Arguments against the existence of God By Robert Aaron Davis

In the great debate on whether God exists or not, there are a number of good and bad arguments on the affirmative. These arguments are addressed in many different ways, and often, if not always, the conclusions are completely rejected by the negative. If the conclusion of a particular argument is accepted, than its implications are rejected. When a conclusion is rejected, it is often due to the accusation of a false premise, which is, if the argument is logically valid, necessary. If none of the premises are false, and the conclusion is still not yet accepted, it is usually due to the offer of a better explanation or implication to the conclusion. This is basically how all debates of this topic go. The affirmative gives a case of arguments, and the negative rejects their conclusions off false premises or alternate explanations. But, this is not how it should be in order to show favor of the negative. Although it is good defense of the negative position, they still must give their own arguments in favor of the negative position. The negative of does God exist? is no, God does not exist. To argue in favor of that statement, it does have a burden of proof that must be sustained in order to support the claim. Recently, I have been fortunate enough to come into a discussion with an Atheist that supports the burden of proof he must sustain. Rather than retreating to the position that he has nothing to prove because he makes no claims based off the well known saying of you cant prove a negative, which, in and of itself, is false, he offers two arguments in support of the Atheistic position. The arguments are: 1. An absence of a reason for believing in something is in and of itself a good reason for not believing in it. 2. The problem of evil. As far as the first argument goes, he didnt give it to me in its full form, but just the general description. Now, based off the initial wording of the argument, there is no evidence to suggest that God does not exist, but rather that there are good reasons for simply not believing He exists. Since that is not the claim that he is trying to demonstrate through this argument, I have had to adjust his argument with premises that would lead to the conclusion that God does not exist. 1. An absence of a reason for believing in something is in and of itself a good reason for not believing in it. 2. If there is a good reason for not believing in something, then it does not exist. 3. There is an absence of a good reason to believe in God. 4. Therefor, God does not exist. This is the only way the argument could be stated in order to rise to its conclusion from its first premise. This argument, if all of the premises are true, does follow logically. So, in order to avoid its conclusion, we must attack the premises and show that at least one of them are false.

The first premise that appears to be false would be premise 2. This premise is rarely asserted by the Atheist, but is obviously implied when they use any argument of a lack of evidence. Now, premise 2is true in its basic meaning, which is evidence against entity X shows that entity X does not exist, so, the best premise to attack would be premise 1. We would have to show that the lack of evidence is actually not good evidence against entity X. First, its not explicitly true. If there is absolutely no evidence for some statement A, it may still be the case that statement A is true. There would have to be evidence against the truth of statement A in order to show that it is false. Appealing to the absence of evidence as evidence against it would be arguing in a circle, since the initial absence of evidence is even calling it into question. This can be illustrated in many different ways, such as; There is an absence of evidence that extraterrestrial life exists on some other planet, but it may still be the case that such life does exist. Or, there is an absence of evidence that there is any gold on the planet Pluto, but it may still be the case that such metals do exist on the planet. There are may ways to demonstrate the absurdity of such a conclusion, but until there is independent evidence against Gods existence, it may still be the case that God exists. So, given the falsehood of premise 1, the conclusion would no longer logically follow, and the existence of God, based off this argument, is still possible. The second argument presented is a more well known one, and has been used by Atheists for centuries. The classical version of the argument tries to show that it is either; 1) It is logically impossible for God and evil to exist. 2) It is highly improbable for God and evil to exist. Since there is no explicit contradiction in the first form of the argument, it has been universally rejected by sophisticated Atheists. This is also true with the second form, since it would carry to heaven a burden of proof, which is God cannot have morally sufficient reasons to permit evil. The version of the argument addressed here is a form of the 1, but tries to approach the logical incoherence differently. Now, bear with me, this is a personal argument from him, because of his understanding of a few terms. The argument goes as follows: Statements: ~ is not. A - Suffering exists in the world. B - God Exists. C - Utilitarianism is the objective morality. D - God is responsible for objective morality. E - God is capable of abolishing suffering. F - God knows of all evil taking place in all places at all times, and all potential evil as above. G - God acts according to what is good. H - God is a utilitarian. I - God will act to create the least amount of suffering for the fewest number of people. B && C && D =H H && G =I I && E && F = ~A A && ~A = ~B || ~C ||~D || ~E || ~F || ~G I have assumed C, D, E, F, and G. I must therefore assume ~B

