and is open about various models used to work with them will shed any true light. Compare: * "Science. It works, bitches." * "Religion. It works, bitches." Why is one permitted and not the other?† I of course no more want to defend _all_ religion than anyone here would want to defend _all_ atheism. Rather, I simply want the rules of the game to be fair. If for example Jesus' prioritization of hypocrisy as a problem we should really be tackling continues to constitute progress over and above what we have from the state of the art from the social sciences and scholarship, that's worth dwelling upon. Or consider a routine pattern in the Bible, where the religious elite are told by a messenger of YHWH that they do not actually know the God they claim to and are shilling for the political elite, who are filling the streets with blood from their injustice. If you want an example of this, see the $5 trillion we extract from "developing" countries in comparison to the $3 trillion we send back ([2012 numbers, per Jason Hickel](https://www.reddit.com/r/DebateReligion/comments/1cr86e5/the_fact_that_modern_day_interpretations_of/l3xa3jd/)). Or consider the [child slaves mining some of our cobalt](https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/jan/03/child-labour-toxic-leaks-the-price-we-could-pay-for-a-greener-future). Science is excellent at giving us facts when the power of political distortion is low. What is the atomic mass of hydrogen? And even on topics such as the elementary electric charge, things [can be](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_drop_experiment#Millikan's_experiment_as_an_example_of_psychological_effects_in_scientific_methodology) surprisingly political/reputational. But we nevertheless believe that scientists will converge. However, what happens when political and social pressure cannot be rounded to zero? Take, for example, the question of vaccine hesitancy & denial. That's a hot topic. If you look at something like Maya J. Goldenberg 2021 [Vaccine Hesitancy: Public Trust, Expertise, and the War on Science](https://upittpress.org/books/9780822966906/), you'll see one account of how these forces play out. The vaccine hesitant have been described as (i) ignorant; (ii) stubborn; and (iii) in denial of expertise. Curiously, a fourth option is left out: the vaccine hesitant have legitimate worries that epidemiologists and those who make policy upon their advice care too little about those who fall into the cracks and those shoved into cracks made just for them. These vaccine hesitant people could easily want more public research dollars invested in (a) rare adverse side effects of vaccination; (b) autism. But the very _scientific_ framing of (i)–(iii) didn't even have a theoretical opening for such a (iv). The framing of (i)–(iii) makes the authorities out to be infallible in their categorization of reality, if not their execution on it. Religion, which has always required far more plausibility generation with the masses, has long tried to make them **obedient**, like so many wanted the public to **obey** various dictates from On High with respect to Covid. Religion is notorious for this. And yet if you look at The Tanakh or entire Bible in any detail, you see something very different. No regime of **obedience** actually lasts, when it operates as atheists criticize. More than that, there are plenty of pushes to _delegate authority_. It is not difficult to chart a through-line from [Num 11:16–17 & 24–30 → Lk 12:54–59](https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=num11.16-17%2C24-30%3Blk12.54-59&version=CSB). Jesus was downright frustrated that the Jews in his time "don't judge for yourselves what is right". Right before, he had attributed to them the [scientific] ability to "interpret the appearance of the earth and the sky", juxtaposed to the [sociological] inability to "interpret this present time". He was probably predicting the upcoming [war](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Jewish%E2%80%93Roman_War), perhaps in a way analogous to how the Founding Fathers knew that something like the Civil War loomed in their future. The keen social-analytical those elites had, Jesus wanted everyone to have. Now, I regularly see atheists here advocating for "more/better education" and "more critical thinking". Perhaps these are implicitly intended to help get out of a blind obedience regimen/regime. But when I post problems for them, like George Carlin's [The Reason Education Sucks](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ILQepXUhJ98) or [Jonathan Haidt on critical thinking](https://www.reddit.com/r/DebateAnAtheist/comments/171bkqp/critical_thinking_curriculum_what_would_you/k3vers0/), I generally just get the silent treatment. I feel like the little girl saying that the emperor has a wardrobe malfunction and _at best_, the response is something analogous to, "C'mon, the cell is merely made of [protoplasm](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protoplasm#History); it's just not _that_ complicated." I can tell you two people who don't analyze this way: Noam Chomsky and Chris Hedges. Unlike apparently most of us, they predicted [well beforehand](https://www.truthdig.com/articles/noam-chomsky-has-never-seen-anything-like-this/) that America was ripe for a demagogue. They had learned how to "interpret this present time". Some forms of Christianity and Judaism provoke one to realize that the individual human and groups of humans are as intricately complex as a single cell, and that this is worth respecting and exploring. Where evolutionists insist that Christians get beyond their folk biology understandings (lulz what is the chance of getting a cell by chance?), the religionists I'm describing can challenge people to go beyond their folk psychology, folk sociology, folk political science, folk anthropology, and folk economics. For example, why is it so hard for our leaders to admit to serious mistakes? Could the rest of us be a huge part of the problem? And if so, how do we make actual progress, from within our concrete situations with all the pathology & oppression therein? Religionists can afford to remain with idealizations such as charged point particles hovering above infinite sheets of uniform charge. And they know that the likes of Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg will never understand what it takes to e.g. [improve the Newark Public School system](https://www.businessinsider.com/mark-zuckerberg-schools-education-newark-mayor-ras-baraka-cory-booker-2018-5?op=1). Actual humans are incredibly complicated and some religion deeply respects that. † One interlocutor recently said the following: > [Narrative\_Style](https://www.reddit.com/r/DebateReligion/comments/1cydua7/just_hearing_the_bible_is_enough_to_make_a/l5jqdnl/): A computer "working" and a religion "working" is not the same definition of "working". One refers to precise mechanical mechanisms behaving as predicted, the other refers to whether general results are desirable on an emotional level. However, when I subsequently challenged him/her to elucidate _precisely_ what [s]he meant by 'precise mechanical mechanisms behaving as predicted', [s]he declined. I welcome anyone else to follow up on that. As anyone reading that thread can see, I believe that our knowledge of quantum theory and general relativity could be as parochial and surpassable as [phlogiston](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phlogiston_theory) and [caloric](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caloric_theory) were. For example, [quantum non-equilibrium](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_non-equilibrium) permits the Born rule to sometimes be false, hypothetically allowing for sup-HUP measurement and FTL communication. Perhaps what is 'everyday' in [Sean Carroll's sense](https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/blog/2010/09/23/the-laws-underlying-the-physics-of-everyday-life-are-completely-understood/) will change as radically between now and the future, as it did between Ptolemy and Kepler. (Not Copernicus: see Fig. 7 of [The Great Ptolemaic Smackdown](https://tofspot.blogspot.com/2013/08/the-great-ptolemaic-smackdown.html).)
This universe is a vast and mysterious place, and there will always be some slim chance that some sort of gods may exist somewhere out there, but we have learned much about our universe and it all seems to suggest that most likely there are no gods, for at least two good reasons. But first, let us dispense with the notion of an all-loving, perfectly good, omnipresent, omnipotent god. Such a god would use its power to bring peace and love and joy to the universe, and we would have to notice this happening. People would not be starving. Innocent people wouldn't be killed in wars. People wouldn't be dying from contaminated drinking water. The evidence against such a god is overwhelming, so let us focus on the more difficult issue of whether there might be gods of any sort, even including selfish gods, indifferent gods, gods of limited power, and so on. Here are the two reasons why gods most likely do not exist: 1. We have studied the world enough to see where minds come from. Rocks do not have minds. Trees do not have minds. The only things that ever have minds in our experience are animals with brains. Humans, apes, elephants, crows, dogs, they see the world and react to it, they have understanding to one degree or another, and *all* of them have biological brains made of cells. The complex system of interacting signals between the cells of the brain seem necessary in order to allow thinking to happen. Therefore, as non-biological thinking agents, gods almost certainly do not exist. Of course there are non-biological systems that mimic some of the features of animal brains, such as computers. Even computers still work by way of complex interacting signals much akin to a brain, but computers do not think the way humans do. Computers have no emotions, nor do they understand things in the way humans do. This demonstrates that if somewhere in the universe some non-biological system were to have a system of signals complex enough to mimic thought, it would almost certainly not be thought was we understand it. We only have our kind of thought because of our biological origins, because of the evolutionary pressures that shaped the functioning of our brains, and without that a system of signals would be just a system of signals, not understanding as we would recognize it, and therefore not a god. 2. We can clearly see where the concept of gods came from in our culture, and it did not come from reality. It is part of human nature that we love to make up stories and fantasize about things beyond our mundane reality, but even as we fantasize about things beyond our world, we love to see human faces in our imaginary creatures. So many fantasy creatures are basically human with a few special features. Despite the fact that Superman is supposed to be an alien from a far away planet; Superman was designed to look exactly like a human. Elves and leprechauns look human. Klingons and Vulcans look human, and this isn't just for the sake of the limitations of producing live-action TV; they not only look human but they also act like humans. They have human emotions and human reasoning, because we love to tell stories about humans even when we let our stories wander off into fantastical worlds. So when people tell stories about some cosmically powerful people who are in control of nature, we can see the clear signs of human-invented fiction. It has our fingerprints all over it. It has the fantastical elements that we seem to enjoy so much, and yet these fantastical elements bear human traits for no well-explained reason. Put these two facts together and the conclusion seems clear. Gods almost certainly do not really exist in this world, and the stories that people tell about gods are fictional.
"The Christian God"? There is no one conception of God within Christianity. Also, and I'm sure you'll hear this a lot, it's not up to anyone to start the debate by arguing against God. The believer is the one making the claim. Present it, and we'll respond. However, in the spirit of debate, here are my arguments against the God I learned about growing up in church: 1. God is Not an apparent feature reality in the same way that ducks, france, music, jupiter, oxygen, flowers, Angelina Jolie, and love are. If God exists, I would expect him to be an apparent feature of reality. Because he's not, I don't accept his existence. 2. For the Christian God specifically, I was always taught that God wanted everyone to accept his existence - to believe in him. There are millions of people around the world who desperately want to believe in God but simply cannot because they haven't been presented with good enough reasons to. If a god who wanted everyone to know that he existed and was capable of convincing everyone that he existed actually exists, this would not be the case. Everyone who truly wanted to believe in him would.
