FROM Reasonable Faith.org, Post 26 in Is Theism Falsifiable:




Theism is falsifiable. God can be proved not to exist. I know because I've done it. That no Christians and few atheists believe me does not refute my achievement. If I had not proved God's nonexistence I would not be an atheist. I had no peace with my Self until I came to this conclusion in July 2006, after more than forty years of deep, deep searching for this God I was supposed to believe in. If someone or something cannot be found, we conclude that it/he/she does not exist.

The Bible, plus the entire religion, promises that God allows himself to be found of those who diligently search. No one has ever searched more diligently than I. Christians deny this claim but they consistently fail to produce any testimony anywhere to come even close to anything I went through in my search to find this elusive God. As a professing Christian while I still had access to all the Christian literature and testimonies, no one anywhere ever provided any testimony that could tell me HOW to find this God. They would only tell me THAT they found this God. But they provided zero evidence of this God outside glowing testimonies.

The professed "evidence" was nothing but the changing seasons, healed illness, fortunate coincidence, helpful insight, or some other seemingly marvelous or unusual or inexplicable incident or occurrence. For some people, a new-born baby somehow proves the existence of God. Yet there are natural explanations for every single one of these items. Thus, I feel convinced that there probably are natural explanations for the few remaining items that science has not yet figured out. Seeing religious people turn to outright deceit, as they do with Intelligent Design theory, to make science fit their beliefs is evidence of their desperation to squeeze the universe between the covers of the Bible. I absolutely had to find the root of this deception so I studied it for my MA thesis and I learned a LOT that people here seem to wish I hadn't.

I think even my prof was disappointed with the conclusions I reached. However, I was raised with the confidence that Truth can withstand all controversy and testing. I learned the scientific method by default; it just is the way this world works. When one applies the scientific method to the claim that God does and is what Christianity claims, he disappears under the weight of the evidence. I didn't stop with the monotheistic concept of God; I had to know if there is such a thing as a supernatural or spiritual realm. At first, the evidence from anthropology seemed to prove that there is because humans from all cultures, religions, and societies across time and geography had spiritual or religious traditions that had identical feels to them.

Via sociology and psychology of religion I was able to identify what this feel is. What I was unable to do was find the God who was supposed to be behind all these feelings. In addition, I had enormous questions about how the Plan of Salvation worked. That is, how can Jesus' dead body save human souls from hell, as Christian theology teaches?

Not even my theology professors could answer my question. Only ExChristians even asked it. The very question is taboo in Christianity. That no theologian addressed it anywhere in all the heavy reading I had to do for my courses, in spite of the claim that Christianity is such a simple religion that uneducated children and slaves can understand it, proved to me that there is no answer. In other words, the concept itself is invalid: Humans are not evil (I had already concluded this simply from observing life) and require no saving through anyone's blood no matter how it's shed.

Obviously, none of these arguments falsifies theism. But neither do they have to. Nothing is more obvious than a character that fails to turn up. Such a fail-to-turn-up character is seriously questionable. If you claim to have this really intelligent Big Brother who can fix everything that can possibly go wrong with computers but unfortunately he's never available when things do go wrong--well, whether or not you actually have such a brother is beside the point. He is nonexistent so far as I and my computer problems are concerned.

Even if you threaten that he will meet me at the corner store after work with a baseball bat and beat me up if I get another technician--if he never turns up to beat up other workers, the chances that he will beat me up are seriously slim. Not to mention that I need my computer now and he is not available. I'm alive now and need to fix my problems now. Since God did not turn up I had to help myself. I must admit I did a considerably better job on my own in ten years than God did in forty. I don't regret taking over.

Of course, part of the way I thought God was in control and it was quite an issue giving up that idea when I realized that God does not exist and never had existed.

And yes, it matters an awful lot that God does not exist. It is really important that humanity realizes this before it destroys itself. Today, too large a proportion of humanity--including Discovery Institute and followers--is intent on distroying itself in the name of its God.

The impact of this kind of belief system on scientific research and education since the nineteenth century through the twentieth to the present day in the United States--and the funding for such research to continue--cannot be understated. If God existed and did what he is said to do, scientific research would be superfluous. God does not exist and we need to retain what learning we have accumulated in the past five centuries. Not to mention the need to continue learning. See this post.