God Doesn't Exist
Tejas GK| (2mo ago)
Yeah. I don't believe God exists.
Not "I'm spiritual but unsure."
Not "maybe there's something out there."
I genuinely think there is no God.
Could I mathematically prove that absolutely no conceivable supernatural being exists anywhere outside the universe? Obviously not. You can't really prove a completely unfalsifiable universal negative like that.
But that's also not how I decide whether something is real.
I can't prove there isn't an invisible dragon following me around either.
The question is:
What reason do I actually have to believe it's there?
And when I apply the same standard to God that I apply to literally everything else, I just don't see it.
Actually, the more I've thought about religion, the stranger the whole idea has become to me.
Start with the most obvious problem: where is he?
This one bothers me more than almost anything else.
Apparently there is an all-powerful intelligence that created:
Earth.
Humans.
Billions of galaxies.
Every atom in my body.
The laws of physics.
Space.
Time.
Everything.
And apparently this being also cares deeply about whether I personally believe he exists.
Okay.
Then why is his existence so ridiculously unclear?
Why are we even debating this?
If God wanted humanity to know he existed, this would be the easiest problem imaginable for an omnipotent being to solve.
Just appear.
Do something unmistakable.
Communicate with everyone.
Put the same message into every human's mind simultaneously.
Literally anything.
Instead we have thousands of years of people arguing over ancient books, personal experiences, miracles, interpretations and competing religions.
Philosophers actually call this the problem of divine hiddenness: if a perfectly loving God wants a relationship with humans, why are there sincere people who search and still don't believe because the evidence simply isn't convincing?
That seems like a pretty massive problem.
God apparently wants me to believe in him.
God knows exactly what evidence would convince me.
God can provide that evidence effortlessly.
God doesn't provide it.
Okay then.
And which God exactly?
This is another thing.
People say:
"Do you believe in God?"
Which one bro?
Humans have believed in an absurd number of gods.
Zeus.
Odin.
Ra.
Shiva.
Vishnu.
Allah.
Yahweh.
Jesus.
Countless local gods, spirits, ancestors and supernatural beings.
People have been absolutely convinced about completely incompatible religions.
And usually, by an incredible coincidence, the true religion happens to be the religion dominant in the family or society somebody was born into.
Born in Saudi Arabia?
Very likely Muslim.
Born into a conservative Christian family in America?
Probably Christian.
Born into a Hindu family in India?
Probably Hindu.
Funny how the creator of the universe keeps changing depending on geography.
Obviously that alone doesn't prove every religion is false.
But it makes me suspicious.
If there were one obvious divine truth being revealed to humanity, I'd expect considerably more convergence.
Instead religion looks exactly like something humans culturally transmit.
Every religion can't be right
This is the simple part.
Religions make contradictory claims.
Jesus is God.
Jesus isn't God.
There is one God.
There are many manifestations of God.
Reincarnation happens.
Reincarnation doesn't happen.
You get one life.
You get many lives.
There is hell.
There isn't hell.
This book is God's word.
No, this book is God's word.
These can't all simultaneously be literally true.
People sometimes respond with:
"They're all different paths to the same truth."
Nice idea.
But that's something we decided.
Many religions themselves make mutually exclusive claims.
At minimum, humanity has clearly demonstrated that people can be completely sincere and completely convinced about supernatural beliefs that contradict one another.
So sincerity isn't evidence.
Faith isn't evidence.
Feeling God's presence isn't enough either, because people from incompatible religions report basically the same certainty about completely different gods.
Suffering makes the all-loving God idea incredibly hard to believe
This is probably the oldest serious objection.
God is supposedly:
All-powerful.
All-knowing.
Perfectly good.
Okay.
Then look at Earth.
Children get cancer.
Babies are born with horrible genetic diseases.
People get dementia and slowly forget everyone they love.
Earthquakes bury families alive.
Parasites literally survive by eating other organisms.
Animals suffered unimaginably for hundreds of millions of years before humans even existed.
People are tortured.
Children are abused.
Entire populations have starved.
And I'm supposed to believe an infinitely powerful, infinitely loving being is watching all of this?
The philosophical problem of evil exists precisely because enormous amounts of apparently unnecessary suffering are difficult to reconcile with an omnipotent, omniscient and perfectly good God.
And before someone says:
"Free will."
A child's leukemia isn't free will.
An earthquake isn't free will.
A baby being born with a fatal disease isn't free will.
A deer slowly dying in a forest fire isn't free will.
Even if human freedom explained human cruelty, it doesn't explain natural suffering.
"God has a plan"
This answer has never made sense to me.
