Background
Not all atheist arguments are created equal. A good argument is always useful, regardless of one’s stance on a subject. Good arguments always help lead to the truth, either by being true, or by inciting a better response. Some atheist arguments are seriously compelling and are worthy of exploration on their own merits, but certainly not all. They exist on a scale, ranging from austere to glorified schoolyard quips.
I’ve put together this tier list of atheist arguments, composed of five categories: good, mildly misguided, kind of smug, superiority complex, and euphoric. This descending scale will include an explanation of each bucket as well as a reflection on each of the arguments within. I explored the arguments which are compelling and deserve proper responses on the previous page. The rest are on this page because it was already getting long, and I thought those arguments deserved a bit of quarantine from this nonsense.
Mildly Misguided
The second tier of arguments are ones which are pretty easily answered, but are still honest in nature. This tier betrays a bit of laziness in critical thinking, and a little bit too much willingness to accept an argument before really thinking about it. But this manifest ignorance is the sort that anyone might experience when they’re first getting into a new subject.
1. Is a thing good because God says it’s good, or does God say it’s good because it already is?
This is actually my all-time least-favorite atheist argument. Not because it isn’t honest, but because it’s a cringe-inducingly ignorant misapplication. This argument was originally formulated by Socrates in Plato’s Euthyphro. Far from being an atheist, Plato believed in one supreme being, and this is one of his major theistic arguments! Here’s how it works: you and I see the color red. We both agree that it’s red. Well, this proves that it is red, but our agreement isn’t what made it so; something else had to make it red first. Likewise, Plato says that the gods (plural!) may agree that something is good, but their agreement is a response to a goodness that’s already there. He reasons that one supreme mind must make things good, and this one mind is obviously God – or as he calls God, “the Monad.”
Ironically, you can just replace “gods” with “humans” and this becomes a rather strong argument against atheism. Example: is rape evil because we agree it’s evil, or is it evil in itself? Well firstly, we couldn’t even get a consensus that it’s evil, because a great many rapists would disagree. And if consensus is our barometer, it would be a bit biased to exclude the people who are obviously most in favor of rape. So is rape then ok because we have a hung jury? If not, then the evilness of rape exists independent of human opinion. But if rape is wrong regardless of human opinion, then it has an objective moral quality. But if things have objective moral qualities, then something must have created the universe with objective moral qualities. This something would obviously have to be a mind. A mind which created the universe would be God.
Then why does God choose some things to be good and not others? Is it arbitrary? No; what is good is whatever is in accordance with one’s God-given nature. For example, the reason rape is wrong is because humans are rational animals, and rationality means the freedom to consent. Rape is contrary to this integral human freedom, so it is wrong. God didn’t pick the wrongness of rape out of a hat; rather, wrongness is its intrinsic relationship to the way human beings were created.
2. Religious people do evil things for the sake of religion.
This is often brought up in the context of the crusades or 9/11. But this is a bit of an unfair bias. People do evil things for the sake of ideology, not religion per se. Communism in atheist Russia and atheist China resulted in at least 50 million deaths, for example – no religion needed. Of course, mass deaths from starvation and imprisonment weren’t in the brochure. Rather, people sought an ideology that would give them the world, and were willing to cross a river of blood to achieve it.
Now, if a particular religion expressly and clearly commands that adherents do evil things, that’s one thing. But if some (or even many) of the people within a religion do bad things without it being a tenet of that religion, it isn’t really an argument for nor against it. People do bad things for all sorts of ideologies all the time.
3. God is incompatible with free will.
The idea here is that God’s omnipotence and foreknowledge mean no created being can be free. The intuition that God necessarily compels all things is indeed agreed upon by all. But theologians would say that God compels some things to be able to choose, while still structuring them to act according to their natures. As Aristotle says in Metaphysics, God moves inanimate things through irresistible forces, but moves sentient beings through the things they love. Similarly, St. Thomas Aquinas claimed that the ability to reason naturally means free will, as it allows the agent to override their brute faculties. He defined free will as “dominating indifference,” the simple fact that the will cannot be irresistibly moved by anything but itself. For example, you can physically force a man to do one thing or another if you’re stronger, but you cannot take away his freedom to resist.
