100 (or so) Arguments for Atheism

100 (or so) Arguments for Atheism

http://exapologist.blogspot.com/2019/

1. The standard deductive argument from evil (Various) (and the failure of Plantinga's free will defense)
2. The evidential argument from evil (Rowe and others)
3. The argument from divine hiddenness (Schellenberg) 
4. The argument from pain/pleasure (Draper)
5. The argument from lack of extensive empathy (Lowder)
6. The argument from flourishing/languishing (Draper) 
7. The argument from religious ambiguity/diversity (Draper and others)
8. The argument from the mind’s dependence on the brain (Draper and others)
9. The argument from evolution (Draper)
10. The Free Will Offense (Schellenberg)
11. Schellenberg's new deductive argument from evil. (Schellenberg) 
12. The argument from the absurdity of life in a Christian (and, arguably, any traditional theistic) universe (Wielenberg)
13. An abductive argument for naturalism (Oppy)
14. The argument from ordinary morality (Maitzen)
15. An ontological disproof of theism (Maitzen)
16. The problem of theistic evidentialist philosophers (Lovering)
17. The argument from autonomy (Kahane, Rachels)
18. The argument from ugliness (Aikin and Jones)
19. The common core/diversity dilemma (Thornhill-Miller and Millican) 
20. The argument from the philosophy of nature (Cordry)
21. The argument from natural inequalities (Mizrahi)
22. The argument from social evil (Poston)
23. The argument from insect suffering (Crummett)
24. The argument from scale (Everitt)
25. The argument from religious evil (Kodaj)
26. The argument from idolatry (Linford and Megill)
27. The argument from indifference (Linford and Megill)
28. The argument from the requirement of divine interference (Maring)
29. The argument from eternally separated lovers (Hassoun)
30. The argument from peer disagreement
31. The argument from the impropriety of worship (Aikin)
32. The argument from the impropriety of belief (Nagel)
33. The argument from abstract objects (Davidson, Craig, me)
34. The argument from inhospitable environment (me)
35. The argument from teleological evil (me)
36. The argument from material causality (me)
37. The argument from revulsion (me)
38. The argument from the ineffectiveness of prayer (various)
39. The argument from divine evil (Lewis)
40. The argument from hell (Sider)
41. The argument from the meaning of life (Megill and Linford)
42. The argument from the demographics of theism (Maitzen)
43. The problem of no best world (Rowe, others)
44. The problem of incoherent/incompatible properties (various)
45. The problem of mitigated modal skepticism (me)
46. The structure and dynamics argument (me)
47. The argument from Mandevillian intelligence (me)
48. The argument from quantum mechanics (me)
49. The argument from wave function realism (me)
50. The argument from low priors (Draper)
51. The argument from decisive evidence (Draper)
52. Epicurean cosmological arguments for naturalism (me)
53. The argument from cognitive biases (Lucas, me)
54. The argument from the etiology of religious belief (De Cruz, others)
55. The argument from moral psychology (Park)
56. The argument from moral epistemology (Park)
57. The argument from meager moral fruits (Draper)
58. The argument from imperfection (Everitt)
59. Smith's cosmological argument for atheism (Smith)
60. The argument from tragic moral dilemmas (me)
61. The argument from substance dualism (me)
62. A Leibnizian cosmological argument for naturalism (me)
63. Arguments from order and fine-tuning against theism (me)
64. Arguments from sub-optimality (Darwin, Dawes, others)
65. Probabilitistic ontological arguments against theism (me)
66. Arguments from the success of naturalistic explanations (D. Lewis, Dawes, others)
67. The argument from lack of character (me)
68. The problem of divine authority (me)
69. The problem of polytheisms (Lataster and Philipse)
70. The problem of alternative monotheisms (Lataster)
71. An abductive argument for liberal naturalism (me)
72. The problem of demiurgism (me)
73. Sterba's deductive argument from evil
74. Another ontological disproof of classical theism (me)
75. The problem of natural nonbelief (Marsh)
76. The problem of permissivism (me)
77. Pragmatic arguments for atheism (Cockayne & Warman; Lougheed)
78. The problem of divine inefficiency (DiMuzio)
79. The argument from dual process theory (me)
80. The cosmological argument from negative PSR to naturalism (me)
81. The argument from pragmatic encroachment (Gillham)
82. The argument from anti-religious experience (me, Adams and Robson)
83. The argument from unfairness (Schoenig)
84. The problem of the death of most humans before the age of accountability (Paul)
85. The argument from the harm of coming into existence (Plugaru)
86. The argument from the existence of non-deities (Plugaru)
87. The argument from physiological horrors (Plugaru)
88. A new paradox of omnipotence (Adams)
89. The argument for the incoherence of aseity (Adams and Robson)
90. The problem of divine causation (Fales)
91. The problem of naturalistic explanations of religious experience (Fales and others)
92. The problem of radical skepticism for God, and thus the impossibility of divine omniscience (Fales)
93. The argument from hard incompatibilism (me)
94. The argument from the disunity of the self (me)
95. The argument from ontological nihilism (me)
96. The argument from the autonomy of ethics (me)
97. The argument from consciousness (Janzen)
98. The aloneness argument (Schmid and Mullins)
99. The argument from expressivism (me)
100. The argument from heaven (Oppy)
101. The problem of reasoning under moral uncertainty (me)
102. The argument from (1)-(101).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z5Dcshr5dbw


