Expert: Austin Cline - 6/27/2010

Question
QUESTION: Hi, what are your strongest reasons for not belieiving in God, wouldent it be better to believe in God( im talking about God in general not just for a particular religion )

ANSWER: There are lots of reasons for not believing:

http://atheism.about.com/od/aboutatheism/p/whynotbelieve.htm

The most basic is that there is simply no good reason to bother:

http://atheism.about.com/od/argumentsagainstgod/a/NoGoodReason.htm

Absent good reasons to believe, it's unreasonable to do so.

There is no such thing as "God in general," absent some theology. To believe in "god" you must believe in something in particular - some deity with some set of characteristics. Is it omnipotent? Is it omniscient? Is it a "person"?

http://atheism.about.com/od/doesgodexist/u/AtheologyReligionCriticism.htm#s2

But to believe in some particular deity with some particular set of characteristics, there must be some good reasons to think that that god exists rather than some other god; to think that this set of characteristics is correct rather than some other set. It wouldn't just be irrational to believe in some random set of characteristics, it would be completely absurd. Surely we shouldn't just flip a coin?

There is, however, no good reason to pick any one alleged deity rather than any other alleged deity. Even if we pretended, just for the sake of argument, that we needed to believe in some sort of god... which one? The deity proposed by the Christians? The one proposed by the Muslims? How about a Hindu deity? Or maybe Apollo? Thor?

If we limited ourselves to just the monotheistic traditions of the West, we still have a wide variety of characteristics to pick from. Christians have disagreed sharply over matters like omniscience, omnipotence, transcendence, and so forth. Which theologians should be side with... and why?

We have no good reasons to take any of the sides in any of these debates: Catholics over Protestants, Christians over Muslims, monotheists over polytheists, Hinduism over Greeks.

Unless and until someone can point to some specific sort of deity and specific, empirical reasons for thinking that it exists, the most reasonable course of action is to just not bother. And that's atheism.

---------- FOLLOW-UP ----------

QUESTION: in your opinion why are all religions false, if you had to pick one as the true religion, which one would you pick and why, what if when you die, God actually is real what would you say/what would you do

Answer
"in your opinion why are all religions false, "

I haven't seen any make the case for being true.

"if you had to pick one as the true religion, which one would you pick and why, "

I wouldn't.

"what if when you die, God actually is real what would you say/what would you do"

Depends on what god. Apollo? Odin? Krishna?