Interpreting "God doesn't exist" [closed]

1. To avoid turning the “God versus no-God” question upside down:

   It was the theist who proposed a concept of God - not only one but even several different concepts.

   Then the atheist reacts saying: IMO there is no being with such properties.

2. Therefore: Having knowledge of a theist’s idea of God does not mean that an atheist shares the concept and believes in it.

Atheism is not technically "God (proper noun) doesn't exist". It's either:

• Saying no god or gods exist (strong atheism)
• Lacking belief in the existence of any god or gods (weak atheism)

"God" is very specific to monotheism, but there are also polytheistic religions, and even different monotheistic religions (or denominations within the same religion) propose their own versions of "God". Atheists don't accept any of those.

Basically, an atheist does not believe in (or rejects) the existence of any of the gods that's been proposed by others.

Similarly, we might reject the existence of all sentient aliens that's been proposed by others, including little green aliens, tall grey aliens, every alien from Men in Black, every alien from Doctor Who, every alien from Star Wars, etc. We might still maintain that there's a possibility of sentient aliens somewhere else in the universe, we just don't have good reason to accept the existence of any particular such aliens.

Of course, we have some understanding of these alien concepts. We might know what they look like, what they sound like, how they behave, and they may have been proposed to have done specific things in our world. But that doesn't lead to us believing they exist, because none of the aforementioned things are good reasons for believing something exists. None of these differentiate things that actually exist from things that have just been made up.

* One notable concept is pantheism. Some pantheists redefine things that exist (e.g. the universe) to be "God". An atheist might reject that definition not because the corresponding thing doesn't exist, but because it serves little purpose beyond creating confusion with other god concepts.

It's rather simple.

Atheists think God is a concept that humans came up with. There are a myriad of different reasons to think why humans did this. What the Atheist who doesn't believe in such concepts is saying is that these concepts are fundamentally wrong about the nature of reality.

Atheists are not claiming that the concept of God doesn't exist.

Since Frege and Russell, it has become common to treat existence as the property of a concept, rather than the property of an object. On this approach, to say, "God exists" does not state that some thing - God - has the property of existing, but rather that the concept "is a god" or "is divine" has at least one instance. Similarly, "God does not exist" states that the concept "is a god" has no instances. So it allows us to understand and speak of concepts without commitment to existence.

This approach is consonant with Kant's argument that existence is not a property of things. It has the merit of avoiding apparently nonsensical talk of non-existent objects and what properties they might or might not have. In formal logic, it takes the form of representing existence using quantifiers rather than using predicates, and of requiring that names always have a referent.

But this approach does face some issues. How do we state that some particular thing does not exist? Santa Claus does not exist. How do we talk about things with potential existence? Things that might have existed but actually do not? Or things that are fictional, or imaginary, or hypothetical? Before Russell, Meinong proposed an ontology in which such things are permitted to be the object of logical discourse, but they do not exist in the same way that real things exist. They may be said to subsist, or to be part of an extended domain of things that includes possible things that are not real.

On Meinong's approach, a non-existent thing may subsist without having actual existence, and it may have properties. On this view, a statement like "dragons breathe fire" is neither trivially true nor trivially false, just because there are no real dragons. Though it is problematic to say just what are the truth conditions of "dragons breathe fire".

Russell's approach to existence was a reaction against Meinong, and it has dominated and continues to be mainstream. But philosophers enjoy pushing on the boundaries of logic and they have found ways to talk about non-existent objects. One way to do this is to talk of possible worlds and of objects that exist in some possible world, but not the actual world. Another is to treat potential existence along the lines of the Meinongian category of subsistence. In formal logic, this approach may take the form of using free logic, which is a kind of logic that permits domains of things that do not exist, and names that have no referent.

Having an idea of a thing does not (necessarily) imply the existence of that thing. For example, I could tell you that the proper answer to your question is on page 231 of the "Liber de Veritate Divina" by Simon de Noze Caeruleo (1632). That gives you the ideas of a book, an answer, and an author. But none of those exist; I made them up out of whole cloth.

