APPROACHES TO THE GOD IDEA 

AGNOSTICISM
The denial that one can know if God exists or not or the assertion that one doesn't know yet if God exists or not.
 
If God existed he would make sure it would be observed that his existence is at least plausible. A person who believes there may be a creator but which is impersonal or amoral is not an agnostic for this being is not God for it is not all-good and all-happy. It is most likely the creator, if any, is not a loving God for there are hundreds of alternatives to the loving God hypothesis.
 
Agnosticism is very offensive for God is basically a misanthropic principle and it should not be suggested even that he might exist. At least Agnosticism tends towards the idea that God is just an opinion and accordingly that God should be taught in school as an opinion and not as a fact. Agnostics do not like the dogmatism of religious schools.
 
ATHEISM
The denial that gods exist or that there is a God is one form. The other form is that there is not enough evidence for the existence of these beings and thus no reason to believe. One form says you believe there is no God and the other says you believe there is no reason to believe. Both forms in practice advocate that one should pay no attention to alleged divine revelation.
 
Agnosticism is not a viable or possible option and neither is Pantheism therefore Atheism is true.
 
People believe in God out of habit and they tend to copy other people and believe what they believe. They believe because they want comfort. They think people who don’t believe have bad morals.  Habit is not a reason. You can get comfort without belief in God – belief in nature spirits would do. And belief in God has nothing to do with a good life because atheists can do much good therefore belief in God is not needed. Since God is supposed to be the supreme good it follows that to believe in him we have to pretend that taking comfort from the idea of nature spirits is bad if not sinful. We have to say that atheists are only pretending to be good people. That shows you that belief in God is intrinsically dishonest and bigoted.

CREATION
Creation is the act by which God made all things out of nothing.  Nothing means that which cannot become something. It cannot become something as it is not something. It is nothing.
 
The Church is clear that all that existed was God and he did not make creation from himself or his power but by his power.
 
The Church says that nothing can come from nothing unless there is a God to make something come out of nothing. It is a trick as it contradicts the definition of nothing. Nothing is that which cannot become something. It is impossible for there is nothing there. Even a God cannot make any difference.
 
Believers say that if the universe popped into existence without a cause that is absurd and we would be wiser people if we would say the cause was God. But something coming from nothing is another way of saying it did pop out of nowhere and nothing!
 
God or not, if the universe came from nothing then he had nothing to do with it.
 
The notion of things popping out of nothing by themselves is impossible. God causing things to exist is far more impossible. Why? Because if God can do the impossible that makes God irrational and he should be able to create a being who though it has no free will is still able to use free will to become good. It would make God fundamentally evil and bad. The doctrine has the hidden meaning that God is evil and should be worshipped for that evil.
 
Buddha said we would never understand how the universe and ourselves came to be and so not to waste time on the issue. He was right in relation to religious speculation. The matter should be left to science. Science should be taken more seriously than religion for science is about experimentation and checking things out.
 
Some have said that there are so many insuperable difficulties with explaining the origin of the universe that the only solution is to invoke the supernatural as maybe providing an answer. Better to offer extremely unlikely answers than a supernatural one. Strange things do happen. The extremely improbable can happen.
 
FREE WILL DEFENCE
An attempt to salvage God from the charge of cruelty when he allows innocent suffering - it works by blaming us for it. The logic goes that God made us to love him and gave us free will to do right or do wrong because love cannot be forced. But even that would only be right if love could surpass evil. Religion takes it on faith that it does or will. Faith is not a good enough reason for saying that as far as God is concerned evil and suffering should be tolerated. Suffering is too serious for that.

Even if we have free will it could be that it is not about God.  A creator that is more like a non-material intelligence that does not have any awareness that it exists could give you free will but it would not be giving it so you can choose the right way or the wrong way.

You can have free will to decide if you are going to help or hinder another person but this is not free will that is about God.  Those who make their will about God may be abusing it or lying to themselves.  My dinner is about feeding me.  If I say my dinner is somehow the body and blood of God so it's about God, not feeding me, that is only in my head.  Same idea.
 
Religion says that love is voluntary. Only a being with free will to do extreme evil can give it. So they say God gave us all this freedom but we abused it of our own volition and so he is not to blame for evil. This reasoning is called the free will defence or the freedom defence. It is meant to clear God of the blame for evil. But it is obvious that God could limit our free will. It is limited anyway by our feelings and what we can remember and what we can think of. In short, it is limited by our mental powers. Hitler disproves God.
 
Religion says that to be free we have to be free all the way. We have to be free to do tremendous harm like Hitler was.
 
Christianity says that too. But it does not really believe it. Christianity says that we are all sinners meaning that we do not have the free will to live a sinless life. So we only have choice in relation to what sins we want to commit. We have no choice about being sinners or not. This implies that God doesn't give us enough free will. A God who refuses to give you the power to live a sinless life but you gives you rein to commit whatever evil you wish after making sure you will sin is a God of evil. The freedom to live a sinless life is not as important to him as making people inclined to commit any sin even extreme ones.
 
The defence asserts that we have free will in order that we might use it to accept God in love.
 
The defence then argues thus,
 
We have free will.
 
#God gave it to us in order that we might have a relationship with him.
 
#We can abuse this free will and God does not interfere.
 
=Therefore evil is our fault not God's.
 
This argument is a circular one. "God gave us free will therefore there is a God." It is an insult to humanity considering the terrible things that visit everybody on earth.
 
When we chose evil, God allegedly made evil things like killer viruses so that sacrifice could be made in love and we are told that this is our fault, not his. But when I am most sure of my existence (that I exist now is the one thing I cannot doubt), I have to put myself first and so I should not suffer but be happy all the time and a God should make that possible. I am not advocating having no concern for others. We occasionally need to suffer to be happy because of the way things are. I am saying this should not be the way things are in the first place if there is a God. God is evil when I suffer and when he demands sacrifice. To invent a God and then accuse people of causing all the evil in the world means that belief is being put before people, what you can touch and see is put second to a concept and perception that might be wrong. That is barbaric and the free will defence is an insult to us humanists and to those whom we cherish.
 
We are told that being good is freedom and being bad is bondage. If God wanted us to have a lot of free will he would have given us the power to live without sin. Instead of that he lets us have a bias towards sin that we will give in to and then lets us become Hitlers if we can. So he gives us too much free will of the wrong kind. The free will argument that evil is compatible with God's love is wrong. To worship God is to close our eyes and hearts to his evil.
 
Good actions are caused by good desires. We are supposed to be most free when we are free from sin for sin is irrational and what is irrational means you have lost your reason and your freedom is diminished. So God takes away our freedom by giving us bad desires! Is it not better to be so free that you never feel interested in sin than to have an interest in it? And especially when this interest puts others at risk of being hurt? The Church instead of saying yes argues that we need to be allowed by God to do harm. What is happening here is that the Church sees how nasty we can be and are. It puts the cart before the horse. Instead of asking if God can let us be that nasty it looks at the nastiness and guesses that God must be right to let it happen. Why not go further? Why not reason that the paedophile is right to abuse the child just because we see him abusing her?
 
Religion implies that the most important good is having freedom to take away the freedom of others by hurting them!! So immorality is good! And it suggests that Satan was more good when God put the suggestion of sin in him! When actions are caused by desires it follows that the more good desires you have the better. But God’s treatment of Satan implies otherwise, meaning if Satan agreed with God’s ways then he deserved to be thrown out of Heaven.
 
The free will defence is rejected by astute scholars such as Brian Davies OP. He says that it denies that God is the maker of all. It says we make our sins in spite of God. But if God is almighty we make our sins because of him. He argues that God is right to do this so it does not mean God sins with us. We have here an idea of God which means he lays out everything that happens to us. It is a form of fatalism and predetermination that is as vile as that taught by Islam. Islam often reasons that if you want to kill for God, go and do it for he is predetermining your actions so it is up to him to worry about it not you. And it is the only real view of God... anything else only looks like God but is not God for it is not absolute and the reason everything is.
 
GOD
To be God, God needs to have all power or there is something he cannot control. To be deserving of worship God needs to have this infinite power and to use it with perfectly good intentions. He has to be absolutely good and holy. He has to be the reason all things exist. A supreme being is not the same as God. God means the origin of all and the being who is so great that he is the reason he exists. Thus it is wrong to ask who made God.
 
God cannot exist because evil exists. The God concept goes with the activity of worship for only what ought to be worshipped can be called God and only what is worthy can be worshipped. As God is perfect and the maker of all and we owe him everything he alone matters. We should prefer even self-destruction to displeasing him.

If God never wanted evil to exist and it is our fault then it follows that he puts up with it for a purpose. This is to deny that he is almighty or even competent because he could arrange things so that we are less likely to choose evil. Yet we have this bias towards evil. Some are born with less bias than others. It is proven that God must want evil to exist.
 
