I want to twin this thread with On generic failures found in arguments for the existence of god.
Problem of suffering / evil (overreach and under-argued premises)
Generic evil arguments often:
- Target only an omnipotent, omniscient, perfectly good, interventionist God, leaving deism, finite-god views, process theism, panentheism, impersonal ultimates, and even a Deus malus (evil or limited god) untouched.
- Assume humans can reliably identify “pointless” or “gratuitous” evil, ignoring skeptical-theist worries about our epistemic limits regarding cosmic-scale goods and the “noseeum” inference (I don’t see a reason, therefore there is none).
- Underweight beauty, order, moral growth, and joy, and dismiss rather than engage serious theodicies (free will, soul-making, greater goods, unknown goods, redemptive suffering).
- Treat theodicy as a zero-sum game instead of a cumulative case across different theistic frameworks.
- Ignore that free will is often presented as a great good that makes moral evil possible; objections that focus only on human suffering sometimes neglect how this trade-off is argued.
- Handle animal suffering inadequately: some historical theists (e.g. Descartes) treated animals as automatons, a view many now reject; generic anti-theistic arguments often assume a particular view of animal consciousness and moral status without arguing for it.
Divine hiddenness and “long wait” arguments (over-specified expectations)
Hiddenness and “why so late?” arguments often:
- Assume a perfectly loving God would make God’s presence unmistakably known to all non-resistant persons, without adequately justifying that expectation or specifying what degree of manifestation is required.
- Overlook how widespread religious belief is and how many people report powerful, sometimes life-altering experiences of the divine; dismissing these experiences as “just psychology” may be partly true, but it is also a broad, easily applied explanation that risks ignoring the scale and phenomenological force of the data.
- Conflate access to explicit doctrinal revelation with access to God, neglecting ideas like general revelation, conscience, or judgment based on response to available light.
- Treat divine silence as total outside particular cultures, ignoring conversion stories and cross-cultural reports of encounter.
- Assume that a 2,000-year gap (or longer) between cosmic origins and a particular revelation is evidence against God, without engaging claims that divine self-sacrifice or salvation is retroactive as well as prospective, or that God’s purposes are not bound by human timelines.
Religious diversity / conflicting revelations (non-sequitur from disagreement)
Arguments that “thousands of contradictory religions prove none are true” often:
- Confuse social geography of belief with epistemic truth-value; disagreement in medicine, ethics, or frontier science does not entail those domains are empty.
- Ignore possibilities of partial revelation, culturally filtered access to a core reality, or convergence on shared truths (first cause, moral order, golden-rule ethics, mystical experience).
- Undermine confidence in particular doctrinal claims more than they establish generic atheism about any transcendent ground.
Evolutionary / psychological debunking (“religion is just an evolved byproduct / comforting illusion”)
These arguments often:
- Commit a genetic fallacy by treating the causal origin of a belief as automatically undercutting its truth.
- Ignore that the same cognitive faculties produce mathematical, scientific, and perceptual beliefs we generally trust; selective skepticism needs extra justification.
- Overlook the recalcitrant, sometimes terrifying, morally demanding character of many religious experiences (the “Wholly Other”), which does not fit a simple comfort-projection model.
- Fail to engage the intersubjective patterns and life-altering consequences many report.
“No empirical evidence” / “there’s not an iota of evidence for God” (argument from ignorance)
These claims often:
- Equate absence of laboratory-detectable entities with absence of any warrant, ignoring fine-tuning, consciousness, mathematics’ applicability, moral experience, and contingent existence as philosophically relevant data.
- Slide from methodological naturalism (a research constraint) to metaphysical naturalism without additional argument. (Internet atheists do this all the time).
- Assume God is a competing scientific hypothesis within the universe rather than the metaphysical ground of the universe itself.
- Use a narrow, empiricist (evidentialist) definition of “evidence” that excludes logical, modal, phenomenological, and moral considerations.
- Commit a classic argumentum ad ignorantiam: “absence of evidence is not evidence of absence,” especially when the entity in question is defined as transcendent and non-empirical.
- Overlook that some theists regard certain arguments (e.g. Anselm’s ontological argument) as unrefuted in any fully satisfactory way, even if not universally accepted.
“Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence” (misapplied standard)
This slogan often:
- Assumes a contested epistemology without arguing for it; the principle itself is not empirically established.
- Ignores that theists often claim there is extraordinary evidence (e.g. for the resurrection: multiple eyewitness reports, early creedal formulas, rapid spread of belief, willingness of early followers to die for their testimony, the long-term historical impact of Christianity, the existence of ~2 billion Christians today).
- Treats “extraordinary” in a vague, movable way so that no amount of historical or experiential data can ever count as sufficient.
Occam’s razor / “God is an unnecessary hypothesis” (misuse of simplicity)
Parsimony arguments often:
- Treat simplicity as the sole or decisive theoretical virtue, undervaluing explanatory scope (existence itself, consciousness, normativity, reason).