The first term that is obviously standing out is utilitarianism. The understanding of this term is not always easily understood, and as my friend told me, there is an entire debate dedicated to this topic, and whether or not objective morality exists on utilitarianism or not. That aside, the basic meaning of the term is that virtue is based on utility. The most accepted view point is to promote the greatest amount of happiness of the greatest number of persons. Or, to spread the greatest good for the majority of people. Immediately some questions seem to arise. It would seem to assume the existence of objective morality to show objective morality exists in utilitarianism, which is obviously a circular argument. Objective morality must exist to call something good. So if you ask what is goodness, in that sense of the definition, the answer would be, goodness. This is obviously fallacious, so we will give him the benefit of the doubt and go with the first definition, the greatest happiness for the greatest amount. This would arise the issue of what makes people happy. If its possible that a greater amount of people would be happy raping and murdering children, then would it still be objectively wrong in this sense of utilitarianism? Of course not, it merely states what is good is the greatest amount of happiness for the greatest amount. So, if the greatest amount achieve the greatest happiness with these actions, then by that definition, it is good. This is just a form of subjectivism, not just subjective to persons, but subjective to the greatest amount of persons. So the question is Is is still wrong to rape and murder even if the greatest amount of persons achieve the greatest amount of happiness by these actions?. Naturally, Id like to think wed all say yes it is, but there are utilitarianists that do hold this view. Once again we will give him the benefit of the doubt and assume that utilitarianism is the objective morality for the sake of argumentation. This is what is called a postulate argument. This kind of argument tries to show one of its premises false by assuming they would all be true, and it wouldnt logically follow, almost the opposite of a deductive argument. In this form, by assuming the truth of I, E and F, A wouldnt be true. Since A is objectively true, then it would follow that B is therefore false. Although this is a suited up version, this is basically the same as the original logical version of the problem of evil. It states that God is defined as, 1) all knowing, 2) all powerful 3) all loving. Now we would obviously seem to object to 3, God doesnt love sin, but we will take the meaning of it in basic understanding, he loves everyone equally and maximally greatly. It would then state that given 1, he would know suffering exists, 2, he would have the capability to prevent it, 3, he would want to prevent it. Since suffering exists, it would seem to follow that one if not all of these qualities are false, and therefore such a God cannot exist. This exact argument was abandoned in the late 50s when Christian Philosopher Alvin Carl Plantinga demonstrated the logical consistency by adding another premise, that God created a world of personal agents with freedom of the will, and at which could act freely to perform such moral evils. Now, given 2 of Gods qualities, this is often misunderstood. People generally think that God, being omnipotent, can create any world he wants, but, that doesnt mean he can create logically impossible worlds. First, if he could, then it would not be a logically impossible world, this is just one of many demonstrations of why the logically impossible cannot exist. Others would be married bachelors, round triangles, dead immortals and so on. So, it is not possible that God could create a world where he could make someone freely choose to do something. If he created beings with freedom of the will, he cannot force them to take the right course of action, and that person could freely choose to do moral evils. So in that sense 2 is false. Now that doesnt make God impotent, it means he did it that way, instead of the other way. Some might argue that it would be better to do it the other way, but they would then have the burden of proof to demonstrate that to be true. This argument approaches it a little differently. It its present state of wording, we can accept all of the statements as true, and have no logical contradiction. Just look at them again, there is no logical contradiction between any of the statements given that they are all true. What the argument is trying to do is that by concluding I, it would contradict A, but, it doesnt logically follow. According to this current wording, it could be possible that I and A are both true. The

argument is assuming that there isnt a least amount of suffering for the least amount of people but not stating it as a premise. It could very well be possible that in a world where there are free creatures, this is the least amount of suffering. It is impossible to prove one way or the other. So, without a way to show it to be inconsistent otherwise, the argument loses its validity, and just because a series of statements with no postulate from it being logically incoherent. There is much more that could be said about both of these arguments, but I thought I would address them in a way that isnt usually discussed. I hope that this will provide a good meaningful understanding of these arguments and ways they can be answered.