I am not claiming that there is no god. I'm also not making this post because I'm angry at a god for creating me and putting me in my suffering. I've never really believed in a god, it was a concept I always felt people were trying to convince me of, but because I am so stubborn, I don't like following their doctrine I haven't myself created, and so I made up my own mind about the "god question". And my conclusion is that I have not yet seen evidence of the god everyone speaks of. That is, a loving god that created humans with purpose and intervenes in the world. If there is a god that created the universe and everything, it is relatively absent now. I'm creating this list more as a hobby because it is fascinating that so many people are preoccupied with the concept of god. Feel free to add to the list in the comments
Here are the pieces of evidence I've compiled, or sensible and logical arguments for thought. Many of which are related to each other, but I've often chosen to break them up into parts:
- There are many religions. How can we know which is the correct one? It is more a function of your geography or circumstance to believe in any particular god or gods. People in western countries are mostly Christian. People in the Middle East are predominantly Muslim. People in India are Hindu. People in East Asia are Buddhist.
- If we burned all the religious books in the world, a whole set of different stories would arise in a few hundred years. If we burned all the science books, the exact same books would eventually be written.
- Have you ever seen a physical manifestation of god? I'm not talking about a miracle or an interpretation of an event like you would an artistic painting ("only god could have made that happen"). Nor am I talking about schizophrenics or people with known illnesses that cause them to hear or see things 99.9% of other people can't. The fact that a "miracle" happened is not evidence of god. It is evidence of winning a random lottery. Consider this: if you enter yourself into tens of thousands of lotteries, don't the odds of you winning at least one go up(yes)? And when you lose the lottery, do you pay any attention to it (probably not)? Miracles are the result of winning the lottery on one of the thousands of things you want in your life, and paying selective attention to it.
- If you pray for something, it comes true usually about 50% percent of the time (depending). This is evidence of completely random chance, not divine intervention
- If the Earth was created for humans, what is the point of fossils like dinosaurs? For us to find them and do what with them? And how come fossils, since they are made out of rock, look similar to the skeletons of creatures that exist today?
- Evolution*. I put the asterisk because the concept of evolution is actually not evidence against god or creation. The definition of evolution is merely "change over time". What evolution is a direct contradiction to however, is human religion, which believes humans magically appeared out of thin air.
- There are infinite contradictions in religious texts which I will not go into too much detail, as my list is merely personal observations. By arguing with a religious text, you are committing a logical fallacy which assumes you believe in religion to begin with. There is no evidence for any given religion being true, so I assume they are false. But here are a collection of insane things western religion includes: Jesus walking on water, Noah fitting pairs of all the millions of animal species on one boat (What even is a species? Whether two organisms can interbreed and produce fertile offspring? Or whether they just look different, i.e. subspecies? Or one of the dozens of other species concepts?), Jesus turning water into wine, cutting off a certain man's hair (Samson) makes him physically weak, a talking burning bush.
- If I can paraphrase the comedian George Carlin, how come one of the ten commandments doesn't include not child molesting or not raping?
- People who were born deformed or mentally retarded. If humans were created to worship a god, what about the mutants who can hardly put together a sentence or have a continuous thought? What is the point of being deformed then? Seem to me to be just bad genes and random chance again at work.
- Some people are born into suffering and then die and that is all they ever knew. For example a baby in Africa born into a poor family and then dying of starvation, or a deranged mom who throws her baby in a trash can and then lights them on fire. The argument for suffering is that in order to know happiness you need to know pain, but some people who are born never know happiness. Suffering is guaranteed but happiness isn't. What then is the point of suffering?
- What about the people who don't ever hear about your religion, such as the bushpeople of Africa or the Aboriginals of Australia? If your god is the one true god then these people are disadvantaged from birth
- Genetic manipulation*. Again, another large topic like evolution that isn't necessarily evidence against an original creator. But if humans were meant to be naturally who they are, how come we for example can create them and replace bad mitochondria, that would otherwise have made an inviable baby, with good ones to produce humans out of "test tubes"
- How come god is supposedly shaped like a human? How can we know what god is shaped like?
