Why don't Athiests believe in God?

Question

I'm not challenging your views or opinions. I am trying to see where you are coming from. Please do not just say "Because he's not real" or leave a witty comment. Just offer your opinons please. Thank You.

Brett: Show me evidence that God doesn't exist.

God is outside space and time, so of course there's no physical evidence... I just have trouble believing that we are an accident with no purpose.

Answer 1

Well i dont believe he exists because
a) Where would he come from?
b) If he cared about us so much why does he let all the suffering in the world continue?
Also to IIm who says atheists were brought up wrong, look at how much death, destruction and hate religion has caused, in my experience Christians are the real people who are prejudiced against everyone who doesn't share the same beliefs..

Answer 2

Personally, i don't believe... it's a long story really. But here's an example of the process. I used to believe in god when i was a kid. But then again, i believed in santa claus and just about anything that adults told me. Growing up, you reason these things and realize they're just nice make believe stories.
You see that all along through history all the civilizations had their deities, and all were different, basically the same concept, but different. I noticed that all people make up a god to explain the things that they don't understand. The current most 'popular' belief is backed by the bible. Something that humans wrote. Too many years ago. It says things that don't go well with what science says, like how life started and such. So i suppose a lot of things there are metaphors, and people seem to take them too literally.
Looking at nature and everything that exists... i know it's amazing! I can't explain how or why things exist, but just saying that someone made them, just like 'magic', seems like the easiest way out to not have to really think about it.
Basically, this is my opinion on the subject.

Answer 3

Why I don't believe in God
"So long as the universe had a beginning, we could suppose it had a creator. But if the universe is completely self-contained, having no boundary or edge, it would neither be created nor destroyed ... it would simply be. What place, then, for a creator?"
- Stephen W. Hawking
I refer here to the Christian God, as that is the culture I was brought up in and am most familar with, although a fair amount of what follows applies to all religions. In a technical way, you could call me an agnostic, as I am theoretically willing to believe, if given sufficient evidence. But by the same token I do not have absolute proof that Santa Claus does not exist. It might be possible that God, say, started the Big Bang. However, it is also possible that a race of advanced fungi from another dimension did it, or, more likely, that nothing whatsoever other than the basic physical properties of the universe set things rolling. While on the one hand I can acknowledge that the existence of God is possible, on the other hand, based on what we know about the universe and the astonishing lack of evidence, it would seem extremely unlikely.

I tend to see God as a metaphor, as a word that is used to convey that which cannot be conveyed by words. I see spiritual experiences as real, but only in the subjective sense. I see them as created in the brain. I see the mistakes we make in religion as coming from the reinterpretations of spiritual experience by people who have not had the experience. This essentially is the origin of dogma.

The Brain is Fallible
"It was, of course, a lie what you read about my religious convictions, a lie which is being systematically repeated. I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it."
- Albert Einstein
The brain is a biochemical computer of sorts, but it is subject to errors. Gross errors. It forgets things. It learns things the wrong way. It unconsciously acquires biases. It makes mistakes, and this is a vital point, because it leads to an important and reasonable idea, checking for mistakes. We have a fancy name for that called scientific method, but it's not much more than checking your work and asking other people to check your work before passing along any conclusions. The corollary is that not checking for mistakes is asking for trouble. An important feature of religion is that it is actually against "the rules" to check for mistakes, or worse yet, to point them out.

Not checking for mistakes leads to superstitious behavior, like "I need to wear my lucky socks today" or to even more complex and dangerous superstitions like religion.

Based on the observations of some chimpanzee researchers, we may not be alone, species wise, on this kind of semi-complicated belief based superstition. There is a tribe of chimpanzees in Africa that appears to believe they can stop the rain by dancing.

Answer 4

Science is provable and easily visible. With current science there is no evidence of God. There is no evidence to the contrary either, but that doesn't mean God exists. This can also raise the question of what makes someone believe in God? I am a pagan, I believe in my gods because I have seen and heard them. It took me quite a while to become a pagan, I spoke to many "deities" including Jesus. I got no answer, so I have no reason to believe in any of those deities. In the end people believe what they do based on what they see to support their beliefs. Not being an atheist, i'm sorry if i've mis-represented anybody!

Answer 5

I am an atheist who was once aVERY DEVOUT christian. I have never seen any proof of "god", and grew tired of believing in obscure, intangible "powers" because a book and my elders told me too. The older and more educated I became , the more I saw religion as a money making enterprise as corrupt as any other. At this point in life I would trust a leather clad man on a motorcycle before a man wearing a white collar(priest) I can now say science disproves the existance of god beyond any doubt. If you actually read the bible from a logistics point of view you will see the majority of its happenings were physically impossible. It is also interesting to note no such "miracles" have occurred since the written word was introduced into society. They are all made up tales that no one can prove or disprove.

