Atheism: philosophical perspectives and contemporary debates

¶ … God Exist?

Humanities fascination with life and death has led to question what happens when we die. Atheists view life as a sentence that begins with a Capital letter and ends with a period. However, others see life as a continuously changing ribbon of time that goes on forever. This essay will explore arguments and counterarguments regarding the existence of God.

The Atheist Viewpoint

Atheists live in a material world and deny the existence anything that cannot be seen, felt, or touched. The only world that exists is the one that surrounds us here on earth. The key atheist argument is that God does not exist because the essence of God cannot be experienced on earth. According to Atheist doctrine, the proof that God does not exist is that there is no physical evidence that God exists. All evidence from the Bible, spiritual manifestations, and other "proof" that God exists are circumstantial at best. Testimony that God has worked in someone's life is dismissed as the ravings of a lunatic. Atheists lack the hard evidence needed for a hard conclusions

The most convincing evidence that God does not exist is the contradiction in the Bible regarding God's role. The argument goes like this. If God is supposedly all-powerful and filled with goodness, how can he allow evil and suffering to exist in the world? It God were truly the all-powerful being, why would he not snuff out all wars, poverty, and sickness. If evil and suffering are a part of our world than it means that God is not all good. If God is not good, then he is not perfect. This makes him not God at all, which means that he does not exist.

The third major atheist argument against the existence of God is that he has limited abilities or he would be able to make heaven on earth. An omnipotent God could simply snap his fingers and make all of the evil in the world disappear. If God were real, then he would have stopped the planes the bombed the World Trade Towers. He would have stopped the young gentleman from killing his classmates and teachers at Virginia Tech. These things happened because God could not stop them. This is more evidence that God does not exist.

Man has never definitively seen God. Those that claim to have seen God meet the criteria for mental illness. Those that feel they have heard or seen God often have a diagnosable mental illness that causes them to hallucinate (Freud, p. 30). If God wanted to make himself known to a person then he should do it. If God wants man to believe in him, then he must make himself more real to man. The Biblical accounts of the history of the world do not coincide with the natural world. If God were real then there would be no difference between the real world and Biblical accounts.

Every supposed "miracle" found in the Bible has a logical and rather ordinary explanation. Many of the miracles in the Bible are simple misinterpretations of the physical events that happened. For instance, when Jesus turned the water into wine, he probable poured it into an old bread crock and it would begin to ferment. Everyone knows that Moses crossed the Reed Sea and that it was only a few feet deep at the time. If such amazing miracles occurred then, why do we not see such similar things in our time. We certainly have been in need of some miracles in the past several years.

Sigmund Freud and Karl Marx argued that God and other religious beliefs that the inventions of an unhealthy human mind. Freud felt that God was created in the minds of human beings to fulfill an unmet need. Marx felt that God and religions are constructed by political powers to oppress the working class.

Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the feelings of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of unspiritual conditions. It is the opium of the people" (Marx, p. i).

If it were true that God is a creation of the powers that be, then why would so many powerful people in the world openly profess belief in God and attend churches? This question is never answered by Marx and Engels.

Answer to an Atheist

We are mortals and cannot possible know the will of God. God does perform miracles in our lives, if we only stop to pay heed to them. If one takes a bunch of parts and random parts and pieces, gives them to a chimpanzee, and asks them to assemble a car from them, an Atheist would have one believe that eventually they would do it through random chance. There is another similar argument that if you placed 100 monkeys at 100 typewriters they would eventually come up with a Shakespeare play. Just as the Atheist argument claims that there is no proof that God exists because no on has ever seen him, there is also no proof that the monkeys will ever make a car or type Shakespeare. It has never been done and no one has ever proven that it will actually happen. At the current time, it is just a theory and there is not physical proof that it would happen.

For that matter there is no physical proof that the stars and moon exist either. Yet we believe them to be a part of our reality. We assume that the chair we are sitting in or the computer we are using is real as well, but if Atheist logic holds true, they too might be an illusion. If God does not exist how do we know that anything exists? God is all-powerful and does not need to bend to the demands of mortals to make him known. If he chooses to make himself known to any man, then he will do so. Demanding that God show himself and prove his existence is not necessary for an omnipotent being.

If God did try to make himself known to someone that did not believe in him then it does not mean that he was not there. A person will see what they want to see. People will block out any thought or image that does not agree with their ideas of reality. The person who fails to see God working in the world is ignoring anything that disagrees with their belief. This is not looking at the world objectively, but with a biased outlook. This type of bias discredits academic research studies for the inability to isolate the variables properly. It is impossible to draw any type of logical conclusion base on biased evidence.