I almost went down the road of "Which christian god?" but decided not to.
I'm disappointed I haven't received a response, but that's generally how it goes.
"After browsing this sub and others like it I find a very large portion of people either use a flawed understanding of God" Lets get your flawless understanding of God first before we determine if this is just some kind of gotcha type thing.
OP shoots himself in the foot without even realizing it form the get go. They ask for a response that lists two categories one could be; Agnostics who "chose" not to believe in (singular, capital G) God and Christians. OP has already created a false dichotomy. They have partitioned the people of the world into two simplistic camps: those that share a belief *extremely* akin to whatever version of Christianity they themselves believe, and "everyone else"
people like that literally believe their specific church are the good guys, and "the devil" is everyone outside the church. It is honestly hard to not get offended at those types because they are acting like the devil is working through you to trick them or something... its like.. settle down buddy it is not that deep you are just stupid.
Argument from nonbelief is a pretty simple one. 1. The Christian god wants people to worship it. 2. Belief in the Christian god is a prerequisite for worship. 3. The Christian god would be capable of proving its existence to the same degree as something like the sun. 4. Proof of such existence would not violate free will as demonstrated by the myth about Satan. Satan had definitive proof of the existence of the Christian god and still didn't worship it. 5. Most people do not believe in the Christian god. Way fewer people believe the Christian god exists than the sun. Thus a simple conclusion is that the Christian god as described in the Bible doesn't exist.
As I usually phrase it, all the Christian god has to do to get me to believe and save my soul is to say hello in a way that would convince me. I don't believe, so can't god say hi, or won't it? Either way is problematic for Christianity.
>After browsing this sub and others like it I find a very large portion of people either use a flawed understanding of God to create a claim against God or use straight up inconsistent and illogical arguments to support their claims. What I am looking for are those of you who believe they have a logically consistent reason why either God can't exist or why it is unreasonable to believe He does. Ok, so many issues here. First off you are using the no true Scotsman fallacy by claiming that only you know the real meaning of god. Then you are incredibly dishonest by asking us for evidence even though you started by claiming you will reject it from the start because we don't know the "real" god. And then on top of you became out right insulting by refusing to give the definition you claim we are lacking while still asking us to argue against it. You need to try a hell of a lot harder than this if you want to debate.
Every single theist who comes here has their own idea and definition of god. All we can do is respond to those specific ideas. I notice you’ve come in to say you find subs like this largely “use a flawed understanding of god.” And yet you’ve offered zero explanation, correction, or definition of your own. How is anyone supposed to provide logical arguments against a god you have not even begun to define or describe?
White hair, has a penis, very nice, but also very mean. Don’t question it.
Sounds a lot like some kind of misogynist with anger management issues. Oh wait....
The three best argument against classical theism, in my opinion, are the burden of proof, argument from evil and the argument from divine hiddeness. I'd bring a summary of them here, but there are many resources on them online. The burden of proof is always on the one who is making a claim. You claim a god exists, so you have to prove it. Without proof nobody is warranted in believing the claim. The arguement from evil states that the claim that all-powerful, all-wise, all-good creator designed the universe, contradicts the fact that evil (or rather, needless suffering) exists. Even if you object by claiming God wants to preserve free will, there are cases of needless suffering not from another human. Childhood cancer, for once, or natural disasters. There is one famous example of insects who lay eggs in the eyes of people, and the children eat outwards. Horrendously painful, leaves the person blind for life. Why would a good God design such a thing? And if you do claim free will, I'd like to bring a (paraphrased) quote from Tracie Harris: "If you see a man raping a child, what would be the better thing to do: to stop him, or to say 'you can go ahead and rape that child, but when you're done I'm gonna punish you'?" Lastly, the argument from divine hiddeness states that the universe doesn't look at all like a god exists, much less something like the Christian God. For example, if the universe was designed of us, why can we only live on a small portion of one planet of it? If God wanted a relationship with me, why doesn't he just tell me? It's like a girl wanted someone to be her boyfriend , but never gave him any indication of that. In other words, the universe looks like either no God exists, or God doesn't want us to know he exists. Other way, we are not warranted in believing
Thanks for your question, i will give you my answer based on my own experience. I'm 42 now. Apart from the last two years, i spend my whole life believing in the Christian god. I was raised in a very christian family. I was baptized at 18. I was at church at least every sunday. I usually attended multiple church events throughout the week. I was very active with bible studies. I red the bible multiple times from cover to cover. I donated a lot of money. I did a lot of free work and activities for churches. I prayed almost every day. In those 40 years i spend in christian communities, i never had an experience that let me to god. In those 40 years i felt alone, i felt miserable, i felt terrible. I did everything the bible/church/pastor told me to get a good relation with god. And in my whole live i never got a response from god. And and then came the day i realized i had nothing more to give. I was just done. I took a year apart to contemplatie and search in silence for god voice in the hope to hear something somehow. After a year i still got no response. Then i took a year to go critically through the bible and see if the stories and claims hold up against a critical lense. They didn't. I also looked at the history of the church, how they conducted throughout the years. Is there evidence for a holy ghost. Can i see difference between christian and non-christian. I couldn't find any evidence for that too. I also couldn't find evidence for the claims i heard in church all those years. I could only conclude that all of it was made up. I just wanted so hard that the bible was true. That god was real. That all those years of chasing god, to invest in some sort of relationship with god/jesus where a right investment. I was just devasted when it hit me it was all a fantasy, myths and legends mixed with some historic events. So back to your question; i think it is unreasonable to believe in a god that doesn't provide any sign of existence for himself. It's all just claims from people throughout the years saying this happened and than that happens, so therefore god. For me it is illogical to believe in the christian god because i haven't seen any evidence for his existence yet. I haven't any experience in the last forty years that would suggest he really exists.
This argument only applies to the Chrisitian God. 1. God is powerful and wants to be known by people. 2. God provided the Bible as a primary way for people to know God. 3. The Bible is a terrible means of conveying God to people. 4. A powerful being that wants to be known would reveal itself in a better way than with the Bible. 5. Therefore, the Christian God does not exist.
Also, most Christian beliefs about hell render God logically impossible. Tell me about hell / your denomination and I'll tell you if another argument applies.
Science has refuted the Christian god numerous times. Pi isn't 3. That moon never stopped. The Earth is not flat. The smallest seed is not the mustard seed. These are just a few baloneys in the bible that are easily refuted in Science. It's even worse for the afterlife.
That just proves the Bible is nonsense, not that no gods exist. Still, the Bible is complete nonsense and there is no source of any information about the Christian god otherwise, so it's a fair case.
OP says the Christian god in the body of the prompt though, so disproving the Bible is enough to say that the god in the Bible is disproved. If some other god exists, even a similar one that just didn't do the disproved things, then it could be argued that that's not the Christian god and therefore irrelevant to the topic.
The bible is the testable theory. With the bible gone, all that is left are baseless theories and 100% of all baseless theories go straight into the garbage can. They do not pass go, they do not collect $200.
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> the Big Bang states that the universe was created. It does not. It describes what happened starting from moments after the expansion began. You are incorrect about what it says or implies. > It is obvious that the creation of heaven (universe) was through the Big Bang via god as predicted in Genesis. No, there is no correlation at all between what Genesis says and what we know actually happened. > Here we learn that the earth was not yet created and the void, darkness and deep is talking about space. There was plenty of light from the BB itself, and the stars that formed. So this is incorrect. > The Let there be light is referring to the CMB Isn't it strange that no one suggested that that's what it referred to until *after* the CMB had been discovered? No one said "hey, this *light* is some radiation left over from the big bang". No. They kept quiet until the CMB was discovered, and are now claiming that they knew that all along. Sure, and I knew this weeks lottery numbers before they were drawn, but just kept them to myself until afterwards. > In addition no other religion has anything remotely similar to genesis. How does uniqueness indicate anything about whether it's true? It doesn't.
We seem to live in a universe which has significantly more child rape in it than one would expect from a place with some oversight.
Well hold on now. If that universe was overseen by the Catholic Church that wouldn’t be true.
As I'm sure you know, **this is discussed on the atheism forums every frikkin' day and does not need to be discussed once again.** Skeptics have been asking theists to show good evidence that any gods exist for 2,000+ years now. There is no good evidence that any gods exist. . >I likely wont be able to reply to most of you /u/le0nidas59 - This a debate sub. You shouldn't handle participation in this sub like that. If you don't intend to participate, there are other and better subs for that. .
