How do you prove God does not exist?

Question

I often hear the retort "Prove He does not exist!"

What evidence could you see or what fact could you learn that you would consider evidence against the existence of God?

I'm not asking whether or not God exists, I'm not asking if providing this evidence is possible, but what would it be?

Answer 1

I can find evidence that god is improbable, but I can't prove a negative.

Rev chap 6
13: and the stars of the sky fell to the earth...
Revelation, chapter 7
1: After this I saw four angels standing at the four corners of the earth, holding back the four winds of the earth...
Rev chap 8
4: His tail swept down a third of the stars of heaven, and cast them to the earth...
Rev chapter 20
8: and will come out to deceive the nations which are at the four corners of the earth ...

Answer 2

As others (i'm sure) will point out, the burden of proof is on the person making the truth claim. (It has to be, otherwise we end up with chaos. I could say "I believe in an Invisible Pink Unicorn" and it would be considered true until you proved it false...)

Further, it's very hard to prove a negative, because someone can always say "Well, maybe you just haven't found it yet." Think about looking around your house for keys for an hour, and then saying "The keys are not in this house!" Can you ever be 100% sure you didn't just miss them? Rarely.

However, there are certain negatives that CAN be proven impossible. And those are logical contradictions. By using logical contradictions, you can quite easily prove a specific version of god does not (can not) exist.

First off, you have to have the person explain what they mean by "god." There are many different versions of god out there, and at the start you have to agree one which one you're talking about.

Next, you look for contradictions in the attributes of god. For example, if I were to say my god is "square" and "circular" at the same time, that would be obviously impossible. The two terms negate each other. And even if it were "possible" in some supernatural way, the term square-circular is meaningless for humans to understand. It has no cognitive content.

As an example, take the Christian God, He is supposed to be omnipotent (all-powerful), and at the same time he is supposed to "want" certain things. (Like he "wants" atheists to convert or peace to be on Earth.) However, these are contradictions, because there can be no such thing as a "want" for an all-powerful being. Anything an all-powerful being wants, he gets. That's what all-powerful means. If an all-powerful god exists, then the world, with all its atheists, hurricanes, death & destruction, is PRECISELY the way god wants it to be. Because if he wanted it any other way, what could possibly prevent it from becoming that way? Logical contradiction.

Next, you should look for "context swapping," in which a trait or characteristic is applied in a way it was never intended. For example, the Christian God is said to be "alive" -- but the word alive comes from our observations of life on Earth. Everything we would describe as "alive" is made of matter, and contains some kind of genetic coding. To use the word "alive" and not imply these things is swapping context. God is "alive," but not in any way a human can understand. God is alive in the same way the shape of a house is blue, or the bark of a dog is triangular. When taken out of context, these words become meaningless.

One of the best exercises to discover this is to drop the word god and replace it with something made up -- like a "blark." By doing that you force your brain to drop all the preconceived notions and start from ground zero. Have the theist explain how a blark is alive, but doesn't have basic things in common with everyting else we know to be alive...

Finally, always look for Either-Or clauses. These are a telltale sign of bs. For example, if I say "It could rain today, or it could not," have I really said anything of cognitive value? No. When an explanation allows for any possible state of affairs, it is not truly an explanation. All explanations must necessarily outlaw some state of affairs for them to function as explanations. This is because any idea which is not hinged, in some way, on evidence from reality, by definition has nothing to do with reality.

This was a quick overview. For an exhaustive treatment see George Smith's book, "Atheism: The Case Against God"

Cheers.

Answer 3

Why would anyone want to waste time proving that God does not exist? I wouldn't bother with trying to prove that lime green flying elephants don't exist, so why bother trying to prove it of God?

If there were some evidence of god's existence it'd be a different matter (though of course then we'd be examining that evidence to find out whether or not god exists).

Answer 4

To prove God does not exist, you'd need an accurate definition of God and an inconsistency with an essential part of this definition. This is why many people feel the existence of unnecessary, terrible suffering in the world disproves the existence of an all-loving God.

Answer 5

You could indeed make an attempt to prove that god does not exist, for example by logical conclusions out of his existence which lead you to a contradiction.
But to be able to do that, you first need a complete definition of god. And this can obviously only be provided by someone who believes in god. It seems that most believers are hesitating to provide a satisfactory definiton of god's nature and attributes, they are rather vague about it. But if you have a definition of god, the attempt to prove his non-existence could be made, by sheer logic.

Answer 6

Well it is your theory, so you tell me. Evidence takes the form of something that is measurable that your theory predicts. Every time you guys make one and it fails it becomes a moving target.

One possibility is that prayer helps heal right. Well you should be able to take a group and pray, and a second group and not pray and statistically show that prayer helped. Here is the best one to date that did it just right: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/31/health/31pray.html?ex=1301461200&en=4acf338be4900000&ei=5088&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss
If you notice there was no real difference, in fact you were statically better off in the control group. As you can tell, I think your prediction was off and that is really strong evidence that there is a flaw.

Answer 7

The onus is on the believer to prove he does exist.

This is a common example. Let's say I tell you there's a tiny china teapot orbiting the sun between here and Mars. I specify that it's too small for even our best telescopes and space probes to see. No one would assume the teapot does exist just because it cannot be proven false.

The same is true of God, only to an even greater extent. God is considerably more extraordinary than a teapot, and therefor requires even more evidence to support his existence.

Answer 8

It is very difficult to prove non-existence. Unfortunately, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

However, you can use a technique called "Occam's Razor". You can look that one up if you are interested, it will be on the web.

Answer 9

It's simply a response to "prove God exists." We don't have a way to "measure" God one way or the other.

Answer 10

I don't think that we really can...but in the same light, we can't really prove that Harry Potter doesn't exist either. That doesn't mean that Harry Potter exists, and that is what people have a hard time connecting.