Saturday, May 24, 2008

100 Reasons to Believe that God Does Not Exist

This is my 100th post. Despite what my detractors seem to think, a lot of work goes into each. (You'll notice that I don't post blog entries about going to store to get a newspaper.) Thanks for reading. Here are at least 100 reasons to believe that there is no God:

A 300 Year Gap

A God Who Performs Miracles is Evil

Adding Epicycles to God

Begging the Question: Miracles and Nature

Believing in God is Immoral

Bogus Probabilistic Judgments and God

Can Atheists Be Moral?

Can We Find Evidence for the Divine Properties In ...

Coherence and Atheism

Confusing Possible with Probable and Having a Righ...

Dawkins' Law

Deal With It

Did the Believers Believe?

Does Sin Corrupt our Ability to See God or Does th...

Does the Atheist Need to Respond to Faith?

Does the Theist Have a Moral Advantage Over the At...

Don’t like my tone? Am I being rude?

Everything is to the Glory of God

Fine Tuning's Fatal Flaw

Fitna, documentary about violence, hatred and Isla...

Garbage In, Garbage Out

Gibberish? Non-Cognitivist Speech Act? or Seriou...

Giving God A Free Pass

God and Suffering

God Blind Spot

God Doesn't Do Miracles, full version

God is Not a Watchmaker

God or Gratuitous Evil?

God Wouldn’t Leave Room for Agnosticism, There Are...

God Wouldn't Do Miracles

God's Evil

Grave robbers or Magic?

He Has No Brain, So God Doesn't Exist

Heroism and the Duty to Rescue Demonstrate that th...

How Big Would God's Universe Be?

How Probable is God?

How the Surreal becomes Commonplace

If There is a Satan, then There is No God

If There is a Satan, then There is No God

Incoherent: I Believe Because It Makes Me a Moral...

Is He Keeping His Distance? Or Is He Just Not The...

Is Heaven Guilt Money?

Is Religious Education Child Abuse?

Isn't "God" Just Another Word for New Age Nonsense...

Jerry Falwell: Exploiting Religious Tolerance and...

Knowing Your Own Mind About God

Miracles Make It Harder to Prove God is Good

Miracles Prove That There Is No God

Monkey Morality or Goodness Isn't Magical

Moving On

No Moral Truths? No God.

Non-Cognitive Religious Utterances Produce Beliefs...

One of Several Ways to Prove the Negative

Perfect Word of God? Reliable Historical Document...

Possible, Possible, Possible: Overdrawing the God...

Proving the Negative

Putting the Fox in Charge of the Hen House

Reasonable Belief, Proof, and Uncertainty

Reining In the Fallacious Human Belief Machine

Religion is a Mind Virus

Religious Memes and Rational Autonomy

Remembering God

Sam Harris: The Problem with Atheism and Being Sp...

Science Always Replaces Supernatural Explanations

Science is Not A Religion

Self-Deception: Religion and Science are Compatib...

Should We Believe that Jesus was Resurrected?

Sinking the Raft I’m Standing On

Stephen Pinker: Instinct for Morality

Textual Exegesis Will Not Solve Religious Problems...

The Believer's Moral Double Standard for God

The Burden of Proof is on the Atheist

The Burden of Proof is on the Atheist Redux

The Double Standard of God’s Goodness

The God Urge

The Hidden Costs of Religious Belief

The Inductive Problem of Evil Argument Against the...

The New Ten Commandments

The Paradox of the Soul-Building Defense of Evil

The So-Called Right to Believe: Confusing Hoping ...

The Super Evil Challenge

There Is No Psychic Contact with The Dead

There is No Right To Religious Belief

Top Ten Suggestions For Performing Better Miracles...

Treating Religious Affiliation as Ethnicity

Trying To Be Moral Through The Distorted Lens Of T...

Videos: Dawkins, and Gay Scientists Isolate Chris...

Washing in Blood, Human Sacrifices, Cannibalism, G...

We Are Wired to Resist the Truth About Pointless S...

We Don't Have the Right Dataset to Make the Design...

What If the Lie Really Is Good For Us?

What Would be Evidence for Life After Death?

What Would Change Your Mind?

What Would Make the Atheist Happy?

Wide Atheism: There Are No Gods Whatsoever

You Don't Really Believe In Miracles

You don't Really Expect Us To Believe That, Do You...

4 Important Modern Atheists Discuss Their Work

500 Dead Gods

22 comments:

Anonymous said...

Samuel Skinner
The first one only deals with Christians who aren't hypertentialsits.

The rest cover all theisms.

Matt McCormick said...

Dude, that's not even a word. See the posts about wide and narrow atheism.

MM

mikespeir said...

It's obvious that a lot of work goes into your posts. I may not always have a comment, but I always appreciate what you have to say.

Anonymous said...

