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Arguments against the existence of God

Each of the following arguments aims at showing that some particular conception of a god either is inherently meaningless, contradictory, or contradicts known scientific and/or historical facts, and that therefore a god thus described does not exist

• The omnipotence paradox suggests that the concept of an omnipotent God is logically contradictory, from considering a question like: "Can God create a rock so big that He Himself could not lift it?".

• Another argument suggests that there is a contradiction between God being omniscient and omnipotent, basically asking "how can an All-Knowing Being change His mind?" See the article on omniscience for details.

• The argument from free will contests the existence of an omniscient god who has free will - or has allotted the same freedom to his creations - by arguing that the two properties are contradictory. According to the argument, if God already knows the future, then humanity is destined to corroborate with his knowledge of the future and not have true free will to deviate from it. Therefore our free will contradicts an omniscient god.

• The Transcendental argument for the non-existence of God contests the existence of an intelligent creator by suggesting that such a being would make logic and morality contingent, which is incompatible with the presuppositionalist assertion that they are necessary, and contradicts the efficacy of science. A more general line of argument based on TANG, seeks to generalize this argument to all necessary features of the universe and all god-concepts.

• The counter-argument against the Cosmological argument ("chicken or the egg") states that if the Universe had to be created by God because it must have a creator, then God, in turn would have had to be created by some other God, and so on. This attacks the premise that the Universe is the second cause, (after God, who is claimed to be the first cause).
Theological noncognitivism, as used in literature, usually seeks to disprove the god-concept by showing that it is unverifiable by scientific tests.

• It is alleged that there is a logical impossibility in theism: God is defined as an extra-temporal being, but also as an active creator. The argument suggests that the very act of creation is inconceivable and absurd beyond the constraints of time and space, and the fact that it cannot be proven if God is in either.

Empirical arguments depend on empirical data in order to prove their conclusions.

• The argument from inconsistent revelations contests the existence of the Middle Eastern, Biblical deity called God as described in holy scriptures, such as the Jewish Tanakh, the Christian Bible, or the Muslim Qur'an, by identifying apparent contradictions between different scriptures, within a single scripture, or between scripture and known facts.

• The problem of evil contests the existence of a God who is both omnipotent and omnibenevolent by arguing that such a God should not permit the existence of evil or suffering. The theist responses are called theodicies.

• The argument from poor design contests the idea that God created life on the basis that lifeforms exist which seem to exhibit poor design.

• The argument from nonbelief contests the existence of an omnipotent God who wants humans to believe in him by arguing that such a God would do a better job of gathering believers.

• The argument from parsimony contends that since natural (non-supernatural) theories adequately explain the development of religion and belief in god, the actual existence of such supernatural agents is superfluous and may be dismissed unless otherwise proven to be required to explain the phenomenon.