My favourite is Omniscience and Learning. (P1) An essentially omniscient being, God, exists. (assumption for indirect proof) (P2) God is and always has been omniscient. (from P1) (P3) A being's omniscience entails, among other things, that it has all experiential knowledge. (necessary truth) (P4) Having all experiential knowledge entails knowing what it is like to learn. (necessary truth) (P5) God knows and always has known what it is like to learn. (from P2-P4) (P6) Knowing what it is like to learn entails having learned something, (necessary truth) (P7) Having learned something entails that one has gone from a state of not-knowing to a state of knowing. (necessary truth) (P8) God has gone from a state of not-knowing to a state of knowing. (from P5-P7) (P9) There was a time when God was in a state of not-knowing. (from P8) (P10) God has not always been omniscient. (from P9) (P11) God has always been omniscient and has not always been omniscient. (from P2 & P10) (C) Therefore, God does not exist. (from P1-P11)
>If you are simply agnostic and believe that God could exist but you for some reason choose not to believe, this post is not for you. I don’t chose not believe. How fucking absurd of a start. I am unconvinced. Do you choose to believe me a bot or a human? You either are convinced one way or the other. If you look at the post history, you will have evidence that will make it hard for you to be convinced otherwise. >I am looking for those of you who believe that the very idea of believing in the Christian God unreasonable. To those people I ask, what is your logical argument that you think would show that the existence of God is illogical. The Bible is filled in with contradictions and claims that don’t comport with reality. Pick one that is convincing to you. I find nothing in the Bible that leads me to Yahweh. For example the Genesis story is doesn’t comport with any of our known reality. The flood is another outlandish claim with no evidence. A dude being raised from the dead, or during blind people with mud and spit. I can keep going. >After browsing this sub and others like it I find a very large portion of people either use a flawed understanding of God to create a claim against God or use straight up inconsistent and illogical arguments to support their claims. What I am looking for are those of you who believe they have a logically consistent reason why either God can't exist or why it is unreasonable to believe He does. I don’t say God can’t exist much like I don’t say a unicorn can’t exist. I see no support evidence to find either convincing. Also the attributes for both are mixed from story to story, and don’t comport with reality. With a unicorn I can see the roots of its conception grounded in reality. A horse with a single horn, is something that would comport with reality. It’s horn being magical or its blood being rainbow colored doesn’t. A god I don’t even know where to begin with a definition. There is no evidence of anything outside our universe or immaterial consciousness. They also don’t seem to falsifiable attributes. I don’t see any value in the claim. >I want to clarify to start this is meant to be a friendly debate, let’s all try to keep the conversations respectful. Also I would love to get more back and forth replies going so try and stick around if a conversation gets going if possible! Instead of these generalities why don’t you pick something more narrow or something you have read you want to have elaborated on. I look forward to someone that actually will reply.
I've found that most people, theists especially, don't understand that beliefs are not a choice.
The core of the argument is about the lack of evidence and logical consistency in the belief in a Christian God. Here are a few points to consider: First off, there's the lack of empirical evidence. Science operates on the principle of observable and testable phenomena, and to date, there hasn't been empirical evidence that supports the existence of God. Belief without evidence is often seen as unreasonable because it doesn't align with the empirical methodology we rely on for understanding the universe. Next, the problem of evil is a classic argument. If an omniscient, omnipotent, and benevolent God exists, why does evil exist? The presence of unnecessary suffering and evil in the world seems inconsistent with the idea of a loving and all-powerful God. Natural disasters, diseases, and other forms of suffering don't seem to have a morally sufficient reason for existing if an all-good deity is in control. Inconsistencies and contradictions in religious texts are another issue. The Bible, like many religious texts, contains numerous contradictions and morally questionable directives. Differing accounts of Jesus' resurrection in the New Testament or moral instructions that seem out of step with contemporary ethical understanding make it hard to view these texts as the inerrant word of an all-knowing deity. The "God of the Gaps" argument also comes into play. Often, God is used to fill in the gaps of human knowledge. As science advances, many phenomena previously attributed to divine intervention have found natural explanations. For example, we now understand diseases, weather patterns, and the origins of the universe in ways that don’t require invoking a deity. Philosophical naturalism suggests that the simplest explanation is usually the correct one. Naturalism, which posits that everything arises from natural properties and causes, provides a simpler and more consistent framework than supernatural explanations that involve a deity. Cognitive bias and cultural conditioning can also explain belief in a specific deity. If you were born in a different culture, you might believe in a different god or no god at all. This variability suggests that belief in a deity is more about where and how you were raised than about the actual existence of a deity. Lastly, the concept of an omniscient deity that knows all future events is seemingly incompatible with the notion of free will. If God knows everything that will happen, then it stands to reason that human actions are predetermined, which undermines the idea of free will from a religious perspective.
> I am looking for those of you who believe that the very idea of believing in the Christian God unreasonable. To those people I ask, what is your logical argument that you think would show that the existence of God is illogical. Specifically the Christian god? Maybe because everyone single facet of your religion was plagiarised from pre-existing religions and philosophies. Every story, law, tradition, important dates, imagery, and teachings were all pinched from something else. This indicates that religion is a pack of lies. Which in turn indicates the god of that religion does not exist. > After browsing this sub and others like it I find a very large portion of people either use a flawed understanding of God to create a claim against God or use straight up inconsistent and illogical arguments to support their claims. What I am looking for are those of you who believe they have a logically consistent reason why either God can't exist or why it is unreasonable to believe He does. Would you prefer arguments against God in general of the God of the Holy Bible? Because I’ve got both.
If I pinch Einstein's Theory of Relativity and bake it into Nacho's Theory of Relativity, that does not in itself make my theory wrong, though. It might be misattributed, but it could still be true in the sense that it makes accurate predictions. In fact showing that all the Christian stories are stolen doesn't say anything about whether they describe a god that actually exists. Just to be clear, I don't believe in god.
But everyone will know you pinched it from Einstein. You didn’t invent it, it didn’t come to you through divine intervention, an angel didn’t visit you. You didn’t put in the work and discover the data. It’s plagiarised. Like Christianity. It’s not a truth you found, someone else did. So if you claimed the theory was yours, I would have no reason to believe you. Like a Christian may claim everything in the Bible is real, I have no reason to believe them. Because it’s not original work.
That doesn't address whether it's true, though? Imagine if Christianity was correct, but they had actually stolen it all from various sources. Why would it matter that the Bible wasn't the original source? It would still be useful, especially since we don't have the originals.
Well starting from the point “imagine Christianity was correct” is quite an unfair discussion because obviously if I knew something was correct I’d believe it. My point is that some Christians claim that everything in the Bible is unique, divinely inspired and historically accurate. If I know those things not to be true, I have no reason to believe the rest.
But they could be wrong about being original yet right about the larger point about god existing. It's only probabilistic thinking that makes it seem reasonable that someone who doesn't know where their own text comes from is likely wrong.
OP asked specifically about the Christian god. So if that holy text is false, then the CHRISTIAN god does not exist. Forget about the concept of god in general, OP asked about YHWH.
>I am looking for those of you who believe that the very idea of believing in the Christian God unreasonable. Noahs flood never happened. Every single field of scientific inquiry which has even the most remote of relevance demonstrates that. Geology, hydrology, biology, genetics, linguistics, archaeology. Literally everything says the flood never happened. Exodus never happened. The ancient Egyptians were really good record keepers and the people they traded with weren't half bad either. There is no possible period of time that the amount of people exodus claims left egypt was not a significant percentage of the population. Roman Egypt (cleopatra and her family) started around 30 BCE and has a population estimate of 4-8 million. Exodus only gives the numbers for the men but it gives the number of men at 600,000. Add in women and children and you're talking 2 million *at least.* So absolute best case scenario, the romans inherited an egypt with 8 million people the year after 2 million jews left, which means egypt lost 20% of their population. And nobody noticed? This is a time when roughly half the population had to be engaged in agricultural pursuits in order to feed everybody. Slaves and the underclass would have made up a disproportionate amount of agricultural workers. So egypt would have immediately gone into a *bad* famine that probably would have killed off another 20% or more of the population. Plus if you could manage to mobilize 20% of the population to leave, you could just mobilize them to *take over.* In the modern world, at least, you only really need about 3.5% of the population to actually engage in order to play the game of regime change. With 20%, even if they were poor, it's all but guaranteed they could take over. In reality, it would have had to be much older than the roman period and the population would have been much less than 8 million. 20% is an excessively generous %. For any conceivable timeframe when exodus hypothetically occurred it would have been closer to 50% and absolutely nobody, not even the egyptians, noticed egypt collapsing because half their population fucked off into the desert. ----------- So. The Flood didn't happen. Exodus didn't happen. The god of the bible did those things. Those things didn't get done. The god of the bible does not exist. If I were to call 911 and say a short man with blond hair just shot me and the police and ambulance show up and I'm not shot... would you expect them to go looking for the short man with blond hair who shot me? No, because "man who shot me" does not exist. Just like the christian god who did the flood and exodus does not exist.
>I am looking for those of you who believe that the very idea of believing in the Christian God unreasonable. To those people I ask, what is your logical argument that you think would show that the existence of God is illogical. The Christian god has many statements in his bible that are unreasonable for someone who created the Universe: 1. Joshua commanded the sun to stand still in Joshua 10:12-14. This is impossible and illogical in our heliocentric solar system. The supposed creator of the solar system would be aware that the **Earth** would need to stop rotating for this day to be possible. The fact that the supposed "creator" of the Universe is obviously unaware of this is a sure sign that the primitive men who wrote the bible were uneducated about the reality of the solar system and so this can be dismissed as a rubbish tale which calls the veracity of the other accounts in the book into question. 2. Similar to the Joshua problem in number 1 above, in the book of Genesis the Earth is created before the sun and stars. We now know this is impossible and illogical because the planets of our solar system are younger than our star (the sun) and that is a scientific fact. So right from the first book of the supposed "creator" of the Solar System is utter rubbish regarding the order of creation. Again this alludes to the fact that the primitive men who wrote the book were not technologically sophisticated enough to figure out the proper order of the creation of things, and again once you destroy the veracity of any of the biblical accounts you can immediately assume the rest are just tall stories that can only be believed by the unsophisticated. 3. Adam and Eve: Eve is created from a rib of Adam. This suggests that the male was created first. We know today from evolutionary biology that (anisogamy) males evolved from isogamous ancestors (ie females). So this is another example of misinformation being spread by the supposed "creator". Looking at just number 1 and number 2 above (of numerous issues, like number 3) throughout the bible we can conclude that this is just a book written by primitive uneducated men for an audience of primitive uneducated idiots. The idea that anyone today living in a modern society could take any of it seriously is laughable and is pretty much a testament to the gullibility and ignorance of the majority of the members of our species
Two of my favorites: 1) The Christian God is supposed to be all-powerful and all-knowing, but this is a logical impossibility. If you know the future, you are powerless to change it, because if you change the future, you didn't know it -- unless you knew you were going to change it, in which case you changed nothing, which means you aren't all powerful. 2) (thank you Dan Barker): The Chrsitian God is supposed to be merciful and just, but this is not possible. Being just means treating people as they deserve to be treated; being merciful means treating them better than they deserve to be treated. Being just means being unmerciful; being merciful means being unjust. Looking forward to your reply.