- Assume God and the natural world are competing posits at the same level, ignoring classical theism’s claim that God is the ground of existence, not an extra object inside it.
- Ignore that “the universe just exists” is itself a brute-fact claim with intellectual cost; parsimony is not a metaphysical free lunch.
- Conflate entity-counting with genuine theoretical economy; a single fundamental principle can be more economical than many unexplained brute facts.
- Overlook that the question “why is there something rather than nothing?” remains live; a “universe that just is” may be ontologically simpler in one sense but explanatorily thinner in another.
“Who created God?” / infinite regress counter (straw-man cosmology)
This objection often:
- Attacks a straw-man cosmological argument (“everything needs a cause”) rather than the actual claim that contingent, beginning, or composite things require an explanation.
- Applies a rule for contingent objects to a non-contingent, necessary being, missing the definition of necessary existence.
- Ignores that classical theism defines God as eternal and uncreated; the objection therefore flies against both traditional metaphysics and modern cosmology that posits a beginning (e.g. Big Bang cosmology) while still requiring an account of why there is a beginning at all.
“God of the gaps” blanket rejection (mechanism vs. ground)
Generic “gaps” objections often:
- Fail to distinguish empirical gaps within a physical model from principled ontological boundaries of physical explanation.
- Treat arguments from fine-tuning, logical laws, or contingency as ignorance-based rather than inferences from what we do know about information, constants, and causality.
- Attack a naive gap-filler theism while ignoring sophisticated cosmological, modal, axiological, or teleological arguments that do not depend on current ignorance.
- Assume that because science explains mechanisms, no further question about why there is a law-governed system remains.
Argument from bad design / dysteleology (cherry-picking and category error)
“Clumsy biology disproves design” arguments often:
- Treat God as a 19th-century mechanical engineer optimizing for localized efficiency, ignoring multi-variable trade-offs (developmental flexibility, adaptability, systemic resilience).
- Conflate “imperfect by human engineering metrics” with “unintended.”
- Engage in cherry-picking/confirmation bias: focusing on a few apparent flaws (choking risk, retinal configuration, vestigial structures) while ignoring the overall functional integration and “perfection in form” of living systems.
- Assume that an all-powerful, all-knowing, all-good God would produce organisms optimized for human intuitions about good design rather than for evolutionary, developmental, or ecological constraints.
Parochialism / geographical contingency and “long wait” together
“Your religion is just your birthplace” and “why wait so long?” arguments often:
- Assume divine hiddenness is total outside one culture and one historical window, ignoring ideas like general revelation, conscience, or retroactive/prospective salvation.
- Confuse access to explicit doctrinal knowledge with access to God.
- Ignore conversion stories where people reject their birth culture’s religion, and cross-cultural reports of encounter with the divine.
- Anthropomorphize God by assuming divine purposes must be human-scaled in time, space, and educational level (e.g. “iron-age peasants”).
“Cosmic sadist” / horrendous evil plus free will
Arguments from horrors often:
- Assume that if a reason for evil exists, we would know it, and if we don’t know it, no reason exists (“noseeum” inference).
- Ignore redemptive or mystery theodicies and second-order goods (courage, forgiveness, sacrificial love) that may require a world with real obstacles.
- Treat a sentimental view of God as the only theistic option, neglecting classical views where God’s primary goal is beatific vision or deep relationship rather than comfort.
- Overlook that free will is argued to be a great good that makes moral evil possible; objections sometimes assume free will is not worth the cost without arguing for that assessment.
Projection / Freudian argument (genetic fallacy about religious experience)
“God is just a father-figure projection” arguments often:
- Commit the genetic fallacy by conflating origin with truth.
- Ignore the terrifying, morally demanding, ego-shattering character of many religious experiences, which contradicts a simple wish-fulfillment model.
- Overlook cross-cultural consistency and transformative power of such experiences.
Omnipotence paradoxes (“rock too heavy to lift”) (category error)
These often:
- Treat omnipotence as the ability to do logically impossible things, whereas classical theism defines it as the ability to do all that is logically possible and consistent with divine nature.
- Apply finite, physical categories (weight, lifting) to a non-physical, infinite act of existence, committing a category error.
Russell’s teapot / burden-of-proof overreach (asymmetric standards)
Teapot-style arguments often:
- Presuppose there is no independent positive case for theism, ignoring cosmological, fine-tuning, moral, and experiential arguments.
- Treat atheism as a neutral default rather than a metaphysical claim (“there is no God”) that also carries a burden.
- Equate “you can’t disprove God” with “therefore God probably doesn’t exist,” which is again an argument from ignorance when a positive case is on the table.
Overgeneralised naturalism (“everything is explainable by science”)
These arguments often:
- Ignore that science is methodologically naturalistic by design; saying “science hasn’t found God” can be like using a metal detector to look for oxygen.
