r/DebateAnAtheist

I am by no means an expert in religious debates, yet I do have two profound questions for atheists which do not make sense to me.

My question for atheists is who created the universe if not god? Is it not the case that if something comes into being, something else must create it?

Forces like gravity are forever, atoms and isotopes within neutrons are definitive, set factors which define our world. Everything is meticulously logical, across planets, solar systems and even our whole galaxy, how are these laws of nature created without a rationalist creator, without god?

A year ago i came here to say "proof that Islam is correct is bal bla bla" and a couple of months ago i became an atheist, or agnostic or wtv you call it

Just wanted to come here and give an update cuz why not

What made me stop being a Muslim?

I noticed that there is just no proof for anything

Its either a he said she said situation

Or its a logical fallacy like "idk who made this so its god" or smt like that yk?

Im much happier as an atheist too

Now i actually have morals not just a book of "do and don't"

Kids are brought to church and told if they don't believe in God...they're never gonna see their family and burn in suffering for eternity.

And after that, they're told that anybody who would speak otherwise is a lying demon.

This is just gaslighting... The kid has a belief forced onto them and adults haven't took two seconds out of their lives to wonder why they themselves are even religious to begin with. Free will is one thing... (join a cult if you like) but kids don't get free will before told these threatening things by preachers.

Who would've known telling kids -> If they don't belive in God... they're gonna burn forever and never see their family again would make someone grow up religious. WOW.

Don't even debate me demons. It's over.

one of my college friends keeps on calling me to come to these meetings saying i’ll get better by just coming and learning the practice and chanting

i have been pretty sick and i told them about it and they just repeated saying the same as above. even tho i ignore it , they just keep going on and on about it.

it’s like when someone keeps insisting so much , it’s very weird and annoying.
feels like atleast their practice is a cult , what do yall think ?

I’ve been reading some random facts about DNA lately, and honestly I'm shocked my some facts.

Look at these numbers:

• The Length: I read that if you took all the DNA from just ONE human body and stretched it out, it would reach to Pluto and back. Like, six times! How does that much "data" even fit inside us without getting tangled or broken?
• Storage: Just a few grams of DNA can store as much data as 100 million hard drives. We’re out here struggling with SSDs and cloud storage, while our own cells have been using the most advanced tech in the universe for millions of years.
• Self-Repair: This is the craziest part to me. DNA actually repairs itself. There are enzymes that literally "scan" the code like a debugger, find mistakes, cut them out, and fix them. If this "software" didn't work from day one, life would have just crashed instantly, right?
• The XY / XX thing: I also found out that a female (XX) can be genetically derived from the male (XY) template, but not the other way around. It’s like the female was literally derived from a "piece" of the male's genetic code. It’s a weirdly specific coincidence considering what’s written in some ancient religious books.
• Programming language. What really gets me is that DNA isn't just chemistry - it’s literally a programming language. It’s an instruction manual written in a 4-letter code (A, C, G, T). It’s not just sitting there, it’s executable code that tells the cell exactly how to build a human. In any other field, if we saw a language and a functional code, we would assume there's an author behind it.

Honestly, looking at this from a logic or systems perspective, it just feels like the ultimate masterpiece of engineering. It’s not just some random molecule, it’s a self-correcting, high-density storage system that’s more efficient than anything humans ever built.

Can I get your opinions about that? Do you think "it just happened over billions of years by some accident?"

’m trying to sharpen an argument, not just rant against religion.

I understand that Alvin Plantinga and Richard Swinburne are important figures in analytic philosophy of religion. Plantinga is famous for the free will defense, reformed epistemology, warrant/proper function, and the modal ontological argument. Swinburne is famous for trying to defend theism and Christianity through probabilistic/Bayesian reasoning. William Lane Craig could perhaps be added too, though he seems less academically central and more apologetic/public-facing.

But I genuinely struggle to understand why these projects are still treated as serious defenses of Christian belief rather than brilliant rationalizations of an inherited religious framework.