The idea that God is incompatible with free will comes from an idea of “free will” which is more liberal than what theologians actually call free will.
4. Can God create a rock so heavy that God can’t lift it?
A true classic. But no theologian has ever claimed that omnipotence means the power to instantiate incoherent concepts. A contradiction simply does not have a nature compatible with existence. It would be better to say that such things fail to be possible, rather than to say that God fails to create them. Similar to the previous argument, this is borne of a too-liberal definition of omnipotence.
5. If you were born somewhere else, you’d believe something else.
This is right on the edge of “honest probing,” as this argument sort of presupposes that no religion is true. No one would ever use “if you were born in 500 BC, you wouldn’t believe in quantum physics” as an argument against the truth of quantum physics.
That said, the deeper argument here is that if God were real, He wouldn’t allow so many religions to exist and “muddy the water.” But this is sort of a less-compelling version of the argument from evil. If God is real, He clearly allows bad things to happen, and actions have real consequences. People have the ability to start false religions and drag people away from the true one. The only real question is whether there’s any good, logical reason to believe some particular religion over the others. If there is, that’s the right one, regardless of how many others there are. If there isn’t, it isn’t. And hey, if you’re interested in that, it’s your lucky day – I’ve dedicated an entire section of my website to looking at the evidence for every secular, spiritual, and religious belief system to answer this very question.
Kind of Smug
These arguments are starting to turn more into quips than actual arguments. Here, they begin to uniformly presuppose God’s nonexistence in their premises. They betray a serious unwillingness to be critical towards one’s own position. Further, anyone making these arguments clearly hasn’t spent much time actually studying religion, but pretentiously assumes their intellect is so far beyond that of the religious that they have the capacity to dismiss religion with hardly a thought.
6. Chance inherently makes more sense than design.
Richard Dawkins makes the infamous “central argument” in The God Delusion that God is a bad explanation for the complexity of the universe, because God Himself must be more complex than the universe to explain it. He claims that this leads to a new problem – who designed the designer? He then claims that the chance processes of science are a better hope than intelligent design. But this has three glaring issues.
First, in order to acknowledge that an explanation makes sense, you don’t need an explanation of the explanation. If I walk into a room and see a glass of orange juice on the table, I can safely assume a human being put it there. I don’t need to understand why they did that, who did that, or how a sentient bipedal hominid exists in the first place. In fact, if it was required to know the explanation for every explanation before accepting it, this would lead to an infinite regress. You would literally need to know the answer to everything before explaining anything. Ironically, this would destroy the entire enterprise of science Dawkins props up at the end of his syllogism.
Furthermore, his claim that God is more complex than creation is completely unfounded. Theists propose that God is (and must be) an immaterial mind, because anything material is subject to change, and God cannot change, and what is immaterial is mind (see here). But minds actually exist in the universe, in humans. So the universe is composed of billions of minds, plus practically infinite material objects, while God is just one mind and no objects. That seems objectively simpler by my lights.
Finally, even if this is true, this argument only works against the “complexity” design argument. He mistakenly attributes this to St. Thomas Aquinas on page 103, when in actuality St. Thomas – born 800 years before Dawkins – actually makes a much stronger argument (see here). The “complexity” argument Dawkins triumphantly defeats here is probably the worst and most easily defeated theistic argument of all time. He has done nothing to topple the mighty contingency argument, nor the argument from consciousness, nor the real (non-strawman) design argument from St. Thomas.
7. Science has never ceded anything to religion, but religion has ceded much to science.
To my knowledge, this argument comes from Sam Harris. Dr. Harris famously wrote a book about deriving morality from science. Considering how absurd it is to suggest that a tool for describing natural processes could somehow provide us with the moral value of those natural processes, I think science must cede Harris’ book to religion. So, put one on the scoreboard for religion at least.