- Conflate explanatory success within nature with proof that nothing beyond nature exists.
Category-mistake arguments about God as a physical object
“There’s no evidence of God in the universe” arguments often:
- Treat God as a being with location, mass, or energy signature, whereas classical theism sees God as the ground of existence, not an object within it.
- Demand empirical evidence for something defined as non-empirical, mismatching the standard of proof to the ontological category.
Conflation of religion with God (anti-theism and institutional critique)
Arguments that attack religious hypocrisy, corruption, violence, or dogma often:
- Assume this undermines the existence of God, though religion is a human institution and God is a metaphysical claim; critiquing the former does not logically disprove the latter.
- Ignore massive body counts of explicitly secular regimes and ideologies, treating religion as a unique cause of violence rather than one factor among many.
- Slide into antitheism (“God is undesirable, a celestial despot, thought-crime enforcer”) and then treat undesirability as evidence of falsehood; but “I don’t want X to be true” does not make X false.
Anthropomorphic fallacy (“God wouldn’t do X”)
These arguments often:
- Assume God has human psychology, motives, or moral intuitions, whereas classical theism explicitly denies that God has human-like mental states.
- Critique a deity no serious theologian believes in, then present the critique as decisive against theism as such.
“The universe is too big and old for humans to matter”
This argument often:
- Anthropomorphizes God by assuming divine purposes must be human-scaled in time and space.
- Treats physical scale as a proxy for significance, confusing aesthetic intuition with logical inference.
Incoherence-of-theism overgeneralization
Arguments that “God is incoherent” often:
- Show difficulties for a particular package of divine attributes (omnipotence, timelessness, simplicity, foreknowledge, freedom, perfect goodness) but then slide to “God is incoherent” simpliciter.
- Ignore that apparent tensions may motivate conceptual revision rather than elimination of theism.
Fine-tuning and cosmic-order dismissals
Some generic anti-theistic moves:
- Claim fine-tuning provides no evidence at all rather than acknowledging it may shift credences slightly without settling the question.
- Treat all order as obviously impersonal, which can be as question-begging as treating all order as obviously designed.
Consciousness and normativity dismissals
Generic naturalistic claims often:
- Assert that consciousness and morality are fully physical while relying on contested reductions; the existence of an explanatory gap does not automatically vindicate atheism.
- Ignore ongoing disputes about qualia, intentionality, and normative facts.
Moral objections to theism
Arguments that theism is morally objectionable (e.g. because of dubious theodicies or divine commands) often:
- Challenge the acceptability of certain theistic views, not the truth of all possible divine realities.
- Conflate moral criticism of particular doctrines or practices with metaphysical disproof.
Overgeneralization from local failures
Generic atheistic moves often:
- Refute Christianity, Islam, or classical theism and then act as though every possible god-concept is refuted globally.
- Show that some religious believers reason poorly and then infer that all theistic reasoning is unsound.
Hidden asymmetries in standards
Generic arguments sometimes:
- Demand that theism meet scientific standards of falsifiability while allowing naturalism to rest on brute facts or unprovable metaphysical assumptions.
- Treat theistic mystery as a vice while treating naturalistic mystery (why these laws? why something rather than nothing?) as acceptable.
Under-specified target problem
Many anti-theistic arguments:
- Successfully lower credence in classical theism but leave deism, pantheism, panentheism, process theism, finite-god theories, or abstract necessary-being theories untouched.
- Treat “God” as one hypothesis when it is a family of hypotheses, so local refutations do not establish generic atheism.
“Magic bullet” / mystery move (double-edged)
The “God’s ways are higher / mysterious” response can:
- Be used to insulate any theistic claim from criticism, putting God beyond human comprehension and making the position unfalsifiable.
- But generic anti-theistic arguments that rely on strong claims about what God would or would not do are equally vulnerable: if God is truly beyond our full comprehension, then confident assertions about divine motives, expected revelations, or required interventions become epistemically risky.
- Thus, the “magic bullet” is not a proof of theism, but it does highlight that both sides can overreach when they claim to know what a transcendent reality must be like.
Kindly put the following argument in its appropriate category. I can’t for the life of me figure out which category from the listed above this argument falls under.
Argument from the failure of prayer.
Prayer doesn’t work. This has been tested and proven. In fact those who were prayed for fared worse. I believe they used patients in hospitals to conduct this experiment. The test group had someone pray for them and the control group weren’t prayed for.
If God exists \to prayer should work
Prayer doesn’t work
Hence,
God doesn’t exist
This ignores the fact that there are instances of people recovering spontaneously, without any medical intervention, from a life-threatening illness. These lucky people prayed to saints/God for a cure and their prayers were answered.
(P.S. There’s not a single case of an amputee growing their limbs back despite praying hard)
Wiki. Fire at will.