Reddit reviews God: The Failed Hypothesis. How Science Shows That God Does Not Exist

That's a common misconception. The traditional concept of gods is not compatible with modern scientific knowledge. For a summary of why this is the case, see e.g. God: The Failed Hypothesis. How Science Shows That God Does Not Exist.

Beyond that, science provides explanations for human belief in gods that shows why so many people have such beliefs, and it's not because gods exist.

We are at a point in human history where it's possible to say, with as much certainty as we have about any knowledge, that gods do not exist, outside of the imaginations of humans.

I highly recommend this book: http://www.amazon.com/God-Failed-Hypothesis-Science-Shows/dp/1591026520/

The author makes the case that god IS a testable hypothesis, and when consistent scrutiny is applied, the hypothesis can be disproven beyond a reasonable doubt.

You might also like to check out some of the links on r/atheistgems (start with the FAQ there).

Maybe check out NukeThePope's book list -

of the ones he has there, I guess I'd suggest (after the ones I mentioned before in my other comment) starting with these:

http://www.amazon.com/Christian-Delusion-Why-Faith-Fails/dp/1616141689

http://www.amazon.com/God-Failed-Hypothesis-Science-Shows/dp/1591026520

http://www.amazon.com/Nailed-Christian-Myths-Jesus-Existed/dp/0557709911 (or, there's this essay)

as addressing particular criteria you mentioned in your post

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Here's something for you to ponder: what are good criteria for evaluating the claims of other religions (say, starting with Islam, but including any religious claims, including those of say Scientology)?

What happens if you apply those criteria to the claims of Christianity?

>And no one has the evidence to disprove it beyond a reasonable doubt.

They do, and have already done so.

God: The Failed Hypothesis. How Science Shows That God Does Not Exist

https://www.amazon.com/God-Failed-Hypothesis-Science-Shows/dp/1591026520

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/God:_The_Failed_Hypothesis

dude it's over.... read some Karl Marx


here's another video from Dr Richard Carrier breaking it down scientifically and with actual facts.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=79Lmmy2jfeo


here's an excellent book:

http://www.amazon.com/God-Failed-Hypothesis-Science-Shows/dp/1591026520


it's a dry read, but it fucking crushes the Jesus myth and other super natural nonsense.


read the portable atheist by Christopher Hitchens, there are countless atheist philosophers that utterly fucking destroy the validity of jesus. It's over dude, give it up! there was no Jesus.


I don't know why people keep thinking he was just some ordinary dude hippy guy walking around preaching shit. He never fucking existed.

facts, science and the philosophers are on my side, not yours and they never will be.

God: The Failed Hypothesis by Victor J. Stenger. It's quite good without being too abrasive in my opinion.

Hello, and welcome to the club!

The four people considered the "founding fathers" of "New Atheism" are also known as "The 4 Horsemen," and they are:

• Richard Dawkins is a biologist specializing in evolution and public awareness of science, especially atheism. Books: The God Delusion and many other good books on biology, evolution, science, atheism and so on.
  
• Daniel Dennett is a philosopher. His best known book is Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon.
  
• Christopher Hitchens is a journalist, author and amazingly competent debater. His best-known atheist work is God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything.
  
• Sam Harris is a neuroscientist with philosophical leanings. His best-known book is The End of Faith. Another interesting one is The Moral Landscape, where he tries to show how morality can be studied by science.
  
  ----
  
  Here are more people who have gotten respect in the world of atheism, in no particular order:
  
  
• Carl Sagan, meanwhile deceased popular science educator to the masses. Though he never took up the banner of atheism, he tried to make people aware of the benefits of science and the folly of superstition, including religions. Look for his videos on YouTube!
  
• Victor Stenger, physicist. God: The Failed Hypothesis. He's a competent philosopher and I enjoyed watching him tear William Lane Craig to pieces in a debate once.
  
• Neil deGrasse Tyson, astrophysicist. A bit of a modern-day Sagan, he's more of a scientist in his message than an atheist.
  
