Why believe in God when you don't believe in the other Gods men have worshipped?

 
"We are all atheists about most of the gods that societies have ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further," Richard Dawkins.

 

You will meet person who says that there have been many gods believed in by men but they don't believe in any of them.  They point out that as it is only belief not evidence that supports all those gods, they may as well reject them all.
 
Some say that the error in that is that it assumes that all gods are equally likely to be true. Or unlikely if you prefer. They say the Christian God is the reason everything exists and none of those Gods were claimed to be creators in that sense.  This seems to argue that God is a better explanation and theory than the other gods.

 

Now if God is different, that does not mean much if he has created pagan Gods such as Zeus and Jupiter. If you want to dismiss the notion of gods who are really sort of superhuman beings with miracle working powers then God is not going to help. At least if Zeus were your god he would be reasonably human and it is easier to believe in a God like yourself.

 

The argument that there can only be one creator from nothing is compatible with the view that he can make tooth fairies, leprechauns, witches and beings who are gods or who are the same as gods.  They are just different from him in that they don't have complete say over the universe.  They are not a threat to how he is supreme.

 

The argument that God makes sense while tooth fairies and gods of thunder is stupid is thus invalid.  It is deceiving.  It is a lie told to hide just how much worse it is to hold that there is an infinite creator who can make a tooth fairy if he wants than to assume that by happenstance a tooth fairy does exist.  Believers are in fact throwing out the concept of superstition.  Nothing is superstition then if there is a God.

 

So the believers are guilty of assuming Zeus and so on cannot be real and God might be when in fact if God makes the gods then their reasoning backfires.  They are clearly deciding that God should not make Zeus and Marduk and different Gods which shows they are not really about God but about what they WANT to think about him.  How can they tell God what he can and cannot create?
 
They say it is illogical and anti-science to start treating all explanations as equally likely or unlikely. They say it depends on what the evidence indicates. They are right but it does not follow that the evidence helps show there is a God or that God is the best of possible magical beliefs.  It shows God in fact is potentially the worst.  Even if it were no better, that would be interesting.  It would put all faiths on the level playing field. 

 

Let us look at this before we move on.

 

Religion: God is the best answer to the question of why anything at all exists.

 

Atheist: If only one innocent being were made and had nothing but extreme torment forever you would still say that?

 

Religion: God is love.  It would not happen.

 

Atheist: I don't see much compassion in a person who would try a dodge like that.  It shows how if such a person existed you would not respect them enough to oppose their maker.  You know fine well I am asking you if you would still posit the existence of a God if the person suffering so much existed?

 

Religion: Yes.

 

Atheist: So the argument you make is not based on whether beings have any quality of life but just on their bare existence.

 

Religion: Yes.

 

Atheist: You are clearly then making a scientific claim for it is not about the creator's morals, amorality, immorality, or whatever.  Yet you lie that your doctrine is not a scientific theory.

 

See now much this is worse than any Zeus or Aphrodite.

 
THE BIBLE NEVER MENTIONS AN UNCREATED GOD
 
Believers say God is different from other gods for the other gods are really just creatures but he is not a creature and never was made. He just always existed and made all things. That view is too simple - it is more complicated. And there is no reason to think those claims about God make sense.

 

The Bible says God is the source of everything and had no maker outside himself. The Bible says that God made all things. It says nothing to exclude the notion that God himself is an object though he is source of other objects.  It never confirms or denies that God made himself. That would be absurd but the Bible is not a book of philosophy so we can expect errors and absurdities of a philosophical nature to appear in the Bible. The Bible says that God made what is visible out of what is invisible. It never actually says, "God made all things out of nothing."

