Is God a self-deception? (Revisited)

[Guest guest]

I fixed up this argument i little, based on some of your comments.

 

Is God a self-deception?

 

Ajita Krishna Dasa

 

Quite a few times in my debates with atheists I have encountered the

following answer to the question about whether or not the atheist can prove

that there are no good reasons to believe in God.

 

Theist: Can you prove that there's no good reason to believe in God?

 

Atheist: Yes, because it's impossible to prove or disprove a self-deception

 

Even though this is a wierd kind of answer I have seen it quite a few times.

Therefore I want to show why it's irrational.

 

The atheistic argument can be standardized in the following way:

 

1. It's impossible to prove or disprove a self-deception

2. The statement ”God exist” is a self-deception

3. Therefore, it's impossible to prove or disprove the statement ”God exist”

(follows from 1 and 2)

4. If a given statement is impossible to prove or disprove then there's no

good reason to believe it

5. It's impossible to prove or disprove the statement ”God exist” (see 3)

6. Therefore, there is no reason to believe the statement "God exist" and

therefore there's good reasons to be an atheist (from 4 and 5)

 

Why the argument fails

 

First of all we can argue that it’s not at all impossible to prove or

disprove that something is a self-deception. For example, it can be proved

that it’s a self-deception to think that the Earth is flat, because it can

be disproved that the Earth is flat. So the first premise is completely

wrong. If it was impossible to prove or disprove a self-deception then it

would be impossible to know if something is actually a self-deception, so

how can the atheist claim that God is a self-deception? It’s obviously

self-contradictory.

 

Put in other words: The first premise in this atheistic argument is

self-contradictory, because if you know that God is a self-deception, then

you must also know that God doesn't exist. Otherwise how could the claim

that He exist be a self-deception? Further, if you know that God doesn't

exist, then there must also exist a disproof for His existence, otherwise

how could you know that he doesn't exist? But the first premise states that

there's no disproof for Gods existence. So premise 1 is a

self-contradiction. Even if we accept the premise then there's a logical

contradiction between the first two premises (1 and 2) and the first

conclusion (3). Consequently the whole argument falls to pieces.

 

To make things worse for the atheist we can also argue that to postulate

”God is a self-deception” (premise 2) is to postulate that God is unreal,

and therefore that God doesn't exist. To know that God doesn't exist one has

to have knowledge of everything. Otherwise it's impossible to see whether or

not there's no proofs at all for Him. Thus, to say that God is a

self-deception one has to be omniscient. In other words, one has to be God

to disprove God, which is self-contradictory.

 

It should now be evident that this atheistic argument is simply totally

useless, and it reveals the cribble-mindedness of an atheistic line of

thought.