Or did I? 😈

For atheists, the concept of god is impoverished: it has few connections within the horizon of their understanding, and many of the connections they do have are negating or distancing. The concept of god is like a splinter under the skin of their mind. They can't quite push if out, so they wall it off and try to break it down. Theists have a rich concept of god; it is well-integrated and thoroughly connected within their horizon of understanding. Neither of those is right or wrong or good or bad. This is just like pointing out that people in Japan can't directly see the Eiffel Tower. The Eiffel Tower is over the horizon for them, and they'd have to broaden their perspective to see it. Theists and atheists both want the other to come over to their horizon of understanding, but neither wants to expand their horizons to encompass the other. It's an interesting pickle…

I would like to challenge the framing of your question: Atheism is an absence of belief at the root, not a refutation of the existence of a higher power. Stating "It does not matter or influence my morality/world-view if a higher power exists" makes me an atheist (not an agnostic or a non-aligned theist).

To use myself as an example, I am an atheist because the existence of God (or Gods) is irrelevant to how I feel I should live my life, and who I should strive to be. I am not unique in this belief either. The name for this (un)belief system is Secular Humanism. There is also no requirement for an atheist to disavow completely religious teachings. I will use myself as an example again, in that my moral code is based quite strongly on my interpretation of the biblical writings related to the Judeo-Christian faith, specifically the Roman Catholic New Testament passages.

The use of Occam's Razor, or Pascals Wager, or any number of other logical and philosophical tools are important in both the information and the critical thinking that can be obtained from their proper application, but cannot inherently prove or disprove divinity on any level. As a result, the logically correct course of action is to strive for morality that is divine ignorant, or, if you will, Atheist in nature.

To bring it together, there are a good number of atheists who simply don't care one way or another if a God exists, as it won't change their morality.

Atheism vs Agnosticism: Agnostics don't care, Atheists don't believe. A large number of Atheists are Agnostic in principle. They do not believe in a higher power, but also do not care if there could be a higher power either. Clarifying my first paragraph - Atheism doesn't have to be loud and confrontational. Atheist is an absence of belief that can be loud, or can be quiet, or anything in between. Secular Humanism is Atheism, but it can also be Agnosticism. The two states are not mutually exclusive.

So having knowledge of the idea means you believe in it?

We perceive it as one of the many inventions people did out of their imagination. Like superheroes.

We do not need to deeply comprehend the concept because this is a concept that is not needed - there is no place where we must plug "something" (say, a god) to help us in any way.

The things we see we can explain. Or not - but we will hopefully one day (thunder was an act of god until someone explained what it actually is). Even if we don't know, we do not have the urge to invent "something" to plug the hole - we can live without knowing.

Note that the "knowledge" you get by inventing a god does not bring you further - you cannot build on it to explain something else.

If we could say

we cannot explain what happened right after the Big Bang (up to about Planck's time). But if we say it is god who did it, we immediately get the equation for the mass distribution before that time (M(t) = a crazy equation)

then all physicists would be cardinals

A square circle does not exist

So having knowledge of the idea means you believe in it?

This "conclusion" follows in no way whatsoever.

Just like I know what the concept of a "square circle" is [something that a) has 4 corners and b) does not have any corners], one could give a definition of what a god would be. The "could" is essential. It's not "is". We can define non-existent things, we have ideas and concepts of fictitious objects.

For example, we knew what Darmstadtium would be (an atom with that specific number of protons) for a decent while. We did - for a good part of that while - not know if it would be possible to exist in reality before we created it for the first time. We only had a rough guess of it's (likely) properties, we didn't even have it's name. For the later-produced elements even more so. Some were theorized decades before their proof of concept. Similarly we have conceptualized some even heavier nuclei that may or may not be physically possible to create (some of which were eventually confirmed, some not). Given the increasing restrictions on nuclear binding forces, there are good arguments that some cannot possibly exist. We still know about them as a concept.

