Originally posted by TheWall
There are obviously specific arguments that can be levied against particular religions based on particular religious teachings. But I think that overall the most powerful general argument for atheism is a general evidence-based one: We can reasonably expect that if there was a god then the world would be different in a number of ways. (this is somewhat cheating in terms of being a single argument because there are sub-components):
(a) there would be less diversity of religions within the world and it would be more obvious that a particular religion was right rather than them all having a roughly equal lack of evidence for them
(b) there would be obvious miracles that occurred in the world, and the invention of everyone having cellphones and video cameras should mean that youtube should have a hundred thousand compelling videos of miracles happening, and the international media would be able to provide video footage of a person's leg growing back as the shaman prayed over the person.
(c) Religious people who felt they had been 'given a message from God' would be right more often and agree with each other more.
(d) there would be less naturally occurring suffering in the world (disease, earthquakes, etc).
(e) a deity could create the world and the life on it instantly, but everything we know about astronomy and biology tells us that naturalistic processes over billions of years were what formed our galaxy, our solar system, our planet, and evolved life on it.
To phrase it as a single argument: The world as I observe it does not show any of the kinds of thing I would expect to see in a world created by or actively interfered with by a deity, whereas the observed world seems entirely consistent with the lack of a deity. Thus the weight of the observed evidence points to atheism (or something close to it - e.g. that the deity's interference is minuscule).
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