Why think that we live in a world with a god when there are so many reasons to reject that idea? For those who want to convince us that God exists, let’s continue our list of 25 things that they need to show us don’t exist (part 1 here).

The next clue that we live in a godless world:

3. Because God needs praise and worship

Is it obnoxious to have seen Donald Trump as president bask in effusive praise as if he were Kim Il Sung, Stalin, or some other dictator? If so, why expect the all-good Christian God to want that kind of praise?

There’s a progression of wisdom from sociopath, to average person, to wise person, to sage. As we move along this spectrum, base personality traits such as the desire for adulation fall away, but the opposite is true for the Christian god. Not only do we hear this from Christianity itself (“Man’s chief end is to glorify God and to enjoy him forever,” according to the Westminster Shorter Catechism), we read it in the Bible (“At the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth”).

What’s the point of praise? Obviously, God already understands his position relative to us. We’re informing him of nothing new when we squeal, “Golly, you’re so fantastic!”

Imagine a human equivalent where you have an ant farm, and the ants are aware that you’re the Creator and Destroyer. It would be petty to revel in the ants’ worshipping you and telling you how great you are. Just how insecure would you need to be?

This sycophantic praise makes sense for a narcissistic and insecure king, but can God really want or need to hear this? We respect no human leader who demands this. Christianity would have us believe that the personality of a perfect being is that of a spoiled child.

Praise makes sense when you’re praising something surprising, but God mindlessly goes from one perfect act to another. Sure, he did a perfect thing, but that can’t be surprising. He’s like water that flows downhill. It could do nothing else!

Another opportunity for praise is when an act came at some expense, like giving food to a needy person or risking your safety to help someone. This too doesn’t apply to God, who is limited by no finite resource and who can’t be injured.

Praise is particularly odd when you consider how unpraiseworthy God is. He’s the guy who demanded genocide and sanctioned slavery in the Old Testament and created hell in the New.

God should be a magnification of good human qualities and an elimination of the bad ones. But the petty, praise-demanding, vindictive, and intolerant God of the Bible is simply a Bronze Age caricature, a magnification of all human inclinations, good and bad.

See also: God as Donald Trump: Trying to Make Sense of Praise and Worship

Here’s a bonus reason we don’t live in God World:

4. Because there’s a map of world religions

There is no map of world science, with the geocentrists in the green region and the heliocentrists in the blue, where the Creationists are over here and the evolutionists are over there. There are disagreements over unresolved questions in science, but they’re rarely regionally based. And when those disagreements get resolved, (1) the process will have taken years or (at most) decades, (2) the resolution will have come due to new and better evidence, and (3) the new consensus view will be adopted peacefully and quickly by scientists worldwide.

Contrast that with religion. (1) Disagreements between religions don’t get resolved. Will Muslims ever accept Christianity’s idea of the Trinity? Will Christians ever accept Hinduism’s idea of reincarnation? Will Protestants and Catholics set aside their differences? After many church councils, some Christian questions have been answered (with the losing side declared a heresy), but there is no objective Christianity. Christianity continues to fragment at a rate of two new denominations per day.

(2) Evidence may be the currency of science, but in religion, it’s power. Disputed points of dogma are resolved and became the consensus view, not because a plain reading of the Bible show them there but because those are the views that happen to win. While arguments are made for the various positions, in the end, it’s a popularity contest.

(3) Consensus within Christianity is sometimes imposed. The conclusions of ecumenical Christian councils (there have been 21 since the first one in Nicaea in 325) are imposed on Roman Catholics by the Vatican.

It’s not always peaceful. The Cathars were a Christian Gnostic sect whose members were exterminated in thirteenth-century France for not being Catholic. Catholic vs. Protestant wars have killed millions.

This bloodshed has done nothing to consolidate supernatural belief worldwide. There is not even consensus on the number of god(s), let alone their names or what is required to placate them. When believers get their story straight, they can let us know.

If this were God World, we’d expect to see a single understanding of God worldwide.

See also: Why Map of World Religions but not World Science?

Continue with more reasons here.

