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. On this page, I will have the first tier of atheist arguments, the ones which are seriously compelling and deserve proper responses. Since this will be lengthy, I’ve split the bad arguments onto a second page. A link to the rest of the list will be at the bottom of this page.
The Good Arguments
In making arguments, atheists obviously have a handicap: you can’t prove a negative. As such, these aren’t really the “best” atheist arguments. The best atheist arguments are those which attack a good argument for God’s existence. For examples of these types of theistic arguments, you can read my cosmological proof of God’s existence, my argument from consciousness, or my description of the infamous five ways. From there, I would recommend looking up the work of real atheist philosophers (i.e., not Ricky Gervais) like J.L. Mackie or Graham Oppy. But I contend with those sorts of arguments in those articles already, so reintroducing all of them here would unnecessarily convolute my list.
In any case: these following arguments are legitimate, meaningful reasons to doubt – serious problems theists need to address. And of course, I will spend much more time addressing these arguments than the ones which follow in the second article.
(1) If God is both benevolent and omnipotent, then how could evil exist?
This answer requires a little exposition. The classical theological syllogisms have formulas that go something like this. (1) things exist; (2) some things exist because other things make them exist; (3) but if all things depend on other things to exist, nothing could exist; (C) so there must be one thing which exists self-sufficiently. And then there are some logical inferences made about the nature of this “self-sufficient” being, which more and more clearly resembles God as the argument continues.
Two such inferences need to be described for this argument. First, there can only be one self-sufficient being. For if there were two, then their separate identities would rely on there being some distinction between them. But if one depends upon a distinction and the other does not, the distinction must be gratuitous. But anything which relies upon a gratuitous distinction for its identity cannot be self sufficient. So, there can only be one self-sufficient being. Second, a self-sufficient being must be totally complete, lacking in nothing. After all, “self-sufficient” definitionally means “not lacking in this particular area,” but the particular area we speak of is existence itself. Completeness of existence is supreme completeness, total realness.
The corollary to this is that only God can be complete, for all other beings – as a matter of logical necessity – must at least lack self-sufficiency. So, all created things necessarily exist on a scale of perfection and imperfection. A man’s movement is more perfect than a rock because he can self-propel. A man without a limp moves more perfectly than one with a limp. And a very fast man more than a very slow one. A man who could fly would be even more perfect, and so on ad infinitum. But we can see from these examples that imperfection is not actually a “created” thing, it is only an absence. Likewise, evil is the absence of some good which is normally present. But in order for anything beside God to exist, there must be beings which lack some goods sometimes. Hence, within the scale of being there is evil.
Moral evil is similar; it is an agent consciously choosing a less perfect good over a more perfect one. Money and life are both good of themselves, for example, but choosing money over someone’s life would be evil. God cannot be the cause of this when all He ever does is provide gratuitous goods, including the gratuitous good of free will. The origin of moral evil is the abuse of God’s proper order, not God.
2. If God is benevolent, why is there gratuitous suffering?
The argument above may be philosophically satisfying regarding the “existence” of evil, but it does little to contend with the experience of evil. That is, evil may in some sense be logically acceptable, but does that really explain pediatric bone cancer? Or the Holocaust? Or animal suffering? These seem completely unnecessary. Surely God Almighty is creative enough to have avoided them?
Let’s first look at the human relationship to suffering. We are perfectly happy to suffer for the sake of things we love. People enjoy going to the gym, earning money, things of that sort. But we actually value suffering for the sake of another even more; selflessness is probably the highest ideal there is, and is usually considered the path to true happiness. In Man’s Search for Meaning, Viktor Frankl shares that while he was imprisoned in a concentration camp, those who served others through work or relationship remained happy. The last group of nuns executed during the French “Reign of Terror” sang songs on their way to the guillotine. St. Lawrence, whilst being burned alive for giving the Church’s money to the poor instead of the Roman government, quipped “turn me over, I’m done on this side.” Although these stories are horrifying, they are also beautiful.
