Atheist Response to: Why I Believe

Explanations without evidence are speculative at best. 

I understand your argument, and when I believed in god, I believed in similar traits.  It’s easy to explain god as being “beyond” our world, and therefore not constrained to our physical laws of time and space.  There are several problems with this argument. 1. There is no evidence of this, and 2. Without evidence, you could come up with just about any explanation having to do with what is beyond the universe and how/who created it. 
Honestly, your whole argument is a hashing of what you believe to be true, but you don’t go into detail as to what evidence you have to back up why what you say isn’t just a guess.  You’ve done a very good job of describing the god you believe in, but you still haven’t given any reasoning behind why you believe this.  I could recite several different gods and creation myths, all as seemingly valid as yours to those who believe in them. I think I heard you tell me once that you were an atheist, and I would love to know why and how that changed.

I usually try to stay away from arguments dealing with word play and logical paradoxes when debating the existence of god. I have heard the question, “what happens when an immovable object meets and irresistible force” and several variations. To be honest, I find them to be a sophomoric attack at best.  You might as well say, “If god can do anything, then tell him to find something he can’t do and then do it!” I agree with you on the answer to this quandary. If an all powerful god exists, then he will find a way. Just because we can’t conceive on an answer, doesn’t mean it can’t be done. Another answer to such a riddle, and one that I ascribe to, is that there is no such thing as an immovable object/irresistible force/rock that can’t be lifted/etc.. And therefore, it’s little more than a thought experiment that is not representative to the universe we live in.

In reference to your, “Computer Programmer” comparison to god, you said that you feel as though God wrote the rules and we are the “characters” in the game. We have “agency” or as I call it, “Free will” within the given parameters. I don’t see much disagreement with our beliefs in this regard, except where you feel the given parameters our universe has are created by God, and I see them as being fundamental laws of nature.  Sure, you could argue that God created the laws of nature.  Unfortunately, the laws of nature themselves point to a creation story that, although it doesn’t disprove god’s existence, it doesn’t need god whatsoever to work.  The mechanics of the universe we live in operate in such a fashion that there is no need for a designer. There is significant evidence to support this within the realms of physics and biology.

This begs the questions to me, “If the laws of the universe don’t NEED a designer to work, and there’s no PROOF of god’s existence, why would I need to believe that God exists at all, and frankly, why would such a god EXPECT me to believe in him when he’s being purposefully deceptive?”

You asked, “Why is it so inconceivable that God is the answer to the question that science is trying to ask – where did all this come from?” This is a return to my “God of the Gaps” fallacy I explained above. We can never look at something unexplained and assume it must just be god doing it. We can always dig deeper.  We may not currently have the answer to something, but lack of evidence is not evidence of god. It’s just not sound logic.

I would like to correct you. We DO have physical, observed evidence of the big bang.  It’s not just a blanket hypothesis. We have detected light in the night sky which is from far enough away to be light from that time. The galaxies are all red-shifted, which means they are moving away from each other from one place of origin.  There IS cosmic background radiation. We have particle colliders which can recreate specific conditions that existed in the first moments of the universe.  Of course we don’t have all of the puzzle pieces, but we do have an overall idea of what the puzzle looks like. 

You said, “Just because we finally prove it happened through some specific process or another doesn’t automatically mean that God didn’t start the process.”  You are exactly right.  This goes back to my earlier argument that you cannot prove a negative.  You can only prove a positive.  This is exactly why Carl Sagan’s statement, “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence” is so pertinent. Just because we finally prove the big bang happened through some specific process or another doesn’t automatically mean that the process wasn’t predicated by some other random event either.  We could just as easily say that proving the big bang existed doesn’t mean it wasn’t caused from a unicorn fart.

I think that making the comparison of our universe to a “game” written by god you are fooling yourself by way of pareidolia. You are making the universe a competitive game, where you “win” if you believe in the correct deity and follow the correct social rules imposed by said deity. Beyond religious belief, there is no indication that the universe or that human life is a game, or any goal whatsoever beyond those goals we make for ourselves. There is no reason to reflect human nature onto an absolutely not human universe.

You said in your summary, “I believe in God because I cannot conceive of a world in which He didn’t exist.” This argument is probably what is boiled down by most people who believe in a god. It’s a comfortable explanation for how the universe is such a beautiful place.  Unfortunately, just because you don’t understand how something happens, doesn’t mean it’s divine. For example: The Insane Clown Posse don’t understand how magnets and rainbows work, and yet that doesn’t mean they are a miracle.  There are perfectly rational and well known explanations for how magnets work, and how rainbows are made, and none of them involve miracles. Just because rainbows and magnets can be explained does not make them any less beautiful phenomena.

I too agree that there can be off topics that can and will hopefully be brought up as discourses in themselves.  I would love to talk about the role of social sciences and philosophy as being modern day sciences that can tackle the moral and philosophical issues also addressed by religion.