(1) If we live in a world with a God,
then there wouldn’t be any apologists.
(2) There are apologists.
(3) Therefore, we live in a world without a God.
— commenter Tommy

Christians are sometimes asked what evidence supports their views, and they’re often forced into embarrassing answers. For example, Creationist Ken Ham admitted that his mind was made up on scientific questions, and nothing will change it.

Christian apologist William Lane Craig made the same admission and tipped his hand about the motivation for his work. It’s not been an honest exploration of the evidence but a quest for rationalizations to soothe the fears of the little boy that he was, decades ago, when he first discovered that people die.

What’s good for the goose is good for the gander

Now we turn the question around. Atheists, you demand that the Christians be open minded, but what about you? Are you open minded? What evidence would it take for you to say that God exists?

I want to pursue some new ideas, but first let me summarize the answer I’ve given before.

For me to have a personal epiphany of God’s existence won’t do. There are so many conceivable natural explanations for such an experience—drugs (recreational or medicinal), mental illness, hunger or mental stress, someone playing a trick, and so on—that I couldn’t trust such a thing as genuinely supernatural. The answer is to crowdsource it. That is, it’s not just me evaluating this evidence, it’s everyone. On one day, everyone in the world sees “Yahweh exists” spelled out in stars or pebbles or lines in the sand in a way that they could understand. Or, one night everyone has the same dream in which a god explains his plan. (I’ve explored this idea more here.)

This still falls victim to Arthur C. Clarke’s observation that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” Sufficiently advanced aliens could dupe us into imagining the supernatural when we were just seeing technology. Still, this would be convincing evidence that some amazing intelligence is out there, which would be vastly more evidence than we’ve seen to date.

Clues that we don’t live in God World

Since God won’t provide this evidence, we’re on our own, looking for clues for God’s existence. What would we need to see to know that the Christian god exists? Said another way, how would we know that we’re living in God World?

My answer: if we lived in God World, we would expect to not see things that argue that this god does not exist. This is a cumbersome way of putting it, but we need to see it that way. We are swimming in so many clues that we don’t live in God World that my answer is: I might conclude that God exists but only if all these clues didn’t exist. You Christian apologists who care more about our belief in God than he does need to go back in time and erase these deal killers from our reality, because they must be resolved before I can consider your positive arguments for God.

Here’s a way to see it. Imagine a used car salesperson pointing to a “real beauty” on the lot and telling you how fast it can go, noting its gas mileage, praising its roomy back seat, and so on. You walk around the car and notice one tire is flat. And one wheel is missing. And one window is smashed. And on and on. Obviously, these fundamental problems must get fixed before you have any interest in the top speed and gas mileage. Each of these problems is a silver bullet that kills any car sale.

Similarly, these problems with the God hypothesis are each a silver bullet, a deal killer, to belief in God. The difference is that a flat tire can be fixed, while we can’t fix a trait of reality that wouldn’t exist in a world with a god.

The first clue that we live in a godless world:

1. Because we’ve seen what Christian society looks like

Christianity had its chance to create a Christian utopia with Europe. Spoiler: it wasn’t so great.

Christianity was in control of Europe for 1500 years. During that time, mystical creatures populated the world, there was little besides superstition to explain the whims of nature, and natural disasters were signs of God’s anger.

Christians might say that Christianity has no goal for humanity to learn about nature. It has no goal to create the internet, GPS, airplanes, or antibiotics. It has no goal to improve life with warm clothes, safe water, or plentiful harvests. It has no goal to eliminate diseases like smallpox, polio, or covid.

And they’re right: Christianity’s goal is instead to convince people to believe in a story that has no evidence.

We find more data on this question of Christianity vs. social health today. U.S. conservatives tell us that loss of Christian belief has caused society to degrade, but is that true? If loss of Christian belief caused society to degrade, we should at least see a correlation between the two. That is, the better the social metrics (homicides, teen pregnancies, income inequality, suicides, and so on) in a society, the higher would be the Christian belief within that society.

In fact, we see the reverse. Social statistics in 17 Western countries show that Christianity is inversely correlated with measures of public health. While we can’t conclude anything about the cause—does higher Christianity lead to worse metrics or does a failing society provide a fertile environment for religion?—it’s obvious from this that more Christianity doesn’t cause a better society.