Claim: for sake of ease i'll be focusing on the triune christian god aka the hebrew thunder god yahweh
Reply: 

Jimmy Akin: Yahweh a Storm God? November 18, 2018
https://jimmyakin.com/2018/11/god-under-another-name.html

The reader referred to the idea that Yahweh and Qos may have been storm gods, but we need to be careful here. In the Old Testament, Yahweh is not presented simply as a storm god. He is the God of everything, and everything includes storms. Storms are very powerful, and thus they make a good metaphor for divine power. It’s thus no surprise that various Old Testament books use storm imagery in connection with Yahweh. Despite the use of storm themes in the Old Testament, the biblical writers did not conceive of Yahweh simply as a storm god. For them, he was the everything God—the Creator of the entire world—and they also use fire themes, harvest themes, healing themes, birth themes, death themes, battle themes, and many others. But that wouldn’t let us reduce Yahweh to simply being a fire god, a harvest god, a healing god, a birth god, a death god, or a war god.

Mark S. Smith: The Origins of Biblical Monotheism 2001
Each deity has a prime characteristic or profile (e.g., Baal as a storm-god) and these characteristics, or at least the positives ones, cumulatively equal the total that monotheism claims for its single deity.  After
all, Baal is a storm god, warrior, and major figure of the pantheon.  There is also the “fierce young bull” (symbol) of the storm-god, Adad.

The majority opinion today is that “Yahweh” is the original pronunciation and that it is a verbal name meaning “He is.”

We read in Exodus 3:14:  I Am That I Am. The Tetragrammaton appears over six thousand times in the Bible. It is the most important name in the Old Testament. In John 8, the Jewish people challenged Jesus authority, and they brought up Abraham. Jesus tells them how glad Abraham is to see the day of the Lord. When asked by the crowd how He speaks as if He knows Abraham, “Jesus said to them, ‘Truly, truly I say to you, before Abraham was, I am’”. Jesus was invoking the Divine Name of God.
The Jewish people took the mosaic law seriously, and reacted to Christ invoking I AM by trying to carry out the punishment of the Levitical law. To them, it was blasphemy, as Christ took the Divine name for Himself.

I AM means that God is all-encompassing and self-sufficient. God is infinite and has no beginning. He simply exists. There is nothing beyond/above HIM. He is the ultimate. That also means that there is no reality that exists outside of him that did not come from HIM. He is the ultimate reference point of all facts.

