Okay, this may or may not be a controversial one, but here goes nothing.

From the outset let me state that you are under no compulsion to read this, analyse it or in any way associate yourself with this. I am not attacking any one individual, nor am I trying to propagate hatred in any way, shape or form.

What I'm going to be doing is looking at some of the more common arguments for the God Hypothesis, and considering them from a rational standpoint and drawing my own conclusion. Feel free to comment with your own perspective on the subject, or any loopholes or faults in my logic.

Firstly, we must define the God hypothesis. Most monotheistic people would contend that God is the creator and overseer of the universe. The most common attributes to God include omniscience, omnipotence, omnipresence, Omni benevolence (perfect goodness), divine simplicity, jealousy, and eternal and necessary existence. God has also been conceived as being incorporeal, a personal being, the source of all moral obligations, and the "greatest conceivable existent".

So far I've heard the following main arguments for God's existence.

1. With the complexity and diversity of life, only god could have created it all.
2. The only way to explain the origins of the universe is via. The God hypothesis.
3. Religion comforts so many people, so then God must exist.
4. We need to derive our morals from somewhere, and God is where we derive them from.
5.We are imperfect beings, the only way to know this is if there's some perfect being to compare ourselves to, and that being is God.

Feel free to add to this list, but for now, this is what I'm going to deal with.

1. This point isn't really true in my opinion. The reason why is the reason that we exist the way we do, and with the diversity of life we observe today.
All life arose by a slow process of evolution- Darwinian natural selection.
How can that work to explain the evolution of complex organisms from inanimate matter?
In the "primordial ooze" that all life originated from, there were huge levels of methane, Ammonia, Hydrogen Sulfide, various Phosphates and water. These formed by basic reactions after the formation of the earth.
There was lightning back then of course, and sunlight, providing the energy required to start chemical reactions.*

Now imagine that in a sort of "sea" around the planet, different, more complex chemicals were forming, and along the way a "replicator" formed. A replicator is a chemical that can reproduce itself by some sort of chemical reaction, which have been created in the lab.
However improbable it would be to form a replicator- it need only have happened once. Once it did, replicators would proliferate through the sea, and a replicator "population" would form. Now there would be a maximum number of replicators that could occupy this sea, so any new reaction would be altering the old replicator structure. "Competition" would happen, and there would be "competing" replicators for dominance in the sea.

Now as it happens, there is another aspect involved here.
Chemicals can stick together. This is an important fact. What if along the way a replicator managed to stick smaller chemicals around itself, protecting itself from another replicator "species"?
What if it could block bigger, more complex replicators from changing itself, but still allow smaller chemicals in, so it itself could replicate?
This is what led to the formation of the cell, a protective wall around the gene, the gene being the modern analogue of the primordial replicators.

When it became complex enough, the cell managed to let in the mitochondrion (Battery for the cell allowing metabolism to happen), which incidently has it's own set of genes independent from our own, so it would have been another replicator that was assimilated in along the way, allowing the development of multicellular organisms to evolve. From then on we began the slow process of evolving to where we are today. But we are by no means done. We are not the endpoint of evolution, merely the most recent product.
Also, it should be noted that huge amounts of energy are involved in evolution, but in gradual stages over millions of years, so the total energy difference between stages is negligible.
In any case, god was not really necessary in the creationist manner for our development.

This actually reminds me of the luminiferous aether, which was said to be an omnipresent medium in which light was said to oscillate.
All of classical physics dictated that anything which is a wave has to oscillate in a medium, like waves on a skipping rope or waves in a pool.
Light can travel through the vacuum of space, so there must be some non-detectable medium that the light must travel through- the aether.

This was hypothesis was comforting, but came out of a "we need an aether, with no evidence" rationalization, which was eventally disproven.

I'm quite sure if there was a Michelson-morley" type of experiment [link] to disprove God, then the hypothesis would be abandoned in much the same way.
Let's hope that physicists in the future can get as imaginative as michelson and morley.

2. God starting the universe off. Most people who have thrown this at me have said something along the lines of "We need God to start off the universe, there has to be a first cause for every thing."

Okay, the big bang, if it did happen (probably did) could imply a creator, who created the singularity that the big bang expanded from.
However, there is a jump in logic here. A person believes that matter cannot exist without a creator, so they make a new kind of matter that is immune to their previous logic named God. But who created the creator? Most will say nobody, God IS the creator, so he doesn't need one.
However, there is no real reason why you should make god more immune to this logic than the original big bang singularity.
Also, there is the problem with probabilities. Thermodynamics tells us that in order to design something it would require large amounts of energy, and a more complicated creator. People are more complicated than machines, and people make machines, not the other way around.

However that means that God needs to be at least as improbable as the universe, although actually more so than the universe itself, especially if he is to be attributed the omniscience and omnipotence that he is generally bestowed with.

Now, by the same rationale that our universe is huge and improbable, we now need an explanation for the origin of God. He is bigger, better and more improbable than the universe, so he needs a bigger, more improbable creator, who in turn needs a bigger creator again.
So, the very argument to explain our cosmological origins actually refutes itself when analyzed.



3. Comfort value versus truth value.
Just because it is comforting does not make it so. It may be comforting for me to go to a doctor, and him tell me that everything is fine, I'm fit as a fiddle and will live till 100 and have 400 babies, but if I really have terminal cancer, I'd rather be told about it and have a fighting chance.
The same can be said of the God hypothesis. People derive a comfort from thinking that something external to themselves is controlling aspects of their lives, and allowing a mechanism by which the bereaved can talk to their loved ones at some future stage.
However, just as in the case of the terminal cancer, just because something is comforting does not give it any intrinsic truth value.
I could find it comforting to think that women are inferior to men, that black people shouldn’t vote, or that anyone who is from a different religion is going to hell.
Yet again, because there is comfort derived from my hypothetical subjugating of others, does not make any of it right or true.