A 2017 United Nations list of the world’s happiest countries makes the same point. Norway, Denmark, and Iceland are at the top, followed by much of the rest of godless northern Europe. The U.S. is 14th.

To see this from yet another angle, American Christians aren’t a noticeably more noble subset of society.

When Christianity was in charge, Europe received no obvious supernatural benefit. Society progressed in fits and starts just like you’d expect in a godless world.

See also: How Christianity Retarded Modern Society by 1500 Years

2. Because religious beliefs reflect culture

Muslims unsurprisingly come from Muslim countries, Hindus from Hindu countries, Christians from Christian countries, and so on. There are exceptions, of course, but people predominantly adopt the religion (or lack of religion) of their culture. In the dozen or so countries that are 98 percent Muslim, what are the chances that a baby raised there will become Muslim?

Christian apologists will say that Muslims aren’t Muslim because their religion is correct but simply because they were raised in a Muslim environment, but they need to explain why the same criticism doesn’t apply to their community as well. (More here and here.)

Let’s take a step back to see where this series of articles is taking us. I’ve written many articles (1) arguing against Christian apologetics and (2) arguing for atheism. This series can be thought of as a prequel to the first category, clues all around that tell us we don’t live in a world with a god.

Continue with more reasons here.

Jesus wants to date you
but doesn’t want to put in any effort.
You should dump him.
— commenter Han Solo

Do modern Christians really buy the Christian story? Prayer that really works, how you get to heaven, the logic of hell—all of it? And what about the conservative political thinking that many Christians have fallen into—the child sex ring, pro-life rhetoric, QAnon conspiracy theories, and all that?

Look just a few centuries back, and there was little competition with Christianity’s message in Europe. They really knew that there was an afterlife. But Christians today show that they’re hedging their bets and aren’t as on board as they had been.

In part 1, we explored the contrast between Christina Johansdotter, who murdered a child in Sweden in 1740, and Andrea Yates, who murdered her own five children in Texas in 2001. Both women assumed that their victims, because they were children, would go straight to heaven, and modern apologists confirm that logic.

Johansdotter committed murder to get executed herself. Her logic was that, with absolution for the murder, she would go to heaven, which was where her recently deceased fiancé was. Her culture understood that logic, and many fellow citizens surely thought that they’d consider the same route if they’d been in her shoes.

But few contemporaries agreed with Andrea Yates. Her actions were not those of a modern Christian.

One society was sympathetic and saw the murderer’s actions as, if not plausible, then understandable from a Christian standpoint. And the other society was horrified and saw the murder’s actions as reprehensible.

Let’s consider more modern examples where onlookers responded with, “Sure, that is what we say, but c’mon, you don’t actually follow through with that!”

More modern examples: do these Christians really buy the Christian story?

In these modern examples, see the tension between Christian or conservative thinking taken at face value and how modern Christians see the issue.

