Lecture 2:

Atheism

The Suggested Reading for this lecture is J.P. Moreland and Kai
Nielsen’s Does God Exist?: The Debate Between Theists and Atheists.

The Role of Reason in Deciding for Atheism or Theism

Most people don’t decide whether to believe in God or not to believe by
objectively and logically comparing the arguments for atheism with the argu-
ments for theism. Most just believe because their families or friends do.
Probably a larger percentage of unbelievers than believers can give good
reasons, because in our culture, religious belief is still the more popular posi-
tion, so the unbeliever, as the rebel, usually has to think more independently.
Let’s use the term “atheism” to mean simply the belief that no God exists
and “theism” to mean the belief that some God exists. We will be arguing
merely about the judgments that God exists or does not exist, rather than
about the roads by which one comes to that judgment.
Who Has the Onus of Proof? Atheist or Theist?
I begin with atheism because I think the theist has to accept the onus of
proof. Persons should be judged innocent till proved guilty, but ideas should
be judged guilty till proved innocent, as long as you don’t limit proof to
absolutely clear and certain proof.
But the atheist has to give reasons too, at least in a religious society like
ours in which most people believe God does exist. If you are an atheist and
you want to help people to find the truth, you have to take their religious
beliefs seriously to begin with and try to refute them, and therefore you have
to give reasons for your atheism.
Twenty Arguments for Atheism
Here are twenty arguments for atheism given by Western philosophers.
1. The strongest and most popular argument for atheism is the prob-
lem of evil. When theists say God exists, they don’t mean a god like
Zeus, who is limited in goodness and in power, but the God of the
Bible, who is unlimitedly good and powerful. So if the infinite God
existed, there would be no room for his opposite, evil. But evil is
real. Therefore such a God does not exist.
2. A second common argument is that God is an unnecessary
hypothesis, like UFOs. Even if you can’t prove there is no God,
you can explain everything without him. Everything in nature can
be explained by natural forces, and everything in human life can
LECTURE TWO

be explained by human beings and human minds and wills.

Maybe you can’t prove there is no God, but if you can’t prove there
is, it’s irresponsible and silly to believe in God. Ockham’s Razor
tells us to use the simplest explanations rather than needlessly
multiply hypotheses.
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3. All the theists’ arguments for the existence of God can be
answered. Each of them has a weak point: an ambiguous term, a
false assumption, or a logical fallacy.
4. On the assumption that there is no God, the atheist can explain reli-
gious belief better than the theist can explain disbelief. If this won-
derful God were real, why wouldn’t everyone want to believe in
him? Why would the atheist give up religion unless he grew up and
learned enough facts to refute it?
The theist, on the assumption that God is real, can’t explain how
the illusion of atheism arose in the mind of the atheist as well as
the atheist can explain how the illusion of God arose in the mind of
the theist. His explanation is usually that the atheist is either very
stupid or very wicked. But why would anyone want to deny God, if
God is real and such a comfort?
5. The scientific method is by far the most reliable method we have
ever found for finding truth. Scientists don’t keep arguing forever, like
philosophers and politicians and religious people. They have found a
method of resolving and ending their disagreements. But religion
does not survive the scientific method. If we use the scientific
method to test religion, we will not be able to verify it, any more than
we will be able to verify Santa Claus. We probably can’t prove that
the Loch Ness Monster doesn’t exist, but we have no good reason
for thinking it does. So the reasonable attitude is not to believe.
There are two kinds of unbelievers: atheists and agnostics. Atheists
say they are sure God does not exist. Agnostics say they don’t know,
but there is no adequate reason for believing God does exist.
6. Religion can’t be verified or falsified, proved or disproved, by any
data. No matter what happens, religious believers will interpret it reli-
giously. If terrible things happen, that’s God’s justice; if they cease,
that’s God’s mercy. No data, no experiment, can in principle dis-
prove a religious faith. That makes this faith logically meaningless.
7. The atheist appeals to the historical fact that science has gradually
replaced religion, throughout human history, because science
explains more and more of what we used to think was supernatural.
We used to think there must be a god like Zeus to explain thunder
and lightning; now we know what causes it. The more we know
about science, the less we believe in miracles.
8. Another scientific argument focuses on evolution, which shows that
the human species evolved gradually by random chance and natur-
al selection; this contradicts the religious belief in creation, which
claims that we were created suddenly and miraculously by a superi-
or being out of deliberate, intelligent design. Are we made in the
image of King God or King Kong? The two theories contradict each
other, and there is massive scientific evidence for evolution and
none for creation.

