Can you prove atheism

And there is not an iota of evidence for such a God, so on what ground should we believe it? Hart claims that this is the conception of God that has prevailed throughout most of history, but I seriously doubt that. Aquinas, Luther, Augustine: none of those people saw God in such a way. My God is just sitting there, watching over us all, but only for his amusement. As Burkeman notes, Hart has removed God from the class of entities that exist and transformed Him into merely an Idea: a philosophical concept that can be subject only to philosophical arguments:.

If you think this God-as-the-condition-of-existence argument is rubbish, you need to say why. But this is all a stupendous confidence game. For the vast majority of modern history, women were viewed as intellectually inferior beings. But that is simply a culturally-conditioned belief that supports no argument for female inferiority.

Why on earth does that argument have any force at all? Western monotheists usually believe in a personal and anthropomorphic God—one who has humanlike emotions, cares about us, and wants us to behave in certain ways. The arguments for evolution are based on evidence, not philosophy, and can be comprehended by the average person: one who, for example, read my book Why Evolution is True.

It simply means that science is not the right means, just as a metal detector is not the right tool to find a wooden cup. We need other tools when exploring nonscientific questions. What other tools are there, besides science? One such tool is philosophy. Philosophy typically offers evidence in the form of arguments.

In fact, thinkers have identified no fewer than twenty arguments for God, arguments that range from the clear and simple to the extremely complex. Some of these arguments appeal to the universe or history, others to the existence of reason and beauty. We can approach the God question from many angles, and there is no one best way.

However, in this short essay, we are going to look at one of the arguments that I find to be the strongest. Before we begin, I want to note that if terms like arguments or evidence disconcert you, you might instead consider these arguments as clues that converge and point to a common conclusion, much the way road signs guide you to a specific destination.

These arguments are signposts to God. The Kalam argument dates back to the Middle Ages but has been made popular today by William Lane Craig, an evangelical Christian philosopher. The argument is very simple; in fact, it is probably the easiest of all the arguments to memorize, having two premises and one conclusion:. Premise 1: Everything that begins to exist has a cause. Premise 2: The universe began to exist. Conclusion: The universe has a cause. If you can memorize these three simple statements, you will be well equipped when dialoguing with a skeptic.

The First Premise. This statement says everything that begins to exist has a cause. Well, if everything that exists has a cause, and God exists, then what caused God? They are literally nonsense because they confuse the meaning of terms. Now that we have cleared away that misunderstanding, let us turn back to the first premise. Is it true? Does everything that begins to exist have a cause? For most people, the answer is yes; it is common sense.

Almost nobody denies it. The statement simply means that nothing just springs into existence, randomly and without a cause. For if things did come into being this way, then our world would be a wild spree of things apparently popping into existence like sleight of hand magic.

Only it would be worse, since with sleight of hand you at least have a magician who pulls rabbits out of a hat. However, in a world that violates this first premise, rabbits would pop in and out of being even without magicians or hats.

Few sane people believe the world works this way. So, through experience and reflection most people agree that everything that begins to exist has a cause. The Second Premise. But how does one actually know that science alone yields knowledge? Or to put it another way: how can you scientifically prove that all knowledge must be scientifically provable?

Let us shift things a bit to what knowledge itself is. Cutting through a good deal of debate, we can say that knowledge has three components: it is 1 a belief that is 2 true and 3 has warrant or, others might say, justification : warranted true belief. Now, essential to knowledge is that a belief be true. Truth is bound up with knowledge. Furthermore, knowledge requires that a true belief have warrant—or something that turns a true belief into knowledge.

To have an accidentally true belief is not knowledge. To have a lucky hunch that turns out to be true is not knowledge. Or let us say you conclude that it is by looking at a clock in a store window; it turns out that you are correct, but only coincidentally : in actuality, the clock is not working! The belief that it is in this case does not count as knowledge either.

Indeed, no one but God could live up to it! One major reason for that is this: you cannot know with percent certainty that knowledge requires percent certainty. Furthermore, we can truly know lots of things that do not rise to this level of absolute confidence. For example, you know that a world independent of your mind exists—even though it is logically possible it is just an illusion— maya , as the Advaita Vedanta Hindu would call it.

Does this mean you cannot really know that the external world exists? The fact is, we know a lot of things with confidence, even if not with complete certainty. Indeed, there would be precious little we could know if we followed that demanding standard.

The believer can have plenty of good reasons for belief in God—even if not absolute, mathematically certain ones. For example, we are aware of the existence of consciousness, free will or a presumed personal responsibility, personhood, rationality, duties, and human value—not to mention the beginning, fine-tuning, and beauties of the universe.

These are hardly surprising if a good, personal, conscious, rational, creative, powerful, and wise God exists. However, these phenomena are quite startling or shocking if they are the result of deterministic, valueless, non-conscious, unguided, non-rational material processes.

We have every reason to think a naturalistic world would not yield these phenomena—though not so with theism—and many naturalists themselves register surprise and even astonishment that such features should appear in a materialistic, deterministic universe. A number of years ago, I was speaking at an open forum at Worcester Polytechnic Institute Massachusetts. This brings us to our second set of terms to clarify— theism, atheism, and agnosticism —and we should also tackle the question of who bears the burden of proof in the face of these conflicting views.

No doubt about it, the theist makes a truth claim in asserting that God exists —a maximally great, worship-worthy being. So the theist, who makes a claim to know something , should bear a burden of proof. How is this belief justified? But does this mean that the atheist and agnostic are not making a claim? This would be an incorrect assumption. Even atheist beliefs themselves have much less to do with rational inquiry than atheists often think.

We now know, for example, that nonreligious children of religious parents cast off their beliefs for reasons that have little to do with intellectual reasoning. The latest cognitive research shows that the decisive factor is learning from what parents do rather than from what they say. Throughout our evolutionary history, humans have often lacked the time to scrutinise and weigh up the evidence — needing to make quick assessments. Even older children and adolescents who actually ponder the topic of religion may not be approaching it as independently as they think.

Emerging research is demonstrating that atheist parents and others pass on their beliefs to their children in a similar way to religious parents — through sharing their culture as much as their arguments. Some parents take the view that their children should choose their beliefs for themselves , but what they then do is pass on certain ways of thinking about religion, like the idea that religion is a matter of choice rather than divine truth.

But are atheists more likely to embrace science than religious people? Many belief systems can be more or less closely integrated with scientific knowledge.