Dan Barker | God does NOT exist

I used to believe in God as our very articulate and eloquent speaker before us I used to believe strongly in God I was an ordained minister I preached the gospel for 19 years I felt this presence in my mind as I prayed I got goosebumps in communion with what I thought was the holy spirit of God as I read the Holy Bible and read about the resurrection of Jesus I dedicated my life to preaching that gospel that I thought was so real that gave so much meaning so much hope so much beauty to the world but I changed my mind .

Now I know he was deceived. He was having a very real, very powerful mental experience that occurs in most religions. I won't tell you my whole story, eh, but I went through a deconversion process. that took me four or five years, starting as a firm believer, evangelical street preacher in the prologue to my book Godless, which tells that story. Richard Dawkins writes that Dan Barkin wasn't just a preacher, he's the kind of preacher you wouldn't want to sit next to. a bus that was me, I was so convinced that I was so in love with Jesus, my Savior and my Lord, but I went through an evangelical fundamentalist process in which I migrated to a more moderate one, where I preach less hell and more love, to a world more moderate. liberal stage in my life until I finally threw out all the bath water and discovered that there is no baby there, it's just words, it's just arguments, but from the very articulate words we heard tonight, we didn't see any connected dots, we heard a lot . argument but when it comes to evidence only two pieces were offered that we will probably arrive at the personal experience and the resurrection of Jesus if nothing arises from nothing then God cannot

exist

because God is nothing if that premise is true that nothing arises from nothing and if God is something then you just shot yourself in the foot today is Thursday, what

does

that mean, Mr.

President? Thursday, what

does

it mean? It is the day when millions of people believed in the god Thor there was a gap in the understanding that there was a mystery what is that noise in the sky what are those lights what is all this what is what must be an agency must be some of must be some being or something and they called him Thor and today we have a day of This week we don't have a day of Jesus, but we do have a day of Thor in which millions of people believed, maybe some still believe it, but that deity It has been found in the scrap heap of History, just like when I looked at the deity.

I used to believe in the god of the Bible. For me it started with the simple idea that Jesus told a parable about the prodigal son. A parable is a fiction. It doesn't matter if the Prodigal Son actually

exist

ed in history. It was the moral tale that mattered the ancient Israelites invented a parable or metaphor about Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden and a talking snake look in the dictionary for the word fable you will find it as a moral tale involving talking animals we know that Adam and Eve it couldn't have existed because of evolution.

I assume everyone in this room accepts the solid fact of the evolution of the human species. So Adam and Eve could not have been real people, it was a metaphor and many Christians accept that fact, they know that there are metaphorical figures of speech in the Bible, but in my process, if the Prodic Sun is an invention, if Adam and Eve are a metaphor, so what about this other character, this Yahweh, this Jehovah, this Elohim character, where is the line drawn when we know who humans are? very good at making up myths like the turtle in my native american ancestry the turtle that swam through the waters scooped up the mud from the bottom created the continents a beautiful story a wonderful metaphor but that didn't really happen the character god himself is also one of those fictions I became aware of maybe a useful fiction maybe it gave me meaning maybe it gave me hope maybe it gave me purpose no fiction, however the reason I'm not a believer today is because of the lack of evidence and arguments for a deity If there was any real evidence for the existence of God then someone should have won the Nobel Prize for pointing out that any scientist in the world would take the opportunity to say here we go, I mean, there is a force of the cosmos until now unknown. that we have not yet been able to determine what it is that the scientists of the world would not love to point out, that point that has not yet been made, all we have is what we would call and I think many believers call the god of the Gap, the thunder and lightning was a gap that is now closed, perhaps the fine tuning of the initial constants, perhaps the origin of the Big Bang, we have some gaps in science, in fact it is those gaps that drive science, without those gaps we would not have scientific research. what is offered to us is faith and belief and you were very eloquent in saying that you have a belief in a God that what you believe is God but the belief is not knowledge the belief is simply a statement according to the Bible that you believers believe that belief is the evidence of things not seen the substance of things expected to be believed is not evidence every time you have to accept a statement on faith you are admitting that that statement cannot be accepted on its own merits, it does not have the force to be accepted as any other scientific hypothesis would be accepted.

Scientists gather every Sunday morning in their scientific sanctuaries and bow their heads and sing. Yes, Higs BOS on is real. I know in my heart that Higs BOS on is real. I will have faith. I will be. strong for this secular world that challenges my belief that the God particle is real. Amen, if they did such a thing, you'd think they were pretty insecure about the concept, wouldn't you? That's what we find with faith, a constant conceit. resist the world strongly believe in these absurdities despite the doubts the resurrection of Jesus Christ the story of the resurrection of Jesus Christ is the worst example that anyone could give about the reliability of the Bible and I am not exaggerating, let me tell you why I am not exaggerating Many stories in the Bible are given once or twice.