And this is the fundamental problem with this argument – science has no capacity to provide humans with meaning nor morality nor metaphysics. It’s just a tool to explain natural processes. These are completely different lanes. Sure, science has surprised religion multiple times, but unless a religion is foundationally built on some incorrect scientific theory, that just proves that sometimes people make bad assessments about things which are, at most, tangential to their religion.
And as an aside, as I point out in another part of my website, evolution, the big bang theory, gene theory, and most of the other major scientific discoveries of the past few centuries were made by priests.
8. If every religion disappeared from earth, none would return intact, but science would be rediscovered.
This argument doubly presupposes God’s nonexistence in the premise. First, if we lost all evidence of the existence of Aristotle, that obviously wouldn’t mean Aristotle never existed. Second, if God does exist, He either wouldn’t let that happen, or could reintroduce the true religion at will.
And as an aside, the basic idea of God is, as I’ve described multiple times, something which does not require any dogma to deduce. On this page alone I’ve pointed out that both Plato and Aristotle deduced God and God’s nature without the guidance of any dogma.
9. Everyone is born an atheist.
Everyone is born not knowing what gravity is. That doesn’t mean gravity isn’t real.
Further, very early on babies make the inference that letting go of a thing makes it tumble to the ground. They may not be able to fully explain the concept, but in some sense, babies do “understand” gravity. Similarly, people are indeed born with a built-in radar of right and wrong, a built-in need for purpose, and a built-in ability to understand the world around them as a coherent structure. All of these lead to the logical inference that God exists. Even adult atheists act like God exists when they are, say, intensely interested in justice. After all, if everything is just a mishmash of atoms, there is no real justice, only opinion. Ditto with love, honor, meaning, and so on. So if pure “innateness” is the argument, it probably ends up a better argument for theism than atheism.
10. God wouldn’t make us worship Him.
First of all, if you live anywhere except Iraq, no one forces you into any religious worship. Second, the intuition here is correct, that God doesn’t need human worship. But every theologian in history has been aware of this fact, and a quick Google search would reveal the answer. God wants us to be more concerned with transcendental goods (goodness, truth, beauty) than material goods (money, power, pleasure), and worship is the means by which we get into that mindset. That is, we are the ones who need worship, not God.
Superiority Complex
In graduating from smugness to a legitimate superiority complex, there is a noticeable shift in argumentation. The arguments go from halfway sensible to entirely reliant upon religious people being complete morons. They begin to deny the transcendental needs of human beings. Unlike the serious “old atheism,” this type of atheism shuts its eyes to the legitimate human needs answered by religion, for admitting the legitimate appeal would cede too much to the delusional slack-jawed religious buffoons.
These really took off during the early 2000’s “new atheist” era. The new atheists were a bunch of scientists, journalists, comedians and so forth who became particularly vocal about their atheism. As one would expect from the philosophy of journalists and comedians, the arguments were mostly clever quips as opposed to substantial arguments. Epitomized in Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion, all – not hyperbole, all – of their arguments were strawmen which ultimately relied on people just chuckling, shaking their heads and saying “ah, silly religious people!”
11. Religion is just fear of death.
Thomas Nagel: “I speak from experience, being strongly subject to this fear myself: I want atheism to be true and am made uneasy by the fact that some of the most intelligent and well-informed people I know are religious believers. It isn’t just that I don’t believe in God and, naturally, hope that I’m right in my belief. It’s that I hope there is no God! I don’t want there to be a God; I don’t want the universe to be like that. My guess is that this cosmic authority problem is not a rare condition and that it is responsible for much of the scientism and reductionism of our time.” (The Last Word, pp. 130-131)
If we’re operating on the (ridiculous) assumption that whomever has something to fear is more likely to be lying to themselves, it is clearly the atheist who has more to fear. So this one defeats itself.