Suppose something amazing happens.
"I prayed and God saved me."
Okay.
What about the person in the hospital room next door who prayed just as hard and died?
"God had another plan."
Notice what's happening here.
Good outcome?
Evidence for God.
Bad outcome?
Also somehow compatible with God.
Nothing happens?
God works mysteriously.
At that point, what observation could possibly count against the belief?
Nothing.
And that's a problem.
If literally every possible outcome supports your theory, your theory isn't explaining much.
Prayer has the same problem
Someone prays for a job.
They get the job.
"God answered my prayer!"
But imagine 500 people applied.
Maybe 100 of them prayed.
One person gets hired.
The winner remembers the prayer.
The 99 people who prayed and didn't get it aren't standing beside him during his testimony.
It's selection bias with a religious interpretation.
Same with surviving accidents.
"I survived. God protected me."
Okay.
What about the person sitting two seats away who died?
Did God just like you more?
People understandably search for meaning after emotional events.
But an emotionally powerful experience isn't automatically evidence for a supernatural explanation.
We keep replacing God with explanations
This is a huge reason I don't feel the need for God.
For most of human history, nature was terrifying and mysterious.
Lightning?
God.
Disease?
Gods or spirits.
Drought?
God.
The diversity of life?
Creation.
The movement of objects in the sky?
Divine activity.
Then we started investigating.
And again and again we found mechanisms.
Physics.
Chemistry.
Biology.
Germ theory.
Meteorology.
Astronomy.
Evolution.
None of this scientifically proves that no God could possibly exist.
That's important.
But every time we explain something naturally, the amount of work we need God to perform gets smaller.
Evolution is an especially good example. We don't need to invoke separate supernatural creation to explain the diversity and adaptation of life; evolution is supported by overwhelming scientific evidence and is the comprehensive scientific explanation used in modern biology.
Could someone say:
"God created evolution"?
Sure.
But notice what happened.
God stopped being the explanation.
Now God is something you've placed behind the explanation.
"But look how perfectly designed humans are"
Perfectly designed?
Have you met humans? 😭
Our eyes have blind spots.
Our wisdom teeth regularly cause problems.
We choke because food and air use intersecting pathways.
Our backs aren't exactly thrilled about this whole walking-upright situation.
Birth can be extremely dangerous because of the combination of large human brains and our pelvis structure.
Evolution makes sense of this.
Evolution doesn't start over and engineer the perfect organism.
It modifies what already exists.
That's exactly why biology is full of weird compromises.
We look less like something designed from scratch by an infinitely intelligent engineer and more like something patched for billions of years.
Because that's basically what evolution is.
"Something must have created the universe"
Probably the most common argument.
Everything needs a creator.
The universe exists.
Therefore God created the universe.
Okay.
Who created God?
Usually the answer becomes:
"God doesn't need a creator."
Oh.
So we've established that something can exist without being created.
Why couldn't whatever fundamental reality produced our universe be that thing?
Why introduce another infinitely complicated conscious being?
Classical cosmological arguments try to move from facts about causation, contingency or the universe toward a first cause or necessary being, but philosophers still debate whether those arguments succeed and whether such a cause would get you all the way to the personal God of religion.
Saying "God did it" doesn't actually explain why there is something rather than nothing.
It just moves the mystery one level upward.
Universe exists.
"Why?"
God.
"Why does God exist?"
God just exists.
Then why couldn't reality itself just exist in some fundamental form?
And we don't actually know what happened "before" the universe
People sometimes treat unanswered scientific questions as victories for religion.
Scientists don't know exactly why the universe exists.
Therefore God.
No.
"I don't know" is a completely valid answer.
Probably one of the most intellectually honest sentences humans can say.
Modern cosmology investigates the origin, history, structure and evolution of the universe, but there remain enormous unanswered questions.
Not knowing something doesn't automatically make somebody else's supernatural answer correct.
Imagine people thousands of years ago saying:
"We don't know what causes lightning."
Therefore Zeus.
The correct answer was:
"We don't know yet."
Ignorance isn't evidence for God.
Fine-tuning doesn't convince me either
Another argument is that the constants of the universe seem incredibly precisely set for life.
Change certain things and perhaps stars, chemistry or complex life couldn't exist.
Fine-tuning is a real subject discussed seriously in philosophy of physics and cosmology.
But jumping from:
"The universe has parameters compatible with us existing"
to:
"A conscious being intentionally selected those parameters"
is enormous.
We don't know the probability distribution of possible universes.
We don't know whether these constants could actually have taken arbitrary values.
We don't know whether deeper physical laws determine them.
We don't know whether some kind of multiverse exists.
