As soon as I started questioning my belief in a "traditional" God, I came across the New Atheist Movement. The movement was led by Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, and Daniel Dennett, who were aptly referred to as The Four Horsemen. Collectively, they have published several books, participated and organized numerous debates, created documentaries and made strong political comments during their lifespan. Their criticisms and arguments centrally address the Western idea of God and religion, but many of those apply to the Eastern ideas as well. A good portion of this write-up would just be a summary of the third and fourth chapter of the book "The God Delusion" by Dawkins.

Definition of God

Whenever we discuss God, it is important to keep in mind what type of God we are talking about. Some of the popular ones are described below:

• The most popularly believed notion of a God is that of an omnipotent (all-powerful), omniscient(all-knowing), omnipresent, omni-benevolent, interventionist and personal God. This God deliberately created the universe and actively takes part in maintaining it. He answers to the prayers, rewards the ones who pray and believe in him. He has emotions like anger, and judges human actions. Dawkins refers to this as The God Hypothesis, and this is the idea of God that is extensively refuted.

• A Deist god is a passive non-interventionist god. He created the universe and left it alone.

• Pantheism is the belief that nature or universe, and the laws that govern them is God. It does not recognize a personal interventionist god. A closely related concept is that of Spinoza's God, in which Einstein popularly believed. Einstein’s God is a metaphysical placeholder for the universe’s rational structure, stripped of person-hood, will, or transcendence. The Vedantic concept of Brahman is also often compared to Pantheism.^[1]

There are several other conceptions of Gods, but I won't go into all of them. Note that the Eastern belief system also has a wide range of beliefs including polytheism, monotheism, monism, atheism, pantheism etc.

(Non)Existence of God

People have been arguing for and against the existence of God since millennia. An almost exhaustive list of these arguments can be found on its wiki page: Existence of God - Wikipedia. I'll list some that I find interesting

• Logical Arguments: From the Five Ways argument made by Aquinas in the 13th century to Kurt Gödel's ontological proof, there are several arguments that originated in the West trying to prove the existence of a personal god. The Nyaya school of Hindu philosophy, that deals with logic and reasoning also makes such arguments for and against the existence of God. One such argument is made in Nyayakusumanjali by Udayana, who lists nine arguments for the existence of a creator god.

• Argument from Personal Experience: People often cite anecdotal evidences like answered prayers, visions etc as an evidence. That which can be explained by random chance and the human tendency to recognize false patterns, should not need to invoke a supernatural entity. Similarly, epiphanies and "revelations" that come during intense meditation or more often due to tripping on drugs can be explained by brain's biochemistry.

• Problem of Evil: This is one of the popular argument that refutes the God hypotheses. In short, it states that the existence of an omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent god is inconsistent with the existence of evil and suffering. The 'evil' can be classified into two types: natural evil (earthquakes, floods, genetic diseases etc) and moral evil (murder etc). In the video essay Could God Be Evil?, Alex O'Connor talks about arguments made by J.L Mackie's against the existence of god and Stephen Law's idea of an evil god.^[2] The following counter arguments are often cited as an answer to the problem of evil.

  • God works in mysterious ways: This counter argument suggests that all this evil and suffering is necessary for the "greater good", and we as mere mortals cannot comprehend God's divine plan. The central issue is that the exact same argument can be made to conclude that god is malevolent.
  • Free Will: This argument says that moral evil is necessary for free will to exist. This does not explain the existence of natural evil, for which unfalsifiable religious arguments are invoked.

• God of the Gaps: Another way through which the idea of God is invoked is to fill the gaps in our scientific knowledge. By this logic, the definition of God has been shrinking exponentially over the past couple of centuries.

  • There is a common rhetoric that rationalists and atheists just replace the belief in God with "belief" in science. After all, how many of us have actually went and read the Origin of Species or verified all the calculations of quantum mechanics? My favorite enactment of this argument is in the TV show It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia's Science is a Liar sometimes. This reasoning is flawed. We are not blindly believing what the scientists tell us and taking their word for it like we do with most of the religious scriptures. The evidence that the scientific temperament works is all around us in the modern world.

• Anthropic Principle: Another reason given for the existence of God is the Anthropic principle, which suggests that the universe seems to be fine-tuned for the existence of life. If any of the fundamental constants of the universe were even slightly different, none of us would exist. This can be explained more easily by the observational-bias: we wouldn't be here asking this question if the universe wasn't exactly how it is.

• Infinite Regress: In simple words, if God created universe, who created God (ad infinitum)? This line of counter argument has been dramatically named as the Ultimate Boeing 747 gambit by Dawkins.

Footnotes