Proving there is no God (Hard Atheism)

How can someone possibly say for sure there is no God, let alone think they can prove it?

I think maybe I have set the question fairly, but of course right away I need to point out I avoided the word "believe." I don't "believe" there is no God, I only "say" it (or think it when saying so out loud would be inappropriate).

Actually, I don't even "think" there is no God -- I just don't think there is one.  This is a slightly different statement -- the first one is an affirmative assertion and hence has a burden of proff, while the second is a negative, subject to the rule that you can't prove a negative (you can't prove Santa Clause doesn't exist, but we all know it -- however, I think that approach is a cop-out).

The thing is, so often believers (aka "theists") insist they will believe in God unless I can prove otherwise.  If someone said as much of the jolly fat man, we would see the logical fallacy, but logical fallacies seem to be allowed when it comes to God (more of them later).

There are at least three standards that if met constitute "proof." The one usually meant goes:  "Beyond all doubt, for a certainty." This is more than just an unfair demand, it is an absurdity.  If this is the test for knoweldge, we do not know and can never know anything, since no amout of evidence and logic could achieve such a thing.  Even mathematical proofs do not achieve that standard, as there is always the possibility that there is an unseen error in the reasoning, or a flaw in one of the assumptions (axioms and definitions).

A slightly more reasonable definition of "proof," to be used, I suppose, in deciding whether to send someone to jail, is "beyond reasonable doubt." This of course is the legal demand in most criminal courts.  What it says is you look at the evidence and any sensible person will be able to see what happened, and any that say otherwise are just being perverse.  "I know the sun will rise tomorrow." I think that statement meets this test.

In civil cases, however, there is a different standard of proof -- it goes, "A preponderance of the evidence." It is hard to give examples of this because this rule and the reasonable doubt rule have no clear dividing line.  They merge, as it were, along a fuzzy boundary.

The first argument I would present against God's existence is as old as the hills, and has never been refuted, and yet theists continue to fool themselves into thinking otherwise.  It is summed in the bit of nonsense about whether God can create a rock so big he can't move it.  I do wish the problem historically had used something different, since God is not a phyical being (I think we will all agree on that) so rocks make the issue seem trivial, and it is anything but trivial.  Spiritual or not, can God create such a rock?

Modern mathematics (mainly in Goedel's theorems) has shown us that in systems complex enough (and numbers or geometric shapes are complex enough) there must necessarily exist unprovable but true theorems.  Can God prove such a theorem?  That the answer necessarily must be "no" will be obvious to anyone who understand this, but that is going to be a minority.

Can God believe something that is false?  Of course not.  Can God tell a lie?  Can God do something less than perfect?  Can he do something evil?  The answers to these questions imply that God is just a machine doing the right thing all the time, who has no possibility of choice in what he does since anything less that perfect in all respects is outside his capabilities.

There exists a standard, highly dishonest, response to this -- we will redefine God and deny him absolute omnipotence.  He can do anything except what is against his nature to do, and it is against his nature to do anything illogical or imperfect or evil. 

You really in that case don't have much of a God left, but, as I already said, just a machine.

To digress a bit, I remember having a certain person defend the idea of eternal torment in Hell as punishment for sins committed in a short human life.  This sort of notion of course blies the idea of God as just, (but then any sort of eternal punishment, even extinction, is unjust in this context).  What I was told was that Hell is something God could not avoid -- it follows from the nature of sin and God is so perfect he has to torture people eternally.

Hard to not want to throw up at such things -- if God does exist I guess such people are lucky he is merciful, the slander about him that people invent.

All I can say when I hear theists bandy about words like "omnipotent" and then explain the self-refrerential contradictions that any sort of infinity implies is they don't think they need be logical when it comes to God.

There are, of course, other gods about besides the "God" of the Bible and Q'uran.  Threre is the Tao, who by definition can't be known, so we might as well ignore him.  Then there are polytheistic deities, as in Hinduism and Paganism.  They don't count either since they make no claim to being God but are merely gods, with maybe superhuman power, but not omnipotence.