Or look at Harry Potter's magic wands. They have a very clear definition, functions, power and way to (in the fiction) create them etc. Yet they aren't real. Or take StarWars' Star Destroyers, where we (for some models) even have a detailed deck layout, crew numbers and so on. Do they exist? Nope. I like them, I find the idea and universe cool. I even thought about buying a model (which then wold be a real thing). And yet i still don't believe in their existence (outside of an existence as fictitious concept if you count that, which for the context of your question or atheism we don't).

Edit: I just realized my opening sentence sounds like I am saying that god certainly doesn't exist, which is not the main point. My main point is that the existence of something isn't required for the concept of it to exist (in the case where god is real I don't need to argue why/how we have a concept of them).

I think you fail to understand because you're not putting yourself in the atheist shoes. Let me help.

You were told God is real and you believe it (for your own reason that I'm in no way mocking) Atheists were told God is real and said "He is? How do you know?" If the only answer is "because the bible tells me so" that's simply not good enough for us. It's an extraordinary claim that we are NOT going to take your word for.

We do not START OUT thinking "God doesn't exist" In fact, many of us start out being told he does exist, accepted it until we questioned it and were told "Don't question it. Just believe"

My stance (and many atheists) is that there is simply no proof of this God you all claim exists. To us he's just as real as Odin or Allah.

Please do not misconstrue this as me trying to get any of you to question your faith. I've seen the good Christianity can bring people. I've seen it cause problems for people too but more good than bad. So i think it (while not correct) is a good set of morals to live by. I just don't have a need for it.

I find life itself pretty dope and amazing by itself.

I'll leave you with this. Your body has teeth because you need to chew. It has lung because you need to breath. It has eyes because you need to see. No human was born with a cross or turban.

The early Christian martyrs were executed for atheism, because they did not believe in the Roman gods. How did early Christians do your "no God thing"? Did they need a really clear idea of every Roman deity that they rejected? If not, doesn't this undermine your original point, assuming you actually had one?

The Romans were generally tolerant of gods that other people believed in; maybe the Romans had genuinely missed one or more of the many Gods, and they sometimes adopted Gods that they might have missed such as Cybele.

In Rome, Cybele became known as Magna Mater ("Great Mother"). The Roman state adopted and developed a particular form of her cult after the Sibylline oracle in 205 BC recommended her conscription as a key religious ally in Rome's second war against Carthage (218 to 201 BC).

See also evocatio - a ritual designed to seduce an enemy's tutelary deity.

The Romans didn't have a problem with people worshipping a new god named "Christ"; the problem was people refusing to worship Jupiter Optimus Maximus, and putting the Roman state into danger (by upsetting its most important protector).

TLDR:

How do you go about denying the existence of god(s) in religions other than your own? Same thing for atheists.

And why are you assuming it implies anything other than what they literally said?

The rest of the answer:

There are thousands of religions and most of them have at least one god. If you are in a monotheistic religion, your disbelief in the number of gods is only different than mine by 1. Do you have an understanding of every god you don't believe exists?

God isn't a proper noun, to me, as if it's a name. It's a word to describe an idea. Me saying "God doesn't exist" is the same thing as me saying "Your god doesn't exist" or "Your gods don't exist". The word "god" is capitalized simply because it's the beginning of a sentence. I could say "GOATs don't exist", while verbally you would hear "Goats don't exist", and you'd probably think I was referring to the barnyard animal, instead of the acronym*.

Also, if we are in a conversation where you are trying to tell me about your religion and I say "God doesn't exist", I'm using the assumption that you know I'm talking about your god. If we were having a conversation about Jeff Goldblum, and I said "Jeff isn't really that good an actor", you would understand that I was referring to Jeff Goldblum, not Jeff from work or Jeff your neighbor. I wouldn't even need to have an understanding of your god to deny it's existence, let alone a belief in it, as you wouldn't have had time to explain it to me.

