David Hume and the Refutation of the Existence of God

Believers try to confuse you but essentially God is all about the belief that somehow there is a person who not only does right and rejects wrong but is right and the rejection of wrong.  This person is God.  God is not even important for worship or anything otherwise except perhaps as a pet theory.

Hume talks about moral distinctions.  Moral distinctions refer to what is morally right and morally wrong.  He says that the distinction is all about how people approve of you if you do certain things and punish and mistrust and disapprove of you if you do not.  He famously asserted that though somebody is hurt when you hurt them that does not prove you were wrong for you cannot turn an is into an ought.  Hume said that morality is incapable of being shown to be correct through reason and thinking and good sense.  That is as good of a rejection of belief in the existence of God as you will get.  It is agnostic and advocates atheism in practice.

I would add that if morality is based on what the community you are a part of thinks and feels then it is selfish to concoct or believe in a God whose opinion matters while theirs does not.  Bringing God into morality only creates a mess.  While believers who only care about God's opinion may be good citizens it is only because it just happens that God and their community have similar moral directives.  They are not truly moral inside for morality is about people not religion or God.

David Hume said: "Man is a reasonable being, and, as such, receives from science his proper food and nourishment."
 
Hume starts off with the thought that "every idea which we examine is copied from a similar impression." In relation to God, we know from looking within ourselves what wisdom is as a faculty and we find feelings of compassion in ourselves. That's just to pick out two things. What we do then is we say God has them too.

Christians like to pretend that sceptics and unbelievers say that the explanation for how the concept of God might have appeared in our minds is a disproof of the existence of God. They do not. And it is not. It proves though that when we claim we believe in God because he revealed himself to us in scriptures or whatever, we are not telling the truth.

I worship my perception of God, the image I have made of him. I never worship the real God - even if there is one.

Maybe God understands that we are doing our best and makes allowances. But can a wife make allowances for her husband's inability to see her as she is?

Hume's argument proves not that there is no God but that believers are all idolaters.

What strengthens Hume's case even further is that the idea of God doing miracles to show us that he exists and to show us the true religion is false. Miracles are inadequate as evidence and we depend on man to verify them. Each religion finds that other religions have been using experts to fake the evidence for miracles. Without real evidence for God, the believer is not really a believer at all but a person who has an emotional attachment to the God concept.

Here is proof for what I said about miracles. Christianity claims to offer the only way of salvation from the agony of everlasting Hellfire starting at death. No miracle can be good enough to prove such an extreme claim.

Prayer is for many if not all just an attempt to feel good about doing nothing. Even the believer has to admit that prayer is really doing nothing for another person. God knows what is best. We might pray for healing. And it may come. Did God answer the prayer then? That depends on his motive. Did he do it to answer the prayer or did he do it just because it was the right thing to do? If he did it because he was asked, then it was not because it was right. Maybe he did it both because he was asked and because it was right? That means he refused to do it entirely because it was right. In so far as God does not do it because it is right he is acting amorally if not immorally. As he claims to be good, he would be showing he is not perfectly good. Then prayer is saying, "I don't care if you are evil or not do what I ask!" How is that supposed to help us become more virtuous. No wonder there is nothing remarkable about the virtue of most believers. Any virtue they have is there in spite of their faith and their prayers.

Those who are encouraged to appreciate prayers are being manipulated.

To love God with all your heart means to hate sin with all your heart as well. Prayer is opening and trying to do that. That is what really matters. It urges people to sacrifice themselves on the altar of religion by being eaten up by hatred. The prayers of believers are not motivated by this intention so they are not prayers to God but to the image they have made of God.