Answer 6

The concept of god is completely unrealistic for me. I think jesus was a real man who went around preaching and must have gotten a pretty good following. But, then he was crucified and died, like many others during that time. Perhaps he had more of an impact on people then the others of his time. But, that doesn't mean he was the son of god! These people had no refigeration and I doubt their villages were very sanitary. That, coupled with lack of education and corruption leads me to believe that people were hallucinating while suffering from disease, malnutrition and so on. The thought that a normal human being would believe that a VIRGIN had a BABY...! god created the Earth and everything and everyone on it, jesus came back from the dead!!! And on, and on, and on. Are you serious? We're supposed to believe these ancient stories from over 2000 years ago, with NO proof. And, you think WE'RE being unreasonable! These stories are the most far-fetched fairy tales I've ever heard! NONE of it is reasonable, it's just too insane!

Answer 7

I do not believe in God because theism is provably false.

Theism has as a necessary consequence the existence of free will. The existence of free will would indicate the possibility of a deity, but the absence of free will would be definitive proof against.

Free will is a literal impossibility in the universe in which we find ourselves as the mind is processed by the brain, which is a neural network. Neural networks are provably equivalent to von Neumann architectures, which means they are also provably equivalent to Deterministic Turing Machines. Determinism invalidates free will. Choices are made but they are deterministically computed.

Since free will is absent, the theistic hypothesis is false.

This leave two options: Deism or atheism. As deism is in all consequences equivalent to atheism, but with one more a-priori agent, I see no reason to keep the unnecessary a priori.

QED.

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Why do you have a problem with believing we evolved via stochaistic principles and have no extrinsic meaning?

Does that invalidate your life?

Does it invalidate that one way or another, you're here, a self-aware decision system which can thus make a temporary difference in the life of other self-aware decision systems?

Sure, at the end, when the universe collapses or rips itself apart, it won't mean a bit of dirty pig-bath water... but so what? We have now. Make the most of it, and let tomorrow worry about itself.

Answer 8

In a nutshell:

On Faith:

There is no evidence that any of humanity's 2,000+ gods are real. Only one can be right, but all can be wrong.

Religion works on faith, which is belief in the absence of evidence and makes no distinction for different points of view. Every religion is equally likely (or unlikely) to be real.

On Science:

What we know of the universe through science shows us a reality built upon natural, unintelligent processes such as natural selection. I doubt that a god exists, but especially a deity interested in our personal lives and shortcomings. We live on one planet among billions in our own galaxy. Why would an omnipotent being be interested in our species?

Religions that make physical claims about the world (like in Genesis) can be disproved by scientific evidence.

On Religion and Morality:

Many religions have perpetuated violence against others. The most popular created doctrines that restricted human nature and individualism. Some groups suppress scientific evidence for evolution or intrinsic homosexuality. Others, like my born again Christian parent, have threatened me with hellfire because I hold a different philosophical view on the existence of a deity. I do not think that religion is a good source of morality. Humans can create better systems of moral behavior without relying on religious dogma or the fear of an angry god.

This is the shorthand of why I do not believe in a God.

EDIT:

"God is outside space and time, so of course there's no physical evidence... I just have trouble believing that we are an accident with no purpose"

Almost all early religions did not believe in this, and I'm not sure that many do today. Early religions made physical claims to explain the world, including Christianity. These ideas did not exist outside of space and time, and are known as creation myths.

That's one way to disprove religion, by evaluating these physical claims against our proven understanding of the planet and universe. Genesis and the Garden of Eden, for instance, are clearly not based on the facts. Two people cannot genetically reproduce the variances in the species without causing genetic anomalies. And our human ancestors migrated out of Africa, and other hominid species existed within the past 5 million years (40+).

As for purpose, we are NOT random. Send a tornado through a scrap yard, and you will not construct a fighter jet out of nothing. Evolution is not about randomness. Our species evolved due to billions of years or refinement and natural selection. This process is not accidental, but it can take many directions.

As for purpose, it exists within us. The wonderful thing is that the human species IS the birth of purpose in this part of the universe. We apply meaningful purposes to our own lives.

This is not random. We create tools to improve our society. We develop social codes to live and to help one another. Our lives are not meaningless, because we give them meaning.
I hope this answers your question, and helps to shed light on my personal position.

Answer 9

On balance of probability there is simply insufficient evidence to support the existence of a God or gods. That coupled with the inconsistencies in religious texts and the sheer number of religious sects leads me to believe it's an impossibility.

Answer 10

*NO* Evidence! None at all. Nothing. Zip. Zilch. Nada. A rien.

Why don't you believe in: Zeus, Ra, Odin, Allah and The FSM?
Plus gnomes, faeries, crossed fingers, psychics & alchemy?

[Edit]: THIS IS BASIC LOGIC AND SCIENCE:
It's impossible to obtain evidence for that which doesn't exist!
Lack of existence cannot be proved: Prove there's no Bigfoot!
IN SCIENCE, "proof" is nothing, EVIDENCE IS EVERYTHING.
ALSO; it's up to the claimant to provide evidence; hence *you*.
... (Any further questions, "Log!k"?)

Re Your: "of course there's no physical evidence", well, yeah, but it was *YOU* asking: "Brett: Show me evidence that God doesn't exist.", so *don't* sound like you grasped this, please.
Pls. note my earlier: "It's impossible to obtain evidence for...!"

Where d'ya get this: "God is outside space and time"?
And re: "I just have trouble..."; that's *your* problem and one I don't share - a pretty slim basis for a belief system, methinks.
This fallacy is known as an "argument from credulity", IIRC.