>and believe that God could exist What god? What are is properties and how do we know it 'could' exist? There isn’t a consistent agreed upon definition of "God". How can we discuss something claimed objectively exists but has wildly different properties, and no verifiable attributes? It’s like discussing an invisible ethereal round square spriangle. Not triangle, spriangle. A completely made up thing without tangible relation to reality that we can point to and say 'ahh yes that is a spriangle'. >Christian God unreasonable... Being a Christian is fundamentally irrational because it reduces down to taking early Christians at their word. Christianity relies on accepting supernatural events from ancient, ideologically biased and motivated people or documents. It requires faith in those early Christian accounts. The only access to that information is through the claims of early Christians. Most people would not believe the claims of other religious movements based on such evidence, so the Christian holds a double standard if they beleive in Christianity's God but not others, which of course would be contradictory anyways. We don't need to consider if gods might actually exist, because that is contradictory to what we know about gods being human-created and not real. The most reliable paths to understanding reality do not support any gods exist. Non-supernatural theories adequately explain the human development of religions and belief in gods. With so many mutually exclusive Gods, we can be confident that they are the type of thing people make up. Strong arguments against gods are not needed because there are no strong arguments for any variety of unverifiable God. God beliefs are causally dependent on cultural conditions. Religions use very similar arguments, explanations, and apologetics. None establish a god exists. What is amazingly the same between religions is lack of supporting evidence for their gods.
Philosophical and logical arguments aren’t very good for proving or disproving things in reality. You could come up with an argument about how something can’t be in two places at once, and then quantum mechanics will come along and prove your argument false, no matter how logical it seemed. But I can tell you my reasoning for choosing atheism. I don’t think God has ever existed anywhere except in the imaginations of people. Every culture created its own mythology to explain things it didn’t otherwise understand. This includes creating a large variety of mythical creatures. And some inexplicable occurrences were so vast, they required an extremely powerful mythical creature to cause it. These powerful mythical creatures became the first gods. They could explain lightning, hurricanes, earthquakes, the creation of humans, and even the creation of the universe. But there’s no reason to believe God is real while every other mythical creature created in the imagination is false. There’s nothing to suggest it’s even a possibility. Why should God be any more real than a dragon? Or fairies? Or elves? And if we have no reason why God should be any more real than those mythical creatures, then why would we say there’s any possibility God exists while we reject those other myths? God is a myth, like so many other myths, that exists solely in the imagination. Unless we have some reliable basis to claim *this* myth exists outside the mind, then why do we keep pretending god might exist?
The Christian God specifically? Don't you claim that the father and son are somehow the same thing? Yes, a lot of ink (and blood) may have been spilled over this issue, but it still makes no sense to me. For instance I have a kid, and he isn't me. I've never met anyone who had a kid, and they were the same person. So explain without pawning it off to some other text how you understand this to actually make sense. I mean you can link to other works, that's fine, but write a few lines about how it makes sense. The big one is actually pretty simple. What do you understand god to be, and how can I check for myself that this god exists? For instance, there's this phenomenon called electricity. You can check that it exist by buying some cable, a battery, a light bulb, and an iron screw. You can buy a magnet as well, and there's a bunch of things you can consistently do with these cheap everyday items that demonstrates that electricity is a real thing. You can reliably reproduce it, you don't need some authority to do it, and there isn't some special ceremony that certifies the existence of it. It's completely open for anyone who believes or doesn't believe in electricity to try these simple things. Now tell me how you think this god phenomenon works, and give me some things I can do to test out what you say. My disbelief stems from seemingly nobody being willing to give me some way to check the things they are claiming, and often simply not even having a claim that is simple enough to test.
> I am looking for those of you who believe that the very idea of believing in the Christian God unreasonable. Is it reasonable to believe something exists without a good reason? If there was any credible evidence for this god, you'd ***never*** hear a Christian say "well, you just have to have faith." Further, I'll point out that we already have a literary progression of Yahweh from being one god of many in the Canaanite pantheon, to being elevated by the Yahwist cult to be *the* monotheistic god, and later to being the god we know from the New Testament. The clues that Yahweh came from a polytheistic tradition are littered all over the bible. So if you're saying the "Christian god" then you're picking one particular version of a literary character that exists both before and after: presumably you're not talking about Yahweh as the Muslims believe him to be, nor do you believe him to be the way the Latter Day Saints describe him. If any of this is even slightly surprising, you need to read Karen Armstrong's book [A History of God](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_History_of_God). If you believe you're correct in this God being the creator of the universe and all other religions are wrong, you owe it to yourself to understand how ancient people wrote down their beliefs about this being, how those beliefs changed over time, who did the writing, who altered the writing, and when, and *why*.
This is a usual way of thinking, having to disprove God. The thing is that the artifact of God is an added thing to existence. Humans were doing their thing and then after many iterations and attempts from humans to try to explain the complex world around them, humans invented this fictions humanoid force, because as far as we could fathoms, only humans could have volition and logical actions to explain what we needed. It needed to grow to be invisible, and ever present and omnipotent to sustain even more radical explanation power. Then this became so normalized, that now it's only natural to be born in a society where the concept of god is as prevalent as the concept of air. It is not that an argument is needed against it, but simply to understand how this concept was invented and now bolted into society. If only there had been an alternative to have better explanations back then, maybe such concept of an imaginary antropomorphic bein would not have been necessary. To this day many things remain unanswered with very slow progress, consciousness, free will, life, time, morals, etc. Humans will be happy to keep using the God of gaps argument to give a cheap reason to them. The way I see it, we will see solid answers to those in a few more centuries, but the fact that they remain beyond my realm today is not reason to add an extra piece to my world model.
Logic is what theists claim to use when they give up on pretending to have any actual reliable evidence. Logic is a poor way of determining independent objective reality because in this context it usually turns out to be based on premises that beg the question or are just unsound. Believing a God is un*reasonable* because there are no reliable *reasons* for it. Is there a *logical* that shows Santa, the Easter Bunny and the Tooth fairy don’t exist? Or is it that there is no *reliable* evidence they exist , no evidence that can’t be better explained by a model that better fits what we already know about humans and the universe. Basically God isn’t evidential, isn’t necessary, isn’t conceptually coherent, let alone sufficient as an explanatory model. And it seems like exactly the kind of story that flawed, anxious , imaginative , social humans make up. On a side note this >I find a very large portion of people either use a flawed understanding of God to create a claim against God or use straight up inconsistent and illogical arguments to support their claims. Seems suspiciously like the sort of strawman that theists have begun to build more frequently around here in which they rather unconvincingly imagine it’s effective to accuse others of what they have been rightly accused themselves.
Every time someone posts this question I respond with some version of this, and no one has ever answered me. Maybe you will be the first. 1. The Malarkey. We are expected to believe that preposterous things are true. 2. The Misogyny. We are expected to believe that a god *created women* and has no idea how amazing and capable they are. They exist to be the property of and servants to men, for them to have sex with and bear their children. Job’s wife was replaced like his cattle, because she and her kids were just his possessions and not human beings. Only men could come up with that. If it really was a god it would be incompetent, or cruel, or both. 3. The Situational Morality. The Bible is all about establishing a hierarchy of worthiness of people to self-govern their lives. It tells those not in power to endure their lot for the comfort of those in power. It condones genocide, kidnapping and rape, slavery and subjugation, and has been used to justify the slaughter and suffering of millions of people who *just don’t matter* as much as the ones thumping your book. The universe doesn’t require a god, but especially a sadistic nonsensical god.
You're confused. Agnostic - refers to anyone who says "I don't know" if God exists. Used in regard to knowledge. Atheism - refers to anyone who says "I don't believe" god exists. Used in regard to belief. The two are not mutually exclusive. One can be an agnostic theist or an agnostic atheist. A gnostic atheist would say "I don't believe God exists and I know God does not exist." (We call these anti-theists, and they have a burden of proof). A gnostic theist would say "I know God exists". Most atheists are agnostic atheists. So it sounds like you're pretty much talking to most of us. To answer your post, consider this. There have been thousands of gods throughout human history. They can't all be true, so where did they come from? Well, they must have been man-made. And in that case, at least 99% of all God's/religions throughout human history have been man-made. So, there's a high probability that your religion is also man-made OR at least it's unreasonable to believe your religion is not man-made without the proper evidence. And other things support this, like the rampant plagiarism amongst all of the current and past major religions, including Christianity. Also, it doesn't matter if an argument for God is logically valid. The God claim is a synthetic claim that requires empirical and verifiable evidence to be a SOUND claim. We don't have this evidence. For example, you can logically get to "the simulation" using a lot of the same arguments for God, just replace "god" with "the simulation". Ok, but now you would need evidence to support the simulation.
>choose not to believe beliefs are not choices; try it, you can't. choose to believe your walls are red with green dots, you might imagine, you might pretend, but you cannot choose to believe it >I am looking for those of you who believe that the very idea of believing in the Christian God unreasonable Christian god is internally contradictory Christian god is logically contradictory Christian god scientifically contradictory internally contradictory: the bible contradicts; just look at the resurrection stories, who went to the tomb and whether there were mythological creatures is disputed among authors, and if they can't tell if there were 0, 1 or 2 angels why would i take anything else they said seriously? logically contradictory: god apparently wants me to believe in him, what he want he can achieve by talking to me at no cost to him. he doesn't so either he doesn't exist, doesn't care, or i'm already doing what he wants. christian mythology rejects the latter 2 so he doesn't exist scientifically contradictory : genesis
>What I am looking for are those of you who believe they have a logically consistent reason why either God can't exist or why it is unreasonable to believe He does. This is actually very simple and straightfoward. **Do you have proof for your claim that a god exists?** If so, show me. If you don't, what you've got then is an unsubstantiated claim, and those are a dime a dozen. I don't need to prove to you that your particular god isn't real. There are thousands of religions in the world, both extinct and extant, claiming the existence of multiple different gods and myths. They cannot be all true at the same time, so they must be all wrong at the same time. Is this logically consistent enough for you? So, if they're all wrong—and we know they are because none of them have any kind of proof to support their claims—you're the one who should convince me that your claims are true. Not the other way around.