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 9. If the theist argues for a creator from evidence in the visible world,
the atheist replies that most of the evidence in the world counts
against theism. The universe is far more full of emptiness, waste,
injustice, chance, disorder, and suffering than their opposites. Why
the empty eons before man evolved? Why all that space, all those
galaxies, all those wasted fish eggs, all the bloody competition for
survival, all the animals that had to die for man to evolve? How can
you look at the real world and say this is evidence for a loving,
benevolent God who created man in his own image?
10. Belief in God usually goes with belief in a spiritual soul that is
immortal, so denial of God usually goes together with denial of the
soul or spirit. When science believed in spirits, it didn’t work; only
when science became materialistic did it start to work. Only when
we stopped looking for the angels that supposedly moved the plan-
ets did we discover celestial mechanics and gravity. Only when we
stopped looking for the soul did we learn how to perform brain
surgery. Materialism works.
11. Materialism also works logically. There is no supposedly spiritual
event that can’t be explained materially. Your brain is a computer.
If you remove parts of it, you can’t do math; remove other parts
and you can’t make moral choices. Remove other parts and you
can’t pray or have religious experiences. Everything that used to be
believed to exist in the spiritual column can be explained by some-
thing very specific and identifiable in the material column.
12. There are no logical contradictions in science, but there are many
logical contradictions within religion. For instance, in Buddhism, the
mystic discovers that the self does not exist. The self discovers its
own nonexistence! You need a real self to make that real discov-
ery. And in Western religions, God is perfect, and everything he
does is perfect, yet he creates an imperfect world. In Christianity,
he is one and three at the same time, and Jesus is divine and
human at the same time.
13. There are also contradictions between any two religions in the
world. And since both of two contradictory beliefs can’t be true,
there must be falsehoods in every religion, or else only one is total-
ly true and all the rest, which contradict it, have falsehoods.
14. Religion does harm because it is arrogant and fanatical. It does
harm to the mind because it closes the mind and deceives you into
thinking you have certainty when you don’t; and it does harm to oth-
ers because if you believe you have the absolute truth, you will
probably make yourself a preachy pest, if not a terrorist, to try to
make other people believe what you believe. Religion narrows the
range of human thought and behavior: you must not think heretical
LECTURE TWO

thoughts that contradict your religion’s claims to truth, and you must
not behave in any way not approved by your religion’s moral code.
15. Suppose the theist uses the psychological kind of argument and
says that you should believe in some religion because it makes you

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 better, not worse. Almost nobody can deny that it’s good to be
good. So the atheist must reply that religion doesn’t make you good,
it makes you goody-goody; it doesn’t make you righteous, it makes
you self-righteous. Religion exists to make saints out of sinners, but
saints are rare. If an auto manufacturer produced ninety-nine
lemons for every good car, would you buy a car from that company?
16. Religion has produced more harm than good publicly and collective-
ly and historically, as well as privately and individually. Religion has
fueled and motivated most of the wars, and the bitterest wars, in our
history. The deepest hatreds are religious. If religion produces the
most wars, and wars harm people the most, by killing the most peo-
ple, it logically follows that religion harms people the most.
17. Another bad psychological effect of religion is guilt. The higher the
standards I believe I have to come up to, the worse I will believe I
am. Religions don’t just give us high ideals, they give us impossible
laws. Religions all begin by making us feel almost hopeless, then
they offer themselves as the only cure.
18. Another effect of having impossibly high ideals is hypocrisy. We
can’t admit we are as bad as religion tells us we are, so we pre-
tend we are good; we pretend we are fairly successful at being the
saints that our religion tells us we have to be, otherwise we would
be in despair. So religion makes us lie to ourselves.
19. Another bad psychological effect of religion comes from its belief in
life after death. That becomes a diversion, a distraction from this
world and all its joys and beauties and possibilities. Religion
depresses the value of this life, and this world, for the sake of the
next life, and the next world.
20. Similarly, religion ignores or puts down or condemns the body for
the sake of the soul. But most of our pleasures are bodily plea-
sures. Religion tells us to give them up. They all condemn greed
and lust (in other words, money and sex). If all religious believers
suddenly became convinced that there was no God, no Heaven
and no Hell, how would that change their lives? They would proba-
bly make all the money they could and have all the sex they could
with all the people they could, without guilt or scruple or repression.
What stops them? It is their belief in God’s frown and wagging finger.

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