Expert: Vincent M. Wales - 7/18/2011

Question
hello sir,i'm 20 years old male and i pretty much believe that god exists but i only say this because the reason i have heard about his existence came from religious guys which convinced me that there is some BEING controlling everything.i still haven't heard the point of view of an atheist yet.the explanation i was given was that since everything(car ,fan ,house,mobile,etc) was made by someone(in this case human beings),how is it possible that this world came to existence on its on.but the thing i'm confused about is if he exist why doesn't he show himself.even for this question i was given explanation but i wasn't satisfied.the other thing i'm confused about is if he really exist then which religion represent true god.

Answer
What you're experiencing right now are the same doubts and questions that most atheists encounter at first.  I'm certainly not going to suggest that any religion is the "right" one, because I don't think any of them are.  And I'm not going to comment about why a creator doesn't reveal itself, because I don't believe there is one.

What I will comment on is your initial point, which is that everything comes from somewhere.  As you say, we look around us and see things that had to be made by others.  So where did the universe come from? Religion says that a deity made the universe.  But we can't just accept that, because it violates the original premise.  If everything must come from somewhere, where did the god come from?

Believers will insist that their god is the exception, that he/she/it did not need to come from somewhere, and is eternal.  But a rational mind will immediately see this for the cop-out that it is.  Because if "god" did not have to come from somewhere (in other words, if there is an exception to the original premise), then neither did the universe (i.e., where there's one exception, there can be another).  In short, if anything must be the "original" thing, it's more sensible to believe the universe is the starting point, not a god.

The irony is this:  Believers will say, "But the universe is too complex to have 'just happened.' It must have been created."  And yet, any deity capable of creating the universe must, by definition, be MORE complex than the universe itself.  In other words, even less likely to have 'just happened' than the universe.

Religions only make sense when we see them in context, and that context is this:  They were invented by primitive people who had no real understanding of the world around them.  Thunder and lightning?  What caused those frightening things?  Lacking any understanding of weather, they naturally attributed it to some creature up in the sky.  Zeus hurled his thunderbolts when he was angry, etc.  Religion has always been the crutch upon which the ignorant lean in order to understand the world.  

However, the more we understand of the world, the more we realize the crutch is unnecessary.