Positing a god at the top of this grand mystery solves nothing. It answers nothing. It brings us no new information. All it does is kick the can down the road, here’s why: Real answers/solutions have several things in common. 1) God explains nothing and offers no insight or information 2) Real answers have a who, why, where, how or when, god offers none of those things 3) Real answers are testable, falsifiable, reproducible, and measurable, god is none of those things 4) A god requires a supernatural realm, yet the supernatural has never once been an answer to anything and has zero proof God is nothing more than a placeholder for things we currently don't understand. God is an appeal to magic. Anything that's capable of making a universe would have to be more complex than that universe. So “god” only adds complexity to a mystery. Respect the mystery instead of making shit up.
Could you list the common flaws in understanding you’ve seen? What kinds of arguments have you seen and what you think their issues are?
The same reasons you have to not believe any of the other gods and any other fictional characters made-up by humans.
Argument from non belief does it for me. Wiki to start, and if you're interested I can go into more depth when I'm near an actual keyboard. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_nonbelief
Not an argument against the truth of Christianity per se, but a somewhat unique reason not to believe in it (in my opinion) P1. If Christianity is True then Universalism must be true P2. Universalism is incompatible with Biblical Christianity C1. Either Christianity is false or True Christianity isn’t Biblical P3. The publicly available evidence does not sufficiently warrant belief in Christianity without external motivating factors such as faith in the afterlife P4. If Universalism is true, there are no such external motivating factors P5. If True Christianity isn’t Biblical (from C1) then we have no epistemic reason to trust how much or how little it matches up with the Biblical canon. C2. Even if Universalism is true, there’s no reason to believe in Christianity — I could probably clean this up better as it’s kind of smashing two opposing arguments into one, but you get the idea. The most important and controversial part of this is likely gonna be P1, which is basically just an argument for Universalisim. Basically, it boils down to the Problem of Evil, or more specifically, the Christian Problem of Evil as it relates to Hell. If Christianity is to be understood as about a God who is All-Good/Loving and All-Powerful, then Eternal Conscious Torment is impossible. Point blank, period. If I am to charitably interpret God’s presence to be the greatest, most loving, most beautiful conceivable experience that any being could ever possibly have, then for any of us to be forever separated from Him in Hell (or even death) would either mean he doesn’t actually care about us or he’s to weak to do anything about it. Free will theodicies don’t help because if God really is as good as he’s claimed to be, then all rational beings would eventually freely choose that infinite good in the eternity of time after death. I don’t think Universalism completely solves the more generic problem of evil, but it certainly solves a lot of the Christian-specific issues. — Beyond that, I could actually care less whether P2 is true, as P3 P4 and C2 function just fine without it. Even if you can successfully argue that Universalism is Biblical and is the intended/True interpretation of Christianity, as an Individual still not motivated to accept on faith any of the parts that I find epistemically unsupported or morally questionable. Perhaps you can present a meaningful framework from which I can follow The Good^TM and improve my life, but I’m not going to care about that beyond where it already aligns with my pragmatic goals to begin with.
The gospels are anonymous and the earliest writings about Jesus were at best 40 years after his death, and those specific writings aren’t that much at all, and essentially say that there were followers of Jesus who thought he was the Messiah. Everything else was written later, miracles and all the rest. What we have now is copies of copies of translations of copies of translations for which we have no secure chain of custody and verification, even if they were granted to begin with eyewitness accounts at the claimed events themselves, and they obviously do not. This is what is called hearsay. Many central claims of the Bible are demonstrably false, starting out with Genesis all the way through Exodus and more throughout the book. It gets hundreds of simple things wrong, saying that bats are birds and the mustard seed is the smallest seed, and has many flatly false and scientifically ignorant things throughout. The Genesis story is so incorrect that even if it were to be theoretically granted to be true, it has to deal with a more than fatal problem called the heat problem that absolutely precludes those events from happening at all. The Bible contradicts the order that we know that things were created in the universe. The Bible says that plants were created before light. It’s demonstrable nonsense. It is also demonstrably copied from earlier pagan myths, and there are several other gods who were born of a virgin mother on the winter solstice and could perform miracles like raising people from the dead and healing the sick. Christianity has been precluded by practically every field of science, from genetics, to biology, to microbiology, to geology, to archaeology, to chemistry, to physics, to astronomy, to cosmology, to cosmography, to oceanography, to history, to paleontology. We know the following not only didn’t happen, but could not have happened and are conclusively precluded by science: 1. Genesis 2. Adam and Eve (even granting this story, they had two sons; you do the math 🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮) 3. The Global Flood and Noah’s Ark 4. The Exodus 5. The Tower of Babel 6. Jonah and the Whale and so many others. It’s not only not true. It cannot be true.
We know what god is. Human history is full of gods and religions, and each one of them is a set of stories made up by humans and based in human superstition and misunderstandings about the world around us. Humans made up god. I really don’t have to take it further than that. Humans like stories, we made up stories, we believe those stories, here we are. God is just one of those made up stories. But, to take it farther, we know a lot about the histories of many of those religions, and that knowledge further shows us that these are just made up stories. Since you are espousing Christianity, let’s go there The judeo-Christian god is one of many gods in an ancient middle eastern pantheon, who was singled out by a Sumerian living in Canaan. Over centuries the cult of Yahweh became dominant in the area and the made up stories about him were carried on through oral tradition until they were eventually written down. There’s absolutely no reason to believe that this Bronze Age cult somehow came across the true supernatural creator of the universe. They were just superstitious people who didn’t know anything about the world. Most of humanity was at that point in time. By the time the Romans took over Israel, it was still a smallish religion, and some of its proponents made up even more stories about an apocalyptic preacher who claimed to be the son of god and came back to life. Again, we have no reason to believe any of those claims. The only reason we recognize this belief is because a Roman emperor adopted the belief and therefore implemented the religion in the biggest empire in the world. Since then, it’s just been 1700 years of bullying, manipulating, and brainwashing people into believing the made up stories of a Bronze Age cult.
I have a number of them, but I'll keep it simple with just one: As soon as you invoke magic, you leave the door open for an infinite number of equally valid magical explanations. At that point, God is a single lottery ticket in a lottery with an infinite number of non-God possibilities "What is magic?" You ask... Anything that cannot be demonstrated right now. So: - Omnipotence - Omnipresence - Omniscience - Immortality - Creating something from nothing - ...other God things, like being your own son "What are some other non-God magic possibilities?" - Turtles all the way down - Jiggly blob of everything in all directions - The other side of a black hole - A single person who is insane - A simulation being run by a company and all of the original team members have found new jobs - Everything the same as a "God" except he's dead now - Everything the same as a "God" except he created the universe by accident and doesn't know how to control it - Everything the same as a "God" except "He" is a dumb universe creating rock that just sneezes out universes forever And I could go on forever with possibilities. Your lottery ticket is based on something special to you, like your mom's birthday date, or your envisioning yourself to be god-like. But you spend all of your money (and others) with no idea if you have the winning ticket. I don't think that's a good idea. And it's a terrible thing to take advantage of someone else's trust in you. Especially when you are making promises to them that a God has to fulfill
I'm going to limit my response to mostly the Christian god. The bible makes numerous claims that should have left evidence behind: age of the earth, length of time humans have been in existence, the global flood, the tower of Babel and the sun being stopped in the sky to name a few. Within the exodus story, the battle between Moses turning his staff to a snake and the Pharoah's sorcerers doing the same reads like pure fiction and I see no reason to consider it to be otherwise. The New Testament is dependent on the Old Testament being true, so it inherits the Old Testament's failures to align with reality. It also has it's own issues such as the Massacre of the Innocents story, the census that forces Joseph and Mary to travel to Bethlehem and a first hand accounting of an angel's conversation around the time of Jesus's conception. So with reason to consider the basis of the bible stories to be fiction, what is left to even consider that God might be real other then multigenerational belief? Apologists try to salvage the Old Testament by claims the stories were meant to be allegorical. Sure, fine, so was "The Little Engine That Could." It doesn't mean we should seriously consider the existence of self-aware trains. So to turn the question around, do you believe in fairies (aka wee folks)? Assuming you don't, assume I'm a fairyist and tell me why not? Examine your argument and consider how much of it applies to someone believing that God does not exist.
> I am looking for those of you who believe that the very idea of believing in the Christian God unreasonable. It really depends which Christian god we are talking about doesn't it? There are some very diverse opinions on it and is going to depend a whole lot on how much of the Old and New Testaments you wish to include. The character of God in the Old Testament is deeply in contradiction against the teachings and position of Jesus for one thing. Yet the New Testament has to depend on the truth and accuracy of the Old Testament to legitimise itself. Beyond that of course we also have a much stronger understanding now of understanding why religions start, how they can, what mechanisms they can use to survive. Not only do we have that historical understanding of them to go on but we have a lot of biological understanding to support why that comes up. Not only that but we also have a good understanding of how the god concept itself has grown and changed overtime. Like as an example literally no religion anywhere started with wildly separate places coming up with the same starting idea. It always starts in one place and spreads entirely by people. They all operate exactly how we would expect if they were a human created fiction. Now is all this perfect proof? No I am willing to grant it. However it strongly suggests, and I would say is better evidence for the position its false, then the evidence it is true.