-------------.................
Once again, none of these arguments disprove an original creator. They mostly attack the idea and image of a creator that people claim to have.
All that aside, this is what science does tell us: people with religion are happier on average about their lives than those who aren't. They can be completely wrong, but at least they are happy. Ignorance is bliss. We also know people naturally come up with the idea of a god when they begin to question how they came to be. Every single civilization ever has come up with the concept of a god, from the Aztecs in Mexico to the Romans in Italy, so it is naturally built into us to create the concept. But just because we can come up with an idea doesn't make it true. J.K. Rowling came up with Harry Potter and wizards and magic, but that doesn't mean it actually happened. What we know is that creating the idea of a god is a diagnostic character of humans and no other animals, hence why gods are always shaped like humans.
I'm sure I'm missing many other good points and I've also condense huge pieces of evidence like evolution and genetics and psychology down way too simply, but this is an expository piece, not a concrete official science report. My pieces of evidence are based off science, but I would encourage anyone to look up any they take issue with and find your own truth. For that reason, and for the reasons I just mentioned, I am also not arguing against religion. Religion is something humans naturally create, much like frogs naturally like to live in ponds. It is inevitable to try and remove religion. It has been the cause of countless wars, and millions, if not billions, of deaths. But life is a constant struggle and animals and humans are naturally going to fight to acquire their needs and wants regardless. Whether you believe in religion is all up to you and your personal history. Do you need to know that your enemies will be punished in an afterlife, or do you think critically about how the world around you actually exists. Both are valid points of view, and most people probably fall somewhere along the spectrum of ignorance to logic rather than being polarized to one or the other.
Here is my paradoxical advice: take whatever advice you want from whoever you want. Take mine to think independently or don't. But whatever you choose, it will always be the right choice for you.
And one day, you will be free from this miserable, guaranteed suffering called life regardless of whether you are suicidal, and won't have to worry about asking questions and choosing what to believe. As the comedian Louis CK once said: Being dead is mostly what you're ever going to be [...] you're just dead people that haven't died yet.
Here are the pieces of evidence I've compiled, or sensible and logical arguments for thought. Many of which are related to each other, but I've often chosen to break them up into parts:
- There are many religions. How can we know which is the correct one? It is more a function of your geography or circumstance to believe in any particular god or gods. People in western countries are mostly Christian. People in the Middle East are predominantly Muslim. People in India are Hindu. People in East Asia are Buddhist.
- If we burned all the religious books in the world, a whole set of different stories would arise in a few hundred years. If we burned all the science books, the exact same books would eventually be written.
- Have you ever seen a physical manifestation of god? I'm not talking about a miracle or an interpretation of an event like you would an artistic painting ("only god could have made that happen"). Nor am I talking about schizophrenics or people with known illnesses that cause them to hear or see things 99.9% of other people can't. The fact that a "miracle" happened is not evidence of god. It is evidence of winning a random lottery. Consider this: if you enter yourself into tens of thousands of lotteries, don't the odds of you winning at least one go up(yes)? And when you lose the lottery, do you pay any attention to it (probably not)? Miracles are the result of winning the lottery on one of the thousands of things you want in your life, and paying selective attention to it.
- If you pray for something, it comes true usually about 50% percent of the time (depending). This is evidence of completely random chance, not divine intervention
- If the Earth was created for humans, what is the point of fossils like dinosaurs? For us to find them and do what with them? And how come fossils, since they are made out of rock, look similar to the skeletons of creatures that exist today?
- Evolution*. I put the asterisk because the concept of evolution is actually not evidence against god or creation. The definition of evolution is merely "change over time". What evolution is a direct contradiction to however, is human religion, which believes humans magically appeared out of thin air.