Now we clearly recognize the beauty and joy in suffering when we understand the purpose of it. So, what if God simply sees purpose in suffering, even when we don’t? God is not a utilitarian machine, viewing life as an equation where pleasure = good and pain = bad. God is like us; self-sacrifice is His favorite thing. As a painter’s soul is found in His paintings, God’s soul is found in His creation, and the soul of creation is sacrifice. Material existence is definitionally a constant process of creative destruction, one thing contributing to the next. Inanimate dust becomes molecules, then those become cells, then innumerable generations of evolution turn those into plants and animals. And finally, with God bestowing consciousness on His favored species, sacrifice finds its greatest perfection – voluntary, selfless participation. We have a natural horror of suffering, but in reality, suffering is the beauty of creation.
What of animal suffering, then? Plants don’t feel much, humans can comprehend meaning in suffering, but animals experience pain without even comprehending why. Seems a raw deal, doesn’t it? Well, we know animals don’t have the self-consciousness required to add the baggage of existential dread to their pain. They have no capacity to turn it into more than it is. It still surely isn’t fun, but it isn’t to them what it can be to us – hopelessness, despair, crisis. We’ve already seen examples of how humans can “detach” this baggage from suffering and be perfectly happy when undergoing it. If animals don’t even have the capacity to add baggage to suffering in the first place, we can only surmise they are fine as well. Let’s not anthropomorphize animals too much; their pain exists, but to them, pain really is just pain. It has a fitting proportion to what they are.
So, all that said, the strange and beautiful answer is this: there is no such thing as gratuitous suffering. There is no suffering which God sighs and concedes. Rather, every ounce of it reflects His own beauty – not in the suffering, but in the sufferer. A Christian knows this intuitively in seeing a God who so adores self-sacrifice that He came to earth just to do it Himself, calling it His greatest glory.
3. Atrocities in holy books.
This argument is usually targeted at the Tanakh (“Old Testament”) or the Quran. Contrary to what some will say, these aren’t just bad things recounted in a neutral, historical fashion. God gives positive commands that are deeply troubling. In the Tanakh, the entire book of Joshua is about the genocide of the pagans who inhabit the Promised Land. After the fun little story where the Jews march around the walls of Jericho to topple them, “they killed everyone, men and women, young and old… They even killed every cow, sheep, and donkey… Finally, they set fire to Jericho and everything in it” (Josh 6:22-25). God commands that slave-beating is only punishable if it results in death (Exodus 21). Deuteronomy has instructions for taking a woman from a conquered territory in marriage, permitting her a month to grieve; it also instructs the stoning of recalcitrant sons (Deut 21).
To a Christian, this argument actually doesn’t pose much of an issue. Anyone who believes in the New Testament understands that these commands came in a preparatory epoch. For example, Jesus abolishes divorce, saying it was always a detestable practice, and was only legal under Moses because of the hardness of people’s hearts (Matt 19). A sort of “moral training wheels.” Think about it: if Jesus had arrived in the time of Joshua preaching nonviolence, acceptance, mercy and meekness, Israel would have been decimated in a week. Or, if victorious in battle, torn apart from the inside by the inevitable rebellion of the military-aged men they had spared. Further, despite their imperfections, the presence of laws protecting the marginalized at all was extraordinarily liberal. The Jews were taking people from cultures of child sacrifice and ritual rape into a culture with a concept of human rights!
But the Quran makes the Bible look like Disney World. It states that child marriage is OK, as long as sex is postponed until three months after first menstruation (Quran 65:4). It says “for [wives] of whom you fear rebellion… leave them apart in beds, and beat them” (4:34). The punishment for fornication is 80 lashes (24:2), but forcing a slave into prostitution has no punishment mentioned (24:33). It permits raping living men’s wives in conquered territories (4:24). One Sahih Hadith (highest grade holy text beside the Quran) describes Mohammad permitting his men to rape POW’s (Muslim 1438). Another describes Mohammad raping a slave and then claiming Allah told him to when caught by his wives (An-Nisa 3959). Another says he married Aisha when she was six (Buhkari 5134) and six others describe Aisha scraping his semen off her clothes (Muslim, Majah (1), Majah (2), Majah (3), An-Nasai, Buhkari).