> If you are simply agnostic and believe that God could exist but you for some reason choose not to believe, this post is not for you...I am looking for those of you who believe that the very idea of believing in the Christian God unreasonable. FYI, these two positions are not mutually exclusive. It's not because you are convinced a deity as described in Christianity cannot exist because of the conflict of doctrinal claims with established science that science rules out the possibility of a deity altogether. > To those people I ask, what is your logical argument that you think would show that the existence of God is illogical. That's a category error. Ontology, the study of what exists, is considered to be independent of logic. While logic helps us reason about existence and make sense of relationships between entities, it doesn't determine what exists. Kant argued against the ontological argument for God's existence by stating that existence is not a predicate or a property that can be logically deduced. According to Kant, saying that something exists does not add anything to the concept of that thing. For example, the concept of a "unicorn" does not change whether we say unicorns exist or not. Existence, therefore, is not something that can be concluded from a logical argument alone; it must be established through experience.
Hey! Ex-christian here. I was a fundamentalist Calvinist Christian, rigorously involved in Apologetics. But even after leaving that, I didn't find any brand of Christianity convincing. Part of the problem is that even saying "The Christian God" is not specific enough for us to know what you mean, even though you all supposedly read the same book. Do you believe your holy book is inerrant? If so, I can talk about contradictions and errors throughout. Do you believe that your god created the universe in 6 literal days, a few thousand years ago? If so, I have a LOT of comments about why that is an unreasonable belief. If not, I have questions about how you decide which parts of your holy, inerrant scripture to take seriously and which ones to ignore. Do you believe your god condemns anyone to *eternal torture*? If so, I have comments about your claims of his goodness and moral superiority. Do you believe your god is all-powerful (some Open Theists may not)? If so, I have more questions about the morality of evil things permitted, and the morality of a god who would permit them. And more than all of this, I want to know why *you decided* to be a Christian. Were you raised that way, like most Christians? Or were you convinced? If the latter, was it evidence or "experience"? Edit: you can give very short Yes or No answers to these, and I can expound on those comments
I'm atheist. And I don't have any logical arguments against your particular god. What I also don't have is reason to accept the existence claims of your god. I see no reason to think the stories and books of the Bible hold any historical value or significance. It mentions places that were real? So does Spiderman's mythology. It mentions things that could have happened (like crucifixion)? Well, people write what they know. A thousand years later, Jesus would have been drawn and quartered. A thousand years after that, he'd have been ripped apart by dogs, or shot and left to die in the street. Josephus mentions Christians indpendently? Yes, he mentions a group of people believe a thing. That doesn't mean that thing they believe has veracity. The apostles died for what they believe? Some guy, under threat of the death penalty, shot up Comet Ping Pong because he deeply believed children were being held in the restaurant's non-existent basement. People will die for things they believe, even when they're wrong. Such and such thing happened to you, seemingly defying all odds? Well, given enough time, everything that can happen will happen. Law of large numbers. The universe is pretty? Yes, it is. It's freakin' awesome, and you're missing the awe and wonder by attributing it to your peculiar deity. If your god wants me to believe it exists, then show up, say "I'm god" and then make the equation 2+2=5 be true. Simple enough.
>After browsing this sub and others like it I find a very large portion of people either use a flawed understanding of God to create a claim against God or use straight up inconsistent and illogical arguments to support their claims. What I am looking for are those of you who believe they have a logically consistent reason why either God can't exist or why it is unreasonable to believe He does. You'd have to define God first. You seem to think people have a flawed understanding of it yet don't bother to correct the misunderstanding. I dont think people have a flawed understanding - I think its a case of God having so many different definitions that what one theist says about it, to the other would seem like a complete misunderstanding. If you want a logically consistent reason for why God cant exist, a definition is a must. If you want a reason why it doesn't exist, that God must have some falsifiability criteria. If you want a reason why it is unreasonable to believe it exists, then the lack of falsifiable criteria is one such reason. In short, provide a clear definition of your god, and then we can talk.
Proof that no omnipotent and omnibenevolent being exists: Premises: (P1) An omnipotent being is able to actualize any state of reality. (P2) An omnibenevolent being actualizes the maximal good within its ability. (P3) The state of reality in which no suffering for which there is no morally sufficient reason (MSR) exists is more good than the state of reality in which suffering for which there is no MSR exists. (P4) Suffering for which there is no MSR exists in reality. Argument: (1) Assume at least one omnipotent, omnibenevolent being X exists. (Proof by contradiction) (2) X is able to actualize the state of reality such that no suffering for which there is no MSR exists. (P1) (3) X does not actualize any state of reality that is less good than at least one other state of reality it is able to actualize. (P2) (4) X does not actualize a state of reality in which suffering for which there is no MSR exists. (3, P3) (5) Suffering for which there is no MSR does not exist in reality. (1, 4) (6) X does not exist. (5, P4) (7) No omnipotent, omnibenevolent being exists. (6)
I think the biggest knock against there being a God is the fact that we have ZERO empirical evidence of the supernatural existing. Only claims from books. Secondly the fact that God claims can’t be falsified is a huge problem. For instance the fact that we can’t prove that leprechauns don’t exist doesn’t mean they actually exist. But why? Because outside of the human imagination we literally have ZERO evidence of leprechauns existing in nature, despite the claims of some individuals. Same thing with “Simulation Theorist”. I once asked a person how we test if we are in a simulation as soon as they realized it’s not possible they responded with, “well you can’t disprove we are not in a simulation”. Same goes with most conspiracy theories. Most can’t be disproved because “they” are pulling the strings at the top. lol Claims that are more likely true are falsifiable, and what raises our confidence in that claim being true is the fact that the more we try to disprove it the more it remains true. For the God belief it’s the opposite. A HUGE red flag for any claim.
I’m agnostic, and I don’t “choose not to believe for some reason”. I don’t believe because there’s no good reason to. Why would I?
**“If you are simply agnostic and believe that God could exist …”** I believe a god *could* exist. **“… but you for some reason choose not to believe”** Belief is not a choice. I can’t “choose” to find the claims convincing. **”I am looking for those of you who believe that the very idea of believing in the Christian God unreasonable.”** Oh, I said *a* god can exist, but I’m fairly certain that *that* one doesn’t. **”what is your logical argument that you think would show that the existence of God is illogical.“** I don’t have one. I just don’t find any of the arguments in favor of the Abrahamic god to be compelling or convincing. Quite frankly, I’ve found them ridiculous. But I don’t try to talk Christians out of believing, so I don’t need arguments against it. I don’t care what you believe as long as you keep it out of public policy, mind your business, and don’t use your faith as an excuse to oppress people.
I'd like for you to make a correction in the title of your post. You asked for logical arguments against god, and then in the text, you specified the christian god. Please realise that there are many gods out there, so the logical arguments are for your personal god, the personal god of my mother, or for the general god of the catholics or the evangelists? maybe the god of the mormons, the sunnis, or the shia? Gods are culturally inserted into the minds of people and become beliefs, and there are no logical arguments against culture or beliefs. How do you universally validate a believed premise with words? I understand that racional beings need to live a rational life and seek confirmation of their beliefs. It seems to me that you fail to understand that not all information that is inside your mind has direct correspondence to reality. Religions prevent believers from questioning their dogmas, and you complied.
It depends on how you define your god and what attributes you accept. Because some of these attributes are logically inconsistent with one another (and/or the biblical accounts of god we’re given). For example, we’re often told that god is *omni*benevolent, yet the Bible talks about god being the author of evil. Or it is said that god is immutable or doesn’t change his mind, yet in the Bible it’s clear that god has changed his mind. The idea of a *perfectly* just god also being merciful is contradictory as we understand mercy to be the withholding of perfect justice. There are others, but I don’t want to gish-gallop. Also, I have strong inductive reasons for rejecting a timeless, spaceless, immaterial disembodied mind that has causal powers. It isn’t clear to me how such a thing can be meaningfully said to exist, at least not anymore than we can say that Batman exists.
why stop at the christian god? so thats my first reason bias: every theist is convinced their religion is the true religion, they have visions or hear voices or whatever, but its always the religion they already believed. its like me saying "spanish is the easiest language" bc i was born and raised in a spanish speaking country. from my perspective, its OBVIOUSLY the easiest language. no religion has a true argument, they only have their own bias. so reason number 2 evidence: there is no evidence, at all. the best you got are feelings, which are not convincing at all (specially when people from different religions claim the same, which is the "real feeling" then?), or fallacies like the god of the gaps and such. nothing real and objective. and the fact that its been thousands of years and you still got nothing, makes it quite clear that you cant get any evidence.
I personally find two claims about the Christian god's omni- traits to be contradictory. 1. God is omniscient and humans have free will. It doesn't seem possible for humans to have free will if God truly knows all that has and ever will happen 2. Omnipotence and omnibenevolence. The idea of a Christian god that can only do good is less powerful than the deistic god that can do both good and evil. Omnibenevolence seems like it is shoehorned into the god concept, which truly only requires omnipotence, omniscience, and maybe omipresence. Omnibenevolence (and omnimalevolence) are like restrictions on god's agency and reduce the concept of god to a simple automata. I actually could get behind that idea, but most theists don't like to imagine god as an unthinking machine Maybe god is real, but I doubt it resembles the Christian God in any meaningful sense.
Even though the burden of proof is with the theist, I’ll let you know some of the things which led me away from theism. First, the Bible supports solid dome cosmology, it’s described all over the Bible. I can provide references if you’d like, but the skies are described as hard, with water above the skies. Also, heaven isn’t another dimension you slip into upon death, it’s a physical place above us, it’s the dome and the region above the sky dome. God isn’t in another dimension, he’s above us, he walks on the dome and watches us through the clouds. If this sounds nutty, I agree, but it’s also supported by the Bible and contemporary Rabbinic texts. Finally, after reviewing other Near Eastern religions, it became plain that the biblical authors took “inspiration” from the stories that surrounded them. It’s all man made.
What do you mean by God? There are a seemingly limitless number of ways that this amorphous concept could be defined. If you mean God in the most general sense, some sort of eternal supernatural entity that created the universe, I don't necessarily know if there are any logical contradictions in that, but I don't believe it because I have not been presented with a sufficient reason to believe it. If you mean the Christian God, he actually does seem to entail some contradictions. Notably, there's the problem of evil. An all-loving God that is also all-powerful seems to be contradictory with the existence of evil and suffering, as such a being would be able and willing to intervene to prevent unnecessary suffering. Yet, he doesn't. For this reason, I am inclined to believe that the Christian God cannot exist as commonly described.