A further implication of the name I AM WHO I AM is that God is an inexhaustible source of energy. Isaiah 40:28 says, “Yahweh is the everlasting God, the Creator of the ends of the earth. He does not faint or grow weary.” If God is the everlasting absolute Reality, then he is the Creator of the ends of the earth and of the universe. And if he is the Creator of everything, then all energy — all motion and combustion and fusion and fission — originate in him. Somehow all the energy in the universe must get started. And since God is the first and absolute reality, it all starts in him. He is an inexhaustible reservoir of power.

That is also remarkable when we consider that energy and matter are interchangeable.

Martin B. van der Mark:   Quantum mechanical probability current as electromagnetic 4-current from topological EM fields August 2015
The structure of stable matter is the result of a balance of forces working between some otherwise bound objects, particles, or granules.  The final stage is a balance of forces on a continuous, circulating flow of energy, holding itself together. The proton’s internal dynamics must be essentially a light-speed knot of circulating energy. That energy is the “stuff” we were after, and it is continuous and takes part in the electromagnetic interaction. 
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/281460952_Quantum_mechanical_probability_current_as_electromagnetic_4-current_from_topological_EM_fields

Frank Wilczek: The Origin of (most) Mass 2003
Quarks and gluons account for most of the mass of matter. The answer appears to be miraculous. Quarks and gluons—that are themselves massless. The equations of Quantum Chromodynamics output Mass without Mass, which sounds suspiciously like Something for Nothing. How did it happen? The key, again, is asymptotic freedom. Previously, I discussed this phenomenon in terms of hard and soft radiation. Hard radiation is rare, soft radiation is common. When quantum mechanics is taken into account a “bare”color charge, inserted into empty space, will start to surround itself with a cloud of virtual color gluons. These color gluons fields themselves carry color charge, so they are sources of additional soft radiation. The result is a self-catalyzing enhancement that leads to runaway growth. A small color charge, in isolation, builds up a big color thundercloud. All this structure costs energy, and theoretically the energy for a quark in isolation is infinite. 
https://physics.mit.edu/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/physicsatmit_03_wilczek_originofmass.pdf

My comment: See the keywords here. The answer to the origin of mass seems to be miraculous. Its sounds suspiciously like Something from Nothing. And: The energy for a quark in isolation is infinite. 
Could it be, that God holds an infinite power, instantiated energy/mass through his eternal power when he stretched out the universe, and all mass is just a manifestation of his eternal power? 

Claim: theists will whinge about how they can logically prove an irrational concept 
My comment: In order to call something irrational, atheists must first be able to ground their own ability to reason, to apply logic. Atheists cannot trust their reasoning and have no justification for it.

Haldane: British Evolutionist, said:
 “If my mental processes are determined wholly by motions of atoms in my brain, I have no reason to suppose that my beliefs are true.  Atheists assume their senses and ability to reason are accurately digesting the information around us. 

And C.S. Lewis: 
Supposing there was no intelligence behind the universe, no creative mind. In that case, nobody designed my brain for the purpose of thinking. It is merely that when the atoms inside my skull happen, for physical or chemical reasons, to arrange themselves in a certain way, this gives me, as a by-product, the sensation I call thought. But, if so, how can I trust my own thinking to be true?  But if I can't trust my own thinking, of course, I can't trust the arguments leading to Atheism, and therefore have no reason to be an Atheist, or anything else. 

But putting this aside, God can be described as spaceless, timeless, immaterial, powerful, intelligent, and personal, which brought space, time, matter into being. There is nothing illogical, that makes the existence of such a being logically impossible.

Claim: The definition of existence is the fact or state of living or having objective reality in this reality this universe we occupy it's composed of matter-energy and physical information
My comment:
Robert Alicki: Information is not physical 11 Feb 2014
Information  is a disembodied abstract entity independent of its physical carrier. ”Information is always tied to a physical representation. It is represented by engraving on a stone tablet, a spin, a charge, a hole in a punched card, a mark on paper, or some other equivalent. This ties the handling of information to all the possibilities and restrictions of our real physical word, its laws of physics and its storehouse”. However, the legitimate questions concern the physical properties of information carriers like ”stone tablet, a spin, a charge, a hole in a punched card, a mark on paper”, but not the information itself.  Information is neither classical nor quantum, it is independent of the properties of physical systems used to its processing.
https://arxiv.org/pdf/1402.2414.pdf

