God
From Wikireligion
God usually refers to what monotheists believe to be an omnipotent being, usually attributed with creating the universe, or else sustaining it. A majority of people believe in God, especially the Abrahamic God, as do Christians, Jews, and Muslims.
Many other traditions held, or continue to hold, belief and worship of multiple gods and goddesses, such as the ancient Greeks, Romans, Egyptians.
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Arugments against the existence of god
Each of the following arguments aims at showing that some particular conception of a god either is inherently meaningless, contradictory, or contradicts known scientific and/or historical facts, and that therefore a god thus described does not exist.
Empirical arguments (against)
Empirical arguments depend on empirical data in order to prove their conclusions.
- The argument from inconsistent revelations contests the existence of the Middle Eastern, Biblical deity called God as described in holy scriptures, such as the Jewish Tanakh, the Christian Bible, or the Muslim Qur'an, by identifying apparent contradictions between different scriptures, within a single scripture, or between scripture and known facts.
- The problem of evil contests the existence of a God who is both omnipotent and omnibenevolent by arguing that such a God should not permit the existence of evil or suffering. The theist responses are called theodicies.
- The argument from poor design contests the idea that God created life on the basis that lifeforms exist which seem to exhibit poor design.
- The argument from nonbelief contests the existence of an omnipotent God who wants humans to believe in him by arguing that such a God would do a better job of gathering believers.
- The argument from parsimony contends that since natural (non-supernatural) theories adequately explain the development of religion and belief in god<ref>Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought, Pascal Boyer, Basic Books (2001)</ref>, the actual existence of such supernatural agents is superfluous and may be dismissed unless otherwise proven to be required to explain the phenomenon.
Deductive arguments (against)
Deductive arguments attempt to prove their conclusions by deductive reasoning from true premises. These arguments inherently depend on specific definitions of the term "God".
- The omnipotence paradox suggests that the concept of an omnipotent God is logically contradictory, from considering a question like: "Can God create a rock so big that He Himself could not lift it?".
- Another argument suggests that there is a contradiction between God being omniscient and omnipotent, basically asking "how can an All-Knowing Being change His mind?" See the article on omniscience for details.
- The argument from free will contests the existence of an omniscient god who has free will - or has allotted the same freedom to his creations - by arguing that the two properties are contradictory. According to the argument, if God already knows the future, then humanity is destined to corroborate with his knowledge of the future and not have true free will to deviate from it. Therefore our free will contradicts an omniscient god. Obviously, such an argument assumes the truth of free will within human agents. However, the argument suffers from a modal fallacy, where the necessity of God’s knowledge is incorrectly transferred to necessity of the action itself. Additionally, the argument is refuted by those who state that God is above time and exists in every moment. Furthermore, simple knowledge of a person's actions would not necessarily influence how one arrived upon those actions. While many theologians maintain that God is able to control a person's actions yet allows that person to decide upon those actions, some suggest that God has deliberately limited his omniscience and omnipotence to allow freewill<ref>eg Polkinghorne op. cit.</ref>
- The Transcendental argument for the non-existence of God contests the existence of an intelligent creator by suggesting that such a being would make logic and morality contingent, which is incompatible with the presuppositionalist assertion that they are necessary, and contradicts the efficacy of science. A more general line of argument based on TANG, <ref>materialist apologetics</ref>, seeks to generalize this argument to all necessary features of the universe and all god-concepts.
- The counter-argument against the Cosmological argument ("chicken or the egg") states that if the Universe had to be created by God because it must have a creator, then God, in turn would have had to be created by some other God, and so on. This attacks the premise that the Universe is the second cause, (after God, who is claimed to be the first cause).
- Theological noncognitivism, as used in literature, usually seeks to disprove the god-concept by showing that it is unverifiable by scientific tests.
- It is alleged that there is a logical impossibility in theism: God is defined as an extra-temporal being, but also as an active creator. The argument suggests that the very act of creation is inconceivable and absurd beyond the constraints of time and space, and the fact that it cannot be proven if God is in either. <ref>Template:Cite web</ref>
Inductive arguments (against)
Inductive arguments argue their conclusions through inductive reasoning.
- The atheist-existentialist argument for the non-existence of a perfect sentient being states that if existence precedes essence, it follows from the meaning of the term sentient that a sentient being cannot be complete or perfect. It is touched upon by Jean-Paul Sartre in Being and Nothingness. Sartre's phrasing is that God would be a pour-soi [a being-for-itself; a consciousness] who is also an en-soi [a being-in-itself; a thing]: which is a contradiction in terms. The argument is echoed thus in Salman Rushdie's novel Grimus: "That which is complete is also dead." Theists argue that such views of God do not necessarily define God and that such an analysis is not necessarily correct. They argue that God is outside of time and space and thus the premises for this argument are meaningless.
- The "no reason" argument tries to show that an omnipotent or perfect being would not have any reason to act in any way, specifically creating the universe, because it would have no desires since the very concept of desire is subjectively human. As the universe exists, there is a contradiction, and therefore, an omnipotent god cannot exist. This argument is espoused by Scott Adams in the book God's Debris. A common counterargument is that God, being the epitome of good, desires to bestow good upon Man. An argument against this is that good is obviously greatly deprived from Man, though many refute this by stating it was Adam's desire to earn goodness which led to the current balance of good and evil. According to this, God is waiting for Man to remove all evil before bestowing eternal good upon Man.
Subjective arguments (against)
Similar to the subjective arguments for the existence of God, subjective arguments against the supernatural mainly rely on the testimony or experience of witnesses, or the propositions of a revealed religion in general.
- The witness argument gives credibility to personal witnesses, contemporary and from the past, who disbelieve or strongly doubt the existence of God.
- The conflicted religions argument where specific religions give differing accounts as to what God is and what God wants. All the contradictory accounts cannot be correct, so many if not all religions must be incorrect.
References
God. From Wikipedia, the Free Encylopedia. Wikimedia. 2007. April 24, 2007.