To me and many atheists, the whole idea of a god makes absolutely no rational sense in reality. When someone talks about a god to us, it's like talking about myth and magic. Trying to describe your god to me doesn't change my idea that they don't exist. There are plenty of science fiction and fantasy stories that go into great depth about their universe and people, but that doesn't make them real. Does someone explaining the Spaghetti Space Monster to you make it real? Do you have to believe in it to say it doesn't exist?

In fact, I consider the Bible and other religious texts to be historical fictions. For instance, the Bible makes wide use of stories from many other religions to fill it's pages. Sure, there are parts of it that can be corroborated in secular history, but so can the movies "WindTalkers", "Apollo 13", "Bohemian Rhapsody", and "Gladiator", but no one thinks they are 100% factual in every movement and word. Even as good as "Apollo 13" is, the Mr. Coffee machine referred to when talking about how much power the LEM had to get the astronauts back to Earth hadn't been invented yet. And "Bohemian Rhapsody" used the original film of the "Live Aid" concert to get as accurate as they could, but a side-by-side comparison shows they aren't 100% accurate. But even as accurate as these movies may be in parts, they are still fiction.

For example, the biblical story of Noah stems from an ancient Sumerian story of a family of river merchants caught in a yearly flood. Otherwise, you'd have to believe that the surviving Noah family went through a period of significant incest to repopulate all of humanity.

Also, I personally believe that Jesus went to India, maybe even Tibet or China, and learned Buddhism, then brought it back and rephrased it in terms his Jewish friends and countrymen could understand. The story of Jesus in the desert where Satan tempts him sounds a lot like the story of Buddha and the Bodhi tree. There's other references that sound like Tao, the Eight Fold Path. So when Jesus refers to god, he may be talking about Buddha, who isn't a god and did actually exist. But I digress.

Bringing it back to the original topic, the Hebrew/Abrahamic god is referred to as Allah, in Islam and some sects of Christianity, as a proper name, so it needs to be capitalized. The Bible says that god has proper names, but they are rarely used. God is more of a title, like Lord, than a proper name. It's simply regular usage that has people believing and/or using god as a proper name, like The Bard.

Thor doesn't exist. Ra doesn't exist. Santa doesn't exist. Quetzalcoatl doesn't exist. Do you have to believe in any of them to agree with me that they don't exist?**

Ok, so Thor does exist. He's all over the Marvel Universe movies and comic books, right? And his real name is Chris Hemsworth.

* BTW, how do you know that someone is "The GOAT"? Maybe there was someone in past history that was far superior and you just don't know it. And saying "of all time" implies that no one will ever be better than them in the forever future. Taken literally, that's an extreme statement and ignores all the performance enhancing medicines and genetic diversity of the future. And if we aren't alone in the universe, some other species may make that person look like an amateur.

** Yes, I said Santa, not Satan, and on purpose. I was going to include Satan, but wondered how many people I could catch if I didn't.

Following the definition of the word “Exist” from the Latin “Existere” (Ex- ‘From’ Sistere ‘To Stand’) God technically doesn’t exist (from the Thomist view). Rather God Subsists the universe. He is the being upon which reality is sustained. All things must be from something else except God. He simply is. YHWH is often translated as “I am” or “I am who is”.

"The fool hath said in his heart, There is no God." (Psalm 14-1) Though I may be one of those fools, allow me to play the God's advocate a bit.

There have been at least two famous attempts to prove God's existence purely based on an idea we have of God. First, Anselm who defined God as id quo maius cogitare nequit (that compared to which nothing greater can be thought). And since it is greater to exist than not to exist, it follows, or so he thought, that God exists. Next, Descartes who finds the idea of God in his mind as the idea of an infinite being and argues that the human mind could not have been the source of this idea (and it clearly surpasses any empirical phenomenon), and thus the idea could only have come from God himself. In his reply to Hobbes's objections Descartes wrote

I proved the existence of God by using the idea of God that is within me.

Anselm's argument can be interpreted also in Cartesian terms. Kant's facile criticism that "existence is not a predicate" does not at all do justice to this argument. (For a more indepth analysis see Zalta and Oppenheimer's analysis of Anselm.)