 

Alister Mc Grath objected to Richard Dawkins for saying that there are millions of gods that are claimed to exist and all he does is just drop God for it is only one more of them.  Having 1 god left when you reject 999,999 of them means it is no big deal to just drop God as well.  He said that Dawkins is forgetting how God is different from crude gods and is a sophisticated smart idea.  But Mc Grath needs to assert that Dawkins' reasoning applies then to the biblical God and not the God of philosophy who is spirit and the source of being. There is no reason to believe that the Bible God and the God of philosophy are the same. The Church only pretends they are and reads philosophy about God into the Bible when it is actually not there.
 
DAWKINS AND TESTABILITY
 
Dawkins stated that to say God is a spirit or to say the unicorn is a spirit puts them beyond refutation. You say they are outside the physical universe which means nothing can prove they exist or prove they do not exist. You have no reason to believe one or believe the other. That is the point not what role they have, not that God is the source of all and the unicorn is not. There is no reason to believe in either so if you reject the magical unicorn it makes sense to reject God as well. If the magical unicorn is mad believing in God does not solve the problem for it says he can make magical unicorns and who is to say he has not done so? Belief in a magical unicorn is mad but belief in something that can make two or more or many of them is worse.
 
THE ESSENTIAL POINTS
 
Essential Points:
 
# If God is a spiritual entity then he can be a spiritual anything even a unicorn or a dog or a computer.  He is called a person but is nothing like a person as we know it.
 
# You cannot prove God scientifically as he is said to be non-material or undetectable. The problem is that this stops investigation and once you stop investigating you can end up believing in anything.
 
# We cannot know what we mean by God.  Would unicorn describe him best?  Some say God as maker of all things is a more sensible thing to believe in than the unicorn which is not creator or source of all. But these are red herrings. The point is that God is a supernatural magical being which is why he is able to be the source of all. It is the magic that is the point not who or what wields the magical power.  So that tells us nothing about what God is.  Only what he can do.
 
# Some say that God as the source of morality is a more sensible thing to believe in than the unicorn which is just a magical animal. But if we get enough morality to get by and we base it on a kind hearted unicorn that is better than basing it on nothing. That is assuming that morality has to come from some authority outside us. It is better to base it on the imperfect unicorn than a perfect God. If we will never be the best all the time, what do we need God for? We need realistic role models.
 
# We think we experience something like spirit when we visualise something for nothing can detect the image we see or measure it or weigh it. But being unable to scientifically check it and examine it does not mean it cannot be scientifically checked or examined if we had the right machine. It does not mean that somehow it is physical.  In principle, what is physical could be checked if we had the equipment.  God is spirit and so is the unicorn but the problem we are looking now is not them but the very concept of spirit. There is no evidence at all that spirit is possible or exists and we have no reason to presume that it is possible. Spirit is a mere human concept. To honour spirits is really just to honour the minds that invent them. And as for God giving a purpose to your life, atheists sometimes find meaning in being a loving god to others. As there is no God we have to do the loving he can't do. Also, to link God and a sense of meaning in life is always over-simplistic. The reality is that working out what good is and what ethics we should have is damn hard work as the controversy is super-complicated and confusing. It takes years. And yet religion says you need to understand good in order to make some progress in knowing God for he is good. Those who say that God gives meaning are really showing that guessing that God exists is giving them meaning. It is not God that is doing it.
 
# A God who loves the sinner and hates the sin, sin means crime against God, would be an impossibility for the same reason that punish the crime not the criminal would be impossible. Therefore there is no all-good God. Your innate qualities show in your behaviour. You can't be a sinner because you sin but you must sin because you are at least partly a sinner. Whoever says that they condemn your behaviour, and not your innate qualities are being pure hypocrites. Thus God is even more absurd than the unicorn or Zeus or anything else.
 
# Religion stresses God because it stresses faith in him. But that means that faith sort of becomes your God. God and faith in God are not the same thing. But they are to the believer. If you have no faith in all gods but one then drop the faith in it. God would thank you for it for he is not faith!
 
