Benjamin Andrews
When non-religious people demand that believers prove that gods exist, the religious then demand from non-believers evidence that gods do not exist because believers cannot provide evidence. Well here is the evidence that gods are man-made fantasies, just like spirits, heaven, hell, the supernatural, and many others.
Our prehuman forefathers were hunted by powerful land creatures and birds. The emotion of fear and the capability of unlimited imagination played a great role in the survival of an otherwise quite helpless and vulnerable animal. The fear emotion produced the fight-or-flight hormones and imagination will anticipate the potential for danger, such as from waving high grass that could be caused by menacing animals rather than just the wind. These tendencies have been valuable.
Fear is a powerful emotion and our imagination is unlimited, as shown in our literature, songs, plays, and movies. Our forefathers passed their imaginary tales to the next generation, with stories, songs, and dance until the invention of writing made some of them permanent. Now we come to the crux of the matter. Our capacity for imagination and the diversity of the tales suggest that these stories are man-made.
You are born with instincts such as fear and imagination, not with any religion or knowledge of gods. These concepts are indoctrinated by other humans and are therefore made by man, not reality.
Any Christian (or other devoutly religious person) could counter that “logic” and “presumption”, while compelling, are not proof that god does not exist. Interestingly, in 1997, molecular biologist Paul Boyer, along with John Walker and Jens Skou, shared a Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the “elucidation of the enzymatic mechanism underlying the synthesis of adenosine triphosphate”. In other words, “the way all organisms get energy from their environments and process it to sustain life and fuel their activities”. No environment equals no fuel.
While the enzymatic mechanism does not preclude the existence of all gods, it does disprove the existence of the god of Abraham as expressed so eloquently by Christian apologist John Lennox, who is non-wavering in his assertion, supported by 20 Bible verses, that “God is eternal”. “Eternal” obviously must take in the period before the big bang, during which such a void would preclude the existence of any “fuel”. No fuel, no organism equals no Abrahamic god.
True enough, there are alternate ways to disprove the existence of gods. And for many around here, the fact of the Toronto Maple Leafs not having won the Stanley Cup in 58 years is sufficient proof that there is no god.
Good point, Alex, but what if the god-fella is a trickster god? There’s a ton more evidence of the existence of Loki than of that good and just Abrahamic god-fella. Hmmm, thinking about it, maybe they’re one and the same, just like typical people? Okay, so god was made in the image of man, as you surely agree.