Godless: How an Evangelical Preacher Became One of America's Leading Atheists

by Dan Barker

There is a difference between prescriptive laws and descriptive laws.

It is sheer intimidation.

it is an argument for belief, based on a threat of violence.

We diminish this life by preferring the myth of an afterlife.

Religion demands time, energy and money, draining valuable human resources from the improvement of this world. Religious conformity, a tool of tyrants, is a threat to freedom.

Suppose there is a god, but he is only going to reward those people who have enough courage not to believe in him.

Nothing can be great or perfect that does not first exist, so the argument is backwards.

And it is comparing apples and oranges to assume that existence in conception can somehow be related to existence in actuality.

No wonder Bertrand Russell said all ontological arguments are a case of bad grammar!

there is no contemporary support for the Jesus story outside the Gospels,

There is no reason to demand it be either entirely true or false.

As soon as that person reports it, it becomes second-hand hearsay.

we allow for miracles, then all documents, including the bible, become worthless as history.

appeal to authority,

This is no argument.

Faith is the acceptance of the truth of a statement in spite of insufficient or contradictory evidence, and has never been consistent with reason. Faith, by its very invocation, is a transparent admission that religious claims cannot stand on their own two feet.

with rigid controls, these claims are generally exposed as misinterpretations or outright fraud.

legitimate, mysterious phenomena could have perfectly natural explanations.

Formally, I can’t say that I know or believe that all of those hypothetical as-yet-undefined beings do not exist.

to rule them all out, so I simply decline to believe in any of them.

like the married bachelor, they cannot exist.

being that is both infinitely merciful and (infinitely) just.

knowing everything in the past, present and future—is impossible. The concept loops back on itself and creates an infinite hurdle

It would also have to contain an image of the image of itself, and an image of that image, and so on.

To be perfect, it would need to keep track of itself keeping track of itself. This would add to its size.

Like the computer virus, an omniscient God gets caught in an infinite loop keeping track of itself and cannot have a single thought.

Creator deliberately placed humans in its path.

Adam did not create his own nature.

God is weaker than chariots of iron,

Since a first cause is not an effect, it is exempt from causation.

circular reasoning.

As with the earlier failures, this puts God into the definition of the premise of the argument that is supposed to prove God’s existence, and we are in fact begging the question.

And not from science, which observes nothing of the sort. If theists get their initial idea from a religious document or from “inner experience,” their argument may be more presuppositionalist than evidentialist.

It would be like a dictator staging an election that permits no other candidates but himself: it’s rigged from the start.

1. Everything except God has a cause. 2. The universe is not God. 3. Therefore, the universe has a cause.

We have no experience of any NBE objects in the natural universe (how could we?),

Transcendent does not equal supernatural.

Have theists successfully eliminated all but one candidate for NBE?

many impersonal causes “create”

then they are useless.

a subject acts on an object.

it couldn’t have happened “after” the decision to commit it because there was no “before.”

causality requires temporality.

personal agency to commit an action happens antecedent to the action itself.

“Oh, look! I just created a universe. Now I’d better decide to do it.”

Therefore, sticking with Kalam, there must have been a “first antecedent” in the mind of an actual God, which means that God “began” to exist.

begging the question,

If infinity is just a concept, as Kalam insists, then an infinite God is just a concept.

I have never heard a coherent definition of what it means for a god to exist “outside of time.”

equivocation, a hand-waving dodge of the issue.