And there's also an obvious observation-selection problem:
Of course we observe a universe compatible with observers.
If it weren't, nobody would be here asking why.
A puddle could look at the hole containing it and think:
"Wow. This hole fits me perfectly. It must have been designed for me."
Maybe.
Or maybe the puddle fits the hole.
The universe doesn't look particularly designed for us
If God made this entire thing specifically with humans in mind, he has a strange sense of real-estate allocation.
Almost the entire universe will kill us instantly.
Space?
Dead.
The Sun?
Extremely dead.
Jupiter?
Dead.
Mars without equipment?
Dead.
Most of Earth?
Even large parts of our own planet aren't comfortably habitable without technology.
We live on a tiny section of one tiny planet orbiting one ordinary star in one galaxy among an incomprehensible number of galaxies.
And for most of the universe's history, humans didn't exist.
This doesn't exactly scream:
"The cosmos was constructed specifically for Tejas GK and friends."
Morality doesn't require God
Another argument:
"If God doesn't exist, where does morality come from?"
Humans.
Reason.
Empathy.
Social cooperation.
Culture.
Our evolutionary history.
The fact that other conscious creatures can suffer.
I don't need a divine commandment to understand that torturing someone for fun is horrible.
Actually, saying something is moral because God commanded it creates another problem.
Would something become good purely because God ordered it?
If yes, morality is arbitrary.
If no—if God commands it because it's already good—then goodness exists independently of God's command.
Either way, simply saying "God" doesn't magically solve ethics.
And religious morality clearly changes
People often talk as though religion delivered one perfect moral system that humanity simply followed.
But religious interpretation changes constantly.
Believers disagree about slavery.
Women's rights.
Divorce.
Sexuality.
War.
Capital punishment.
Caste.
Marriage.
Religious freedom.
And eventually people reinterpret scriptures through the moral standards of their own era.
Which makes me wonder:
Are we getting morality from religion?
Or are humans developing moral ideas and then updating their interpretation of religion to match them?
Why would God care whether I believe?
This one is especially weird.
Imagine the creator of hundreds of billions of stars.
Maybe vastly more planets.
Possibly an unimaginably enormous cosmos.
And he's upset because a primate on one planet looked at the available evidence and said:
"Yeah... I'm not convinced."
Seriously?
If God exists and gave me the ability to reason, then presumably he knows exactly why I reached this conclusion.
He could also provide better evidence at literally any moment.
Why would honest disbelief be some kind of moral failure?
I can understand punishing cruelty.
Murder.
Abuse.
Hurting people.
But disbelief?
That's like me hiding from my future children their entire lives and then getting angry because they don't think I exist.
Hell makes even less sense
Infinite punishment.
For finite actions.
During one tiny human lifetime.
How is that justice?
Even the worst human criminal exists for maybe 100 years.
Infinite punishment has no proportional relationship to any finite crime.
And if disbelief itself earns eternal punishment, the situation becomes even more absurd.
God creates you.
God knows exactly what evidence you will encounter.
God knows before you're born that you won't find the evidence convincing.
God creates you anyway.
You genuinely aren't convinced.
Then God tortures you forever.
And we're calling this perfect love?
No thanks.
Religion looks extremely human to me
This might actually be the biggest thing.
When I look at religions, they don't look like messages written by an intelligence that created galaxies.
They look like humans.
They contain the concerns of the societies that produced them.
Rules about food.
Marriage.
Sex.
Clothing.
Tribal membership.
Rituals.
Land.
Enemies.
Purity.
Family structures.
Authority.
And then later generations reinterpret those ideas as society changes.
That's exactly what I'd expect if religion were a cultural phenomenon created and transmitted by humans.
Humans are also unbelievably good at seeing agency
Something moves in the bushes.
Could be wind.
Could be a tiger.
Evolutionarily, assuming "tiger" and being wrong is cheap.
Assuming "wind" and being wrong makes you lunch.
So it isn't surprising that human minds are extremely willing to detect agency, intention and patterns.
Something unlikely happens.
"It happened for a reason."
You think about someone and they call.
"Whoa."
You pray and something happens.
"God."
Meanwhile we forget the thousands of thoughts, prayers and coincidences where absolutely nothing happened.
Our brains aren't perfect truth machines.
They're pattern-recognition machines.
And sometimes they find patterns that aren't there.
The fact that belief feels good doesn't make it true
I completely understand why religion appeals to people.
Death is scary.
Losing someone is horrible.
Life can feel meaningless.
The idea that you'll see everyone again is comforting.
The idea that somebody is watching over you is comforting.
