Are you wrong to deny existence of God?

Pascal’s Wager offers two alternative options to atheists. In the first option, god doesn’t exist but one still believes in the god, and the cost of such foolish decision is claimed to be minuscule, namely in the form of wasting some time and resources to worship the god. In the second option, god does exist but one refuses to believe in the god, and one risks a supposedly huge cost of attracting the wrath of the god for not having paid respects. The theist policy considers the first alternative to be safer. But firstly, when a god is imagined to be more and more powerful to be able to punish us, then such a god automatically becomes less and less likely to exist. Attribution of more and more miraculousness itself make such god’s existence less and less likely. So by comparing the probabilistically weighted costs of the two proposed options, it turns out that the total cost of exercising the second option - the extremely less likelihood of a big punishment, is still less than the total cost of the first option - certainly incurring small worship expenditures. That shows the second option to be actually cheaper. It is wise to accept the minute risk of punishment from a highly implausible god, than to gullibly waste resources for believing in the god.

Secondly, as Richard Dawkins has argued, when multiple competing concepts of gods, such as Brahma, Yahweh, Zoroaster, etc. are available to pick from, accepting any one of them is more confusing. You are more likely to make the wrong choice. What if you started believing in Zeus but the true god turns out to be Jupiter? Or vice versa? Isn’t it prudent to neutrally wait for the one true god to be revealed? Thirdly, does it make sense that such an omnipotent being, which created us, and which defined the laws of science that govern our behaviors, will be interested in the petty offerings that too were created by that deity itself? This thought leads us to the Problem of Evil, which can be phrased as “if god exists, then if god is all powerful, then god can’t be kind, and if god is kind, then god can’t all powerful”. Lastly, if you advocate dishonesty and pretend to believe in the god just to be on the safer side, will god be satisfied with such craftiness?

Society will plunge to anarchy without the god as the giver and preserver for morality.

Historically, morality kept changing as per the government’s need for stability in specific socioeconomic background. The basic principles of morality that are found commonly across all gods, had actually existed in the societies prior to all gods and that is why the messages of all gods sound fundamentally so similar to each other.  Our moral sense was not gifted to us by any god to lift us up above the animals. We have been hard-wired with instincts such as honesty and kindness because such behaviors were rewarded, and, selected-for, during hundreds of thousands of years of evolution as social animals. The newly found human intelligence does sometimes need to contradict and overcome what our instincts consider as moral. Had our sense of morality been god-given, would it have been necessary for human intelligence to regulate it? 

Science can’t explain how the universe could have been created without a creator.

The known laws of science can’t see beyond or before the singularity that has spawned the universe. However, the answer ‘god did it’ doesn’t enrich our knowledge at all. It is equivalent to answering ‘I don’t know’; whereas, feeling contended with the answer gives a sense of accomplishment and stops the spirit of inquiry. A valid answer in science provides the mechanism of ‘how’. Science is not subjective, the ‘who’ doesn’t matter. Theism can’t escape the infinite regress of causality - if god created the Big Bang, then who created the god?

(It is a continuation of the article published in the Nov 3, 2016, edition. The author is a MBBS, MTech and has done Biomedical Engineering from IIT-B)