Plantinga’s free will defense seems to show, at most, that God and evil are not logically incompatible. But that feels like a very low bar. With enough auxiliary hypotheses and possible-world machinery, many absurd beliefs can avoid strict contradiction. That does not make them epistemically plausible.

The natural evil part seems even worse. If human free will does not explain earthquakes, diseases, animal suffering, etc., Plantinga appears to appeal to the possibility of non-human free agents — Satan, fallen angels, or something in that neighborhood. I understand that, technically, he only needs logical possibility to answer the logical problem of evil. But if someone appealed to fairies, elves, or invisible spirits from another mythology to explain suffering, nobody would treat that as serious academic philosophy. Why does it become respectable when the vocabulary is Christian?

His reformed epistemology also seems vulnerable to parity objections. If Christian belief can be “properly basic” because of a sensus divinitatis, why could Muslims, Hindus, Mormons, or believers in any incompatible revelation not make the same move? And if non-belief is explained by saying the faculty is damaged or suppressed, does the theory become insulated from criticism?

Swinburne seems different but equally strange to me. His Bayesian project looks more ambitious, but the crucial priors and likelihoods often seem like Christian-friendly intuitions assigned numbers. He has to estimate what God would probably do: create a universe, create moral agents, allow suffering, reveal himself, perhaps become incarnate, etc. But how are those probabilities independently justified rather than smuggled in from the theology he is trying to defend?

So my question for atheists, especially those familiar with philosophy of religion:

Do you think Plantinga and Swinburne should still be treated as serious philosophical interlocutors, or are they mainly examples of Christianity receiving inherited epistemic privilege?

More specifically:

1. Did Plantinga really do anything more than show that the logical problem of evil was too strong?
2. Does his appeal to non-human free agents for natural evil strike you as academically respectable or bizarrely protected by Christian vocabulary?
3. Does reformed epistemology avoid the “any religion can say this” problem?
4. Does Swinburne’s Bayesian theism offer real probabilistic support, or does it just formalize Christian assumptions?
5. Is analytic philosophy of religion itself biased by the historical dominance of Christianity?

I’m interested in the strongest atheist/agnostic responses, not just “religion is dumb.”

Whether you're an agnostic atheist here to ask a gnostic one some questions, a theist who's curious about the viewpoints of atheists, someone doubting, or just someone looking for sources, feel free to ask anything here. This is also an ideal place to tag moderators for thoughts regarding the sub or any questions in general.

While this isn't strictly for debate, rules on civility, trolling, etc. still apply.

If you believe there’s no God, then explain life. Then why we cannot create it ? Why, if the organ stops, there’s no way back, despite we know about it and how it works ?

If we are nothing more than biological machines, why does the "spark" of existence remain so elusive to our greatest scientific minds ? If life is merely a complex chemical reaction, why haven't we been able to replicate that reaction in a laboratory starting from zero ? We have mapped the human genome and understand the mechanics of every valve and vessel, yet we remain unable to jumpstart a system once the threshold of death has been crossed.

Is life an emergent property of matter that we simply haven't mastered yet, or does our failure to "reboot" the human body suggest that there is a fundamental element missing from our equations ? If we truly "know" about how the organs work, why is the transition from a living being to a corpse so instantaneous and irreversible ?

This is a common defense given to Adam and Eve, God knew from the beginning that they would disobey but they still freely made the choice to go against his order.” Or justifying excessive evil in the world, God knew this mass un-al1ver was going to successfully perform his goals, but he is still giving him free will to do it or not.

To me it just sounds like a grand assertion that can’t be debunked (unfalsifiable), but wondering if there’s a better way to defeat this?

Accomplished something major this week? Discovered a cool fact that demands to be shared? Just want a friendly conversation on how amazing/awful/thoroughly meh your favorite team is doing? This thread is for the water cooler talk of the subreddit, for any atheists, theists, deists, etc. who want to join in.

While this isn't strictly for debate, rules on civility, trolling, etc. still apply.