An argument I had against the idea of having an all knowing ‘God’ in any religion would be that such an idea could be completely dismantled if you could find one point of failure your opposition agrees with. Any prediction made that fails can be used to dismiss the idea of an all knowing creator completely.
As a programmer, I think about it like the following:
0001 boolean[] predictions = new boolean[]{ 0002 prediction1(), 0003 prediction2(), 0004 /* ... */ 0005 predictionN() 0006 }; 0007 0008 public static void main(String[] args){ 0009 boolean allKnowing = true; 0010 for(boolean test : predictions) 0011 allKnowing &= test; 0012 System.out.println("'God is '" + (allKnowing ? "" : "not ") + "all knowing."); 0013 }
If one case fails, the whole thing fails. If there is one contradicting prediction with another, it all fails. Of course, the larger the religion and the more material offered - the more likely it is to fail the basic test.
This is just one “special” case out of many, but it’s a step in the right direction to finding a definitive way of dismissing a creator without any argument for those who understand logic.
I did once get to the point where my logic was completely sound with one person, at which point the argument that “God exists outside of logic” was made. It makes it all rather pointless if when you have somebody on the edge of reason that they then flip towards the “God of the gaps”.
Yet another argument against a creator is that of creating predictive models. Examples of arguments you will see:
The only way that a model can be predictive is if it can reliably show a signal above background noise. Here we shall go through an example:
Of course, they will claim that their God does not want to be measured - to which point you can reply “awfully strange for a being that wants to be believed in to not want to leave any evidence of their actions, except a few unprovable scenarios”.
Yet another theory that religious people tend to use when confronted with the whereabouts of God, is that God is in some place where Science is still debating. This could be “in the sky” if we were discussing this a thousand years ago, or “in some extra dimension” if you’re talking to somebody clued up in the modern age. This God/s is always some place just out of reach, some place we are yet unable to explore.
This of course poses a problem that we can explore with a simple program:
0014 public static void main(String[] args){ 0015 /* 1. We slowly discover more gaps than we solve */ 0016 System.out.println("1. Result: " + process(100, 0.99)); 0017 /* 2. The same number of gaps or we add at the same rate we remove */ 0018 System.out.println("2. Result: " + process(100, 1.00)); 0019 /* 3. Reduction in gaps */ 0020 System.out.println("3. Result: " + process(100, 1.01)); 0021 } 0022 0023 private static double process( 0024 double currentGaps, 0025 double gapDiscovery 0026 ){ 0027 for(;;){ 0028 double temp = currentGaps; 0029 temp /= gapDiscovery; 0030 if(temp == currentGaps){ 0031 return temp; 0032 } 0033 currentGaps = temp; 0034 } 0035 }
The first test is if we slowly add more gaps and remove them at a greater rate that than we add them. In the first example, we get the following:
0036 1. Result: Infinity
This implies that we slowly, but surely begin to know less and less about the world around us. The irony here, is that in knowing less, we actually know more as we become aware of what we don’t know. This actually means that as well as the gaps in the human race’s collective knowledge increasing, so does our knowledge of what we don’t know, meaning our knowledge is tending towards infinity, a.k.a knowing all there is to know. If this occurs, we become the Gods we are searching for.
I think it’s safe to say that this is not the scenario that religious people believe, as if we become Gods then our God would be redundant and unnecessary. If humans can become Gods, then there is unlikely a need for a God in the first place - we could be self creating.
We’ll skip the second test for a moment.
The result of the third test:
0037 3. Result: 2.47E-322
The third test show’s an exceptionally small number, tending towards zero. This is just a flaw in how programs themselves work - this value is actually zero given a computer of infinite computing power. This would imply that a God would tend towards having no available gaps to exist, leading to us knowing either there is or isn’t a God. This would break the concept of faith, as having evidence would mean that we have no need for faith, the whole idea of religion. So either God becomes part of Science, or we discover there is no God. This is the route that I propose most atheists will take.
The second result is the most interesting:
0038 2. Result: 100.0
This is the result that most religious people tend to follow, but has multiple flaws and will be broken into several points:
Either the definition of God needs to change and it has to be accepted that a God can not be responsible for anything past creation of the Universe, or that God doesn’t exist in any of these gaps and can’t be found elsewhere, therefore not existing. The first option certainly makes any type of religion completely redundant, which is good enough for me.
The first point in this is that because of “original sin”, all children as a result are born into sin (according to Christians) and therefore have to beg for forgiveness. Being born into a debt you only pay off when you die - is nothing short of slavery. The fact that this slavery is passed down from your supposed great, great, great, great, great, great, …, grand-father/mother (Adam and Eve) and somehow this debt has not been paid off yet is insane. How many people have to give up their lives to beg forgiveness for one person’s short-comings?
Then there is the point of the sin itself - the sin was to want more. You have to admire the way that God put something in the garden that would get them in trouble, is all knowing and can see the future, then gets pissed off that the thing he knew would happen, happened. If God does exist, he fails to understand himself on the most basic level.