I haven't dusted off the old "Skeptic" category in a long time, but what I have been seeing about this on YouTube has been disappointing me. Let me be clear up front that I am not a god believer; I am not here to argue in favor of any god's existence. I want to address these “proofs” because they just aren’t good arguments; non-believers can do better.
1. The fact that a human being has to tell you about the existence of your God proves there’s no God. We would be born with knowledge of its existence.
Certainly an all-powerful, all-knowing god would not need human representatives to tell of their existence and spread their message. That still doesn’t constitute proof that such a god doesn’t exist. Such a god could want humans to spread the message for some reason, and there could be other sorts of gods with less comprehensive communication powers.
2. A God belief is simple geography. Being raised in a Christian home decides which God you believe in.
While the statistics show that most people belong to the religion they were raised in, the fact that conversions (and deconversions) can and do happen refutes this claim.
3. There was no time before the Big Bang, so that means that there was no time for a god to exist in or create things in.
This depends on how the god is defined. A god defined as existing “outside of time and space” doesn’t exist at all, unless you want to invoke some kind of multiverse. A god existing within the space time continuum could still be a god, just not a god that created the whole universe.
4. The Abrahamic God cannot exist because it wasn’t the first god to be created. There are other gods that have been proclaimed to exist before this god. They can’t all be true, so if we can deny the existence of one of these gods, we can use the same method to deny them all.
I don’t see how any of that follows. If a god did exist, it would be possible (however unlikely) that the people living in that part of the Middle East at that time were the first to discover them. That said, it is still true that the same reasoning apologists use to dismiss the existence of other gods is often just as applicable to their own god.
5. God either allows the “devil” to exist and is an accomplice or it isn’t an all powerful god. An all powerful and loving god wouldn’t allow the devil to exist.
This is a rephrasing of the Problem of Evil. It doesn’t prove that a god doesn’t exist; it only shows that an all-powerful, all-knowing, all-good god makes no sense in a world where evil and suffering exist.
6. The God of the Bible is jealous of other gods. This proves that this god is not the only one. With multiple choices, this shows that there is no reason to choose just one. If a god were true, there would be other options.
This argument doesn’t work because polytheism can and still does exist. It would also be possible for a real god to be offended by people worshipping false gods, but an all-powerful god would be able to easily get people on the right track, so there’s definitely something fishy about the existence of so many mutually exclusive religions in a world with one true god.
7. There is no evidence that spiritual energy exists, so we can conclude that psychics, ghosts, and gods are nonexistent. Otherwise, god has nothing to be made of.
This argument only affects gods that are defined as existing in some kind of “spiritual” realm. There is no evidence of a spiritual realm, ghosts, or genuine psychic abilities, but the non-existence of a spirit world doesn’t keep a god from existing in the real world.
8. There is no such thing as “nothing”. For nothing to exist would cause it to be “something”. Creationists believe that god created the universe out of literal nothing.
Apologists often wrongly claim that atheists think the universe sprang from nothing, even when they should know better. The assertion is correct that there was never a time when nothing existed, since time itself is one of the properties of the universe. Not even every creationist thinks the world was created out of literal nothing, though. Genesis itself describes a pre-existing universe of endless water wherein God (or multiple gods) creates the world. Of course, there’s no explanation for why there is a god there.
9. This isn’t a finely tuned world created with us in mind. The sun gives you cancer, most of the water is undrinkable, and diseases run rampant. If there was an intelligent designer, there wouldn’t be any mistakes.
This doesn’t disprove the existence of a god in general, but it does refute the existence of a perfect creator god who made the universe just for humans to live in. The small fraction of the Earth’s surface that is tolerable to humans is an infinitesimal fraction of the vastness of the known universe.
10. Evolution is obviously proven and true. This means that we weren’t created by magic and are somehow superior to the animal kingdom. No creator, no god.
Evolution is well supported by evidence and the only explanation for the diversity of life on Earth that has any scientific validity, but there are plenty of creationists who are happy to accept evolution and just attribute its success to their god. This is only a good argument against literal interpretations of religious texts as explanations for the universe.
So most of these arguments make an important point, and some of them refute particular concepts of god, but none of them constitute solid proof that no god exists.
