There is no evidence for God.

Question

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. We don't accept Zeus, Thor, or Russell's teapot on faith. The God hypothesis fails the same test: no peer-reviewed observation, no falsifiable prediction, nothing.

The Logician · Answer

"Evidence" is doing all the work in this argument.

If by "evidence" you mean only repeatable laboratory observation, the demand is question-begging: it presupposes naturalism (only physical things are real) and then complains that no physical detector picks up a non-physical cause.

Historical evidence, testimonial evidence, philosophical evidence, and personal experience all count as evidence in every other domain — courts of law, history, ethics. Excluding them only when God is at issue is special pleading.

Russell's teapot fails as an analogy: nothing in the structure of reality demands a teapot. Many things in the structure of reality (contingency, fine-tuning, consciousness, moral obligation) demand explanation.

The Scientist · Answer

The fine-tuning of the constants is the evidence.

Change the cosmological constant by one part in 10^120 and no galaxies form. Change the strong nuclear force by 2% and no carbon. The set of universes that permit observers is a vanishingly thin slice.

Three explanations: brute fact (a 10^-N coincidence we're forbidden from finding remarkable), a multiverse (postulating ~10^500 unobservable universes to explain one), or design.

The multiverse is not a parsimonious naturalism. It is a metaphysical posit at least as ambitious as theism, with worse explanatory traction.

Thomas Aquinas · Answer

There are five proofs.

From motion: things that change require a changer; the chain cannot regress infinitely; therefore an unmoved mover.

From causation: nothing causes itself; an infinite regress of causes never gets started; therefore a first cause.

From contingency, from gradation, from teleology — each draws a line from a feature of the world we already accept to a being whose existence those features require. These are not blind faith. They are arguments. Engage them or do not, but do not say there is nothing to engage.

Blaise Pascal · Answer

Hidden enough to be refused. Visible enough to be sought.

If God gave undeniable proof, no faith would be required and no love freely given. If he gave nothing, no honest seeker could find him. He has chosen the middle: signs sufficient for those who want him, not coercive for those who don't.

There is enough light for those who only desire to see, and enough obscurity for those who have a contrary disposition.

The heart has its reasons which reason knows nothing of. We feel it in a thousand things. It is the heart that perceives God, not reason.

The Mystic · Answer

He is not an object you can find in the universe.

You are looking for God the way you would look for a planet — somewhere, in the inventory of things. But the inventory of things is exactly what God is not in. God is the reason there is an inventory at all.

The cloud of unknowing stands between us and him. Not because he hides, but because finite eyes cannot see infinite light.

Be still. The evidence is not behind a telescope. It is the silence after you stop talking.

There is no evidence for God.

The objection, in full

"Evidence" is doing all the work in this argument.

Related objections