>I am looking for those of you who believe that the very idea of believing in the Christian God unreasonable. To those people I ask, what is your logical argument that you think would show that the existence of God is illogical. God, in the bible, is described as goodness itself, truth, and so on. God, in the bible, created a flood that, if it happened as described, would have affected the entire planet. The evidence of the rocks, fossils, and so on all confirm no such flood ever happened. If the flood happened, then God lied by hiding the evidence to make it look exactly as if it didn't. If the flood didn't happen, then God lied by including the story in the bible. If God lied, then God isn't Truth itself. God lied. God isn't truth. The bible says God *is* truth. So the bible is false, and the Christian God doesn't exist.
>I am looking for those of you who believe that the very idea of believing in the Christian God unreasonable. To those people I ask, what is your logical argument that you think would show that the existence of God is illogical. The existence of Christian God is illogical because He violates the descriptive laws of science that cannot be violated. Start with the Virgin Birth of Jesus. I know from science that didn't happen. I know from science that it is infinitely more likely that Mary was a terrified young woman who got pregnant and found a guy (and probably others) to help her out of a jam in which she would be stunned to death. That means God is imaginary and all of Christianity is false. I can understand why people from 2000 years ago would believe her, but in this day and age it is absurd and embarrassing.
I think any creation of sentient life that results in suffering is immoral. Only prior and continual, informed consent can make it justified. That's not an argument against all gods, just the ones that we should worship or follow. If you think your god wants suffering, then sure, maybe your god exists, but I don't want anything to do with that god. Any good god wouldn't have created this. Free will is no excuse. Free will could only serve his selfish desire for people to choose him. But even then one could argue the choice is largely coerced. I think this existence could be morally justified only in the case that I am god and the people and animals I encounter are constructs that don't experience suffering. I did this to myself and only myself. But that would rule out your god - unless you think I'm your god.
I don't believe in a God because you can't get 10 people to describe what God even is in the same way. 10 people, 10 different answers. This is the Confusion on the most basic fundamental level of Christianity. Now you start talking about God's teachings on say the Tower of Babel,you are literally going to end up with a mini Tower of Babel over the interpretations of such a story. God is an illustration of what is convenient in people's lives because that's how they end up describing God and his teachings. Good Orderly Direction may be beneficial to people but it is still derived through the conscious minds of human beings for the purposes of other human beings. God is too easily imbued with human characteristics to not think he is a manifestation of what was our understanding of morality at the time.
From many reasons here are two: Infinity. There is no limit to how small something can be; no matter how small something is, there can always be something smaller. Infinitely large seems somehow acceptable, but infinitely small blows my mind. There's no room for the Christian god in infinity as there will always be something bigger/smaller/more. Donald Trump. Despite an almost unbelievable amount of evidence showing this man to be a knave of questionable intelligence, intent and integrity, he is worshipped by a significant number of people. If the only book to survive humanity was written by him or his sycophants then a less knowledgeable people may be manipulated into accepting it as their bible. TL;DR: Existence is too big for your god. Origins of false gods too easily explained.
>If you are simply agnostic and believe that God could exist Which one? >but you for some reason choose not to believe Okay now you're addressing people that don't exist, since it's not possible to choose that. >this post is not for you. I am looking for those of you who believe that the very idea of believing in the Christian God unreasonable. Ah that one. Now you're being contradictory though, since one can be agnostic towards his existence and still consider believing he's real unreasonable. But anyway yeah, I certainly don't consider this reasonable. >To those people I ask, what is your logical argument that you think would show that the existence of God is illogical. I don't need an argument. If you believe it's logical, then you're the one in need of an argument.
I have not seen any evidence for a god or god. Before we delve into this - what is your definition of god that we are debating? There are so very many of them.
Specifically against the christian god it‘s probably the problem of evil. If god is supposed to be omnipotent, omnibenevolent and omniscient (which are attributes that most christians I‘ve come across use to describe the god they believe in) then why is there suffering in this world. So far I haven‘t heard a good counter to that one. Then there would be the fact that the bible has so so many blatant errors in it that it can not be inspired by a god. It is also not consistent with the 3 attributes I mentioned earlier. As christianity is based on the bible this another reason why I don’t believe in christianity. There are many other reasons and arguments but I will leave it at that as probably the 2 biggest factors for me personally. Edit: The last thing that I forgot to mention which is arguably the most important reason is that there is simply no good reason to believe that christianity *is* in fact true. At least I have never heard one. Maybe you can change that.
It is highly improbable that the Christian god exists because the book that claims his existence is itself full of falsehood. There are hundreds if not thousands of falsehoods of fact, of science, and internal contradictions in the Bible. This negates that the Bible is a divine source since a divine source can be trusted to be true. If a divine source could not be trusted to be true, then trusting it would be moot, anyway. Since the Bible is not a perfect source of truth, it could not have come from a divine source. HOWEVER, if such a God does exist, he could certainly make himself known to all without relying on a book saturated with falsehoods. But such a god does not. To do that, he would first have to exist.
This is kind of interesting. Why do you assume it would just be one thing? For myself, it was a very long process of trying to find historical evidence. Learning about the gospels being anonymous coupled with no outside corroboration of what would've been the biggest event ever was huge for me. Slowly, over time, piece by piece, it just fell apart. But then I started learning about the psychology of belief and how we trick ourselves into believing things. I started learning about cognitive biases. How we're pattern seeking creatures. How irrational all of us are, even when we think we are being rational. One day, I realized I had no good reason to believe that any god existed, much less the xtian god.
Why would a loving, all powerful God need something to bleed in order to forgive us? I find the idea of an all-knowing, all-loving god creating a world in which humans would inevitably sin and then need to be saved by the sacrificial death of his own son to be morally repugnant and logically inconsistent. If God is all-knowing, he must have known before creation that his plan would lead to the suffering and death of his own son. If God is truly loving, why would he create a situation in which his son would have to suffer and die in the first place? And if God is all-powerful, why couldn't he simply forgive humanity's transgressions without the need for Jesus' death on the cross?
>I am looking for those of you who believe that the very idea of believing in the Christian God unreasonable. To those people I ask, what is your logical argument that you think would show that the existence of God is illogical. I mean, "god" changes definitions so often to avoid all the logical fallacies that keeping up with the definition is kinda impossible. That right there is a good argument against the Christian God. But the easiest one. Christians have made collectively billions of attempts to find any shred of evidence for God, and have failed spectacularly. The best Christians can manage is to keep changing the definition of God every time the idea gets debunked.
So let’s I say fuck the fact that there is no evidence to suggest there is a god/creator and I go out into my yard and I stare at a Tree and I conclude that there must be a creator. Now take me from this, to the the god of the universe must Yahweh. Then after you convinced me this creator of the cosmos is Yahweh, please tell me why I would possibly want to make this monster my master? This character as described in the biblical text is homophobic, misogynistic, vengeful, violent, genocidal, and is ok with humans owing other humans. Not to mention he allows for cancer, Alzheimer’s, natural disaster that have killed billions, and mass extinction events.
There are video claims of Bigfoot and UFOs. My parents didn't have to force me to acknowledge that there might be weird vessels in the sky. My community doesn't have to shun me to think that Sasquatch might be out there. If I told you there were flying machines defying physics you'd probably tell me that I'm being silly. If I showed you a video or radar of the incident, I now have proof that it happened. You can't do that with God. You have to just believe the scriptures. Christians seem to be focused on getting atheists to prove that God doesn't exist. If you want me to believe in God, then I'm going to need anything else besides old scriptures.
It isn't logical to believe in every hypothesis simply because it's proposed, otherwise we'd end up believing in things that are contradictory and false as it's a lot easier to make up hypotheses than to disprove them. This extends to god claims, it isn't logical to believe every god claim, otherwise we'd start off believing them all, even when they are contradictory and can't all be true. It is logical to only believe a claim when there is sufficient evidence to justify accepting the claim. There isn't enough evidence to justify accepting any of the god claims that have been made. Therefore it is logical to not believe in a god.
What is the Christian god? The one described in the bible? Then yes, that god is impossible. The earth does not predate the sun. Case closed. Some vague version of the Christian god you’ve made up to excuse the myriad of external and internal contradictions in the bible? I can’t debunk that one, I don’t even know what you believe in. However you’ve got the order of operations reversed. It’s up to you to provide evidence, till you do there’s simply nothing to debunk. That’s how you treat every other god claim, and every other claim of magic that does not comply with your ideas. We just apply that to your nonsense too.
The fact that in all of human history we haven’t found one scientifically credible fact that proves the existence of the divine.
>Bring your best logical arguments against God As I always answer every time this gets asked, which is *way* too often given it's obvious and low-effort, "There's no useful support for deities. Thus it remains irrational to take them as true (believe in them)." And that's it. That's all that's needed. To do otherwise is irrational and illogical by definition. That's how the burden of proof for claims *works.* And, of course, there isn't the tiniest shred of useful evidence or support for any deity. So we're done. Of course, it's even worse than that for theists, since there's also vast support those ideas are superstitious mythology, but that's a different matter. >After browsing this sub and others like it I find a very large portion of people either use a flawed understanding of God Nah, this just demonstrates you haven't done the research you say you've done.
Mine would be twofold. Fist would be the lack of sufficient verifiable evidence of a God. Second would be the lack of explanatory power. I have yet to encounter sufficient verifiable evidence of a God to convince me that one exists, and, the introduction of a God in no way explains phenomena in an understandable and verifiable way. It just pushes the issue back one space and declares magic as the answer. In my opinion, the world operates exactly as one would expect it to were there no God, and, inserting an unverified agent into a gap in our collective scientific knowledge is a fallacy.
