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 little bit too much willingness to regurgitate an argument without research.
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 in Plato’s Euthyphro. Far from being an atheist, Plato believed in one supreme being, and this mirrors his major supporting 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 can only be a response to a goodness that’s already there. But the goodness of any particular thing relies not on any decree, but on a foundational principle of goodness which it relates to positively or negatively, and this, Plato says, is God.
For example: rape is evil. We ignore the dissenting opinions of rapists because rape is evil independent of subjective opinion. Rape is wrong is because humans are rational animals, and rationality means the freedom to consent to sexual activity. Rape is contrary to this integral human freedom, so it is unjust. Being unjust is wrong because God is justice itself. The wrongness of rape is the intrinsic relationship of the act to God, whose very nature is the standard for moral evaluation. There is nothing “within” nor preceding God; God is necessary, simple and uncaused. God neither conforms to, nor invents the moral order; He is the foundation of reality, He is the moral order. Ironically, this argument turns back around on the atheist: without this order and foundation, it is the atheist who has no objective, universally binding explanation as to why something like injustice is inherently wrong.
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 sovereignty means no created being can be free. St. Thomas Aquinas would solve the problem by comparing God’s relationship to us as an author to a character in a book. The author creates a fictional scenario in which a character with fictional free will makes a fictional choice. God likewise can create a real scenario in which a real person with real free will makes a real choice. The sovereignty of the author and the freedom of the creature do not somehow compete with each other; they are two sides of the same coin. The sovereign author compelling the creature to exist, to be free, and to make choices without compulsion is free will. Contrary to the author destroying the creature’s free will, he is its cause.
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 lacks the power to create them.
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. 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 in order 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 whole idea of the infinite regress here is confused. Theists obviously do not bring up complexity to suggest all things need a designer; rather, they bring it up because the universe is clearly very complex, but also is ontologically incapable of “designing itself,” which means things like laws of physics cry out for some explanation outside the material order. This is the exact sort of infinite regress a theist might actually use to prove God exists, such as by saying: the universe is extraordinarily complex, implying design; since there cannot be an infinite regress of designed designers, there must be an “undesigned designer”; being that design comes from coherence (mind), this undesigned designer must therefore be a super-intellect; a primordial, uncaused super-intellect is God.
Finally, even if this weren’t complete nonsense, 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 – makes a much stronger teleological argument (see here) which goes something like this: we observe inanimate things behaving coherently, as acorns grow into trees; coherence is a property of mind, which either directs itself or inanimate things to an end, as an archer directs an arrow; therefore, laws of nature imply a sentient, universal governor of nature. Nowhere does St. Thomas rely on complexity to make his argument. The point is that “laws of nature” require a governor, regardless of how simple or complex they may be. Dawkins does nothing to address this much stronger teleological argument.
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. This ignores the “is-ought gap,” the principle that one cannot derive moral values from purely factual statements. For example, the statement “cigarettes are not outlawed” does not demonstrate whether cigarettes should or should not be outlawed. This requires a value judgment separate from the factual statement. Likewise, it is impossible for the scientific method to somehow produce moral judgments on our behalf. Considering how absurd this idea is, I think science must actually 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 judge meaning, morality, philosophy, metaphysics and so on. 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 are wrong about things. Not exactly groundbreaking information.
And, as an aside, there is quite a bit of irony in this assessment. Modern science was almost entirely fathered by the religious. Galileo was a devout Catholic his entire life; both of his daughters became nuns. Gene theory came from Gregor Mendel, a Catholic priest. Newton spent more of his time writing about the Bible than about science. Germ theory came from Louis Pasteur, a lifelong devout Catholic. The big bang theory came from Georges Lemaitre, another Catholic priest. Juan Molina, another Catholic priest, was the first to develop a theory of evolution, and Darwin cited him serially. Max Planck, father of quantum theory, was a Christian whose scientific studies convinced him all the more of his position.
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. Plato, Aristotle, Xenophanes and others deduced the basic facts of God’s existence and nature without the guidance of any dogma.
9. Everyone is born an atheist.
Everyone is born not formally 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, an inference the vast, vast majority of people have made throughout human history. Even the atheist acts as if 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 ends up a better argument against atheism.
10. God wouldn’t make us worship Him.
First of all, if you live anywhere except Iran, 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. 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 desires of human beings. Unlike the serious “old atheism,” this type of atheism shuts its eyes to the legitimate needs answered by religion, for admitting any appeal at all 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, nearly 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).
Aldous Huxley: “The philosopher who finds no meaning in the world is not concerned exclusively with a problem in pure metaphysics. He is also concerned to prove that there is no valid reason why he personally should not do as he wants to do. For myself, as no doubt for most of my friends, the philosophy of meaninglessness was essentially an instrument of liberation from a certain system of morality. We objected to the morality because it interfered with our sexual freedom. The supporters of this system – Christianity – claimed that it embodied the meaning of the world. There was one admirably simple method of justifying ourselves in our erotic revolt: deny that the world had any meaning whatever” (Ends and Means, pp. 270).