So what is information?
Semiotic functional information is not a tangible entity, and as such, it is beyond the reach of, and cannot be created by any undirected physical process.
This is not an argument about probability. Conceptual semiotic information is simply beyond the sphere of influence of any undirected physical process. To suggest that a physical process can create semiotic code is like suggesting that a rainbow can write poetry... it is never going to happen!  Physics and chemistry alone do not possess the tools to create a concept. The only cause capable of creating conceptual semiotic information is a conscious intelligent mind.
https://biosemiosis.net/?fbclid=IwAR1xTZ-JWsSeSaTHqN5MmsaXpPN6dlFQz4liWCcOYzt6ugib-TVWv9y8YIE

Claim:  one of the ways that we determine the difference between what is real and what is imaginary is novel testable predictions based upon evidence by this strict methodology if a god exists it would exist in one of
these states and it would be detectable either directly as in we could measure it or indirectly we could measure the effect of it 
My comment: There can be several points made upon this claim.

1. Without God's hiddenness we would not have any significant freedom. Even those that hate God would be unable to fully live according to their wishes; much like a criminal would find it intolerable living in police station. Atheists wrongly assume that God wants everyone to worship Him because He's an apparent egomaniac; God being visible to the senses would make even that choice impossible.  If God stays hidden to a degree, He gives people the free will to either respond to His tugging at their hearts or remain autonomous from Him.
2. Science cannot demonstrate the existence of a mind, nonetheless, we know that it is something distinct from matter. The evidence are NDE reports.
Dr. Pirn van Lommel, MD: Near-death experience in survivors of cardiac arrest: a prospective study in the Netherlands DECEMBER 15, 2001
A young American woman had complications during brain surgery for a cerebral aneurysm. The EEG of her cortex and brainstem had become totally flat. After the operation, which was eventually successful, this patient proved to have had a very deep NDE, including an out-of-body experience, with subsequently verified observations during the period of the flat EEG.
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140673601071008/fulltext
3. Either there is a God, or not. Since one of Gods, faculties is being intelligent, and matter is not, we can contrast and compare "intended" versus "accidental" arrangements which can lead us to the notion of design.
We have extensive experience-based knowledge of the kinds of strategies and systems that designing minds devise to solve various kinds of functional problems. We also know a lot about the kinds of phenomena that various natural causes produce. For this reason, the theory of intelligent design makes predictions about the kinds of features we are likely to find in living systems if they were in fact intelligently designed.
Only intelligent designers invent things for specific purposes, make blueprints containing instructional assembly information to make objects like machines, computers, energy turbines, robotic production lines, and factories which are irreducibly complex, integrated, and interdependent systems. Analogously, in living cells, information is encoded through genetic, and epigenetic codes that form various sets of rules and languages. We know by experience, that alls those things are always the result of intelligent setup.

Claim: Unfortunately this omni being simply cannot be starting with omniscience knowing all things this being would exist in a state of direct violation of the heisenberg uncertainty principle this violation implies a violation of
the second law of thermodynamics to explain violating the uncertainty relations in quantum mechanics leads to a thermodynamic cycle with positive net work gain
My comment: 

Bradley Monton: God Acts in the Quantum World
Quantum mechanics is probably a false theory—it can’t accommodate the empirical evidence that supports general relativity, and that’s one reason that physicists are working on a theory of quantum gravity, to replace both quantum mechanics and general relativity. Some versions of quantum mechanics are indeterministic, while others are deterministic. The main deterministic version is David Bohm’s pilot wave theory. According to this interpretation, particles always have definite positions, and outcomes of processes that look indeterministic are actually determined by the precise locations of the particles (locations which are only imprecisely accessible to us).
https://philarchive.org/archive/MONGAIv1