The idea that everything happens according to a plan is comforting.
I get it.
Actually, I wish some of those things were true.
I'd love to know that death isn't the end.
I'd love to believe everybody I care about somehow continues forever.
But:
I want something to be true
and
I have evidence that it's true
are completely different sentences.
Reality doesn't owe me emotional comfort.
"Science can't explain everything"
Correct.
Science can't currently explain everything.
Scientists would be the first people to tell you that.
We don't completely understand consciousness.
We don't know why there is something rather than nothing.
We don't have a complete quantum theory of gravity.
There are enormous unanswered questions about the universe.
Awesome.
That's what makes science interesting.
But:
Science doesn't know X
does not logically imply:
Therefore my God did X.
There's an entire universe of possibilities between those statements.
"I don't know" beats inventing certainty.
Also, God is strangely immune to the standard we use for everything else
Suppose I told you:
There's an invisible man living in my room.
You can't see him.
You can't hear him.
You can't detect him.
He doesn't interact with anything in a measurable way.
But trust me, he's there.
You'd ask:
"How do you know?"
Imagine I responded:
"You just need faith."
You'd think I'd lost it.
But put the invisible being outside spacetime, make him infinitely powerful and tell the story for thousands of years...
Suddenly asking for evidence becomes offensive.
Why?
Extraordinary claims don't become more credible just because they're old.
And supernatural claims have a testing problem
Science works because claims are supposed to connect to observation and evidence.
Supernatural explanations generally escape this requirement because they're often formulated so they cannot be tested against evidence. The National Academies explicitly notes this distinction when discussing why supernatural explanations aren't scientific explanations.
Again, that doesn't logically prove they're false.
It means science has no reason to accept them as explanations.
And neither do I.
Could there be some weird intelligence outside our universe?
Sure.
Maybe we're in a simulation.
Maybe some civilization created our universe.
Maybe consciousness is fundamental.
Maybe reality is infinitely stranger than anything we currently imagine.
I genuinely don't know.
But if tomorrow we discovered our universe was created by some advanced alien intelligence, I wouldn't suddenly start worshipping it.
That's just another being.
Calling the unknown thing "God" doesn't give us Christianity, Islam, Hinduism or any other religion for free.
You'd still have to demonstrate all the additional claims.
That's the part that often gets skipped.
Someone argues that the universe might require a first cause.
Then somehow five minutes later we're discussing what that first cause thinks about sex and what we're allowed to eat on Tuesdays.
Bro.
There are several missing steps there 😭
So can I PROVE God doesn't exist?
Not in the sense of:
God = false ✅
There is no experiment that can rule out every imaginable definition of God, especially when God is defined as something outside observable reality.
But that's almost beside the point.
I don't need to disprove every imaginable supernatural creature before withholding belief.
The person making the claim needs to give me a reason to accept it.
And so far I see:
No clear direct evidence.
Massive disagreement between supposed revelations.
A hidden God who apparently wants to be known.
Enormous apparently unnecessary suffering.
Natural explanations replacing supernatural ones again and again.
Arguments that often move the mystery instead of solving it.
Claims protected from falsification.
Personal experiences occurring across mutually contradictory religions.
And explanations that frequently become:
"God works in mysterious ways."
I'm sorry, but none of that is convincing to me.
I don't hate religious people
This part matters.
Saying "I think your belief is wrong" isn't saying "I think you're stupid."
Extremely intelligent people believe in God.
Extremely intelligent people don't.
Religion is wrapped up in family, childhood, culture, identity, community and some of the deepest emotional experiences people have.
So I completely understand why this subject gets personal.
I'm attacking the claim, not the person.
If you're Hindu, Christian, Muslim, Sikh, Jewish or anything else and religion makes your life better, cool.
We're allowed to disagree.
Just don't tell me I have to pretend the evidence convinces me when it doesn't.
My position is actually pretty simple
Show me evidence.
Real evidence.
If God appeared tomorrow and demonstrated his existence clearly, I'd change my mind immediately.
I have zero loyalty to atheism.
I don't need God to not exist.
I just want my beliefs to follow reality.
And right now, when I look at the universe, I don't see evidence of a personal deity watching us, answering prayers, judging our thoughts and handing down religious rules.
I see an enormous universe operating according to natural processes.
I see life that evolved.
I see humans trying desperately to understand why we're here.
And I see those same humans creating thousands of different stories to answer questions that terrified and fascinated them.
Honestly?
That story is already incredible enough.
We don't need to add God.
I don't believe God is hiding somewhere behind the universe.
I think we looked into the unknown, got scared of saying "we don't know", and gave the unknown a name.
God.