Arguments against Atheism?

How would one argue against an Atheist?

The argument I always used went as follows:

There are known unknowns and unknown unknowns. You can have information about something without knowing whether it exists.

By way of example, Bigfoot would almost certainly be classified as a primate. And a sasquatch would almost certainly have been photographed or found dead on a road by now if they existed. So we can assign a pretty low probability to the existence of Bigfoot.

We've never verified that extraterrestrial life exists, and we can't be certain that we aren't alone, but taking the vastness of the universe into consideration along with the fact that we know for certain conditions can be favorable for life, we can assign a high probability to some form of extraterrestrial life. Maybe or maybe not advanced life. ET moss (for example) is not terribly exciting, it is pretty likely.

You can run this little exercise for any hypothetical entity.

Can you do this for divine being(s)?

You can certainly rule out certain aspects of the god(s) of certain faiths that seem inconsistent with what we now know. Apollo probably doesn't pull the sun across the sky in a chariot, for example.

But can you rule out the core proposition of some all powerful being that exists outside of our range of detection? How much information do we even have about such a thing?

We don't actually know enough to even assign a probability to the notion.


That said, I've begun defining myself as an atheist, because then you bump up against the question of which divine entity. The God of Abraham? If so, which aspect? Father, son, holy ghost, YHWH, Allah, something else, all of the above? If not, which other god(s)? Zeus, Amaterasu, Zoroaster, Osiris, Odin? Or something else entirely, like some entity in another universe that programmed us as a simulation, and is for all intents and purposes God to us while being bound by its own constraints within the scope of its own reality?

Further, if we're going to be consistent and be agnostic about God, we have to be agnostic about all manner of fictional thing we have insufficient data on. Which is fine, but can lead to some strange positions.

And we have to explain why God is silent. Because it wants to be? Because it prefers to communicate through toast despite being omnipotent? Because the universe and our quest for meaning is a colossal game of hide and seek that it finds hilarious? Because it's just as scared of us as we are of it?

After a lot of complicated reasoning, I ended up deciding to apply the same rationale to god(s) that I apply to donuts in my house. That reasoning being, if I don't seem them there, it's pretty reasonable for me to assume they aren't there.

/r/agnostic Thread