Monday, April 11, 2011

Rosenberg: Argument from Nonbelief

If God, an omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent, all-loving, and perfect being existed, what kind of world would he create? I image it would be a world much different than our actual world.


One difference between our world and a God-created world would be that the inhabitants of a God-created world would believe in the existence of it’s creator. (There are other imagined differences, each of which are worthy of discussion at a later time.)


I will use this as an argument for the non-existence of God:


If God exists, then there would not be many nonbelievers in the world.

But there are many nonbelievers.

Therefore, God does not exist.


Let’s start with this second premise. Some say there are no atheists in foxholes, but that is simply not the case. There are many rational people that do not believe in God. I think we both agree on this one.


Now, the first premise. If God exists, then there would not be many nonbelievers in the world. Why would we expect this to be the case? Well, a loving God would want his people to know that he exists. We are assuming that God is loving and wants to have a personal relationship with all his people. This cannot happen if there are reasonable people that do not believe in his existence.