Why God Doesn't Exist
Created | Updated Aug 27, 2002
So. Does God exist? Is there a supernatural being or beings that control everything?
No. I don't think there is any kind of God or any kind of afterlife. Or a soul. Life is a biochemical process, nothing more. When it stops it stops. The Universe neither requires nor allows for any kind of deity.
A dedicated theist should be able to argue any of the points made in this essay, because religion first and foremost is an issue of personal faith.
Remember that there are large groups of people who believe in the literal truth of the bible. I have met some of them, and it's quite scary. Most Christians, however, do not subscribe to this extreme view of the Bible and prefer to take it more allegorically.
Over the Rainbow
Let's take the rainbow as an example. The Bible tells us that God flooded the entire earth, but saved Noah and his ship full of animals. Leave aside for a moment the fact that Noah couldn't possibly fit two of every species into a boat that small. Leave aside that the flood would not have affected the planet's dominant form of life - the billions of species of bacteria that are known to exist. Leave aside for a moment that covering the entire Earth would require an inconceivably large volume of water, and leave aside for a moment the question of where it all went when it was over.
No. The real problem is that according to the Bible, God put a rainbow in the sky as His promise to Noah and his descendants that he would never do that again. Now, most versions of the story that I've read imply that rainbows didn't exist before the Flood.
Isaac Newton observed that the rainbow is a result of the laws of reflection and refraction working inside drops of water. Different wavelengths of light are 'bent' (refracted) different amounts by their passage through the medium. The light then reflects off the back surface of the water drop, is refracted again as it passes out of the raindrop, and enters to our eyes. The combination of millions of tiny drops is what builds up the image of a rainbow.
Did God create the phenomenon of refraction as a covenant? Or did refraction, and therefore rainbows, exist prior to the Flood? If you believe the literality of the Bible, then refraction and reflection didn't exist before God destroyed everything in the Flood. This would make for a very different world.
I haven't checked recently, but I believe that the Bible makes several references to reflection prior to the Flood. It mentions the Moon, for example. If reflection and refraction didn't exist, then the Moon would be invisible to us (it shines by reflected light). The sky would not be blue, as it is the phenomenon of refraction which makes it blue. Nor would the sea. As there is no suggestion that this was the case before the Biblical account of the Flood, I have no choice but to assume that reflection, refraction and rainbows did exist before the Flood and that therefore the Bible is wrong.
Science and Religion
The problem with religion is that it involves denial of evidence. Some people try to say that science is just another religion and requires as much faith as orthodox religion does. To these people I can only say that they don't understand science at all.
The best definition of science I have so far come across is one by the founder of the Skeptics society: "Science is a set of mental and behavioral methods designed to describe and interpret observed or inferred phenomenon, past or present, aimed at building a testable body of knowledge open to rejection or confirmation." (Michael Shermer, 1998). This differs greatly from religion in three particular areas:
First, science is mutable. It builds on its mistakes. It acknowledges where the explanation is weak and seeks a better explanation. Religion entrenches its explanations as dogma and has a history of persecuting those who disagree.
Second, science doesn't rely on belief - only evidence. Religion on the other hand relies entirely on belief in the face of evidence. There is ample observational evidence for evolution - we have seen it in action and documented it extensively, and yet it it still denied by Christians who believe in a six-day Creation.
Third, science and religion have very different versions of what consitutes a fact. According to one of the world's most prolific and respected scientists: "In science, ‘fact’ can only mean confirmed to such a degree that it would be perverse to withhold provisional assent" (Stephen Jay Gould, 1983). Religion on the other hand defines whatever is in the Bible as a fact, and it is not open to discussion or revision.
So science doesn't involve belief, unless it is belief in the bleeding obvious. Belief has no place in a system that relies on logical proof, because logical proof according to Euclid's laws follows directly from the bleeding obvious.
God's Redundancy
The other reason I don't think that God exists is that the Universe rolls along quite happily without His influence. He is unnecessary. He is redundant. He has no purpose in this Universe beyond the emotional satisfaction of those who believe in Him. The origin of the Universe is one of those things that scientists cannot describe yet, but they are working on it. Proponents of the God hypothesis suggest that this is the First Cause, the 'let it be' that God spoke at the beginning of the universe. Science cannot disprove that possibility yet.
However, that stance in itself contradicts what the Bible says. No special six-day creation in the Big Bang theory. But regardless of whether the Big Bang occurred naturally or was sparked off by God, the universe has been developing quite naturally ever since without His help. Everything from the creation of stars to the fall of an apple has been described by the laws of gravity, electromagnetism and the weak and strong nuclear forces, all of which are very well understood and confirmed by experimentation. There is no room for the supernatural. Physics describes everything.
Vastness - Quarks and Quasars
The quark is one of the smallest known constituents of matter. It is so unimaginably tiny that no one has ever seen one. There is theoretical and experimental evidence that they exist, however, and the theory of quarks fits all of the observations that people have made of matter at its most fundamental level. The existence of quarks is accepted by a majority of those who study the subject.
The quasar is the most distant object ever observed in the Universe. Explanations of what it is and why came after it was observed. They are so unimaginably far away that we see them in a state they were in when the Universe was a fraction of its present age. The light from a quasar has spent most of the age of the Universe getting to us. The existence of quasars is accepted by a majority of those who study the subject.
Here is the problem: why do they exist? Heaven and Earth were created by God in order to provide a home for Man. Why did He go to all the bother of creating things that we wouldn't even know about for thousands of years? Why did God create quasars? Why did He create quarks - or rather, why did He create matter with such a fine and detailed structure that it took us thousands of years to discover it? The answer: he didn't.
Conclusion
God is a psychological phenomenon that may or may not have a neurological basis. Regardless, the idea of God (Gods, Goddesses, etc) has given great comfort to billions of human beings over the ages. Many people are better, kinder, more thoughtful people than they otherwise would be because they have faith in their particular religion.
However, the idea of God has also caused great suffering and evil. So many people have died in the name of one God or another. There is terrorism, intolerance, racism, murder, violence, and hatred - all because of religion.
It is time for the human race to get over it. Religion has served a purpose in the past, but as we find out more and more about the Universe we live in, the idea of God only holds us back. Until humanity as a whole can discard the idea of deity, we will never fulfil our potential in the Universe.
