I've never really believed in any gods, and the more I've learned about the world and religion, the more I've moved from strong doubts to outright disbelief. So today I can say that I can come to no other rational conclusion than: No gods exist.

In this essay I'll explain my reasons for this, and thereby answer the question I'm often asked: "Why are you an atheist?" I'll deal with some of the typical arguments for the existence of gods, argue why I think they fail, and I'll discuss some of the many logical problems in today's religions (though my focus will be on Christianity). Furthermore I'll argue that religious thinking is dangerous and that many religions are immoral in my opinion.

Before I get started, it should be noted that my choice of words might offend some people, and for that I'm sorry. However if I can argue that a claim is absurd, then I think it's entirely fair to call it just that, instead of wrapping my point in so many layers of political correctness, that the result becomes vague and meaningless.

Furthermore I'm quite aware that I can't know anything about the real world with certainty, but I feel as convinced that no gods exist as I do that the Tooth Fairy doesn't exist, and no one would think it unreasonable for me to say that the Tooth Fairy doesn't exist.

Proofs of the Existence of a God

Many theists (a theist is someone who believes in one or more gods) have over the years tried to prove the existence of a god. I have seen quite a few attempts, but none have been able to survive critical scrutiny.

It will of course be beyond the scope of this essay to go through each and every proof, so we'll have to make do with a few short examples.

The Anthropic Argument

Proponents of the anthropic argument points out that the universe is extremely well suited for life forms like humans. Had just a single physical constant been different, then the existence of humans would be impossible. This, they argue, tells us that someone made the universe to accommodate mankind.

Though this argument might sound persuasive, it's actually getting it all backwards.

Consider someone who sees a small pool of water in a hole and marvels at the fact the hole is formed in exactly the right way to accommodate a pool of that particular shape. This is of course silly, because it's not the hole that has taken on a form just right for the water's shape. Instead it's the water that has adapted itself to the form of the hole.

Similarly the universe isn't fitted to make life as we know it possible; instead life has adapted itself to the universe.

Imagine that when the universe began (assuming that it hasn't always existed) each of its attributes were set randomly. It seems reasonable to assume that only a few of the possible random universes could support humanlike life. It might however be that the other possible universes could support other kinds of life.

If the universe hadn't been structured to allow for human existence, then we wouldn't be here to wonder about it, and instead it might very well have been some other life form, wondering about the same thing. So a creature marvelling at the fact, that the universe just happened to be structured in a way, so that its race could evolve and survive, is silly in the same way that the example with the pool of water is silly.

Apart from this it should also be considered that there might actually be or have been a huge number of universes (which is an idea being considered seriously by physicists). If this is the case, then the existence of a universe supporting humankind is a lot more probable.

The Argument from Design

One of the most common arguments for the existence of a god is the argument from design. This argument states that the complexity and interdependencies of nature can only be explained, if someone intelligent (i.e. a god) designed it all.

This kind of argument is what atheists call a "god of the gaps"-argument. That is, God resides in the gaps of our current knowledge. When people couldn't explain lightning, it was a god who made it, and when that gap in our knowledge disappeared, the god had to retreat from it.

This has been a continuing theme throughout history: Gods have retreated from one gap after another as the light of science has illuminated them one by one.

The argument from design places gods in the shrinking gaps of the well supported theory of evolution (http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/comdesc/), which explains the development of the species without the need of an intelligent designer.

One very common version of the argument from design is the claim that the odds of the eye being created by chance are so huge that the possibility can be discounted.

This argument however misunderstands what evolution is. Evolution isn't just randomness. It's randomness with selection, and evolution doesn't create things like the eye in one go. It's nearly 150 years since Darwin explained in "The Origin of Species", how the eye might have evolved. It could for example have started with a single cell that were sensitive to light, which generation after generation increased in numbers and complexity. In this connection it's worth noting that all our skin cells are sensitive to light. When we feel the Sun burning on our skin, then it's simply light of a frequency not visible to our eyes, which we feel. Furthermore we have today observed creatures in nature with eyes of different complexity.

As an analogy, consider a lottery where you have to pick 7 numbers out of 40. You would have to be extremely lucky to win such a lottery, but now assume that you were allowed to accumulate correctly chosen numbers from one game to all the following ones. Perhaps you will get one correct number in the first game, then nothing in the next three, then two in the fourth game. Now you have 3 correct ones, and you would get all 7 in a reasonable number of games.

This is the way evolution works. It accumulates advantageous mutations, just like winning numbers were accumulated in the lottery example. Thereby evolution climbs Mount Improbable step by step instead of making an impossible all-in-one leap to the top.