12. God is a lazy man’s answer.
This one is only said by a person who has no comprehension of what the serious arguments for God’s existence actually are and assumes it’s all “God of the gaps” fallacies. Returning to The God Delusion, Dawkins dismisses the first three of Aquinas’ five ways by saying that they all argue things need to have a beginning, so God had to start them. This is, of course, exactly the opposite of Aquinas’ first three arguments. Serious atheist philosophers like Graham Oppy simply refer to theism and atheism as a reasonable disagreement. It’s only the people who have no earthly idea what they’re talking about who suggest theism is an inherently flawed answer.
13. Religion is just faith and indoctrination.
John Searle: “Materialism is the religion of our time… like more traditional religions, it is accepted without question and… provides the framework within which other questions can be posed, addressed, and answered… Materialists are convinced, with a quasi-religious faith, that their view must be right” (Mind: A Brief Introduction, p. 48)
Quentin Smith: “Due to the typical attitude of the contemporary naturalist… the vast majority of naturalist philosophers have come to hold (since the late 1960s) an unjustified belief in naturalism. Their justifications have been defeated by arguments developed by theistic philosophers, and now naturalist philosophers, for the most part, live in darkness about the justification for naturalism. They may have a true belief in naturalism, but they have no knowledge that naturalism is true since they do not have an undefeated justification for their belief. If naturalism is true, then their belief in naturalism is accidentally true.” [“The Metaphilosophy of Naturalism,” Philo: A Journal of Philosophy (Fall-Winter 2001)]
Richard Lewontin: “Our willingness to accept scientific claims that are against common sense is the key to an understanding of the real struggle between science and the supernatural. We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism… Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door. [From a review of Carl Sagan’s The Demon-Haunted World in the New York Review of Books (January 9, 1997)]
In other words: pot, kettle. This meaningless ad hominem props up the atheist position as if it is the enlightened, non-assumptive, default. But an atheist ultimately does have to assume just as much (perhaps more) than a theist to maintain their position. Where did everything come from? Why are there laws of nature, instead of incoherence? How did inanimate matter develop itself into a unified center of conscious self-reflection? How is subjectivity even possible in the first place?
The present materialist answers to these questions are that the universe and laws of nature are “just there” for no reason, consciousness and subjectivity are either also brute facts or aren’t actually real to begin with. Yes, a materialist will sooner believe that consciousness isn’t real than that God is. And that’s their right, we all have to make some metaphysical assumptions – my point is just that atheists are not exempt from assumption (faith) and instruction (indoctrination).
14. I just believe in one fewer deity than you do.
Imagine a bachelor saying to a married man, “we’re basically the same. I just have one fewer wife than you do.” This would obviously be absurd, reductive, and even offensive. The difference between “married” and “not married” is not just a numerical quantity, it’s a categorical difference. Similarly, belief in God is belief in meaning, objective morality, duty, order, and the spiritual dimension of life. Atheism is believing that all of these things are made-up human concepts and that reality is simply a vast desert of atoms smashing against each other. The difference between these worldviews is not a numerical quantity, it’s categorical.
Further still, as I’ve pointed out several times, there are very good arguments for the existence of God. Again, the basic formula is (1) things exist; (2) some things exist because other things made them exist; (3) but if all things depended on other things to exist, nothing could exist; (C) so there must be one thing which exists self-sufficiently and self-evidently. That’s a pretty reasonable inference. There are no such arguments for lesser gods. Perhaps gods exist, perhaps not, but that has no bearing on the logical deduction that one supreme being exists. The enterprise of religion is not a desperate clawing at an ever-decreasing number of deities, where every time Zeus or Horus gets thrown out, the whole thing becomes less likely. I mean, if God is real, He can conceive of and infinitely more fake gods than we can. Should God then become an atheist?
15. Who created God?
I know this is shocking, but Richard Dawkins and Bertrand Russell were not the first geniuses to think of infinite regress. In fact, contrary to being a good zinger, this argument concedes the main point of the cosmological argument: there can’t be an infinite regress of explanations for existence. Contrary to arbitrarily throwing in “God” as an answer, the theist acknowledges that to stop an infinite regress, something somewhere must exist self-sufficiently, not relying on any prior condition. It’s like how plugging a TV into an infinite series of power strips wouldn’t turn it on unless somewhere, something had the power of electricity inherent to itself.