The Quran commands far graver atrocities than the Bible, and appeared long after the coming of Christ. The Quran says that it’s the final word; nothing else is coming (Quran 6:38, 6:114-115). No training wheels argument applies. If Islam is true, God’s perfect and final intention is child marriage, wife-beating, slave prostitution, and taking the wives of living men you’ve bested in battle. God’s chosen exemplar of perfect moral conduct for all times was a pedophilic warmonger with 12 wives. Needless to say, I think that actually is a pretty good argument against Islam.
4. Why doesn’t God just make it clear that He exists?
Consider a few ways God might reveal Himself. He could appear in the sky today, perhaps, and speak to the whole earth at once. He could appear to people one-by-one in His glory. Or, he could just appear to an individual every time they doubted to remind them that He exists. These seem like great ideas, why wouldn’t God do them? Well, because there would be no way to know it’s actually God doing them. There are many possible beings who could do any of these things. In most religious traditions, there’s some immensely powerful evil figure who might be leading people to the wrong God in such a circumstance. But it certainly wouldn’t have to be an evil super-intellect. Could just be aliens. Might be that we live in a simulation. I mean, David Copperfield made the Statue of Liberty disappear in 1983, and he’s just a human being.
So we cannot detect God with our senses, yes, but pure sensory experience can’t prove His existence in the first place. Does that mean God is truly hidden? Indiscernible? Well, no, because God is known through logical deduction, and logical deduction is infinitely more certain than sensory experience. For example, I have not seen an unusual number of triangles in my life, but I know through the Pythagorean Theorem that any three-sided polygon I do see will have three interior angles of 180°. Based on this logical deduction, I know more about triangles than, say, a dog who has visually perceived more triangles than I have.
Although there are many well-defended, complex, formal proofs of God’s existence, the basic deduction is very simple: reality is the way it is, and there should be a reason for that. Just as a man with no awareness of gravity knows that some things fall and others do not, man is aware that He lives within a broader range of existence, knows that some things are right and wrong, and sees that the world is coherent. Far from being hidden, God is knowable through clear, fundamental logical deductions about reality… which is literally the least-hidden a thing could possibly be.
5. Where is Australia?
I colloquially call this argument “where is Australia?” but it applies to a whole domain of similar questions. The basic formula is this: God had the opportunity to mention something no one was aware of in scripture. The discovery of that thing however many years later would prove the scripture. For example, if Moses went into a discourse about a 2.9mi² landmass in the middle of the Pacific and Indian Oceans, the discovery of Australia would prove that was a real, undeniable prophecy.
Except, it wouldn’t. Similar to the previous point, this is asking God for a magic trick unrelated to the content of the holy book, and that wouldn’t prove anything. If the Gospels said something like this, Muslims would say it proves the Quran is true, as they believe God is responsible for parts of the Christian Bible. Jews would say it was inspired by a demon to lead people astray. Atheists would say it was some kind of lucky guess. Ok, say instead the Gospel included a theory of gravity. For anyone to even understand what the authors were talking about, they’d have to explain the theory of gravity – but, then it would look like they just figured it out using science. On the other hand, if it was presented in simplistic fashion, it would be called a lucky guess. There’s no winning move here.
If we’re going to talk about prophecy, why not prophetic vision related to the actual domain of holy books? The Gospel doesn’t teach about gravity, but it does teach that everyone is equal in the eyes of God. Christianity was the first religion to unify disparate cultures instead of atomizing them. It replaced the virtues of power, wisdom, and conquest with humility, love, and selfless sacrifice. It sided with traditionally marginalized groups like women, children, and those in poverty. Doesn’t this sound like the unquestionable basis of the civilized world today? Doesn’t that strike you as an improbably extensive and revolutionary series of teachings to come from a first-century carpenter? By my lights, that’s more prophetic than random trivia.
Conclusion
These good atheist arguments are ones which every theist and atheist ought to ponder. Again, no good argument is a waste – such a thing always leads closer to the truth.
But as I said, not every atheist argument is good. To descend from the heights of logic into the depths of smarmy pretentiousness, continue the list here.