Even if we, for the sake of the argument, accept the existence of a designer, we can still point some annoying facts out to the theist:

1. The designer can't have been very intelligent. Just take a look at a giraffe: Why does it have a nerve between the brain and the larynx going all the way down the neck and then up again, instead of just going the very short and direct route? And why does a giraffe have 7 neck bones and a humming bird 14, when the opposite would have been more suitable?

2. The vast majority of the species, which have existed, have gone extinct, which goes to show that the designer has a lousy track record.

3. Who other than a sadist would design organisms that eat others from the inside, while they are still alive (such as some wasp larva does with spiders) or design diseases like Ebola and the plague?

4. If complexity implies design, then the immense complexity of the designer must imply that someone else designed him. The designer of the designer would then also require a designer, and we would end up with an infinite chain of designers.

The First Cause Argument

The first cause argument is very popular among theists. It is based on the assumption that everything has a cause, and from this assumption it is argued that the universe must have had a cause, and that this cause is a god.

However, if everything has a cause, then the god must also have a cause, and that cause must have a cause and so on infinitely. This is a conclusion that I think isn't palatable for any theist. If the theists, to counter this, claims that his god is uncaused, then he has contradicted the assumption on which the argument is based and has therefore invalidated it.

Furthermore even if the argument were correct, all it would tell us would be that there is a first cause. Calling this first cause "God", doesn't give it any of the properties, which are normally ascribed to gods, it could be some perfectly natural occurrence. I might as well say "I call the chair, I'm sitting on, 'God', therefore God exists".

The Argument from Religious Experiences

It's often argued that since so many people today and throughout history have had religious experiences there must be something to it.

To answer this argument one should consider that earlier in human history more or less everyone experienced the Earth as being flat. Today science can explain why they saw it this way, even though it isn't true. Similarly scientists today are starting to explain why people have religious experiences and even trigger them without involving a god.

So when someone is trying to make a case for the existence of a god based on the many religious experiences, they could make an equally (un)compelling argument that the earth is flat.

It should also be considered that religious experiences are dependent on the religion of the person having the experience, which indicates that it's only a subjective experience generated by the persons own brain. This aspect will also often make the experiences mutually contradictory, which shows that they can't all be true, and even if we accept them, then it will be very hard to argue why we shouldn't also accept the very similar experiences of alien abductions, succubus visits etc.

The Argument from Uncertainty

Everything we know about the world is uncertain to some extent, and we have all seen how some scientific "knowledge" turned out to be wrong.

Based on this some theists argue that since our scientific knowledge is never 100% certain, it's quite alright for example to believe that the universe was created by God 6000 years ago, because the science, which shows that this isn't so, might be wrong.

Well, science might be wrong in this case, but it's so unlikely that it's silly to base anything on it being wrong, and no one in their right mind acts on such possibilities in any other connection. Your bed might have turned into peanut butter while you read this, but I'm pretty sure that you don't deem it worth your time to go look if this has happened. So why should the equally implausible ideas of religion be treated any different?

The Argument from Authority

The world we inhabit is so complex that none of us can check everything out for ourselves, therefore we in many cases have to rely on authorities, who have specialized knowledge. Most people for example believe in the existence of electrons even though they haven't really seen any themselves.

Some theists argue that it's no different to accept the existence of a god based on the authority of a holy book or someone with great knowledge of a religion.

In my opinion such an argument cuts no grass, because a scientist claiming that electrons exist can back up his claim with a lot of solid evidence. The computer I'm writing this on wouldn't have worked if there were no such thing as electrons and neither would any other electronic device. Similarly the scientist will be able to teach you the theories backing up his claim, and at each step in your learning, you will be able to perform experiments that verify the theories. Religious authorities can do no such thing.

This example shows that it's rational to believe in the claims of science, because it has delivered overwhelming quantities of testable evidence, while religion has nothing to show for all its effort.

The Ontological Argument

Another famous proof of the existence of a god is the so-called ontological argument, which basically goes like this:

1. A god is a being greater than which nothing can be imagined.

2. Since nothing greater can be imagined, a god must be perfect.

3. One of the qualities of perfection is existence.

4. Therefore a god exists.

There are several things wrong with this argument. First of all I would tend to be pretty suspicious of its foundation. Can a human really conceive of perfection? I don't think so, and the claim definitely is in need of proof, which brings the ontological argument to a grinding halt before it even gets started.

Even worse, the argument confuses the concept of something with the thing itself. Just because we can imagine something, it doesn't follow that it in any way relates to the real world. This might be made easier to understand by seeing that one could as well argue that a perfect unicorn exists using exactly the same logic as the ontological argument.

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