It’s widely acknowledged that it isn’t possible to prove absolutely

that no gods exist, any more than it’s impossible to prove absolutely

that no invisible unicorns exist. Every atheist I know freely

acknowledges that. But at the same time, one can easily argue that

gods (or invisible unicorns) are very unlikely to exist.

A lot of these arguments are meta-arguments, in that they don’t stand

on their own, but build upon arguments made by theists.

Lack of evidence

Despite what a lot of people think, atheism isn’t the firm belief that

there aren’t any gods. Rather, it’s a lack of belief in gods.

To put it another way, the atheist position is “You believers haven’t

made your case. I’m not convinced that you’re right.”

So the lack of evidence is the big one. There is no good evidence for

any gods. No verified miracles, no verified prophecies, no burning

bushes, no nothing.

There’s a saying that “absence of evidence is not evidence of

absence”. This is true as far as it goes, but absence of evidence

where we would expect to see some is evidence of absence.

If I say that there’s a Thai restaurant at 15th and K, the fact that

you’ve never heard of it doesn’t mean that I’m wrong. If, however, you

go down to 15th and K, and look all over, and fail to find the Thai

restaurant, that is good evidence that I’m wrong.

Theists have had thousands of years to demonstrate that their various

gods are real. And they’ve tried. Oh, boy, have they tried. And so

far, bupkis. No divine abodes on top of Mount Olympus, no rainbow

bridge to Asgard, no Noah’s Ark, no nothing.

Okay, so maybe gods aren’t directly detectable, either with our senses

or simple measurement devices. Maybe they don’t reflect visible light,

or emit sound waves, or pull compass needles toward them. That still

leaves indirect evidence.

I’ve seen satellite photos in which you couldn’t see ships, but you

could see their wakes. A lot of extrasolar planets have been

discovered not by direct observation, but by they affect the orbit of

their sun. Heck, if it comes to that, all nuclear physics is done

through indirect observation: protons and electrons are too small to

see, but we can observe the shape of trails in a bubble chamber, or

flashes of light on a CRT.

It’s not just the so-called hard sciences, either: there are

statistical methods for figuring out whether an election was rigged by

looking for anomalies in the results, the sorts of things that would

be introduced by a cheater, but unlikely to come up by chance.

And yet, nothing. No good direct evidence, no good indirect evidence.

The Templeton Foundation keeps throwing money at trying to come up

with evidence of a god — studies on intercessory prayer, that

sort of thing — and so far they’ve come up with two kinds of

results: ones that come from flawed experiments, and ones that show no

effect.

I don’t think it’s just me being overly skeptical: after 2000 years,

Christians have still failed to convince two thirds of the world’s

population that they’re right. Jews and Hindus have had even longer.

Miracles of Islam

are not convincing to anyone but Muslims. And so on, and so forth.