Isaiah 46:10 says: Yahweh is able to ‘make known the end from the beginning’  and he, for example, foreknows the elect (Rom 8:28; 1 Pet 1:2) but also he inspired the prophets to make some truly remarkable predictions. The same dilemma of quantum indeterminacy goes for free will, where a man can decide freely, but God knows nonetheless what decision will be made.  If God created the physical world and its laws, there is nothing that hinders him to be fully in control even of indeterminate quantum effects or knowing what they will do. Since God created time, he is unlimited to time. God knows where the electron will be. He knows the dice rolls before they're cast. His Spirit controls matter but matter has no power over him. If God created and instantiated the physical world, and the laws of physics, then he has unlimited freedom to bring about any effect in the physical world, including (for example) parting the sea, changing water into wine, resurrecting the dead, and producing fish and loaves of bread. God is the future, as he is also the past. He is both the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end. If he is our future, he certainly knows our future. We just don't know how a spiritual being that is not comprised of matter sees the physical world. We just have to accept that we can infer God's existence from his creation and from what we find in the fulfilled prophecies. We have some statistical data that confirms that God can know the future to a huge level of certainty. 

Claim:  the third issue is how unnecessary such a being is virtually all processes and phenomena in the universe can be explained now there are a few gaps in our knowledge but we have taught men working on them
My comment: PHYSICS professor Ulrich J. Becker, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, stated: “How can I exist without a creator? I am not aware of any compelling answer ever given.”
I agree. Science has basically not been able to provide any consistent natural explanations in regards to any relevant question of origins. It begins with the fact that the universe has a beginning, therefore a cause.  

Claim: there is no evidence that even implies that the laws of the universe that which describes how the universe operates is contingent upon anything there is no necessity for a god at any point in the current predictive model
to be fair that could change
My comment: The universe, in order to exist, and to operate in an orderly, stable manner, to permit atoms, planets, chemistry, molecules, and life, requires forces to be created, to be constant, to have the right strengths, and right coupling constants within each other. If that were not the case, then these forces would and could adopt any spontaneous coincidental, values, coupling constants, and pop in and out in a stochastic chaotic manner.  The fact that there is a principle in operation, that secures that these forces are constant, is evidence of God.  If naturalism were true, we should expect a dead and lifeless universe. It would be typical, and not exceptional, and there would be no mechanism to secure these forces to be stable and permit that life-permitting universe. The initial conditions of the universe must be just right, and the expansion rate of the universe is finely tuned in an order of one to 10^123 power. Why is that so? Now let's suppose there was a multiverse generator. He would have had to make up to 10^123 attempts to get one universe with the right expansion rate. He would have made 10^18 attempts after 30 billion years. There are four fundamental forces that describe every interaction in nature. The precise relationship of these forces makes it possible for our universe to be filled with atoms, chemistry, molecules, and life. There is no known physical principle that says that the forces must have the precise values they have to permit atoms and life. Necessity extends to the fine-tuning of the Milky Way Galaxy, our Solar System, the sun, the earth, the moon, electromagnetic spectrum, and even biochemistry. There was no natural selection of the right building blocks to create life. Human consciousness also cannot be explained by unguided physical and chemical processes. In short, science and observation point to a Creator.

Claim: Any facts that we rely on do actually have an ultimacy upon which they are contingent the laws principles and theorems of this isolated system that we call the universe that is the only ultimacy that we have evidence of and we use that evidence to create predictive models asserting that anything is prescriptive for the laws of reality requires evidence of that prescriptive thing there isn't any and asserting there is is irrational
My comment:  Naturalism cannot ground fundamentally anything. That is: 1. Existence itself 2. The meaning of life  3. The value of human life 4. Moral values 5. Knowing what is objectively ( ontologically) true in regards to reality  6. Sound reasoning 7. Logic 8. Intelligibility 9. His mind and consciousness 10. Uniformity in nature.

Gods existence can be logically proven: 
1. A series of events exists.   One event is added to another to get us to today.  But we know that whenever we pause, we can't have an infinite number of events.  This means that there is not an infinite number of events that go backward from this point in time. Adding individual events together can never get to an infinite period of time.  
2. The series of events exists as caused and not as uncaused(necessary)
3. There must exist an uncaused necessary being that is the cause of all contingent being
4. Since that cause created space, time, and matter, it must be above and beyond physical reality. That cause must be timeless, uncaused, eternal, spaceless, and personal. We call it God.