Then, the theist ponders the nature of a self-sufficient thing. Well, it couldn’t be malleable nor subject to time, since that would make it conditional upon space and time. Already, before even going into the rest of the argument, we know that a self-evident being mut be immutable, immaterial, and eternal. Indeed, it would be silly to ask what created an immutable, immaterial, eternal thing. Those concepts are mutually exclusive; it would be like asking how much the letter C weighs. The inferences continue until you end up with a being that very clearly is God. This sort of argument existed long before the west was exposed to monotheistic religious dogma, by the way.
Ironically, it is the atheist who has to wave this problem away arbitrarily. Bertrand Russell’s own “illegal chess move” was to say the universe is just a “brute fact” with no explanation. He can’t say the universe is self-evident the way a theist can say God is, because the universe is not immutable, immaterial, nor eternal. There is, of course, no evidence nor logical deduction to support the brute fact claim, and it runs directly contrary to the idea that things have explanations, a claim with practically infinite evidence.
In short, “who created God?” suggests theism lazily hand-waves away the problem of creation without much critical thought. But in reality, that’s exactly what the person asking the question has done, both by failing to understand the theistic argument, and by ignoring the problem of infinite regress intrinsic to their own position.
Euphoric
On January 4th, 2013, “Aalewis” made internet history with a post to the r/atheism subreddit:
The same day, the post was linked in r/cringe. Following this, it was purposely misattributed to scientists and authors, added to urban dictionary as the definition of “euphoric,” and the word became a symbol of self-important, smarmy atheism. It is probably the most iconic single internet post in history, oft credited as the “ground zero” where internet jokes turned from traditional satire to postmodern irony. To add another feather to its fedora, it is now the final, most nightmarish tier of this list.
For an argument to be “euphoric,” it needs to be totally fallacious or unsupported, but totally convinced of its own brilliance. The beginning and end of a “euphoric” argument is that religious people are complete morons. The idea of God is so utterly ridiculous it is intellectually unmentionable. Any smart person who happens to be religious can only be that way because they haven’t thought about it for more than a few minutes.
Euphoric arguments transcend atheism, or even philosophy. They are really just cringey intellectual self-aggrandizement from people who think atheist = enlightened. The people who make these arguments imagine themselves as some kind of modern Socrates; a great intellect awash in a sea of fools too concerned with wishful thinking to even approach the truth. And the truth, far from being complex and nuanced, is easily accessed by the brilliant mind in question with only the most cursory thought. To the euphoric atheist, nothing more could be going on here; nothing is even worth investigating. It’s far more likely that everyone else is just stupid.
16. The universe created itself.
Stephen Hawking’s magnificent argument can be found in The Grand Design. It goes as follows: “On the scale of the entire universe, the positive energy of the matter can be balanced by the negative gravitational energy, and so there is no restriction on the creation of whole universes. Because there is a law like gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing in the manner described in Chapter 6” (p. 180). The point referenced in chapter 6 is that because time did not exist prior to space, asking what happened before the universe is meaningless.
Hawking acknowledges in his premise that “because there is a law like gravity” something can come from nothing. Except, the physical law of gravity isn’t nothing. True nothingness has no properties, no constraints, and no laws. Furthermore, it is an undeniable logical fact that nothing can come from nothing. How can we be sure? Because to come from nothing, something would have to create itself, and that is a clear contradiction – nothing can exist prior to its own existence. And that’s the case regardless of the involvement of time.
This argument is just sophistry, subtly redefining the word “nothing” in order to ignore a painfully obvious, elementary axiomatic truth.
17. People are fine without religion; religion just poisons everything.
The world before Christianity was a brutal place. Child sacrifice was practically ubiquitous. There was no such thing as human rights. Women and children were seen as second-class citizens, usually sex-objects for men. Archaeologists know they’ve found an ancient brothel when there’s a pit full of baby skeletons behind it. Specifically male skeletons, of course; the infant girls were spared the ditch to be raised as child prostitutes.
