Doubting Marcus

Bad Reasons to Believe in God

This is a collection of my responses to common arguments for belief in god(s).

Popular Miscellaneous

• “What if You’re Wrong” (Pascal’s Wager)
• “I Can’t Explain That” Arguments (Arguments from Ignorance)
• “God is Love”
• “We Can’t Use Our Logic to Judge God”
• “I Have Personally Experienced God”

Scriptural Arguments

• “The Bible or Qur’an Says So” Arguments
• “The Qur’an is Poetically Unmatched”
• “They Said People Would Disagree With Me”
• “Fulfilled Prophecies Prove My Religion is True”

Classical Arguments

• First Cause/Cosmological Argument
• Kalam Cosmological Argument
• Argument from Design/Teleological Argument
• Paley’s Watchmaker
• Moral Arguments
• Ontological Argument
• Transcendental Argument for God (TAG)

Presuppositional Arguments

• Van Tillian Presuppositionalism
• Clarkian Presuppositionalism

Scientific Arguments

• “Prayer Works”
• Fine Tuned Universe Argument
• “Miracles Prove God”

Arguments Against Naturalism

• Argument from Reason
• Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism
• Argument from Intentionality

Attacks on Atheism

• “Atheism is a Religion/Atheism Requires Faith”
• “Hitler, Pol Pot and Stalin Were Atheists”
• “Believing Makes Life Enjoyable/Without God Life Would Be Meaningless”
• “You Don’t Really Not Believe in God, You Just Hate God”
• “You’ll Believe When You Are Dying”

This list is not final, there will be additions to it, and many of these formal arguments have popular variations which I may address in the future. A pocket version, a single post without links, will become available when I finally get around to it.

Additionally here is a reason why I don’t think there should even be debate about the existence of gods, a generous challenge to any believer of a specific religion in which I grant you a general god, an explanation as to why near-death experiences aren’t even good reason to believe in a soul let alone a god and here’s list of reasons why I will positively say the Biblical god does not exist.

P.S. I’ll be happy to expand this as I want to include every common reason given and would happily take on any specific argument that doesn’t appear here. These also are the only posts on my blog which are changed after the original posting for anything other than basic grammatical errors and they may be subject to extensive expansion and clarification (especially some of the very early posts).