Last Updated on 2025-05-02 by Joop Beris
As an atheist, I obviously do not believe in God. I can’t be absolutely sure that there is no divine being of some sort but I think it is beyond any reasonable doubt that the God of the Bible (or Torah and Koran for that matter) doesn’t exist. Here are my Top 10 reasons God does not exist.
For a better understanding of my personal reasons to be an atheist, you may want to check out this article too. If you believe in God or find yourself in doubt, you will want to read 10 bad reasons to believe in God and 9 logical reasons why there is no God.
10. People speak for God.
According to Christians, Jesus walked the Earth in the flesh, appeared to people after his alleged death and God even spoke directly to people like Abraham and Moses. This all happened a long time ago though and no direct evidence exists to support these events. Nowadays, there are still people who claim to speak for God and people who claim that God speaks to them. Many of them sound like they have mental problems and would be a source of embarrassment if they were the spokesperson of anyone today. Why would an omnipotent and benevolent God have such people speak for him? If God really existed, he would speak for himself.
9. So many gods to choose from.
Christians (and other religions) claim that their God is the one true God and all the others aren’t real. It’s unclear how they determined this. Why is their God the real thing and not any of the others? Circumstance appears to dictate which God you believe in, like place of birth and the faith of your parents. Children growing up in a home without religion, grow up without believing in God unless someone tells them. If there were one true God who wanted to save people, he would reveal himself. The fact that he doesn’t, proves that God doesn’t exist.
8. God isn’t love.
Christians are ever so fond of telling us that God is love, that he regards us as his children, that he came to die for our sins and that he wants everyone to be saved. Obviously, this is not true. If God is our omnipotent father, it would be trivial for him to save people from dying horrible deaths. If he cared for us like a father, he would make sure that none of us would have to suffer an eternity in hell. That’s what an actual loving parent does.
The God of the Bible appears very different when you actually read the Bible. God has no problems wiping out very nearly everyone on Earth in a global flood. He commands the Israelites to commit genocide and berates Moses for not being thorough enough. He deliberately hardens the heart of the Pharaoh so that he can deliver the plagues upon Egypt. If we don’t love him back, he quite happily consigns us to everlasting torture by fire. These are not the actions of a kind, loving father but the actions of a psychopath. This proves that God doesn’t exist, at least not how people prefer to believe in Him.
7. God supposedly doesn’t want to interfere with free will.
When asked why God no longer performs miracles today, why he doesn’t appear to people any more, we are often told that God has to remain hidden because he doesn’t want to interfere with our free will. If it were obvious that he was there, of course people would believe in him. Yes, and? Why would that be a problem for God? If he loves us and wants us to be saved, what better way to ensure that than being painfully obvious for everyone?
Moreover, God had no problem being obvious in the past. He parted the Red Sea, spoke directly with people, appeared in a fiery column, brought people back from the dead, incarnated himself and died a public death, appeared after his public death and many more. Why wasn’t it a problem for people witnessing these events to lose their free will? What has changed? It is much more likely that those events are myths and that God doesn’t exist. Free will has nothing to do with it.
6. Jesus wasn’t a nice person.
Christians all around the world have this warm, fuzzy image of a kind of hippie Jesus avant-la-lettre, who went around preaching love and forgiveness. That doesn’t correspond to what the Bible tells us about Jesus, though. At best, Jesus sounds like a hypocrite when he tells people to love their enemies but at the same time says that people who don’t believe in him, will be cast into the fire. Jesus also tells people that he has not come to bring peace but a sword and that we are to hate our relatives if we want to follow him. And what to think of the Canaanite woman who pleads with Jesus and he sends her away calling her a dog because she is not the right nationality? Or when he kills a fig tree for not bearing fruit at a time when figs are out of season? That doesn’t sound like a loving God but like a childish, capricious and bigoted person.
The loving Jesus who is also God? He doesn’t exist.