"100 reasons"? Hmm, if this is your 100th post, then you could only list 99 or fewer previous columns. And this one appears to be duplicated: "If There is a Satan, then There is No God." I demand a recount.

Seriously, I appreciate the effort you've put into this, and I consider your blog to be a useful resource.

John said...

reginald: if we're going to be that anal, technically he didn't say "100 distinct reasons" , so I think it's ok that the mapping from his list to his posts fails to be injective.

on the other hand I feel your pain--it's always bothered me deeply that Myth 3 and Myth 5 in the Top 10 Myths about Belief in God are the same.

nevertheless, a good blog; glad to see it still going.

Matt McCormick said...

Hi folks. I am really lucky to have an audience of readers with sharp minds and eyes. (I'm not being a smart ass about that.) I fixed Myth number 3:

3. Myth: Atheists are less decent, less moral, and overall worse people than believers.

There are hundreds of millions of non-believers on the planet living normal, decent, moral lives. They love their children, care about others, obey laws, and try to keep from doing harm to others just like everyone else. In fact, in predominately non-believing countries such as in northern Europe, measures of societal health such as life expectancy at birth, adult literacy, per capita income, education, homicide, suicide, gender equality, and political coercion are better than they are in believing societies.

Thanks for catching that. I have needed to fix it for a while.

I did intend "reasons" to be understood losely in the title, but I think if you were to look at all of the posts carefully, you'd find a lot more than 100 reasons for not believing, depending on how you count reasons.

MM

Thomas said...

everyone believes that God is but very few do what He says to do; this includes "christians" that choose what to believe and what not to believe in the Bible

Anonymous said...

I like your articles, but they are more proofs against Christian-like religions with one supreme super-being who supposedly created all of everything and set up "moral" rules for people to follow.

I do think that there are spiritual influences with abilities to affect the physical realms, but they may not be our creators and they may not have the kind of over-arching reach that the traditional God concept has.

Ketan said...

Hi, Matt!

The discussions concerning your posts have been so much "to the point" (dispassionate and rigorously academic) that I'm not sure if a comment like mine, which has an element of emotion would not be out of place here. But nevertheless, I choose to be unabashed in what I convey!

Initially when I read your post for the first time (a fortnight back), I was impressed only with the clarity of your expression (language skill). But as I read more, I came across many new ideas, some of which could be originally yours, too. In that case, congratulations!

The problem with "originality" in realm of philosophy is that all those who were born much earlier have had an unfair advantage :) Many things that I concluded about life were my own thoughts, but realized that in matters of philosophy it's so difficult to come up with any thought that would not have been thought by anyone out of the countless thinkers born before us.

Thus, it turned out that I found your (and for that matter of so many atheists who I know only through the ideas they broadcast by writing books or making speeches or giving interviews) similar to mine.


Talking of your posts, in particular, I was very impressed with how clearly you expressed the idea of impossibility of believing something (God, in this case) only on the basis that doing so could have some "benefits". (Your examples of how 2+2 cannot equal 5, and how one can't imagine a plain wall to have dots on it.) I was impressed because I'd attempted to deal with the same subject in one of my blogs--"Criticism of atheism--and few responses". But I couldn't convey the idea that truth can't be substituted by wishful fantasy as objectively as you could.

I know you must be an extremely busy person, but if you could find time, I'd be happy to have your comments on my posts, which have dealt with issues related to philosophy and sociology. And since professionally, I'm totally unrelated to philosophy, you're very apt to find my posts very amateur. Same goes for my English, which is not my native language.

The reason I'm commenting here is that I was shocked to realize that you had felt a pang of discouragement dealing with detractors. Shocked because of prospect (even if remote) of abandoning your blog. Fortunately, that hasn't happened, and my only fear's that you might not read my comment as this post is so old!

I hope my post serves to motivate you...

Ketan said...

If it means anything, I've posted the above message using my cell phone, punching in the keys on the keypad only in attempt to make you aware that your thoughts and your writing have one more fan! Take care, and regards.

Believeitornot said...

If I didn't believe there is a God, I wouldn't waste my time trying to convince people to agree with me. I have seen amazing things like childbirth and am convinced that God does exist. From a logical point of view, it would be foolish to discount the possibility of the existence of a Divine Creator.

GETTING THE WORD OUT said...

As I begin to conduct research for a college paper on the existence of God, knowing all that I know about the Lord, and to see educators who are preparing students for the real world,behaving in this manor.. You have to be very careful,it's one thing for you to doubt God, ut it's dangerous to plant those seeds in the life of the others. I can not see how you speak so boldly about God that you do not know, and then close your eyes up and sleep at night. I know he sears your consious, its a very dangerous thing you are playing with. It is a scary thing to see how the enemy or Satan has blinded so many. I totally understand why God allowed me to choose this topic to research. The need to get the word out about Jesus is so important ..I have never in my life been exposed to so much ignorance, and to be spreading this hate is a shame. I pray that God is merciful upon the souls and lives of people who hates the only one who can heal you, restore, and redeem you. I pray that when you go before God, that you can boldly say these things to him personally, cause there is certainly a heaven and hell...believe how ever you choose, I pray that God will touch your mind, and your heart to hear him before it's to late.

