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Atheism & Agnosticism

Questioning whether the concept of God can be disproved

Can unicorns be disproved? Bigfoot? The Loch Ness monster? Celestial teapots? Anti-gravity? ESP? Extraterrestrial abductions?

No, they can't. Empirical existence claims are impossible to disprove by definition. They aren't even in the same category of absolute *proof* of logical and mathematical truths. Anything that is logically consistent could *potentially* exist, but that doesn't mean we should believe it does, merely that we can't completely discount the possibility the way we could of an irrational integer or a square triangle.

Indeed, there are certain conceptions of God-after all, no two ideas of God are alike, which is all the more reason to doubt them all-that can almost be disproven, or at least refuted to all reasonable scientific confidence: omnipotent, omniscient, benevolent, creator of the universe. If God were all these things, babies would not die of birth defects, tsunamis would not kill thousands of innocent people, and HIV would not infect millions annually. If we are to ascribe even the most basic human decency to God, we must deny that he is powerful enough to stop all these events, which is to say we must deny that he is significantly more powerful than we are.

That in itself seems enough to disqualify God from worship; when we consider also that any explanation for existence which invokes God is now tasked with explaining the existence of God (why that's so hard for people to understand, I don't know; if you postulate electrons, you explain electrons), it becomes clear that there is basically no good reason to suppose that any sort of God exists at all.

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