Futility of the Arguments for the Existence of God

Both theists and atheists debate a lot about the existence of god – and (agnostic) atheists usually attribute their lack of belief to the lack of evidence – and theists obviously arguing otherwise. Personally, I don’t have any qualms with people who keep their beliefs to themselves and stop making positive claims about the existence of god(s) – although rare, people like that do exist. However obviously a fairly good portion of religious and theologians often come up with such “arguments” for existence of god – and you often get into a horrible mess when you’re in a debate or discussion with them given the gish-gallop argumentation of theirs. Not to mention the argument often gets derailed and you end up lecturing them on cosmology or evolutionary biology – which in my  opinion, people should stop doing if they don’t have a really good grasp of the subject, it is quite unnecessary and most of them have no intention of learning anything, neither do they comprehend or attempt to any of those.

So why is it futile? Because no matter what “arguments” you bring forth – none of those mean anything without empirical evidence. You simply can’t “prove” the existence of anything that has independent existence in reality with any arguments, period. You could present a sound argument (not that I have ever come across any sound arguments for the existence of god) and that does NOT establish the “prove” the existence of anything.  Yes, rationality and logic is extremely important, but neither of those without empiricism can establish the existence of any such deity, as our rationality is pretty much limited to what we observe in this world. People followed  their “common sense” to assume that the earth is flat, it seemed too “obvious” to them. You can’t establish the existence of quarks or virtual particles by any sort of argument – if anything, that would have sounded extremely absurd if not backed by empirical evidence.  So no, we can’t establish the existence of anything in reality with pure reason. Which is why common sense or such intuitions has no place in science.

But what about beauty, morality and such? That’s what I had said earlier – empiricism is essential in establishing the existence of something that exists in reality independent of your own existence. Without an observer, there is no beauty as it’s a mere perception of our mind, or morality without us and our actions.  Yes, empiricism has it’s limitations, and even in science rationality and logic is important (and empiricism is useless without rationality in science too)  – but we are discussing merely about establishing the existence of anything, which includes deities of any kind.