Arguments Against God
These are the classical and contemporary arguments that God does not exist, or that the idea of God does not hold together. The evidential arguments rest on the suffering of the world and on the pattern of belief and unbelief. The disproofs answer the arguments for God directly. The coherence arguments ask whether the divine attributes can be held together without contradiction.
Each argument has its own page, with the argument stated in form, its proponents and history, its references, and the standard theistic responses, with links to the argument pages it answers. No objection is presented without the reply.
Start here: Problem of Evil — The suffering of the world is said to count against a God who is all-powerful, all-knowing, and perfectly good.
Evidential — from the world's suffering
- Problem of Evil — The suffering of the world is said to count against a God who is all-powerful, all-knowing, and perfectly good.
- Divine Hiddenness — If God were perfectly loving, reasonable people would not remain without belief; yet many do.
Coherence — is the idea of God consistent?
- Omnipotence Paradox / Coherence of Theism — The stone paradox asks whether a God who can do anything can make a stone too heavy for God to lift.
- Foreknowledge and Free Will — If God already knows infallibly what each person will do, the future seems fixed and human freedom seems lost.
- Omnipotence and Omniscience Incoherence — The divine attributes themselves are said to conflict, so that no being could hold them all together.
Evidential — from the world's suffering
- Argument from Non-Belief — The sheer scale of unbelief in the world is said to fit naturalism better than theism.
Answers to the arguments for God
- Cosmological Disproof — Modern cosmology is said to remove the need for a first cause of the universe.
- Teleological Disproof — Evolution and natural explanations of fine-tuning are said to remove the need for a designer.
- Ontological Disproof — The ontological argument is said to fail because existence is not a property that can be built into a definition.