- There are infinite contradictions in religious texts which I will not go into too much detail, as my list is merely personal observations. By arguing with a religious text, you are committing a logical fallacy which assumes you believe in religion to begin with. There is no evidence for any given religion being true, so I assume they are false. But here are a collection of insane things western religion includes: Jesus walking on water, Noah fitting pairs of all the millions of animal species on one boat (What even is a species? Whether two organisms can interbreed and produce fertile offspring? Or whether they just look different, i.e. subspecies? Or one of the dozens of other species concepts?), Jesus turning water into wine, cutting off a certain man's hair (Samson) makes him physically weak, a talking burning bush.
- If I can paraphrase the comedian George Carlin, how come one of the ten commandments doesn't include not child molesting or not raping?
- People who were born deformed or mentally retarded. If humans were created to worship a god, what about the mutants who can hardly put together a sentence or have a continuous thought? What is the point of being deformed then? Seem to me to be just bad genes and random chance again at work.
- Some people are born into suffering and then die and that is all they ever knew. For example a baby in Africa born into a poor family and then dying of starvation, or a deranged mom who throws her baby in a trash can and then lights them on fire. The argument for suffering is that in order to know happiness you need to know pain, but some people who are born never know happiness. Suffering is guaranteed but happiness isn't. What then is the point of suffering?
- What about the people who don't ever hear about your religion, such as the bushpeople of Africa or the Aboriginals of Australia? If your god is the one true god then these people are disadvantaged from birth
- Genetic manipulation*. Again, another large topic like evolution that isn't necessarily evidence against an original creator. But if humans were meant to be naturally who they are, how come we for example can create them and replace bad mitochondria, that would otherwise have made an inviable baby, with good ones to produce humans out of "test tubes"
- How come god is supposedly shaped like a human? How can we know what god is shaped like?
-------------.................
Once again, none of these arguments disprove an original creator. They mostly attack the idea and image of a creator that people claim to have.
All that aside, this is what science does tell us: people with religion are happier on average about their lives than those who aren't. They can be completely wrong, but at least they are happy. Ignorance is bliss. We also know people naturally come up with the idea of a god when they begin to question how they came to be. Every single civilization ever has come up with the concept of a god, from the Aztecs in Mexico to the Romans in Italy, so it is naturally built into us to create the concept. But just because we can come up with an idea doesn't make it true. J.K. Rowling came up with Harry Potter and wizards and magic, but that doesn't mean it actually happened. What we know is that creating the idea of a god is a diagnostic character of humans and no other animals, hence why gods are always shaped like humans.
I'm sure I'm missing many other good points and I've also condense huge pieces of evidence like evolution and genetics and psychology down way too simply, but this is an expository piece, not a concrete official science report. My pieces of evidence are based off science, but I would encourage anyone to look up any they take issue with and find your own truth. For that reason, and for the reasons I just mentioned, I am also not arguing against religion. Religion is something humans naturally create, much like frogs naturally like to live in ponds. It is inevitable to try and remove religion. It has been the cause of countless wars, and millions, if not billions, of deaths. But life is a constant struggle and animals and humans are naturally going to fight to acquire their needs and wants regardless. Whether you believe in religion is all up to you and your personal history. Do you need to know that your enemies will be punished in an afterlife, or do you think critically about how the world around you actually exists. Both are valid points of view, and most people probably fall somewhere along the spectrum of ignorance to logic rather than being polarized to one or the other.
Here is my paradoxical advice: take whatever advice you want from whoever you want. Take mine to think independently or don't. But whatever you choose, it will always be the right choice for you.
And one day, you will be free from this miserable, guaranteed suffering called life regardless of whether you are suicidal, and won't have to worry about asking questions and choosing what to believe. As the comedian Louis CK once said: Being dead is mostly what you're ever going to be [...] you're just dead people that haven't died yet.
Last edited:
