Religions are historical products of changing human cultures. They are born, evolve, and die; the ancient Greek, Roman, and Norse gods, for instance, are extinct by any reasonable measure, nor have we heard much from Baal and Marduk or Isis and Osiris lately. Belief in any particular god, or concept of god, seems to be quite relative to human cultures. There’s also a bewildering variety of religions available to choose from, and no conceivable basis for choosing the "right" one.
Technically there's no way to prove any particular god does or does not exist. Most religious people I've discussed these ideas with remark at some point that belief is a matter of faith and therefore immune to any kind of scientific investigation. I don't buy that. Even the most fuzzy-minded believer would have to agree that god must interact with the universe to some degree; if she doesn't, she might as well not exist. If she's not literally running everything on a second by second basis, as some fundamentalists claim, then she certainly originated and designed it, at least in the sense of choosing the right physical laws. That means god must be at least to some degree a part of the physical universe, and therefore a legitimate subject for scientific investigation.
A universe with a god in it ought to be detectably different from one without. If we consider the claim that god exists to be a statement about the nature of reality, then the supposed attributes of such a god become testable hypotheses. There are lots of statements we can make about the physical world that provide simple, logical reasons not to believe that the postulated anthropomorphic god exists. The first paragraph of this post is one of them, based on the field of anthropology. Here are some more:
We can make a simple statistical observation: There’s a very clear inverse relationship between how much we know about something and the role we’re willing to assign to god in it. Much of the history of the last 400 years can be seen as religion retreating from making empirical claims about the world in the face of the scientific revolution. In other words, the more we know, the less we attribute to supernatural causes. Any logical person faced with such a consistent trend wouldn’t hesitate to extrapolate and decide god most likely doesn’t exist.
The field of geology tells us the earth is clearly and definitely much older than the few thousand years permitted by the teachings of any religion I’ve ever been able to investigate.
From astronomy, I see that every religiously derived cosmology I’ve ever encountered is demonstrably wrong. And not just a little bit, but egregiously, stunningly wrong.
Jeez, I do get on a roll sometimes, don't I. Must be because it's Saturday and there's nothing else I have to do...
Dex
Its not rare here, but I've noticed many people are still religious in Canada and the US...
