No Evidence for God?

I often encounter atheists who claim that there is no evidence for God.

Question: Is this true?

A: The most obvious answer is a quite resounding no.

No one can claim there is no evidence in the universe for the existence of a supreme being. Yet, armchair atheist pseudo-experts and wannabe philosophers say dumb things like that all the time because they never think anything through deeply enough to see how foolish such statement is.

Proof? Ask them to prove there is no evidence for God. End of discussion right there – if they were honest, but too many of them are not.

What has been said of lawyers easily applies to atheists – its only 99% of atheists that give a bad reputation to the rest.

It is simply not – by any means – a logical or justifiable claim. Why? Well obviously no atheist can possibly offer any evidence for his own claim. He can’t offer any justification for such a stupendous claim, therefore he must bare alone the burden of proof that there is no evidence for God. Can he? No, of course not.
This is where the atheist jumps in claiming that “you can’t prove a negative”. A very infamous, and of course false, claim that so many misguided atheists make. Fact: We prove negatives every day.

The atheist positing such bunk thus puts himself in the exact same position that he insists theists are in. Claiming that which cannot be proved. This is hardly surprising since atheists religiously claim there is no God all while claiming they can’t prove a negative. Perhaps this is because the atheist can’t do it. Yet people can and do prove negatives all the time.

His claim implies that he has searched out and examined all proposed evidences of God and found them all lacking. Of course there are no atheists who can even be aware of all the evidence that may exist for God, nor even of all existing proposed evidence since this would require a knowledge of every argument for God that has ever existed as well as all possible other evidences. Yet another knowledge claim that such ill-reasoning atheists cannot uphold.

To truly know there is no evidence for God’s existence implies that the atheist claiming this knows all possible evidences for God’s existence, that he understands it and has adequately refuted all. No single human being ever has, nor ever will, be able to do this. Thus, all such flippant dismissals of all evidence for God are mere arrogant pretensions to unavailable knowledge.

That in itself destroys all claims by any atheists that there is no evidence for God. It also demonstrates what every theist knows – that atheist website debaters are almost invariably arrogant people making foolish claims that they cannot back up.

Dismissal of all evidence for God is not an argument against God. It is mere denial of the reality that there are indeed infinite evidences for the existence of a first cause. Claiming there’s no evidence for God is tantamount to claiming to have proved that all proposed evidences, ever, are wrong.

Moreover, claiming that any proposed evidence is wrong or insufficient does not prove that it is in fact wrong or insufficient. Empty assertions abound in the atheist world. Worse, even if one were able to truly refute all proposed evidence, that still does not imply that there is no God. There may be other evidences that one is unaware of, the wrong analysis tools and methods may have been used for devising evidence, etc.

Even atheist Kai Nielsen stated,

“To show that an argument is invalid or unsound is not to show that the conclusion of the argument is false….All the proofs of God’s existence may fail, but it still may be the case that God exists.” – Reason and Practice (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), 143-44.

The low-level website atheist, though he will always deny it because of personal wishes that there be no God, is always left with nothing to found his own beliefs on. What do we see instead? Nothing but denial and lame attempts at shirking his share of the burden of proof. Atheists always try to shirk this by mere caviling and, as always, denial that they even have any such burden. But they do have such a burden anyway – shirked or not, admitted or not.

“in truth-directed enquiries, the burden of proof is on all of us alike”
– Putting the Burden of Proof in its Place: When are Differential Allocations Legitimate ? Tim Dare and Justine Kingsbury, Academia.edu

Atheists tend to assume that if one has no evidence for God’s existence, then one ought to believe that God does not exist. False. What the atheist fails to see is that atheism is just as much a knowledge claim “There is no God” as theism’s “There is a God”. Thus, as Ravi Zacharias states,

“the atheist’s denial of God’s existence needs just as much substantiation as does the theist’s claim; the atheist must give plausible reasons for rejecting God’s existence”.

The atheist cannot say, “Well I don’t claim there is no God, only that I don’t believe there is”. But such would lead to agnosticism, not real atheism. If one does not know there is no God, one has no grounds to believe there is no God. Back to burden of proof! Is there evidence that no God exists, that no creator exists, that nothing created everything? No. None whatsoever.

Is there evidence of a first ultimate cause? Yes, everything that exists in the material universe is evidence of a first and ultimate cause, by implication of the law of cause and effect. (Certain interpretations of quantum phenomena notwithstanding). To say a singularity started it all, or a quantum fluctuation started it all is to say “we have no idea what started it all”! What already existed to create the fluctuation? It only moves the problem back one step.

Consider the following evidence, for example:

Information is evidence of God. Information itself is metaphysical. Logic is metaphysical. Now, if metaphysical things exist then that itself is yet another evidence for the possibility and probability of the existence of God, who, by very definition, is metaphysical. But most atheists claim there is no such thing as a “metaphysical” something. All is matter and energy.

Thus atheism is little different than foolish naivety, for claiming that nothing metaphysical exists is as bad as claiming that information doesn’t exist. So where does the atheist get this tasty bit of information?

We know information is metaphysical because it is always other or different from the medium in which it is stored. The ink on the paper in a book, by itself is not information. It’s just a dye. Ink on paper, by the way it’s used and structured to form symbols that, in turn, represent specific concepts and meanings, is merely the container, the medium through which information is conveyed. All symbol systems imply metaphysics and intelligence. The collective symbols, by the way they are organized on the paper can contain meaningful information, to a mind that knows the symbolic convention, or code, used.

But the pixels on your screen are not the information they contain. They are mere colored light spots. However, the pixels encode information that requires a mind – a mind that has been taught the symbol convention used (say the alphabet or icons) – to interpret it. That information is not random – it isn’t a meaningless blotch – but is structured and semantic. It has syntax, semantics (meaning) and purpose. No symbolic convention (code) is without purpose. But the very concept of purpose implies intention which implies mind and volition.

Encoded algorithmic information is a symbol system, whether that symbol system be such as the English, Cyrillic or Hebrew alphabets or the ATCG chemicals of DNA. Such symbol systems cannot exist without intelligence (they intrinsically imply intelligent origin) thereby demonstrating that metaphysical intelligence must exist in order to explain the humongous levels of algorithmic information contained in the DNA molecule.

That intelligence – given its complexity, depth and intricacy – is best and most simply (Occam’s Razor) explained by what men have always called “God”. The Intelligent originator.