Why There Is No God: Simple Responses to 20 Common Arguments for the Existence of God

by Armin Navabi

4) Zuckerman, Phil. “Atheism: Contemporary Numbers and Patterns.” In The Cambridge Companion to Atheism (Cambridge Companions to Philosophy). New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007.

That we might have some desire to appeal to a higher deity says less about the reality of a god than it does about the way our brains are wired and our naturally human desire to understand the universe, regardless of whether such perceived understanding is based on verifiable evidence or ancient dogma.

Christopher Hitchens. “Author Hitchens Talks Cancer and God.” CNN. August 5, 2010. Accessed September 25, 2014.

Shermer, Michael. The Believing Brain: From Ghosts and Gods to Politics and Conspiracies – How We Construct Beliefs and Reinforce Them as Truths. St. Martin's Griffin, 2012.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, physician and the author of the famous Sherlock Holmes stories, believed in fairies

An appeal to authority is a logical fallacy that usually takes the following form: Person A is an expert in Z. Person A said X about Z. Therefore, X must be true. This is a fallacy because person A’s opinion or misinformed conclusion does not actually affect the truth, and experts are not always right (2).

Valid scientific findings are accepted as most likely true because they can be independently tested and validated.

some data seem to suggest a strong positive correlation between intelligence and atheism (3).

Extreme skepticism is a form of philosophical skepticism that considers it impossible to believe anything (1).

If there is no way to test whether a claim is true, there is no reason to live as though it is.

Carl Sagan once said, “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.”

Theists, by claiming that God exists, are making an extraordinary claim. This requires extraordinary evidence. As seen throughout this book, that evidence does not exist. No argument laid out by theists so far is compellingly believable.

The only thing which terrified him more than the thought of his own everlasting torment was the possibility of his parents being sent to hell. To his young mind, this was a very real possibility since they didn’t pray regularly five times a day, as he did.

by the age of 18, he had lost all of his faith. He felt cheated, betrayed and taken advantage of by society, his country, teachers, and those who impose the belief in God as an absolute truth without any proof, denying all other alternatives. He felt angry, depressed, and broken. He had sacrificed so much, even almost his life, all for the sake of a fairytale.

above all, he wished for people to be made aware that atheism was a legitimate option. It was one of his life’s greatest examples of unfairness that he wasn’t given a chance to choose.