Does God exist?

Twenty reasons to doubt the Christian God

I am a strong atheist, because I strongly believe there are no gods, based on applying reason to evidence. I am also an agnostic about absolute knowledge, because I do not claim to know this with certainty.

I am always happy to say about any of my beliefs, including whether there is a god, that I might be mistaken. But at the moment, I am as confident that the Christian god does not exist as Christians are that Thor does not exist.

For clarity, in this article, I’ll call the Christian god ‘God’ with a capital ‘G’.

‘Does God Exist?’ is not merely a technical claim about how the universe came to be. It is also a claim about having moral authority to tell people how to live their lives. That puts a strong responsibility, and a strong onus of proof, on those making the claim.

So how do we evaluate what is most likely to be true?

I suggest that faith and personal experience are the worst and least reliable ways of identifying what is true. They result in different people coming to different beliefs about the same reality.

Applying reason to evidence is the most reliable way, because it can more reliably result in different people coming to the same beliefs about the same reality. The best example of this is the scientific method.

Christians typically believe that their God is a pure mind without a body, perfect and changeless, a first cause beyond time and space, all knowing, all powerful, and all good. Here are twenty reasons why this idea is implausible.

Can a mind exist without a body?

1. A pure mind without a body is an invented convenience. We have no evidence that minds exist without bodies, brains, or energy, and we have a lot of evidence that minds are changed by changes to brains.

2. Even if we explore this invented convenience, a pure mind without a body might be aware of the existence of matter, but how could it interact with that matter? There is no known or coherent mechanism by which it could do so.

Can a changeless being create anything?

3. If this God is changeless, then it cannot create anything, because it would have to change in order to do so.

4. Even if you believe it simply willed matter into existence, which is another invented convenience, then that act of will would be a change, within that supposedly changeless mind.

5. But if this mind is perfect, then it could not change anyway, because it would either become more perfect, which is impossible, or less perfect, and thus no longer perfect.

6. Even if it could change, it would not want to change, because, being perfect, it would have no need or desire to do anything.

7. If you respond that it was changeless, but it changed when it created the universe, then it is simply false to say that it is changeless. Or could it change back to being changeless? How would that change happen?

Can a timeless being cause anything?

8. If this God is beyond time, then it cannot cause anything to happen, because cause and effect (if they exist) involve time. And calling this ‘atemporal causation’ just adds a contradictory name to a mystery.

9. If this God created, and interacts with, a universe that involves time and space, then the God is not beyond time and space.

10. If the God is no longer changeless, or beyond time and space, then it may have ceased to exist sometime in the last 14 billion years.

Can a perfect God create suffering?

11. If this God is all perfect and all good, then it would have created a perfect universe. At a minimum, a perfect universe would not contain suffering or evil.

12. If you respond that even a perfect God can only do what is logically possible, then it is logically possible to have beings who freely do good, or at least to create a universe with far less apparently pointless suffering.

13. If you respond that the universe is actually perfect, but we just don’t understand how, then why would the God have to intervene in this perfect universe through miracles?

Can a God be the source of morality?

14. The Euthyphro dilemma remains: does the God command things to be good for arbitrary reasons, or does it identify things as being good because they correspond to independent standards of goodness?

15. If you respond that God’s nature is good, that does not solve the problem. The dilemma still remains: is the God’s nature good for arbitrary reasons, or is it good because it corresponds to independent standards of goodness?

16. Many arguments for an all-good God can just as easily support the idea of an all-evil God. This God allows free will so that we can voluntarily choose to be evil, instead of being forced to be evil.

Can an all-knowing God allow free will?

17. If this God is all knowing, then it knows the taste of strawberry yoghurt. But if the God has no body and therefore no senses, how can it know the taste of anything?

18. If you respond that the God only knows the truth of propositions, then the God is not all-knowing. It is less than all-knowing.

19. If this God is all-knowing, then before creating the universe it knew every evil thing every human will do. But if it knows that, then either we do not have free will, or else the God has consciously created free agents that it knows will do evil.

Can an all-powerful God not communicate effectively?

20. If this God cares about the lives of humans on planet Earth, then, at a minimum, it could have given us all the same information and the same moral messages. Instead, we see exactly what we would expect if humans invented the idea of gods: different messages, scriptures, rules, and claims of certainty.

Conclusion

Finally, all of this is exploring an invented convenience that has not been justified in the first place: that there can be such a thing as a pure mind without a body.

Before moving on to claims about that mind being perfect, changeless, timeless, all-knowing, all-powerful, and all-good, Christians first have to justify the original claim. And they have to justify it in the real world, not merely in the invented universe of theological discourse.

When we apply reason to evidence, reality and morality seem much as we would expect them to seem if there was no God. We also see a relentless pattern of natural explanations replacing supernatural explanations.

I’ve covered in this earlier article why morality requires compassion, not divine commandments. I’ll return to other arguments in future articles.