The story of the resurrection is given five times. You can compare them. Scholars have never been able to reconcile those contradictory accounts of Jesus' resurrection and then and there. How many of them was the tomb open or closed when the women arrived? What message did the angels give? How many angels were in the tomb? etc On top of that, we see through the development in the first century of Christian myth that the first stories were simple, there were no angels, there were very few notable events, but as you go 10, 20, 30 years later, you find more and more until you get to the Book of John, where you find these outlandish stories that you see in the development of the The story of the resurrection in the New Testament is the development of a legend that begins simply and grows over time and becomes more and more fantastic.

It is a mistake to treat these stories as if they were flat, as if they all happened at the same time. We can see the development before our eyes. from something simple and unadorned, perhaps some element of Truth in some story about someone who may have ascended spiritually like we say grandma died and went to heaven, maybe the first Apostles said Jesus died and went to heaven, but that was exaggerated, so the resurrection of Jesus Christ is not evidence of a God and even then it would only be evidence that a man rose from the dead.

How do you connect the dots? We also suffer for a coherent definition of God. We have a proposition. This house believes in God. What is that word? Does that word God mean that there are many? I don't have time to go into much detail, but there are many incompatible properties that many theists assign to this deity, much like saying uh, this scripture is a married bachelor, can a married bachelor logically exist? It can't. and there are mutually incompatible supporting characteristics of this deity that many theists have proposed that make him a married bachelor, for example, God is supposedly an omniscient being who has free will, but if you know the future you cannot have free will.

We are not talking about human free will and that is a big debate about whether we have it or not, even atheists agree among themselves, they disagree among themselves, but God presumably this being is a personal being with free will who knows your own future decisions so you can have free will whatever that may be. that means there has to be a period of indeterminacy during which you actually have options. He could choose coffee or tea. I could choose this or that, but if you know your future options, you have no choice, you have no freedom, you are not free. personal agency, so if your definition of God is that God is omniscient and free, he cannot exist, he is a married bachelor.

I know theologians try to change the definitions. By the way, if God can't change what he knows he will do tomorrow at 12:00. noon that also puts some limits on his omnipotence, doesn't it? Many of these design andology arguments, for example, suffer from begging the question, it's more like the man who is surprised to see how all these rivers were made to flow across pretty state lines, how do they explain that? It must have been a huge engineering feat, a huge economic development, how did they get those rivers to do that? It's not that incredible and yet that's where a lot of this theological thinking lies between how did the human eye evolve?

How do you explain that there must be a design behind it? It seems like design, doesn't it seem like those rivers were designed to flow along those boundaries? It's a backwards kind of thinking and in a sense, it raises the question of the general idea that in some of these theological arguments that complexity requires a designer and U. Richard somewhere here pointed out in his book The Blind Watchmaker, any anything that is complex enough to engineer functional complexity, any deity that can do it. The designer has to have a mind that is at least as functionally complex as what he designed correctly, if his premise is that functional complexity requires a designer, if that is his premise, then the mind of that deity must also, according to that premise , require a designer and you go into this infinite regression of well, then God needed a bigger God and a bigger God.

I think most scientists prefer to stop with what we do know rather than endlessly speculate about a mountain of turtles and another lack that goes against the evidence of existence. of a God is the lack of agreement among believers if there is a deity that you love and you care why two believers don't agree on any social or moral issue, whatever, gay marriage, doctor-assisted suicide, stem cell research, death, um, war. Name these social issues we are struggling with, find devout praying Bible believing Christians on both sides of those issues. Paul wrote in the Bible. God is not the author of confusion, but can you think of a single book that has caused more confusion than that Bible?

I don't agree why why not why shouldn't it be made clear why this all-loving and caring deity shouldn't make it clear to us that it's not like they fought with each other over these issues during the 30 Years' War. which was based to some extent on confessional differences over infant baptism and transubstantiation, people were murdered. John Calvin had his friend killed by him for a simple incorrect placement of a preposition. God and then of course the problem of evil and our previous speaker pointed out that that is probably the Achilles heel in theology. All you have to do is walk into any children's hospital and know that there is no God, at least there is no good God, maybe there is. an evil God, those children are dying at the same random rate even though their parents are desperately praying desperately loving those children who want some kind of divine intervention and yet, as Ann Gayer says, who is the president, the former president of the Foundation for Freedom of Religion, nothing goes wrong? prayer, that would be evidence if you could give some scientific evidence that prayer actually makes an organic difference, not just makes you feel better, but a real difference in the real world, that would be something to put on the table, the fact that that is not put on the table.

The table shows that prayer is more or less talking to yourself, ultimately there is no need to believe in God. Millions, tens of millions of people on this planet live happy lives, productive lives, moral lives, purposeful lives, lives of hope and meaning, without fooling ourselves that these invisibles exist. personalities that populate some Supernatural Kingdom we are very happy, thank you without that belief based on all that it is more likely to reject the proposal than to accept it, thank you