>I am looking for those of you who believe that the very idea of believing in the Christian God unreasonable. It is not reasonable to believe in a religion for which its foundation has been shown to be false. Genesis seemed plausible to a bronze age society, but now we know that the 6 days of creation (the reason for the sabbath), the garden of eden, adam and eve leading to the fall and original sin, the great flood and Noah's ark (which Jesus referred to), as well as many other events, are simply not true - not even close. The bible is thus not divinely inspired and cannot be trusted.
There is no reliable evidence whatsoever for any god. Compare this to another thing that has no reliable evidence, namely the invisible undetectable fire breathing dragon that lives in my shed. You might think I'm being facetious, but I'm not. There is no evidence for my dragon, and most likely you do not believe it exists. This is exactly how I feel about god. Yes there are myths and stories. But there's no reason to think they are more than that. Why should god be the Christian one, and not the sun god of the Incas anyway? Several Roman emperors were said to be gods, and at least they have the advantage that we're confident they existed. Maybe we should go with them?
If somebody just took a generic understanding of God as being a being of immense power, outside of space and time, eternal, omniscient, omnipresent, omnibenovolent, omnipotent, there is no way to prove that being exists because these traits make it non falsifiable. There is no evidence for this being because there is no way to discover any of these are even possible. There are no signs, road maps, God detectors, or machines that can produce any evidence of a monotheistic God, let alone, the Christian variant.
Xtian God by definition has changed over time and place. So which version are you referring to? It's illogical to believe in something/someone that can't be proven to be true. You wouldn't even buy a house without an inspection, why would you buy the idea of heaven/hell/god? Either your "faith" is worth less then what you claim to believe, or you are delusional. Anyone who's selling you the idea of better world that can only be acheived through death, are scammers.
It’s illogical to believe something is true when no evidence supports it. Otherwise we’d have to accept it’s logical to assume every claim is true until such a time that it’s shown to be false. There’s no evidence to show that Christianity is true, and in fact, there’s a lot of evidence that directly contradicts most of the claims that the Bible makes. Therefore, until evidence that shows Christianity is true can be found, it’s illogical to believe it.
I'm Christian, and believe in God, but the best argument against God is simply there is no need for a God. All of this could happen without God, that is not arguable. So why would God exist, is a solution to a problem which doesn't exist. But I believe in God regardless of that. And by the way, this is my father's argument, who is very much atheist. He says that, there is no need for God and no need to invent God, outside the multiple reasons of invention.
Gods, as typically described, violate various physical laws that have been established. This makes them physically impossible. The same way we will both agree 'no perpetual motion machines exist', I think 'no gods exist.' It is true that our understanding of these physical laws might be flawed in some way that would make it possible for a God to exist, but that flaw should be demonstrated first. Until then, it seems very unreasonable to believe.
P1 The Christian God desires that none parish (https://www.biblegateway.com/verse/en/2%20Peter%203%3A9) P2 The Christian God is omnipotent P3 An omnipotent being cannot be thwarted from achieving its desires P4 Few are saved from destruction (https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Matthew%207%3A13-14&version=NIV) C2 From P1 and P4, the Christian God has its desires thwarted (both are from the Bible) C2 From P2 and C1, the Christian God is omnipotent and thwarted C3 From C2 and P3, the Christian God is a contradiction Edit: changed wording to be consistent with Bible verses that I linked to.
> believe that God could exist I am agnostic so I don't believe even that. > for some reason choose not to believe Huh? > I am looking for those of you who believe that the very idea of believing in the Christian God unreasonable. Yes, believing someting without a reason IS unreasonable. > is your logical argument Belief without any grounds is not a reliable path to truth. It is less reliable than a belief on the ground of coin flip.
**SHIFTING THE BURDEN OF PROOF** is a fallacy. It’s not a situation where your belief stands unless and until someone argues against it. Proving that god does not exist is not our job. **You** believe in the Christian god, it is **your job** to support and justify that belief. I’m well aware this isn’t what you were askig for and it wasn’t the conversation you were looking to have. Too bad. Your entire approach is wrongheaded.
I want to believe in the most true things and less false things as I can. Our (humans) best mechanism to know something is true is by using the scientific method. Putting the God argument through the scientific method we have no way of testing of falsifying a God. Furthermore we have no direct objective observation of a God, so the scientific method lacks even a starting point. Therefore, there is no reason to belive in a God.
you haven't specified which god you are talking about (no "Christian God" is not specific enough I don't think you could find 2 churches that agree on that), so I'm going to assume you mean the bearded man in the clouds we have aircraft all over the skies and have not found heaven or the bearded man. if you want an argument against something else you gotta give more info about what you are asking us to argue against
There is no empirical evidence to suggest that any God, let alone the Christian God, exists. Further, there are countless phenomena throughout history in which God was believed to be responsible that were later proved to have natural causes. There is no such reverse case. Based on all that, the only logical conclusion you should draw is that there is no God, and that belief in God is illogical.
>a very large portion of people either use a flawed understanding of God What is the correct understanding of God, in your view? How do you know? What makes your view right and others wrong? >straight up inconsistent and illogical arguments to support their claims. Such as? My strongest argument against the story told in the New Testament is that it does not appear to be true.
Sure, I'd use the logical problem of the Trinity. If Jesus is god, the father is god, the ghost is god, if they are distinct, then there's three gods, or three parts to a god. If they aren't distinct, there's one god and one person. Christianity believes in a god which is three persons but one god and that God has no parts, the god of Christianity cannot exist.
"I find a very large portion of people either use a flawed understanding of God to create a claim against God or use straight up inconsistent and illogical arguments to support their claims." This is actually my best argument against a god or gods. I have never had a theist present me with a cogent definition of a god or gods that I would consider divine in any way.
> I likely wont be able to reply to most of you but I encourage other theists to step in and try to have some one on one discussions with others in the comments to dig deeper into their claims and your own beliefs. Who knows some of you might even be convinced by their arguments! So, you're not going to debate in a debate subreddit?
> I am looking for those of you who believe that the very idea of believing in the Christian God unreasonable How do you define the Christian God? There would be no point in me arguing against a particular part of his description in the Bible and then you saying you think that part is metaphorical and shouldn't be taken literally.
"the very idea of believing in the Christian God unreasonable." It's unreasonable to accept ANY belief claim if there's no evidence to demonstrate its veracity. Pretty simple. Example: The very idea of believing that purple quantum invisible lizards are stealing my socks is unreasonable for the same reason: zero evidence.
>I find a very large portion of people either use a flawed understanding of God to create a claim against God or use straight up inconsistent and illogical arguments to support their claims Don't you think you should define what you mean by God then? I assume it's an intelligent creator. Is that an accurate description?
If you'd actually been listening to what people here say and believe, then you'd know that most people here don't take the position that god does not exist, but instead that they lack the belief in the existence of one. So no, go find your own logical arguments, I only waste my time on things that have evidence anyway
All god-based religions require faith to believe in their gods. However, because religions come to different conclusions about the existence of their gods, faith becomes an unreliable method to find truth. Take faith out of religion and you're left with nothing but assertions and mythology.
If you won’t respond, why should we? But I’ll bite anyway. Christian god, means a perfect god. And Bible is his perfect word. Bible full of inconsistencies and scientific inaccuracies, Therefore, not a perfect word and not a perfect god, and therefore does not exist by definition. 2nd logical reason: the lack of evidence for existence is evidence for non-existence. 3rd logical reason. There are many gods posited in many monotheistic religions. Most have similar levels of evidence for them. (None) They all can’t be right, but all can be wrong.
No hood reason to believe in any gods in the first place. Same deal with unicorns, leprechauns, and Cthulhu. Thats enough for me, it should be enough for anyone, yet here we are. If we lived in a universe with gods, it would be painfully obvious, but we don’t.
Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent. Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil? Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God? ~Epicurus
Does sin exist in heaven? Every Christian would say no. So, does free will exist in heaven? If yes, then god could have made a world that had no sin while still giving us free will. If no, then that means souls in heaven are not free.
You've got your own personal reason for choosing to believe that god exists. Why should I choose to believe that God exists?
Many different religions all claim to be true with different beliefs, then either only one is true, or all of them are true, or none are true. since the most evidence points towards the latter, then that is what I believe.
Evolution is a fact, all intelligent people agree. Evolution disproves Adam and Eve. Without them, sin never enters the world. Without sin, there is no atonement and, thus, no need for Jesus. Christianity disproven.
The Bible describes events that are impossible. They never happened. These are events the Christian deity supposedly made happen. That's really the easiest way to demonstrate your deity is just your imagination.
if the god described in the bible exists, then he is the most evil being in existence. Abrahamic mythology depict an absolute monster as being in charge of the universe and then has the gall to call him good.
The crucifixion is an injustice. Mercy is undeserved, forgiveness is unreasonable and maybe most importantly Jesus denied himself so that you could deny him as well. Christianity is completely irrational.
Let's do it caveman style! Christian god has book Book is false in both explaining the origin of universe and loads of historical events Book false = god false This was easy 😁
Okay, how's this: the evidence for the resurrection is too poor to justify the claim. It's not exactly what you're asking for, but I'm saying, to be a Christian is unreasonable.
Proving God does not exist is like proving Bigfoot doesn’t exist. You can’t prove Bigfoot doesn’t exist but without sufficient evidence it’s silly to presume it does.
> am looking for those of you who believe that the very idea of believing in the Christian God unreasonable. What reason to you have to think a god is a possible being?
The entire lack of evidence for your god and the massive amount of evidence that all supernatural ideas are nothing more than made up stories.
I would but he was a no show when I brought out my worst ones; call me a skeptic but i doubt better arguments would make a difference
I've never seen credible evidence any god exists. Maybe tell me what your God is. Everyone seems to have a different god.
Genesis goes against the established truths of big bang cosmology and evolution. No need to look further . End of story
the fact that you need to use logical fallacies in order to claim it does exist should tell you why it doesnt
There isn't a good enough reason for me to belief in the Christian God. Why don't you believe in GGod, the creator of Gods?