Claim: terrible design for many people the seemingly complex perfection of the human body is proof positive of god they assert that god created we humans in his image and that from our dna to our variability to reason is evidence of intelligent design  unfortunately just a cursory examination of human anatomy can tell you that if the body was designed whoever did it was an idiot upon closer inspection evolution designed our bodies with the biological equivalent of throwing random [ __ ] at a wall to see what would stick to quote princeton physical anthropologist alan mann evolution doesn't produce perfection it produces function a few examples of our inadequate design include the inappropriate curving of our spine due to bipedal walking the hinged knee joint which is prone to severe injury our wisdom teeth the narrowing of the pelvis making childbirth very painful and sometimes fatal the misrouted recurrent laryngeal nerve which often impacts the aorta backwards retinas the trachea and esophagus both opening into the pharynx and of course our clergy brain an organ that evolved in stages which led to haphazard neural workarounds resulting in disjoining communications between the forebrain and the hind brain often resulting in hormone imbalances depression schizophrenia unreliable memories confirmation bias and many other cognitive limitations and impairments 
My comment: There are a lot of flaws in my smartphone. The keyboard is awful. It obviously was not designed. In order to say something is badly designed, you would have to make a theological claim about what the designer would do. That would be a theological argument, not a scientific one. A scientific argument only identifies the action of an intelligent agency. Someone could point out that a design could be better, but that doesn't mean the object wasn't designed, even if the objection is eventually true.
https://reasonandscience.catsboard.com/t1302-bad-or-suboptimal-design-does-it-mean-no-design

Some reasons for non-theism
http://aniara.wikidot.com/some-reasons-for-non-theism?fbclid=IwAR0SOANzwcVPubfdzF6RIpb_knlWS7Ue2J-lQIKV8T8JD3_zDGX7mkbcCdA

Here are some very basic questions you should be asking of your special creation theory.
(1) How did God do it?
(2) What was God doing for eternity before he got around to making our universe?
(3) Why is it that the way our universe came into being mimics so closely a naturalistic explanation and DOES NOT mimic how actual intelligent designed universes (ie video games) come into being?
(4) What about really shitty design? Why does our digestive tract and respiratory tract share the larynx? Thousands of people die per year because of this screw up. Why can we induce teeth in chickens? We activate a genetic pathway that is turned off. Why is it there? Aphids are sexually reproductive. Why is it that the females are born pregnant? They are fertilized by their brother who fertilizes them before birth and then dies … before birth. What sense does that make? There are shitloads of other examples.
(5) What exactly is the soul? Is it the mind? Is it the personality? Is it thoughts and memories? Is it something else. Why is it that brain injuries can affect all of those things? If a person with a birth defect like Down Syndrome goes to heaven, does he live with the disorder of cognition he was born with or does God fix it. If God fixes it, is it really his soul that is in heaven? Neuroscientist Vijay Ramachandran relates the story of a split-brained patient. Some people suffer frequent debilitating episodes of epilepsy. Cutting the corpus callosum (fibers connecting one hemisphere of the brain to the other) is the only effective treatment for some of these unfortunate individuals. But it leaves them with two pretty much independent brains. Dr. Ramachandran developed a technique to ask each hemisphere questions. He asked one patient if he believed in God … one hemisphere said yes, the other said no. So how does that work? He had two souls? One goes to heaven the other to hell? But the only thing that allowed these two souls to show up was severing the corpus callosum. So do we all have two souls?
(5) How come the Bible has forgeries in it? What does that mean about it being a message from God.
(6) Why did God chose prophets to disseminate his message. They are incredibly unreliable.
(7) Why doesn’t God show himself? Seems pretty simple thing to do. If he showed up and explained himself then there wouldn’t be so much disagreement.
Come on … these are elementary questions. You guys need to get together and try answering some of them. Then if answers aren’t clearly made up bullshit, then we can have something to talk about.