Christian historian Dr. Wallace Marshall and I are debating whether or not enough evidence points to the existence of a god. For background and format, and Dr. Wallace’s opening statement, see entry one. For other entries, see index.

We’ve just concluded our debate on the cosmological argument, which Marshall chose to address first, believing it demonstrates a god probably exists. I’ve closed that debate with my last entry, finding no merit to it.

Dr. Marshall has now asked that I reverse the order and take up my opening case against the existence of God and elaborate on it, to which he will then reply, and eventually have the last word. If we see any need to continue after that, we will reverse order again and Marshall will take up the mantle again.


That the Evidence Points to Atheism (VI)

by Richard Carrier, Ph.D.

I argued there’s no evidence for gods in cosmology or the pleasures of experience; rather, the evidence of the world proves gods highly improbable, particularly in respect to science, fate, morality and history

Making a single argument: that if a god existed, the world and its history and contents would likely be very different than we observe, whereas what we observe is just as we could have predicted from the absence of gods. Which entails God is improbable, as this is all more likely on his not existing; and no evidence is less so. 

I’ll now list many ways this is true from a moral POV. I’ll assume Marshall does not agree an evil, crippled, or indifferent god is likely to exist, and that any being that frequently adheres to the Golden Rule (“Do unto others as you’d have them do unto you”) is correctly designated moral; and any being that doesn’t, immoral. [1]

In every case, the evidence is what we expect on atheism; not what we expect on theism. Theists thus must invent bizarre excuses for these observations; but they present no evidence any of those excuses are probable. Therefore neither is God.

The Argument from Cosmic Indifference

The universe is indifferent to human and animal welfare.

Natural evils not of our making plague all life on earth. From disease and deformities and famines to tornadoes and tsunamis and beasts. No moral person would allow this could they prevent it; moral humans are moral precisely because they try to. God does not. Therefore probably no moral god exists. 

Human evils also go unopposed and unpunished by anything other than human effort; and yet all rational moral beings alive agree a system that would more justly prevent and police such crimes would be better for human well-being. That this is therefore what a moral being would produce, entails no moral being likely exists to produce it, other than us. 

Therefore there is probably no moral god. [2]

The Argument from Non-Design

The world also looks godless, to our detriment:

  • Absent a God, life could arise only by improbable accident and the only place such an improbable accident is likely to be observed is in a vastly old and large universe almost entirely lethal to life; ergo atheism predicts what we see: a vastly old and large universe almost entirely lethal to life; theism does not. [3]
  • Absent a God, we could only arise from billions of years of evolution by natural selection plagued by random mistakes; ergo atheism predicts observation, theism does not. [4]
  • Absent a God, we’d likely exist only as long-evolved assemblies of originally single-celled organisms, producing cancers; whereas a god would have no need of such ad hoc construction. [5]
  • Absent a God, we could think only by having a brain—a long-evolved, fragile machine of extraordinary complexity; but God could just give us souls, immune to harm and impairment. [6]
  • Absent a God, our abilities at reasoning would be highly flawed and ad hoc, as in fact they are; any God who wanted us to think well would not do that to us. [7]

All of this is likely on atheism but not on theism without improbable excuses. [8] Even in general the supernatural could substantially improve the goodness of the world, yet there’s no credible evidence of it; which is unexpected if’s there’s a god. [9]

The Argument from Evolved Morality

I argued moral facts exist in all possible universes containing self-aware beings, then argued “the evidence of human morality matches not what theism predicts, but what atheism predicts: its starting abysmal and being slowly improved by humans (not gods), over thousands of years, in the direction that would make their societies better for them.” That’s improbable if God exists but exactly what we’d see if he doesn’t. [10]

The world hasn’t been governed by moral laws, and neither have human societies but for laws humans invented, which all—including in the Old Testament—began dysfunctional, inequitable, ignorant, and cruel, and took enormous spans of failure to revise, and were revised by reason before anyone credited gods with rethinking them. [11

The Bible endorses the immorality of slavery (even Jesus uses it as a moral exemplar), and says nothing for democracy or human rights or universal suffrage or equality (the New Testament in fact condemns it); nor freedom of religion, freedom of speech, or respect for personal autonomy (all condemned by the Bible). [12]

Moral gods would not allow that; therefore they probably don’t exist.

The Argument from Religious History

A real God would ensure all communications from the divine would be consistently enough the same at all times in history and across all geographical regions, and presciently enough in line with the true facts of the world and God’s values, as to assure us which were real. But atheism predicts these “communications” will be pervasively inconsistent across time and space, and full of factual errors about the world and immoral or harmful directives promoted as good, exactly matching the ignorance of each culture.

Richard Carrier, “The Carrier-Marshall Debate: My First Reply

The vast confusion and variation in “what gods tell us” from the dawn of human culture to today and across the world proves there are no real gods. Only humans who imagine them. 

And all of these claimed revelations align with the ignorance and false beliefs of their authors, thus again demonstrating none came from any real gods. Jesus did not know about germs. Moses did not know about democracy or human rights. Neither knew any correct fact about the world or people or socio-political systems that wasn’t already known. No revelation has therefore ever been real. 

This is all improbable, unless no moral god exists. [13]

Conclusion

A god with no interest in helping us is not moral according to any morality any rational person would endorse. No god has ever credibly helped us. No competent revelations. No moral instruction. No well-designed brains. The total and continual indifference of the universe and fate toward human and animal well-being. All prove this. Therefore a moral god is improbable.

It’s also improbable that any god would make the world look exactly like a world with no god in it: vast, ancient, random, void of the supernatural, almost entirely hostile to life, and ruled by a wholly indifferent physics.

