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

by Dan Barker

Basic atheism is not a belief. There is a difference between not believing there is a god and believing there is no god—one is the absence of belief and the other is the presence of belief.

George Smith, in Atheism: The Case Against God, calls it the difference between “implicit” and “explicit” (or “critical”) atheism.

Michael Martin, in Atheism: A Philosophical Justification, calls it “negative atheism” versus “positive atheism.”

Others describe it as “soft” versus “...

Smith suggests the term anti-theists for “Atheists,” the subset of atheists who positively deny the existence of a god.

Anger at religious immorality

Disgust with superstitious anti-intellectualism

Fear of the dangers of Christian...

Dissatisfaction with the way religious divisiveness interferes ...

Empathy for the victims of secta...

Outrage at the hypocrisy o...

Impatience with the churches that actively retard...

If the only way you can accept an assertion is by faith, then you are admitting that the assertion can’t be taken on its own merits.

Truth does not ask to be believed. It asks to be tested.

Faith is actually agnosticism. Faith is what you use when you don’t have knowledge.

With faith, everybody is right.

Hebrews 11:1 says, “Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.” In other words, faith is the evidence of non-evidence. It is a free lunch, a perpetual motion machine. It’s a way to get there by not doing any work.

The bible says that the “ungodly are like chaff which the wind blows away.” (Psalms 1:4) That’s fine with me. I prefer the winds of freethought to the chains of orthodoxy.

Chapter Six

Refuting God

In general, atheists claim that god is unproved, not disproved.

You can’t require that everything except what you are arguing for needs a designer. That brings your desired conclusion into your premise. This is known as “begging the question” and is illogical.

Evolution explains how complexity can arise from simplicity. Creationism can’t do that: it tries to explain complexity with more complexity, and so explains nothing.

God belief is just answering a mystery with a mystery, and therefore answers nothing.

I have my own bet: Barker’s Wager. Suppose there is a god, but he is only going to reward those people who have enough courage not to believe in him. This god is no less likely than Pascal’s. By believing in a god, Christians are risking eternal torture! When they die, they will be very surprised (so will we atheists).

Outrageous claims require outrageous proof. A criterion of critical history is the assumption of natural regularity over time. This precludes miracles, which by definition “override” natural law. If we allow for miracles, then all documents, including the bible, become worthless as history.

Theism implies a supernatural realm. Science limits itself to the natural world. So theism can never be consistent with science, by definition (unless the god is defined as a natural being, which it rarely is).

Faith, by its very invocation, is a transparent admission that religious claims cannot stand on their own two feet.

Sartre said that to believe is to know you believe; to know you believe is to not believe.

DEFINITIONS:

Any person, for whatever reason, who cannot say the words “I have a belief in a god” is an atheist.

Chapter Seven

Omni-Aqueous

There are some gods—such as the God of the bible—that I claim to know do not exist because, like the married bachelor, they cannot exist. Many definitions of “God” are incoherent. They contain mutually incompatible properties that are impossible to reconcile; therefore, they do not exist.

Religious doctrines are most vulnerable when expressed in absolute terms. Terms such as “all,” “always,” “never” and “infinitely” should raise some red flags.

Superlative characteristics also include the cardinal doctrines about the nature of the Christian God: omniscience, omnipotence, omnipresence and omnibenevolence.

To “know” is to contain a true image or idea within a mind. A being that knows everything must also know itself. Therefore, the mind of an omniscient being must contain an image of itself within itself. It would also have to contain an image of the image of itself, and an image of that image, and so on. It would have to know that it contains those images, and also contain an image of itself knowing that it contains not only those images but the image of knowing that it contains the knowledge of such images—well, you see where this is going.

In order for God to know everything, he has to know not only about all the unknown galaxies and extrasolar planetary systems and where all the undiscovered diamond mines and my missing socks are located, he also has to know everything about himself. He has to know what he is going to think next. He has to anticipate that he is going to need to know what he is going to think next, and after that into the infinite future.

Perhaps a lesser god exists, but a god who is truly omniscient cannot exist. It therefore does not exist.

You can argue all around the bushes on this point, but you can’t get away from the fact that Adam did not create his own nature. At the moment of creation, an omniscient deity would have been picturing the suffering and damnation of most of his creation. This is mean-spirited.

Perhaps a lesser (or malevolent) god exists, but the problem of evil gives the lie to the claim that a god can be both all-good and all-powerful.

An omnipotent God must be able to counteract the greatest possible force that could exist in the universe.

An omnipotent God would make the cosmos infinitely massive, a fact that is contradicted by the expansion of the universe (or, if God is outside our own pocket universe, by the uniformity of such expansion), or by the fact that we are not all instantly compressed by the gravity of infinite matter or incinerated with heat by being in the presence of such a grotesquely massive black hole out there.

Somehow, God can manipulate the existing mass/energy in the universe without adding to it, and without sucking everything into himself. But if “omnipotence” is meaningful, it has to indicate something to us humans who do not transcend nature. By definition a “spirit” is nonphysical, so a “spiritual god” should have no power—no real power—at all.

Since we know that an actual infinite mass (not the mathematical “infinite mass” some posit for black holes) would make all life, indeed all existence, impossible, we know that an all-powerful God does not exist, cannot exist.

To admit that God uses power is to concede that God has problems, needs and physical challenges. Why drown the human race with a flood? Why not just make them disappear? Why make the earth split open to swallow the followers of Korah? (Numbers 16) Why not just whisper to Moses to expel them from the tribe? (One answer is that maybe God gets a kick out of seeing people tortured in horrible ways—“That’ll show you not to question the authority of Moses!” That certainly weakens the claim of omnibenevolence.)

If God knows in advance that there will be evil as a direct or indirect result of his actions, then he is not all good. He is at least partly responsible for the harm. Since God has the desire and the power to eliminate evil, why doesn’t he?

If God truly is all-knowing and all-powerful, then he is not omnibenevolent when he does not stop unnecessary harm.

How could he have created an angel named Lucifer who possessed some quirk in his character that would cause him to go wrong? If this were deliberate, then God is an accessory to evil. If it were accidental, then God is not omnipotent.

Whether theists think God is all-powerful, or merely very powerful, or even self-limiting in his power, they must think that God is at least free to exercise whatever power he has.