Tuesday, August 27, 2013

The Impossibility of Atheism

Emotionally I am an atheist. I don't have the evidence to prove that God doesn't exist, but I so strongly suspect he doesn't that I don't want to waste my time.
--Isaac Asimov

Logically speaking, it is impossible to prove the non-existence of something. Or is it? Where is the logical flaw in:
  1. If A then not B
  2. A
  3. Not B
Where A is some natural phenomenon, B is the existence of God.
All we have do is find something that is incongruous with the existence of God and poof! God formally no longer exists. Philosophically speaking, I am in way over my head here.  People have been working on this problem for thousands of years. So really all this does is show that my thoughts really aren't any higher than your thoughts.

The book "36 Arguments for the Existence of God" gives way better proofs than I could come up with. Well, it rebuts all the proofs for the existence of God that are very clever, showing that none of them hold water. But still, none of them prove that God does not exist. It just shows how hard it is to prove that God does exist (even though logically speaking, that is supposed to be the easier case to prove.)

In the end, I don't think it is necessary to prove one way or the other. God has failed to give sufficient proof of his/her/its existence and science has done a great job of providing evidence that God did not take part in X physical law. Or more correctly, science has provided evidence that God was not required to take part in X physical law. When I look at the human eye, I see a very flawed, yet quite wondrous organ. But when a intelligent design believer looks at the human eye, they see the hand of God. We see what we want to see, believe what reinforces what we already believe and leave the rest of it outside our boxes.

So I think I will join Isaac Asimov and say that for all intents and purposes I am an atheist. If God really wants people to believe, he/she/it will have to do a lot better job of providing evidence of existence. And don't tell me that God can't provide evidence of existence without taking away our agency. An all-powerful, all-knowing, omni-present God should certainly be able to provide a way. If not, they lack the power to convince me.

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