If suffering has a purpose then it follows that it must be intended so that we will be able to make sacrifices for love. This implies that the more God lets us suffer the better for the more we sacrifice the more we love. This shows the doctrine of God to be morbid and degrading and enamoured of fanaticism for the allegation that God wants suffering is the only plausible assumption to take if you want to believe in God.
 
Should we feed the beggar because he needs food and we care? That is the same as doing it is because it is good. Or should we do it because God commands it in which case if he forbade it we would let the beggar starve? If God comes first then we should do it because God commands it for in so far as we do it for the beggar we are not honouring God who is more important. The solution that God commands us to care for the beggar doesn’t work for the question is asking what matters: obedience to commands or concern for others.  If God commanding is what is important and not good then religion is about power and control even when it seems to do good. God may be called love but all he is good for is destroying it for since we have to put obedience before caring for an unfortunate human being. The person who believes that caring is more important than obeying is an atheist in practice. The only message the concept of God gives out is that God and therefore religion must be served and put first and that human beings and yourself are dirt and good for nothing at all and all must be manipulated for him and those who resist him must be punished.
 
Priests who condone the ways of God when he lets the children suffer are doing so in honour of a belief that thrives on a hidden kind of evil and that is totally repulsive.

NATURALISM
 
Naturalism is the view that there is no God or magic or supernatural. Religion says that we need to believe that our origin is God who has personality and awareness and who is pure intelligence and pure love in order to ground our trust in our reason and our values. If we are the products of chance or blind natural forces how can we trust our reason? How can we trust our perception that some actions are to be forbidden and some are to be praised? Some say that naturalism undermines trust in reason and science and values and morality. Others say that it does not but merely fails to support them. The latter view says we may have values and the power to think even if there is nothing but nature.
 
In fact, we treat our perception of values and our trust in thinking as brute facts. That cannot be changed. It's intrinsic to us. Brute facts are things that are just the case and there is no explanation for them or at least none we can think of. Perhaps we will never explain and they need to be treated as brute facts as long as we do not understand. By being dissatisfied with our reasoning faculty and our values as being brute facts, religion is in fact saying, "We oppose the human intrinsic instinct to accept them as facts that are simply facts." That is an onslaught on our nature. They defy their own nature to pay homage to religion. They purge integrity to embrace self-deception. They are on a par with the man who denies the existence or the power of gravity. They cruelly try to make others addicted to the same self-degradation.
 
The notion that blind forces can't produce moral beings or beings that value goodness is as absurd as saying chance cannot make a basic machine that adds up 2 and 2 to make 4. Of course that is possible. Seeing something as good and something else as less good is like maths in the sense that you see that ten apples is ten apples and three apples is three.
 
If natural forces cannot produce moral beings, God can't do it either. He is not like us at all but more like a mind without personal characteristics. He is not a moral agent for he cannot be punished if he does wrong. He can't do wrong but that is not the point.
 
Good exists whether there is a God or not. If there is no creation and nothing at all exists, that is good for it means there is nobody around to suffer. It is bad other ways but that is not the point.
 
Natural selection causes us to tend to adopt beliefs that are advantageous in the natural selection processes. Some say that it follows that if we believe God is not behind our evolution then we are saying is very unlikely that we are programmed and made properly. In other words, we will have untrue and true beliefs that are advantageous. But surely natural selection would have us pick out the true beliefs that are best for us at least when it comes to the major things such as thinking and working out what values we have? An untrue belief never confers an advantage when the overall picture is looked at.
 
Another complaint that naturalism is counter-intuitive. It is stated that "intuition is sometimes wrong but still it is unwise to pay no heed to it without having adequate evidence that what it is saying is incorrect". Intuition does not come from nowhere. It comes from how we apply reason and learning to life. If we misuse reason, our intuition will mislead us.
 
Naturalists and believers in God alike assume the trustworthiness of human reason - when learned properly - in order to work out their view. The notion that you need to believe something that indicates that reason is reliable is silly and is assuming the thing you aim to prove. We simply go along with our reason. How can we look for arguments to prop up reason when we have to use reason to come up with the arguments?
 
PANTHEISM
The belief that God is not a spirit outside the universe but that the universe is this spirit behaving as if it were matter so all things are God. This is absurd for it would mean the child killed by the car is the same being and thing and person as the car. A God like this is insane when he morphs into a world such as ours. He is therefore not a God for he is not in control of himself so he cannot expect sincere worship. Many Atheists claim to be Pantheists for they believe that God is a material thing, the universe. They see God as non-supernatural and just another word for the universe.