What is the strongest or most compelling argument in your view for the non-existence of God or gods?
I'm sure this question has done the rounds on RF ad nauseum. I'm curious as to why people would be completely convinced about the non-existence of God.
Strictly speaking, I am not. I am more of an ignostic and an apatheist than of an atheist (and I am a very solid atheist, trust me).
By saying that I am an ignostic, I mean to say that it makes little sense to even contemplate the matter of whether there is a god before attempting to clarify what would a god make. The word is actually meaningless. There is no core meaning to speak of.
But I am also an apatheist, which means that the matter has no true significance to me either way. I only bother to call myself an atheist, apatheist or ignostic because there are people out there who lend significance to the idea of a god. Myself, I don't miss even the concept.
The strongest argument I would put forward, is a personal one. I have never seen God and to my knowledge, nor has anyone else.
That being said I am a committed theist and the the God I believe in is an Unknowable Essence.
Since you are a Bahai, I will assume that we are talking here about some version of Abraham's god.
Those conceptions of gods are slightly less ambiguous than the unqualified word "god", because there are so many mutually exclusive conceptions of Abraham's god yet there is also a bit of a core that can be presented.
Let's assume for the sake of discussion that we are talking about a version of Abraham's god that has at least these few characteristics that are often attributed to it. Most Abrahamic and Abrahamic-adjacent forms of theism include quite a few more, but there is considerable divergence there.
- It is in some sense conscious and aware.
- It has the ability to perceive and understand human thoughts and emotions, at least under certain circunstances.
- It is credited with the creation of existence itself, yet also above or beyond that same existence.
- For some reason (or perhaps for no reason at all) it is aware of individual human beings and cares enough about their behavior to want to communicate some form of instructions to them.
You will notice that the third attribute roughly describes the form of divinity that pantheists believe to exist, but the other three do not. There are always exceptions, but I think this is a fair description of the ideas involved.
So, what about the Abrahamic gods? Why and how can I say that they do not exist?
I actually can not. I can however say (and do) that such deities are not convincing enough, even hypothetically, to deserve consideration or indeed the time that I spend describing them even once.
The first two attributes are of course no big deal. We know for certain that entities with awareness and reason exist. We call them sentients and include ourselves in that group without too much controversy.
The idea of an uncreated creator, however, is simply not useful even in the abstract. It amounts to a play on words to attempt to satisfy a specific, unnecessary form of anxiety. But it truly means nothing. It is the expression of the desire to validate both the question of whether existence was in some sense "meant to be" and a very arbitrary answer to that question. Nothing more. Its only worth is as an illustration of a certain aesthetical sense that is closely associated with theism and perhaps even more closely with Abrahamic theism.
The deal breaker, though, is the last attribute. God as the uncreated creator is just a play on words with no particular significance, and therefore mostly harmless. But god as a decreer of behavior rules is an actively harmful idea, because it actually inhibits moral discernment and development.
On a slightly subtler level, the Abrahamic conceptions of gods also have another strike against them. Their believers claim that their gods have the ability to communicate with them, often through written or even spoken words, yet somehow there is a very significant failure or refusal of those same gods to help their believers achieve any meaningful measure of mutual understanding or consensus where it really matters.
So no, I can't technically declare that there are no gods. But it makes little difference in practice.