But the comfort doesn’t hurt anyone, does it?
Actually it does. There is no evidence for any of this belief other than it’s comforting. Allowing irrational belief like this occur is in no way different to believing irrationally that an innocent man should be executed for a crime that he didn’t commit, with no evidence, or a guilty man going unpunished for a crime that he did, against evidence.

Also, strident, irrational faith leads to atrocities. Do you think that suicide bombers would commit suicide if they didn’t seek the prize of seventy-two virgins?
God did not create natural disasters, but God did lead to attacks like 9-11, or George Bush’s arrogance. God is on his side, so he is in no way wrong. Most religious people I have debated with seem to think that to be an atheist is to deny accountability, but I propose that unwavering religiosity is an escape for accountability for the very same reason as George Bush’s arrogance.

And in any case, IF this life is all we have, we would be better able to enjoy it to the full because there is no heaven afterwards- the sweet is much sweeter with the bitter, and the joys of life would not be cheapened by an eternity of unending, constant bliss, or cheapened by an eternity of unending torment and suffering in hell.

4. God is an example of perfect goodness, and from him we derive our morals. Now, we have a bit of dilemma here, because several religions have differing beliefs, and I will stick with the religion most familiar to me, Christianity. That is not to say that in the Koran there aren’t similar contradictions. I shall first look at the Old Testament, the blueprint for all of the other derivatives (Christianity and Islam, as well as the Sandemanian sect, and various others).

The old testament is actually one of the most violent and bloodthirsty book I have already read. Here is an excerpt from the book of Joshua, regarding the battle of Jericho. Joshua 5:13-6:27
"Shout! For the LORD has given you the city! 17 The city and all that is in it are to be devoted to the LORD... 18But keep away from the devoted things, so that you will not bring about your own destruction by taking any of them. Otherwise you will make the camp of Israel liable to destruction and bring trouble on it. 19 All the silver and gold and the articles of bronze and iron are sacred to the LORD and must go into his treasury."

20 When the trumpets sounded, the people shouted, and at the sound of the trumpet, when the people gave a loud shout, the wall collapsed; so every man charged straight in, and they took the city. 21 They devoted the city to the LORD and destroyed with the sword every living thing in it—men and women, young and old, cattle, sheep and donkeys.”

What is moral about that? The slaying of innocent animals, children and destroying valuables (except from silver and gold, which added to the lord’s wealth)?

Oh, and what about smiting the first born children of every Egyptian. Isn’t that kind of genocide a little immoral?
Oh that’s right- in Exodus 20:22 "He who sacrificeth unto any god, save unto the Lord only, he shall be utterly destroyed." If this commandment is obeyed, then the four billion people who do not believe in the biblical god must be killed.
That’s not just atheists, thats muslims, buddhists, secular humanists and any other religious person who isn’t a jew, or believes in the old testament.

He also makes his hospitality clear in Numbers 1:51 "The stranger that cometh nigh shall be put to death."
He says this again in 3:10.

There are a lot more than this, but I have neither the time nor the space to write them further.

There is a huge difference between the bloodthirsty old, and the new testament. However, this just shows that we don’t derive our morality from scripture.
You can see which old testament passages are immoral, amoral, and some that are moral. But If we derived our morals from old testament scripture, then it would all seem moral to us.
So we have some independent criterion that we use to see what is moral and what isn’t.
Oh, and for those who think that christians believe that the old testament does not count towards christian beliefs of morals, jesus said that they still count as a compass. In Matthew chapter 5 he says:
17 "Think not that I have come to abolish the law and the prophets; I
have come not to abolish them but to fulfil them. 18 For truly, I say
to you, till heaven and earth pass away, not an iota, not a dot, will
pass from the law until all is accomplished. 19 Whoever then relaxes
one of the least of these commandments and teaches men so, shall be
called least in the kingdom of heaven; but he who does them and
teaches them shall be called great in the kingdom of heaven.”

He also doesn’t seem to like family values Luke 14:26,33,
26 "If any one comes to me and does not hate his own father and
mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes, and even
his own life, he cannot be my disciple. 33 So therefore,
whoever of you does not renounce all that he has cannot be my disciple.”

In any case, we pick and choose our morality, which has evolved by darwinian natural selection.


5. I really don't think I need to include this, but has actually swayed some people I have spoken to.
We need an example of perfect goodness etc.
Let's look at this from another perspective- why goodness?
I may as well say that we all perceive different degrees of smelliness, so there must be an example of someone who has absolutely no smell, and a person with an infinite amount of odour.
Also, this view is incompatible with the malevolent God of the old testament, particularly if you bestow him with omniscience and omnipotence, because he should not really be able to change his mind, as no new information would enter his ethereal brain, so why change it?

If you wish to discuss this particular topic further I have no problem.

In any case we have then determined that God is not necessary for explaining the universe, or anything in it because he raises more questions than he answers, and there are perfectly good darwinian explanations for morality.
In my opinion there is no rational reason to believe in any form of the God hypothesis, and since there is no evidence to suggest that he exists, (the burden of evidence is on the believer to prove, not the unbeliever to disprove, an extension of “innocent before proven guilty” rationale), I conclude that there is no personal God.


I hope you found this interesting at least.

*Actually, it was demonstrated in the lab that HCN can form passively in ice. It is also present in most asteroids, along with other amino acids , which would support life originating on earth and panspermia arguments equally.