• Assassins for Jesus. In 2015, a shooter entered a Colorado Planned Parenthood clinic. He killed three and injured nine. Another example is the assassination of abortion doctor George Tiller, shot and killed during a church service in 2009. These were logical responses to Christian pro-life rhetoric that every abortion kills a baby (which isn’t true). But while this abortion-equals-murder claim is popular within conservative Christian circles in the U.S., there was no groundswell of support for these two shooters. Very few Christians deep down believe that abortion is equivalent to murdering an adult, and they understand that a month-old fetus is different in important ways than a month-old newborn. The pro-life line is just rhetoric, and it’s said with a subliminal wink.
• Abortion = murder? The work of apologist Greg Koukl also reveals this difficult knife edge. He pushes the idea that abortion is murder, but it’s a bad look to also insist on the logical consequence, that the women getting an abortion should be charged with murder. Koukl acknowledged this third rail when he said, “We can’t ever make a decision on the policy concern [that is, the punishment] unless we’re really, really clear on the moral concern.” To this I say, are you really, really certain that abortion is murder? If so, then you’ve suddenly become really, really clear on the policy response as well. The reverse is also true. If the punishment that goes along with murder doesn’t fit, then the crime couldn’t have been murder.
• Homosexual acts deserve death? Koukl also argues that homosexual acts are wrong and for proof points to the Old Testament. But of course he doesn’t want to bring along the Old Testament’s punishment, which is death. A modern sense of morality won’t sit by when an abominable moral conclusion is being considered.
• Pizzagate. Or take the shooter who fired shots in the Comet Ping Pong pizza restaurant in 2016. He was investigating the false Pizzagate sex ring conspiracy theory. How many Christians greeted this news with “It’s about time!”? How many were envious because they hadn’t had the courage to do the right thing? Surely very few. Overly literal interpretations like this are embarrassments to modern Christians.
• The red telephone. Years ago, I read that President Kennedy’s three-year-old son John Jr. was playing in the Oval Office while his father was working and accidentally picked up the receiver for the red telephone, the Moscow hotline. (While fact-checking, I discovered that there was never a red phone on the president’s desk—that was Hollywood. There was a Moscow-Washington hotline, but in Kennedy’s term, it was a Teletype machine, and it wasn’t in the Oval Office.) But though the story about John Jr. isn’t true, it nicely illustrates the idea of a young, naïve child dabbling with immense power. That’s what we have with children and prayer. Jesus promised that prayers will be answered, but can we entrust this power to children? Those children might pray for God to kill the star player on the opposing football team. Or kill a teacher who assigned too much homework. Or kill a romantic rival. Only because no one believes that prayer works as Jesus promised do we let children pray.
• How prayer really works. Mature Christians know that prayer doesn’t work the way Jesus promised. No one anticipates success after prayer for an amputated limb to be restored. It’s not a matter of the prayers being petty or selfish. Countless prayers have been earnest and charitable, from recovery from the health crisis of a loved one to the end of a war on the other side of the world. The desired result is no more likely to happen with a prayer than not.
• Does Jesus heal disease? A church in New Zealand put up a billboard in 2012 that made headlines. It read, “Jesus cures cancer,” but the local advertising authority forced them to take it down. It’s one thing to make untestable claims for which Christianity is grandfathered in—about the afterlife, the resurrection, or the Trinity, for example—but another to make significant, testable claims like this one. Of course, if the church felt muzzled, it would have been easy to go to a hospital and heal everyone to prove their claim. But not even the members of that church would’ve been surprised that it doesn’t work that way.

Wrapup

Here’s an insight from Robert M. Price that might clarify how modern Christians juggle ancient mythology and modern science and find a place for each in their worldview. Price considered what pastor Rick Warren said about Noah in his Purpose Driven Life. Warren, he said, takes the Flood story literally but not seriously. That is, Warren claims that the Noah story literally happened, but he doesn’t take it seriously enough to defend or even consider its consequences.

Hell is another example. Hell is taken literally but not seriously—many Christians will stand by their literal interpretation of hell, but they don’t take it seriously enough to consider what it would mean to their afterlife even if they make it into heaven.

Or take prayer. Christians apply prayer only when a naturalistic route is unavailable. They pray for a football win or safe travels or a cure for intractable cancer, but where a proven naturalistic option is available—an antibiotic for an infection or a car with airbags or a church with a lightning rod—these are a lot more reliable than prayer, and they know it.

Unlike Christians in 18th-century Sweden, modern Christians have the phenomenal success of science to explain. From the Industrial Revolution through skyscrapers, the moon landing, computers, the internet, and all modern technology, science delivers, not religion.

Christian dogma for many Christians has become a suit of clothes—something that advertises your club, not who you really are.

See also:

• Reason 14 we don’t live in a world with a God: because not even Christians take their religion seriously
• A critique of the reliability of faith
• Silver-Bullet Argument #28: Because Heaven Is too Horrible to Endure

Contrary to their empty rhetoric
that atheists live as though their God exists,
believers live as though their God doesn’t exist.
But when they actually do read their Bible
and follow its barbaric morality
it’s additionally clear that their god doesn’t exist.
Either way their god doesn’t exist.
— John Loftus