1. Introduction

Welcome to the first post series of my blog, in which we shall be discussing arguments against the existence of God.

Anyone who has encountered any discussion of atheism in recent years—whether on places like reddit, YouTube, or organisations like the Atheist Experience—will be familiar with a certain trend in defining “atheism”:

Atheism is just a lack of belief in God—it makes no claims of its own.

This isn’t the only way that “atheism” has been defined. In academic discussions of the existence of God, “atheism” denotes a claim that no gods exist. For example the late atheist philosopher William Rowe, in his landmark paper “The Problem of Evil and Some Varieties of Atheism”, defines:

To be an atheist in the broad sense is to deny the existence of any sort of divine being or divine reality … [Atheism in the narrow sense denies] that there exists a divine being that is all-knowing, all-powerful and perfectly good.

and the atheist philosopher and foremost philosopher of religion Graham Oppy defines in his book Atheism and Agnosticism: 

Atheists believe that there are no gods. Hence, in suitable circumstances, atheists affirm that there are no gods and endorse the claim that there are no gods.

However, this post series is not an argument about how to define the word “atheism”. Instead, I want to ask the more interesting question: whatever name we give to it, should we endorse the claim “there is no God”? Should we claim to know that God does not exist?

1.1. Common hesitations

There are a couple of reasons one might hesitate to assent to knowing that God does not exist that we can dismiss from the get go.

First, one might worry that someone might call anything, even things that obviously exist, a god. The atheist doesn’t say the Sun doesn’t exist, and yet the Sun has been worshipped as a god.

In reply to this, we can first note that when the atheist says the Sun exists, they do not say that it exists as a god. The Sun exists as a giant ball of gas, the Sun as understood in godlike terms does not exist. But in any case, for the purposes of this post series I am narrowing my focus. Rather than discussing on a general “god(s)”, we shall look at whether the capital-G “God”—the all-powerful, all-knowing, all-good creator of the universe—exists. Since all the major monotheisms endorse belief in this God, that seems enough of a target, though in a later post series I may examine what the atheist can say about gods like Zeus, Odin etc.

Second, one might say that we can’t be certain that God doesn’t exist, that one “can’t prove a negative”. However, this presents a misguided view of what knowledge is. Knowledge doesn’t require certainty; when I look both ways and see no cars on the street, I know that it is safe to cross. I’m not certain, there could be a car going extremely fast just out of sight, my eyesight might not be as good as I think etc. etc., but I have good enough reason to think it safe to justify crossing. And this is an example of “proving a negative”—we show there are no cars by looking for an effect cars would have, in this case me seeing one, and then noting that this effect is absent.

1.2. Types of arguments for atheism

So, if knowledge is not certainty but more about having good reasons for belief, what good reasons are there for thinking that God does not exist? In this series, I shall examine two broad classes of atheistic argument.

First, we have what I shall call metaphysical arguments against the existence of God. These are arguments which seek to establish the thesis that “there is no God”. In particular, I shall primarily discuss:

• The Argument from Evil
• The Argument from Divine Hiddenness
• Arguments from the incoherence of God’s properties
• Arguments for a rival atheistic metaphysics, e.g. Naturalism

Secondly, we have the more sideways epistemological arguments. These are arguments that seek to undermine belief in the existence of a God, to show that a rational person should believe that no God exists. I shall primarily consider here arguments focusing on anthropomorphism, on the natural history of religion, or on the demographics of belief to debunk belief in God.

In my next post, we shall consider the argument from evil.