Do I know for a fact that there is no God.
No.
I'm going to say that and I know that's going to upset some people, but, um, no, I don't
think that I could prove to you that God doesn't exist just like I couldn't prove to you there's
a flying pink unicorn in this room right now.
Just like I couldn't prove that there's a flying spaghetti monster out there.
I don't think you can disprove someone's belief.
That said, the definition of atheist, as far as I've always considered it, as far as I've
seen anywhere that matters, the definition of atheist is not someone who knows God doesn't
exist or could prove to you God doesn't exist.
It's someone who doesn't believe, God exists.
You know, if you take God out of the picture, my entire world functions the exact same way.
And so God doesn't change that for me.
So why throw something in there that doesn't make any sense.
I've never seen any evidence to suggest that God exists.
And every time- when I was growing up I thought I had that evidence, I thought I knew, like
look that traffic- that parking spot has opened, God must like me.
Or you know something good happened in my life, God must be looking out for me.
And now I realize a lot of that's just coincidence and a lot of that might have happened even
if God didn't exist.
So usually any time- I think the burden of proof is on religious people to explain to
me why God exists, and every single time what they give me are anecdotes and personal testimonies
which you know, o.k. that worked for you but that's not proof, that's just something that
you went through and maybe if I went through the same thing I would have a different explanation
for it.
It's funny because you sometimes hear, especially Christian will say like, "Oh no, someone prayed
and their limb grew back!" or something crazy like that and it's like "Oh really, where's
the video evidence of that, 'cause no one's ever seen it."
There's even a web site, called whywontgodhealamputees.com, I hope I'm getting that right, but that's
the idea, that Christians especially because they're the ones who tend to go around doing
apologist work, they can never prove to you why God doesn't- why God does exist.
They have stories, they have anecdotes.
They don't have proof, so they always try to throw the burden on atheist to do something
that no one else would be expected to do, which is "prove to me my delusions are wrong!"
Well I can't.
What I can show you is that when you take God out of the picture we can make sense of
just about anything and then when it comes to things like "Where did the Universe come
from?"
"Why are we hear on earth?"
Or at least I think the Universe question is more than philosophical, where did this
universe come from, I think we have some theories, and we could legitimately say "I don't have
an answer to that" what I'm not doing is jumping to this radical conclusion that "Well, God
must have poofed it into existence."
I don't have to do that.
I can be honest and say "There are some things I don't know.
There are some things I may never know.
But everything else I can try to find an explanation for."
In fact, that's what scientists do all the time.
They find explanations for things that we used to attribute to God.
There's even an argument called "God of the gaps" where you know if you say "God did all
of this stuff."
and then we find reasonable explanations for all of those things, we're painting God into
this smaller and smaller gap until at some point even that's going to go away.
So it's a silly idea to say that God does all this stuff when we have natural explanations
for it.
It's silly to make atheists explain why God doesn't exist because you can't explain to
me why there's no unicorn in the air right now that's invisible and you can't see it
or touch it.
I mean we could make up any symbol- I think Bertrand Russell had the "Flying Teapot" going
around the universe, like "You can't disprove it so I guess it must be there!", and we all
know that's a silly argument.
But you know, it gets very personal when you're talking about God instead of a teapot.
And that's why I think people are averse to talking about it.
My name is Hemant Mehta, I write at friendlyatheist.com and if you have any questions you'd like me
to answer or any comments about what you just heard, leave them in the comments below and
we'll take care of that.