Religious arguments

I've seen a few debates between theists and atheists and I would like to add my replies to the main theistic arguments for the existence of a god, multiple gods or whatever. The arguments are always the same and I will present some of them.

1. The cosmological argument.

This argument states that the Universe must have a cause and that cause is a god. I've seen a nice way of dismissing this argument with Occam's razor: “God created the Universe, God just exists.”. Yes, it's that easy, the simplest explanation is better, that the Universe just exists.

Even if the Universe has a cause, why would that cause be intelligent? Even if the Universe has an intelligent cause, why would it be interested in us, humans? These questions can go on forever.

I talk more about the beginning of the Universe in this post.

2. The argument from design.

The argument from design states that the Universe or what it contains is too complex to exist by chance, therefore, a god designed everything. Before the theory of evolution, this argument was about biological beings and some people still use it. Nowadays it's mostly about the fine-tuning of our Universe, so as to sustain life and most importantly human life.

My first reaction to the fine-tuning argument was that it's an awful waste of space, matter and energy to create an entire Universe with billions of billions of stars and planets, all just for us. Another obvious problem with this argument is that life is rare in the Universe, so if it is fine-tuned to sustain life, it's incompetently done. Life occupies a tiny portion of even the Earth, only the surface area and humans are not well adapted to live in the oceans, which cover most of the Earth. There is no need to mention other planets. So, it really is a sloppy job if it is the work of a creator.

Another problem with this argument is that a god needs to be a very complex being, it cannot be as simple as a boulder. This god needs to be far more complex than the Universe, so, basically, they want to explain the complexity of something by postulating something even more complex, without evidence. I talk more about this in this post.

3. The argument from morality

This argument states that there is objective morality and the source of that morality is a god. I disagree with this, I don't believe there is objective morality. Morality has changed a lot over time. In ancient times it was moral to kill a sinner with stones, slavery was moral and even religious war was moral.

We can't take our morality from the bible and thankfully, we don't. We don't kill people because they work on Sunday, we don't kill homosexuals as the bible tells us to do, we don't kill witches and so on.

In ancient Rome people used to go and watch gladiators fight till the death. In the Dark Ages, people used to gather and watch the burning of witches. We don't do this anymore and some of us are even revolted by animal cruelty. What changed? Did religion change? Has the bible been modified since then? No, religion is not the cause of our morality improvements. The cause is civilization, we are becoming more civilized.

4. The argument from miracles.

This argument states that miracles occur (or have occurred) and that they are created by a god. I have never seen something I would call a miracle and even if I did see something like that, it might be just trickery, I've seen a magic show once, and some people would call those tricks miracles if they did not know it was just a magic show. There are a lot of cases of charlatans, so I won't go into that.

Medical miracles always fall within what is possible. There has never been a case where someone who lost a limb grew it back, no matter how much he/she prayed. That would be no problem for an all-powerful god, but it never happens.

The miracles presented in the bible should not be believed more than you believe in Harry Potter. They are just books and believing that those stories are real makes you naive. A lot of people cannot discern reality from fantasy. You should read this post. You might say that people don't believe in Harry Potter, well, that story is not meant to be a religion, it's not meant to be believed. The Iliad is a better example, because people did believe in the gods of mount Olympus. You can take any religious book. All religious books are fairy tales, and I don't need to read all of them to know this.

By the way, “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence” - Carl Sagan.

 

5. The argument from religious experience

This argument states that some people have had religious experiences and that proves that at least one god exists. The problem I see here is that people from different religions, even contradictory religions have had religious experiences, so who is right? Which religion is correct? I believe that all religions are wrong.

I do believe that some people have religious experiences and I don't believe they are necessarily crazy. Lots of things can cause religious experiences, but I believe they are just hallucinations.

I was laughing one day, when I read this: “religion is a result of malnutrition”. I can't remember who said this, but it's probably true. In the bible, some jews went into the desert for long periods of time, they had little to eat, some got close to starvation. Hallucinations are known to be caused by malnutrition and isolation, so it was the perfect recipe, religious people going into the desert to find god and finding hallucinations because of malnutrition and isolation. Even Jesus went into the desert for 40 days, where satan appears to him and tempts him in various ways, another hallucination, I believe.

 

6. Pascal's wager

It goes like this:

“If you believe in God and God does not exist, you lose nothing.

If you believe in God and God exists, you gain everything.

If you do not believe in God and God does not exist, you gain nothing.

If you do not believe in God and God exists, you lose everything.”

This wager has never impressed me because it's based on fear and fear is the mind killer. But, imagine that this wager was available for every god, like Zeus, Thor, Bumba, Chinigchinix, Allah, Brahma or any other. This should be the case, as no god has more proof than any other. But you can't believe in all the gods for fear of the consequences of disbelief. Furthermore, christianity and islam don't accept belief in other gods, so if you believe in Jesus and Vishnu you will still go to hell, according to christianity.

So, there is no way to get out of it, there are no valid arguments for the existence of any god. Usually, people try to squeeze their gods in the gaps of our knowledge, like the beginning of the Universe, the laws of nature and any other place where we are still ignorant. This is why I call it “the god of ignorance”, whatever we can't explain, we attribute to him.

What makes us human?

What is it that makes us different from other animals? Is it the skin, hair, eyes? Not really, all our organs are present in other animals too, but our brain is truly unique, so you might say that our brain makes us different from all the other animals. But the brain itself is useless without other features.

Let's imagine, for example, that dolphins are smarter than humans. This might even be true, but it's not my point. What could they do with that intelligence? They would not be able to do anything interesting with it, really. They can't discover fire under water, they have no use for wheels or clothes, they couldn't use tools even if they had them, they can't grasp anything, they don't have hands.

Throughout the ages, people have often tried to find a definition for the term “human”. Obviously, there is no such thing. These definitions often contained the fact that we are bipedal, we have opposable thumbs, we wear clothes, we are capable of abstract reasoning, and so on, but, obviously, this is silly. There are lots of bipedal animals, some animals with opposable thumbs, such as apes.

This reminds me of a story, when some biologists or philosophers said that “humans are bipedal beings with no fur”, or something like that, someone said: “I'll pluck a chicken and that will make it human.” So, even if a human is not bipedal, if he lost a leg, he is still human, if a human does not wear clothes, it is still human, and so on.

Some people might say that we have religion and that makes us really different. But from my point of view, religion is superstition and other animals also have superstition, a famous example being Skinner's experiments with superstitious pigeons.

There may be a case for a DNA definition of a human, but DNA is unique to each individual (except some cases, like monozygotic twins). But I think it is possible to say that a being is a human if he is within a certain deviation from a human DNA strand.

Anyway, from my point of view, the only thing that makes us different from all the rest of the animals is technology. Some other animals create and use simple tools, but nothing that compares to what we do. I believe that a technological civilization is what stands out from the crowd.

You might say that there are still primitive tribes of humans in the Amazon rainforest. Obviously, they are human, but, from my point of view, they are not much different from other animal groups. This is probably how a technologically advanced alien species would see things also, they would probably search for radio signals.