Meanwhile, inventing excuses for such behavior does not increase but actually decreases the probability of a god, as there is no evidence any of those excuses are probable, therefore adding them only compounds the improbability of any god at all. [14]

-:-

Such is my case against the existence of Marshall’s god.

Continue now to read Marshall’s reply.

-:-

Endnotes

[1] Just to keep things simple. My actual moral philosophy is a bit more sophisticated and is laid out formally under peer review in Richard Carrier, “Moral Facts Naturally Exist (and Science Could Find Them)” in The End of Christianity, ed. by John Loftus (2011), pp. 333-64, 420-29. With extensive informal discussion in Sense and Goodness without God (Part V). See also Richard Carrier, “The Real Basis of a Moral World” (12 November 2018).

[2] On both points see Richard Carrier’s Argument from Divine Inaction in the Carrier-Wanchick debate (2006); for more extensive argument: Richard Carrier, Why I Am Not a Christian (2011), pp. 7-27, and, more so, Sense and Goodness without God (2005), Part IV. And note I said “humans and animals” and “all life”: for the extension of this point beyond the misery of only humans, see John Loftus, “The Darwinian Problem of Evil,” in The Christian Delusion (2010), pp. 237-70.

[3] For formal discussion see Richard Carrier, “Neither Life Nor the Universe Appear Intelligently Designed,” in The End of Christianity, ed. by John Loftus (2011), pp. 292-98; cf. pp. 295-96:

99.99999 percent composed of lethal radiation-filled vacuum, and 99.99999 percent of all the material in the universe comprises stars and black holes on which nothing can ever live, and 99.99999 percent of all other material in the universe…is barren…or even outright inhospitable to life.

See also Richard Carrier, “Why Life Must Be Complex” (24 February 2019) and Arguments from Design in Richard Carrier, “Bayesian Counter-Apologetics” (10 January 2017).

[4] See Richard Carrier, “Neither Life Nor the Universe Appear Intelligently Designed,” in The End of Christianity, ed. by John Loftus (2011), pp. 284-89.

[5] Ibid., pp. 289-92.

[6] See Richard Carrier, Argument from Mind-Brain Dysteleology from the Carrier-Wanchick debate of 2006; and Argument from Consciousness in Richard Carrier, “Bayesian Counter-Apologetics” (10 January 2017).

[7] See Richard Carrier, “Neither Life Nor the Universe Appear Intelligently Designed,” in The End of Christianity, ed. by John Loftus (2011), pp. 298-302; and Argument from Reason in Richard Carrier, “Bayesian Counter-Apologetics” (10 January 2017).

[8] See Richard Carrier’s Basic Argument to Naturalism as the Best Explanation in the Carrier-Wanchick debate (2006).

[9] See Richard Carrier’s Basic Argument for Naturalism in the Carrier-Wanchick debate (2006) and the Argument from Miracles and Argument from Superman in Richard Carrier, “Bayesian Counter-Apologetics” (10 January 2017); with development in Richard Carrier, “The God Impossible” (8 March 2012), “The Argument from Specified Complexity against Supernaturalism” (17 April 2018), and “William Lane Craig’s Duplicitous Denial That Extraordinary Claims Require Extraordinary Evidence” (28 February 2019).

[10] See The Moral Argument in Richard Carrier, “Bayesian Counter-Apologetics” (10 January 2017).

[11] See Richard Carrier, “Christians Did Not Invent Charity and Philanthropy” (24 May 2017) and “No, Tom Holland, It Wasn’t Christian Values That Saved the West” (18 April 2019) and, as one example, my Response to McFall on Jesus’ teachings regarding women; and as another example, see the Wikipedia article on The Golden Rule. See also my article (also cited below) on The Real War on Christmas.

[12] See Richard Carrier, “That Christian Nation Nonsense (Gods Bless Our Pagan Nation)” (12 March 2013) as well as The Will of God: 24 Evil Old Testament Verses and “The Real War on Christmas: The Fact That Christmas Is Better Than Christ” (23 December 2016).

[13] See Argument from Religious Experience in Richard Carrier, “Bayesian Counter-Apologetics” (10 January 2017).

[14] For those unaware, this is a fundamental principle of mathematics: for any assumption A added to any hypothesis B, P(A&B) = P(A) x P(B). Ergo the conjunction of A and B will always be less probable than either A or B. For instance, an assumption A that is only so far as we know 50% likely to be true will reduce the probability of hypothesis B by 50%. Thus adding excuses (A) always reduces the probability of the excused hypothesis (B). Not realizing this is called the conjunction fallacy. This is not to be confused with Alvin Plantinga’s so-called “Problem of Diminishing Probabilities,” in which Plantinga confused accumulating assumptions with the effect of accumulating evidence. The latter conjunction always increases the probability of a hypothesis if each individual addition does, e.g. if for each A it is the case that P(A|B) > P(A|~B), then for every added A, P(B|A) increases. This is the difference between P(B|A), the probability of B given A (where A, being evidence, is already established to be highly probable), and P(A&B), the probability of the mere conjunction of A and B (where neither A nor B is “evidence” but conjecture). See The Cost of Making Excuses in Richard Carrier, “Bayesian Counter-Apologetics” (10 January 2017) and Proving History (2012), index, “gerrymandering”.

[Note there is one exception to the conjunction fallacy: when B is logically entailed by A, i.e. it is logically impossible for there to be an A without B, then the probability of their conjunction is the same as their independent probability (though also not higher). But to show that would require proving B is logically entailed by A; merely conjecturing it is does not suffice.]

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