• Dan Barker, former evangelical preacher. Goes around telling people how he lost his faith. He's also written a book, Godless.
  
• Matt Dillahunty, host of the radio show The Atheist Experience where he does live telephone debates with callers. Quick on his feet and very knowledgeable on his former faith.
  
• Richard Carrier, historical scholar active on The Secular Web and author of Sense and Goodness Without God, a defense of Metaphysical Naturalism. He's working hard to raise awareness for the historical theory that Jesus never actually existed.
  
• ZOMGItsCriss, hot looking atheist activist on YouTube. Don't let her good looks fool you: She's a very smart cookie. And she's funny, too. Well worth a look even if not only for the obvious reasons.
  
  ----
  
  You'll find a few more atheist authors on my book page and even more in the book and video recommendations in the /r/atheism FAQ.
  
  

No, some conceptions of god are falsifiable. There's nothing magical about the word god that makes it somehow unfalsifiable. It really depends on what one means by 'god'. How many essential attributes/past actions does this purported entity have? If they are disproven, perhaps that conception of god has been disproven. There are people who would not - indeed perhaps cannot - believe in a god who did not create the universe in 6 days. If one considers this disproven, then that god is in fact disproven.

One can create a conception of a god that contains no falsifiable claims, or perhaps one can simply disbelieve that particular claims have indeed been disproven. In the first case the proposed deity would look not much like the christian conception, and in the second one definitely must ignore much of modern science.

The recently deceased Victor Stenger wrote a number of wonderful books on the subject that I highly recommend. The short version is that atheists should not agree that god is unfalsifiable because virtually all conceptions of god are not only falsifiable, but nearly entirely falsified. We should be challenging this assertion wherever it is stated, not reenforcing it.

If you haven't read it I strongly recommend Stenger's God The Failed Hypothesis. He tackles the question of if God can be tested for. He comes up with a number of viable tests all of which God fails. As Goldang says we can't disprove all possible gods. But what we can disprove is an interventionist God. And since that is fundamentally what groups like TSCC argue for, it amounts to the same thing.

All the other comments here clarify how your friend is misunderstanding how science and the scientific method actually work, so I won't repeat that.

I just wanted to add an additional perspective, that a lot depends on just what questions are being asked. If someone is asking about the existence of God, then this is something that is not directly addressable with the tools of science in the traditional sense (although Victor Stenger does a pretty good job of addressing this in his book God: The Failed Hypothesis).

But many religions, especially Mormonism, go way beyond these difficult questions, and make their claims about matters that are well within the ability of Science to address: was there an Israelite migration to the Americas around 600 BC, was there a culture present in the Americas that developed from that migration, is the Book of Abraham a translation of specific Egyptian papyri? The actual evidence is compellingly stacked against these claims having any truth to them whatsoever.

If somebody wants to believe in some kind of God, in the absence of compelling, direct evidence against God's existence, I'll cut them some slack, and leave them be. But if they choose to exercise faith and belief on empirically testable claims, and claim certain things to be literally true, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, then I will challenge them whenever I have the opportunity.

Two books you should probably read are:

God: The Failed Hypothesis: How Science Shows That God Does Not Exist by Victor J. Stenger

and

Faith Vs. Fact: Why Science and Religion Are Incompatible by Jerry Coyne

This is a fascinating read:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/God-Failed-Hypothesis-Science-Shows/dp/1591026520/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1265843053&sr=8-2

God the Failed Hypothesis: How Science Shows That God Does Not Exist

Don't get The God Delusion. I seriously don't understand why people always recommend Dawkins to thiests. I think non-theists get much more out of his books.

Read this or this. I have The God Delusion and was not satisfied with it:
http://www.amazon.com/Atheism-Case-Against-Skeptics-Bookshelf/dp/087975124X

http://www.amazon.com/God-Failed-Hypothesis-Science-Shows/dp/1591026520/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1302021802&sr=1-1
(Mind you this 2nd book's title is a bit hyperbolic, its rather the argument for the abrahamic religions (Xtianity/Judaism/Islam) but he goes into detail on the extent of the evidence for those vs. other religions etc.