# Agnosticism presumes that God might exist but alleges that you have no reason to presume that he does or he doesn't. Presuming God might exist is wrong for it is too big of a claim just to assert without trying to substantiate it. Atheism is the default position not agnosticism and certainly not theism. For that reason God is worse than gods like Odin that don't matter too much.
 
# If God hiding can be justified, then we are saying we are believing in God though he hides and because he hides. Then why not substitute tooth fairy or fairy godmother for God? Why can't they be the hiding gods?
 
AN OBJECTION
 
One objection to the one less God argument is that the gods of other religions exist in a sense. What they are is evil spirits mistaken for gods and who pretend to be Gods. The point is that you might as well believe in God for you believe in some other gods anyway. This argument is irrelevant for they can be as godlike as they want to be but they are not God. But it does show that if you think you are talking to God, then what if it is to something pretending to be God? And those who use the argument are putting their God on the same level as any rubbish god.
 
PRAYER
 
People in the past invented gods and prayed to them and swore those prayers were answered. Sometimes they got no answer but then when they asked for something very important and got it they did not care any more about the unanswered prayers.
 
The one god less argument can be worded as follows. "A god is necessarily a prayer answerer and prayers that are not answered are in fact answered but not in ways we notice or expect. The god responding to prayer is what the god is all about. It is more important to connect with God through prayer than through arguments such as that there would be nothing without God. God is about a relationship. But the trouble is that you can pray to anything and think your prayers work. You will think that prayers to God or Krishna or Satan or to your pet rabbit or your sex toy work. Many pray to different versions of Gods and idols and not others. The person who does not pray to any is only excluding all the alleged gods whereas most other people exclude all but one." Worded this way, the argument is unassailable.

 

WHAT GOD IS OR WHO?

 

Atheists are accused of dismissing God as creator as if he were just other god like Thor.  They are accused of blasphemy as in equating God with a heathen deity.  They are accused of stupidity.   The Christians tell the atheist that God is be the ground of all beings and is nothing like a Thor or Jupiter. Notice this assumes WHAT GOD IS. It is not about WHO GOD IS.  A God who is about love and justice and having a relationship will want it to be about who he is.  If there is a choice between the what and the who then he wants it to be about the who.  The what is too much of an attempt at a scientific theory.  It worries about God's power over existence.

 

God is not an inherently tolerant or benign idea when you think of what God implies about atheists.  The atheist then by rejecting God as as divine who as he rejects Thor, Hecate, Marduk and Moloch is definitely rejecting just one more God than what the believers in God reject.

FINALLY
 
It is proven. Belief in Zeus or an invisible magical unicorn is as bad as belief in God if not better. Suppose creation really needs a creator. Then what matters is not what creates but that something creates. So a creator could be a witch or an invisible unicorn or anything.  Creation is a magic doctrine which means it tells us nothing about what did the creating so we can say the gnome down the garden did it.

 

Do you use the same logic to debunk Thor or super-aliens with invisible technology who are kind as you do God? YES!!  And we know that such technology seems more probable than outright magic or miracle.

 

The logic that there is a God is based on, "I pray and God shows he is with me by helping me in response to my prayer."  That ultimately reigns over any argument from creation or design that there is a God. It directs one to arguments for one does not want to think God is just a make-believe friend.  The "sensing" of God in prayer suggests a relational god who you can connect with while the arguments only show you there may be a God there. It is the difference between meeting John and knowing from arguments that there is a John.  Christians argue that Thor etc cannot answer prayer.  But the pagans in fact thought he could.  It is all in the head.  So the logic by which you reject pagan gods applies to the Christian God too.  The only way to debunk gods is to point out that coincidence explains their answers to prayer.  And excuses are made by believers for when Jesus' Church is hit by lightening but when it is Thor's temple that is struck they say it shows Thor is impotent and not a real god.  There is no fairness in any of that.  When we say that, "Everybody is an atheist with most gods so we just go a step further and include them all", we are not being stupid.  We cannot be accused of throwing out good ideas about divinity with the bad ones.

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