St. Augustine: “He who denies the existence of God has some reason for wishing that God did not exist.”
“Religion is just a fear of death” is the argument that religion is a result of fear leading to self-deception. But let’s compare the fears of the atheist to the religious. It is the atheist who contends that you can do whatever you want and nothing happens after death, whereas the religious generally believe man has an eternity to contend with – an eternity which may be unimaginably bad unless one is strictly disciplined in this life. So it is clearly the atheist who objectively would have more to fear crossing from their side to the other, and we see from the quotes above that some lucidly deny God to avoid contending with this. So, if the argument is that fear leads to self-deception, 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. My favorite example is The God Delusion, wherein 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. Dawkins wrote an entire book on a subject he didn’t even bother to study, and millions of people ate it up without looking deeper into it. That’s a lazy man’s answer. 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.
Further, I must also point out that theism isn’t just a neutral alternative to atheism. It actually demands something of you – often a lot. As we discussed in the previous argument, some atheists reject God due to an unwillingness to control themselves sexually, philosophically, or otherwise. There’s quite a bit of irony in atheists – a group with no existential obligations – calling a group who sexually control themselves, wake up early on Sundays, submit to authority, pray, learn their faith and so on – lazy. Sincerely religious people are actually characterized by rather remarkable discipline.
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 atheism is a position, and an atheist ultimately has to hand wave away much more than a theist to maintain it. 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 and subjective experience are “just there” for no reason. Whether or not you agree with that is irrelevant – my point is just that atheists are in no way exempt from faith and 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 constructs, 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) identify an infinite regress problem; (2) propose a terminus; (C) prove the terminus must be God. 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 must exist. The enterprise of religion is not desperately 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 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 people to think of infinite regress. In fact, far from 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. We thus know that such a being must be immaterial, immutable, and eternal. Further, the only way an immaterial being could influence the material world is power of mind, since Newtonian physics don’t apply to non-physical objects. Though there are certainly objections to these arguments as I’ve presented them, my point was not to make a perfect argument in three sentences; my point is that there’s a perfectly rational, non-dogmatic reason theists believe in a self-sufficient being and that the self-sufficient being is God.
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-sufficient or self-evident the way a theist can say God is, because the universe is not immutable, immaterial, and 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 uniformly have explanations, a claim with practically infinite evidence, a claim which the entire enterprise of science relies upon in the first place.
In short, “who created God?” suggests theists lazily hand-wave away the problem of creation without much critical thought, when in reality, that’s exactly what the atheist asking the question has done, both by failing to understand the theistic argument and by ignoring the very problem of infinite regress they’re invoking.
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 among the most iconic internet posts in history, sometimes even 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. Of course, this is different to the theistic argument that God exists unconditionally, free of constraint. God did not create Himself, He is self-evident like A<(A+1); He can’t-not be.
This argument is just sophistry, subtly redefining the word “nothing” in order to ignore a painfully obvious, elementary 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, that’s certainly true. Rather, this argument suggests that religion is fundamentally a scam, something like a Ponzi scheme. Since this often falls on the Catholic Church, I will use Catholicism to demonstrate the absurdity of this claim.
You can go to practically any Catholic church in the world 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. As of 2025, the Pope and his predecessor were under vows barring ownership of 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. With the money the Church does have, she operates and subsidizes thousands of schools, healthcare facilities, and social protection facilities. She 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 just presupposes that anyone involved in religious affairs is either a scam artist or a mark without any real evidence. It’s prejudice disguised as skepticism.
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 except them is clueless.
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 #1, if God exists, God is the barometer of objective right and wrong. So calling God objectively evil requires using Him as the metric. That doesn’t make any sense; you can’t call God, who is justice, unjust. On the other hand, let’s instead say moral relativism is true (Stephen Fry is a relativist). 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 an English comedian?
But this argument goes even further, suggesting that whomever is making it would courageously stand up to God and righteously outsmart Him if only given the chance. Which is more likely: that you will stare into a fiery abyss, maintain your composure and tell God something He doesn’t know, or that God will simply show you your life – every lie, every word of gossip, every moment of unjustified anger or accusation, all your meanness, all your laziness, all your immodesty, all the ways you failed your friends, family, neighbors and coworkers, all your carelessness, all your self-gratification, all your self-righteousness, all your grudges, everything you did at the expense of others; every evil word, and every evil deed which you ought to be ashamed of – finally revealing to you that you were the problem of evil the whole time – and then dismiss you from His presence?
Conclusion
Hopefully this list and the previous have revealed a simple truth: there’s just no good reason to be an atheist. In the words of G.K. Chesterton: “if there were no God, there would be no atheists.”