Unknown said...

Though I not religious I not moral, every one has different views. Most people are Christian second being Muslim the third is non religious. I am a Atheist because i believe that there is no god(s) since though out time people have believe many different things. However has human beings we should tolerate others beliefs and look to a better world.

ccrider said...

I believe everthing alive is here by accident. There is no God or logic for our existence. We are on Earth because the distance our Earth is from our Sun to have water, because without water there is no life. Our infinte universe is alive with living organisms. Humans have evolved by trial and error to whom we are today. Religion was created to change the ways of man and profit.

Anonymous said...

Thank you for your article. it's quite a good read for me.

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Unknown said...

I don't think god is going away anytime soon. Those who suffered the relentless pressure from religious zealots like church, cult or religiously devoted parents may never admit to the god delusion despite all the logic in the world discrediting god. I wrote a short e-kindle book that clearly throws god out with the bath water and my Christian wife was unphased. She admitted it made sense but refused to budge on her position about god. Only in a delusion could that kind of polarity exist. Christian enlightenment-an essential journey is the book, buy it, check it out, write a review. I love your blog keep up the great work.

Unknown said...

If there is a god the bible tells us the earth was surrounded by water.If the water was where the ozone layer is the moon would have pulled the water into space and the sun would have vaporized into space. God would have to make water every day for every. Maybe that's why god flooded the earth and put the ozone layer too much work for man.How did the plants grow no rain and sun rays would not get through the amount of water.Also god was the first to tempt man BY PUTTING A TREE OF KNOWLEDGE.No need for the tree as man was perfect or did god lie man was NOT perfect.I can see that if god created all things from the prehistoric to the animal kingdom to man to his own heavenly kingdom it is all violent and bad.The devil and a third of his heavenly kingdom is bad what does it say about god he can not create any thing good.Also god put the URGE in man to have sex with woman he did not the same URGE in Angels and to have working human body to have offspring WELL so maybe that was his idea. I have lots more god does not EXIST.

betoquintas said...

no need to argue much. you say 100 reasons to believe. to believe is not rational, by atheist standards. its a matter of choice, not a matter of evidence. case closed.

Danny said...

Ian Troy,

The way I see it you interpreted the Bible literally when you assumed that the water level around our planet should be reaching out into where the ozone layer is. The moon is 384,400 km from the earth. True enough the moon's gravity could affect our oceans, But at that distance could it really sucked all the liquids on earth when its gravitational full is only about 17% of our planet? To be precise the moon's gravity is 1.622/ms2 against the earth's 9.780327/mms2.
How do you explain the vaporization of the sun? Think you're smart? All your reasons that says God doesn't exists is the product of your ignorance to the law of nature which is in fact
the law of God. Science.....is the very instrument of man that could prove that God is real!

Jonas said...

If a name for something exist, it means it is real or spiritual. If God does exist or not then why discuss the topic if He does exist or not. I have never seen an alien with my eyes, but does an alien exist or not? The discussion of God and His existence has been a debate by living, previously living but dead people from the beginning of man's existence and people always end up dead and buried without finding the clue on what is happening in this world or in the universe. It is better to be quite and not be a fool and say God does not exist - how do you prove it. Do one have eyes to see in the unseen world? I will listen to anyone who can tap into the mysterious world of Ghosts, spirits and the unknown. Scientists have discovered more amazing things that shows that there is grand designer such as new discoveries by astronomers, the DNA, galaxies and other many strange things. Can we say things just happen? by chance perhaps? Until one comes with an answer to all these mysteries, then one will be qualified to assert that there is no God or gods, if not, then why bother to say things that one cannot explain, for that matter, on God's existence while failing to explain why the sun comes from East and disappears in the Western horizons.

Unknown said...

if you think God is not real, why would you bother to tell people that he is not real? to wake people up? that is the worst way you can try to wake someone up, if you don't believe keep going with your life, we christians are not doing anything against other people and we are really happy so leave us alone. I thought this article was going to be something with sense but no.

Cris said...

One day you will be at the most saddest, painful, depressing, and challenging state of your life. Whether you go through a horrible illness, facing death or just in a massive trouble, you Will face it, and when that time comes just remember to say these words from your HEART, "GOD, if you really exist, help me, because I really need you". You have nothing to lose but everything to gain. You'll realize why most people only search for Him during desperate times, because He is truly our only hope in life. GOD DOES EXIST. You'll see.