Now, we, analytical and logical thinkers, are probably mostly inclined to say that an idea is "just something in someone's head". So, based on a mere idea - a mere phantasma - we can never know that anything exists. (Gaunilo, a contemporary of Anselm, already had a similar criticism.) But then we run into our contemporary, someone who's seen as one of the greatest logicians of the last century, Kurt Gödel, and discover, to our dismay, that he too seems to seriously have believed in a variant of the ontological proof. Fortunately, he didn't publish it, and some of his notes do suggest he wasn't competely certain that "necessary being" was really a coherent concept, but it's disconcerting.

And then there is Michael Dummett's quasi-onto-theological proof of God's existence (or, if it's not a proof, at least it's a kind of meta-logical-linguistic purely conceptual argument that the concept of God is "needed"):

Since it makes no sense to speak of a world, or the world, independently of how it is apprehended, this one world must be the world as it is apprehended by some mind, yet not in any particular way, or from any one perspective rather than any other, but simply as it is: it constitutes the world as it is in itself. We saw that how God apprehends things as being must be how they are in themselves.

But now we must say the converse: how things are in themselves consists in the way that God apprehends them. That is the only way in which we can make sense of our conviction that there is such a thing as the world as it is in itself, which we apprehend in certain ways and other beings apprehend in other ways. To conceive of the world as it is in itself requires conceiving of a mind that apprehends it as it is in itself.

(in: Thought and Reality, 2006, based on 1996 Gifford lectures)

Of course, what could we expect from someone who converted to Catholicism, even if he became "the most notable interpreter of Frege" (wiki)? But what is a simple atheist to make of this? I'm inclined to say that the argument may be valid, but if so, it's not sound. It shows that "the world itself" or "things as they are in themselves" and "God" are correlates, but that may mean no more than that they both are phantasmata. Or if not, then I see no reason to not equate the two. Why not see God simply as the world as it is, nature unfolding itself? Why not see God's mind as the order in the world - or vice-versa? (Assuming "there is" order and that the perception of order is not entirely due to a local pocket of non-randomness inside global chaos!) If so, then I can be an atheist, theist, pantheist and panentheist all at the same time...

The poster-boy of the modern crop of atheists, Bertrand Russell, spoke on this topic with a nuance that is more and more rare nowadays: [emphasis mine
^{except where indicated}]

Whenever I go into a foreign country or a prison or any similar place they always ask me what is my religion.

I never know whether I should say "Agnostic" or whether I should say "Atheist". It is a very difficult question and I daresay that some of you have been troubled by it.

As a philosopher, if I were speaking to a purely philosophic audience I should say that I ought to describe myself as an Agnostic, because I do not think that there is a conclusive argument by which one prove that there is not a God.

On the other hand, if I am to convey the right impression to the ordinary man in the street I think I ought to say that I am an Atheist, because when I say that I cannot prove that there is not a God, I ought to add equally that I cannot prove that there are not the Homeric gods.

Don't Be Too Certain!
^{Russell's emphasis}

[As a rationalist...] To my mind the essential thing is that one should base one's arguments upon the kind of grounds that are accepted in science, and one should not regard anything that one accepts as quite certain, but only as probable in a greater or a less degree.

Not to be absolutely certain is, I think, one of the essential things in rationality.

Excerpted from here
From a time when discussions here were more philosophical than the current polemic fashion this older question may also be of value.

So it is very clear. The doyen of atheists, when speaking to the philosophical cognoscenti, calls himself an agnostic.

So to answer your question pointedly:

• You can say I'm not interested in God — irreligious
• You can say I dont believe in God — »layman« atheist
• You can say I dont know — agnostic. The sensible view according to Russell
• But you cant say I believe in no God + I am a rational philosopher — Sorry! That juxtaposition is, as programmers would say: Type Error!!

Added Later

For a more personal side of how Russell guarded his rationalism/scepticism with tentative nuance see.