5. Jesus failed
Millions of Christians believe that Jesus was God incarnate, God become flesh in this world. He came to die for our sins so that everyone could be saved. Clearly, he failed miserably in his mission. Many people don’t believe in him and some even believe he may never have existed at all. Many more people believe in a different God. And many people have never heard of him. When you think about it, why didn’t Jesus do a better job? Why didn’t he do something better with his omniscience than dying rather anonymously in a barbaric desert region in the Middle East? After all, being omnipotent and omniscient, he would have known beforehand that his mission would only be a success on a limited scale. Even I could find a better way to save people without being all-knowing. Clearly, the Jesus that Christians believe in, wasn’t the omnipotent and omniscient God that he is made out to be. He doesn’t exist.
4. Christians don’t trust in God either
I know they profess to believe in God and that God is their saviour and that they put their trust in God. The reality is that they don’t really do that. If they did, no Christian would have insurance, no Christian would go see a doctor and no Christian would need to look before crossing the road. After all, when God has your back, what could possibly happen to you, right? A simple prayer will set everything straight again, won’t it? If it’s your time to die, it’s your time to die, no? Since they’ve accepted Jesus, they’ll go straight to heaven, won’t they?
Christians don’t trust their God any more than non-Christians do. Why? Because God doesn’t exist, that’s why.
3. The crucifixion story is utterly unbelievable
The central message of Christianity is that God so loved the world, he came down from heaven as a person to die for our sins in a most gruesome way so that we could be forgiven for our sinful nature. Forgiven by whom? Forgiven by the same God who came to die for us. All you need to do to become a Christian, is believe that this is true and you are saved.
When you think logically about it though (and religion rarely stands up under logical scrutiny), you’ll immediately see that this makes no sense at all. For one, why would God need to be born, become flesh? Why go through all this trouble of being born, growing up, performing the odd miracle, teaching at temple, gathering a bunch of followers, do some more miracles, get arrested, crucified, die, only to come back from the dead three days later? If God, who is allegedly omnipotent, wants to forgive us, why go through with this elaborate scheme? Why not just forgive everyone and be done with it?
In addition, God is omniscient so he knew before ever making humans that one day, he’d do all that. Why not just leave that one tree out of reach of Adam and Eve? Surely God knew that they’d eat from it? None of it is necessary! It could all have been prevented, the fall from grace, the flood, the plagues, the genocides, the crucifixion if God had just left that one tree out of the garden of Eden.
The most logical explanation is that none of this is true, the garden of Eden never existed and neither does God.
2. The Bible
When asked, most Christians will tell you that the Bible is the word of God. In essence, God is the author of this book. Since God is supposedly perfect, omniscient and omnipotent, you’d expect the Bible to be the most beautiful, most moving, most poetic, most moral and most accurate book of all time.
This is not what you find when you read the Bible. Most Christians never bother reading the Bible cover to cover and if they did, there’d be a lot more atheists in this world! Instead of a book as I just described, the Bible is full of errors, contradictions, superstition and utterly immoral texts. There is not one person among my readership who could not write a more moral text. Instead of proving a perfect author, the Bible reads just like a text you’d expect from a barbaric age, an age of slavery, genocide, pestilence, torture and scapegoating.
The Bible proves it’s author wasn’t divine and that God does not exist.
And lastly, the number one reason why God does not exist:
1. Prayer never works
It may seem to work from time to time but in reality, it doesn’t. Try praying for something that is deemed impossible and it will never happen. Why? Well, because it is impossible. Imagine all the people on Earth right now, imagine what they are praying for. People praying for peace in their country, people praying for food, for shelter, for safety, for healing, for the floods to spare them, for a successful exam, for anything you can imagine. If you do an analysis on the prayers that get answered, you’ll see it is only the prayers that had a fairly realistic chance of coming true regardless. You can pass an exam without prayer if you study but no matter how hard you pray, food never falls from the sky, God never restores an amputee, God never brings peace, God never heals a child with terminal cancer. He will help you find a parking space though.
It should be painfully obvious that prayer accomplishes nothing. In fact, nothing fails like prayer!
This is completely at odds with the words of Jesus who promised that anything you ask in his name, he’ll do. No conditions, no excuses: ask and ye shall receive. But you don’t. Why? God doesn’t answer prayers because God doesn’t exist.
Conclusion
These are just my Top 10 reasons God does not exist. I’m sure you could think of several more but these are the ones I like. What reason do you have? Why don’t you leave me your Top 10 reasons God does not exist in the comments below? Have anything else to say about the above? Please leave a comment!
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