All of the foundational opposition to treating human beings like this began with Christianity. Indeed, the old quip that “humanism is Christianity with nothing upstairs” is a well-supported reading of history. But, not to the person making this argument. No, they’re different. If they were born in Rome in 150 BC, they would’ve known better! Not only that, they would’ve had the bravery to stand up for what was right, despite it meaning certain death. Totally. Definitely.
18. Religion is just about mind-control and money.
This argument is not just making the claim that some religions are about consolidation of power. This argument suggests that religion is fundamentally a scam, something like multi-level marketing schemes. Since this often falls on Catholicism, I will use Catholicism as an example of the absurdity of this claim.
You can go to any Catholic church in the country every day for a decade and never donate a penny. The most accosting you will ever face is someone walking by with an offering basket on Sunday. Presently, the Pope is a Jesuit, which means he isn’t allowed to own any personal property. Priests are required to have a doctorate and take a vow of celibacy, and their average U.S. income is around $40,000. Almost all of the Church’s wealth is in assets, but even those assets are not capitalized on – admission to the Vatican museums hovers around a measly $12, for example. Furthermore, with the money the Church does have, she operates and subsidizes thousands of schools, healthcare facilities, and social protection facilities. The Church is the largest non-governmental healthcare provider on earth. All the while, most parishes struggle with basic overhead like boilers or parking lot maintenance.
So who is this mysterious person getting rich off Catholicism? Do they have a name? Where is the mind-control? The average age people leave Catholicism is 13. I don’t see any beheadings because of this? And who wields this great power? I don’t see any Bishops making public law anywhere.
This argument is a conspiracy theory on par with the New World Order or the earth being flat.
19. God is just a sky-wizard fairy tale.
Hopefully this doesn’t need much exposition at this point. There are atheist philosophers of religion, like Graham Oppy. There are atheist Biblical scholars, like Bart Ehrman. That is to say, not only have there been countless great theistic thinkers – Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Maimonides, Newton, Kant, Dostoevsky – there are also countless great atheistic philosophers, who spend all day arguing against theism. The reason we don’t have thousands of brilliant biologists committed to the study of Bigfoot is because Bigfoot is actually a ridiculous conspiracy theory. The reason we have thousands of brilliant philosophers committed to the study of God is because theism is not.
The person who makes this argument is not just saying that theists don’t know what they’re talking about. They’re also implicitly claiming that expert atheist philosophers don’t know what they’re talking about. After all, if this is all just sky-fairy nonsense, no one should be wasting any time on it at all. Instead of thinking, “hm, maybe I’m the one who’s missing something here,” this type of atheist just does their favorite thing – assume everyone who actually knows what they’re talking about is just a clueless moron. They know better. For sure.
20. God is evil if He exists, and I wouldn’t worship Him anyway.
This is it. The crown jewel of all smarmy self-assuredness. The capo di tutti capi. The creme de la creme. I think the very best example is this magnificent soliloquy from Stephen Fry.
First, this argument makes no sense under any interpretation. Let’s assume Stephen Fry means God is objectively evil. As described in argument #6, if God exists, God is the barometer of objective right and wrong. So calling God objectively evil requires using the order He created as a metric. That doesn’t make any sense. On the other hand, let’s instead say that Stephen Fry is a moral relativist (he is). That is, there is no objective right and wrong, it’s all subjective. Well, if that’s the case and God exists, God is still an all-powerful super-intellect. Surely this status gives Him more of a right to arbitrate what is good and bad than a random human?
But this argument doesn’t stop with the claim that “if God exists, I’m definitely smarter than Him.” It also implies whomever is making the argument would have the courage to stand up to God if given the chance. What is the expectation there? God says “oh! I’ve never thought of it that way! Bad things are bad after all!” and changes everything? Or, God becomes flustered and furious and trips over His words as the brilliant atheist defiantly walks to Hell, head held high in righteous defiance?
Yeah, sure dude. Sure. And your girlfriend is a model, but she goes to another school.