Category: Agnosticism

Bad Atheist Arguments

bad atheist arguments

If you ever ask an atheist to prove their claim that God doesn’t exist, chances are you’ll hear some truly atrocious responses. Below you’ll find some of the worst atheist arguments.

You can’t prove a negative!

This may be the most common response. Somehow many atheists have come to the conclusion that it’s not possible to prove negative claims. That begs the question as to why they would frequently make them! At any rate, this claim is clearly false as any competent logician will tell you.

There is no flat Earth.

This is a negative claim that can be easily proven true. Also, any positive claim can be negated. e.g. Prove God doesn’t not exist.

The burden of proof is on the person making the claim! You prove God exists!

This argument is just bizarre but it’s surprising how many times it is used. Somehow, many atheists believe that the person claiming that God doesn’t exist is not making a claim. Also, they are admonishing you for daring to request justification for that claim. To top it off they shift the burden of proof onto you. Unbelievable.

In logic, a claim is a declarative statement that asserts a proposition that is either true or false, but not both. Clearly the statement “God doesn’t exist” is a claim.

Prove Zeus doesn’t exist!

This is another odd one. Instead of justifying their claim that God is imaginary, they try to shift the burden of proof onto you for a different claim.

That “God doesn’t exist” is the null hypothesis!

Atheists sometimes attempt to ague that because the claim “God doesn’t exist” is the null hypothesis to the claim that “God exists”, they do not have to prove their claim. However, the null hypothesis is the claim that there is no difference between groups or no relationship between variables. So for every claim you are trying to support, there will an alternate “opposite” claim that you must reject. If you find a relationship between your variables, you have disproven the null hypothesis.

If you claim that God exists, the null hypothesis is that God doesn’t exist. But if you claim God doesn’t exist, the null hypothesis is that God does exist. Simply because a claim has a null hypothesis does not mean that the null hypothesis claim by itself doesn’t require support. When you make any claim, you have a burden of proof to support that claim.

Which God?

When asked to prove an atheist’s claim that God doesn’t exist they might bark “which God?”. That’s like saying “which Supreme Being?”. A being can only be supreme if there is only one such being.

They may also spell it lowercase, i.e. god instead of God. They appear to be unaware that names are proper nouns that are always capitalized.

Atheism is about belief! Agnosticism is about Knowledge!

This claim is made when stating that a weak atheist is the same as an agnostic. That claim is false because knowledge is justified true belief, so both positions involve belief. Also, when Thomas Huxley coined the term agnosticism he specifically meant it to refer to a lack of belief and a lack of knowledge of God.

Are you also agnostic about fairies!

Here the atheist is attempting to argue that it’s rational to believe that things that cannot be justified do not exist. This however involves committing the appeal to ignorance logical fallacy. That is, fairies don’t exist because they haven’t been proven to exist. The rational position on the existence of fairies is in fact one of agnosticism.

Atheism is just the lack of belief in God!

This is the so called lacktheist argument. Agnostics lack both a belief in God and lack a belief that there is no God. Atheists however, do not lack a belief that there is no God. In other words, atheists actually believe there is no God. Atheists obviously cannot in any way support this claim (meet their burden of proof) so they falsely claim that atheism merely involves a lack of belief.

The Atheist Delusion

Explains how atheism in all its forms is fundamentally delusional.

Is atheism irrational? It definitely is. No matter which flavor of atheism you look at, you’ll find it’s based on fundamentally flawed beliefs. For the sake of simplicity we’ll look at atheism as split into two camps: soft and hard (AKA negative and positive). Also we’ll be dealing with lay definitions. In philosophy, atheism generally refers to hard atheism.

Hard Atheism

Hard (positive) atheism is the purely faith-based belief that there is no God. Believing something doesn’t exist without having proven its nonexistence is completely irrational. A rational person is convinced in the truth (or falsity) of something commensurately based on the evidence available to support its truth (or falsity). A rational person knows something is false only if it has been logically proven false. This includes falsification by the scientific method.

Soft Atheism

Soft (negative) atheism is the lack of belief in God because of a belief that there is no evidence (knowledge) to support any God’s existence. In other words, soft atheism is simply agnosticism. Why would soft atheism exist when we already have the concept of agnosticism? Further, rational people also do not align themselves with very irrational people when they don’t have to unless some other motive is afoot.

Why Soft Atheism?

Now why would soft atheists align themselves with atheism despite being associated with the glaringly obvious irrationality of hard atheism? If they truly were rational, why wouldn’t they distance themselves from the hard atheists? Why don’t they criticize the irrationality of hard atheists instead of welcoming them with open arms? Why also would they not simply call themselves agnostics since that is supposedly what they really are? Maybe it’s because they’re not really agnostics at all. The only plausible explanation is that soft atheists are simply hard atheists masquerading as soft atheists because they are unable to explain away the irrationality of their faith based position of hard atheism. By fraudulently posing as agnostics they can still publicly call themselves atheists without having to answer hard questions about their irrational faith.

Imagine someone who strongly believes in science. She’s looking for a group to join that shares these views. She finds two groups “Friends of Science” and “Science Friends”. “Friends of Science” is picky and very strictly allows only highly science oriented people to join. “Science Friends” however is astonishingly open and counts among its members flat earthers, astrologers and channellers. None of these three areas are valid areas of science at all. Someone who values science would always choose “Friends of Science” and never want to join such a group such as “Science Friends”. Someone who values science would criticize the “Science Friends” for allowing such irrational members. Anyone who claimed to value science but rejected “Friends of Science” and joined “Science Friends” willingly and without criticism could only be a fraud.

Some “weak” atheists try to sidestep the issue by claiming that the existence of God is of low probability. But probabilities can only be computed when there is data and no data is ever produced. Claiming to have computed probabilities when such a thing is impossible is incredibly irrational.

Argument Summary
Positive Atheism

P1. Irrational people believe in unprovable claims.
P2. X believes that there is no God but cannot prove it.
C. X is irrational.

Agnosticism

P1. Rational people withhold belief in something when there is no evidence for that thing.
P2. Z is unconvinced of the existence or nonexistence of any god due to lack of evidence.
C. Z is rational.

Negative Atheism

P1. Rational people do not belong to groups of irrational people if they have an rational alternative.
P2. Y claims to hold the same position as Z but instead choses to belong to a group with X as a member.
C. Y is irrational.

P1. Rational people understand that probabilities cannot be computed when there is no data.
P2. Y claims that any god is improbable but cannot produce any data.
C. Y is irrational.

Atheist Criticisms

This argument has elicited several weak atheist “criticisms”.

  1. “Atheism is about belief while agnosticism is about knowledge. “

    Knowledge is justified true belief, so both agnosticism and atheism are about belief.
  2. “You don’t get to choose what the definition of atheism is!”

    We’re not in any way changing definitions. We’re showing, using sound logic, what atheists believe despite their lies to the contrary.
  3. “Your argument is childish, is full of fallacies and proves nothing at all!”

    When believers cannot refute criticism that threatens their blind ideological faith, they lash out with emotional pronouncements. This happens with cult members, religious fundamentalists and atheists.
Conclusion

As we can see, whichever way you look at atheism, it is a belief system that is fundamentally irrational. Couple this with the undeniable reality that the God of pantheism is a logically established fact. Rational people accept established facts, they don’t ignore them or belittle them. If a purported fact is not actually established, rational people will explain why rather than simply issue empty pronouncements of faith.