Why God does not exist:

http://www.amazon.com/Non-Existence-God-Nicholas-Everitt/dp/0415301076

http://www.amazon.com/God-Failed-Hypothesis-Science-Shows/dp/1591026520/

http://www.amazon.com/Impossibility-God-Michael-Martin/dp/1591021200/

http://www.amazon.com/Improbability-God-Michael-Martin/dp/1591023815/

http://www.thesixwaysofatheism.com/

God: The Failed Hypothesis. How Science Shows That God Does Not Exist; by Victor J. Stenger

> 1.) What scientific evidence does atheism present in the argument against God?

http://www.amazon.com/God-Failed-Hypothesis-Science-Shows/dp/1591026520

Take a look at this book sometime. Someone with a phd in physics wrote it. I think he knows more about logic and what can or cannot be deduced from the scientific method.

https://www.amazon.com/God-Failed-Hypothesis-Science-Shows/dp/1591026520

This book answers your question (with actual evidence).

This is exactly what we're talking about right here.

>Pascal’s Wager

>The Authority of the Bible

>Quality of Life

Calling these arguments at all is very generous. Pascals wager comes the closest to being taken seriously but has multiple fatal flaws, such as the fact that if there is no God and you take him up on his wager so to speak, you waste your entire existence, making it a poor bet. Then there's the many gods problem as well.

>The Actionable Conclusion

This is neither an argument, nor supporting of a belief in God.

>Personal Experience

Hume has an excellent response to most of what could be considered an argument in here. However most of what you've written here does not constitute an argument, and should not rationally be enough to convince anyone else. It certainly doesn't qualify as, " any rational argument, supported by evidence."

>Kalam's Cosmological Argument

For the sake of time, I'm going to refer you to the wikipedia article here. There are numerous problems with the KCA, none of which can be satisfactorily resolved, and it does not have any supporting evidence. Since the argument is not logically sound, valid, and non-vacuous, it isn't taken seriously in modern debate except for it's role in the history of philosophy.

>Aristotle’s Cosmological Argument

This is no stronger than the KCA above, and has many of the same problems. It doesn't prove a God exists even if true, has no supporting evidence, and must resort to special pleading for the "first cause" to not have a cause itself.

>The Fine Tuned Universe Argument

This is probably the only argument in the batch that's even taken seriously at all, but it has the most problems, probably due to being more well-defined and claiming it has supporting evidence (which none of the rest can).

1. This is a new iteration of the "God of the Gaps" fallacy, which is often considered by both theologians and Atheists to be logically fallacious .
   
   
2. There is not any good reason to believe that the universe is actually 'finely tuned' in the first place. The puddle analogy is a great way to think of this
   >Imagine a puddle waking up one morning and thinking, “This is an interesting world I find myself in, an interesting hole I find myself in, fits me rather neatly, doesn’t it? In fact it fits me staggeringly well, must have been made to have me in it!”
   
   
3. Life as we know it could exist under substantially different cosmological constants than exist in our universe, implying that the supposed 'fine tuning' of our universe is just one possible set of options in a wide band in which life and the universe as we know it, could actually exist.
   
   
4. Much like with intelligent design arguments, fine tuning arguments suffer greatly from the fact that the universe is actually pretty shittily designed for intelligent life to flourish, and it could be vastly improved even to the eye of a mere human.
   
   
5. The fine tuning argument is based on faulty probabilistic reasoning
   
   
6. Fine tuning is insufficient to prove any kind of creator with agency, even if correct. It's possible that this could be an inevitable outcome, predicated on some universal law of physics unknown to us.
   
   If you want more supporting evidence against fine tuning/god of the gaps, wikipedia has almost everything you could possibly want cited, and Victor Stenger has written a sound rebuttal to it and all common counter arguments within God: The Failed Hypothesis.