Assuming that the gods of monotheism and polytheism are competent, I will argue that they do not exist. Unlike the problem of evil, which only works for Abrahamic religions, this will work for all theistic religions. This argument doesn’t work against Supernatural Atheism, especially the subset of Supernatural Atheism that is called “nontheistic religions”, which includes Buddhism and Jainism.

• Introduction
• The argument
• Hinduism
• Abrahamic religions
• Nontheistic religions

Introduction

The problem of evil is a very powerful argument against monotheism. Abrahamic theologians’ least absurd solution for this is Plantinga’s free will defense. But there are many natural evils, like tornados, floods, etc, that are not caused by any person’s free will. Plantinga claims that even these are caused by Satan’s free will. It is very absurd to make such ad hoc claims with no evidence. Why a god respects the free will of Satan more than all the natural suffering endured by sentient beings remains unanswered.

But the problem of evil fails for religions like Hinduism. You might have seen victim blaming in Abrahamic religions like in the original sin. What Adam and Eve did is not even an evil thing. But somehow, this malevolent God is punishing all future humans for what those 2 did. Apparently, by default, every human will go to hell because of this, and unless you believe in this God, in which case he/she/it will forgive you. So, he/she/it will send even morally perfect people who didn’t believe in his/her/its existence to hell and tortures eternally for the mere reason of not believing his/her/its existence but will accept to heaven anyone who believes in his/her/its existence for irrational reasons like childhood indoctrination, circular arguments, blind faith etc even if they are the most immoral person. In this case, blaming the people who go to hell instead of the unjust God is victim blaming.

Hinduism is several orders of magnitude more comfortable with victim blaming than Abrahamic religions. If some evil happens, then one can always blame the victim by saying in the past life he/she was evil, and so this is all Karma. The fact that the number of human souls is constantly increasing is not an argument against Hinduism because Hindus think the souls of animals are also similar to humans, and those few Hindus who thought might have concluded that the total number of sentient animal souls is conserved. It is generally said that those who did good things as animals in the past life will be promoted to humans, and those who did bad things will be demoted to lower castes or lower animals on the biological ladder. Trillions (1,2,3,4) of sentient animals are needlessly tortured and killed every year in animal agriculture. To a Hindu, why are supposedly good gods not stopping this atrocity is a simple question because they think it is justice to allow those people/animals who did immoral things in the past life to suffer.

In this post, I will discuss an argument that works for all theistic religions.

The argument

P1: If a God exists, he/she/it will be competent at things that he/she/it wants to do.
P2: In all theistic religions, the Gods are very incompetent at sharing the information (that they regard as important) in a way that makes sure it reaches every person and compels at least all rational people to believe in it.
C1: Therefore, these Gods are fictional, and the incompetency in sending this information is completely human in nature. Some ordinary humans created these religions, but they were incompetent in sending this information to all humans.

I assume all theists will agree with Premise 1. I will justify Premise 2 separately for Hinduism and Abrahamic religions. This argument will similarly work for all theistic religions like Zoroastrianism, Sikhism, etc.

Example of a competent transmission

I will give 2 examples of how I would transmit important information if I had 1) Advanced science & technology and 2) Omnipotence. Both of these examples are much better than what popular (fictional) gods used.

1) Advanced science & technology:

• For comparison with gods, we should at least consider someone as powerful as a benevolent dictator of the world government. Since a unified world government doesn’t need a military, we can drastically reduce the world military expenditure and instead use that to build a gigantic particle accelerator and experimentally verify a quantum gravity theory. Then the world government’s benevolent dictator can send everyone on this planet this important information by mandating every social media app like YouTube, Instagram, and Twitter to share it on the homepage and ask everyone to teach this to their children. This way this important information is transmitted to everyone.
• For an even more advanced civilization that has built things like Dyson sphere, energy will be quite abundant. So, the benevolent world dictator can create billions of robots such that everyone gets a robot to help with all daily needs. This robot should also tell them whatever important info that their benevolent world dictator wants them to know by projecting it on a wall. The analog of this for a god would be sending a “holy animated video” to every robot that contains all the commandments etc.

2) Omnipotence: For an omnipotent being it will be quite easy to create a copy of himself for every sentient being and always roam with every sentient being and transmit to everyone all the important information. Each being’s version is visible to only them. You can even give them infinite regeneration abilities and infinite cognitive abilities and make sure they will never suffer again. For example, if you try to kill someone then your version of god will stop it and peacefully explain to you that everyone is immortal and you can’t do this stuff anymore and will tell you to be more peaceful. This method solves many other issues with theism apart from solving God’s incompetency in sending his messages it also solves divine hiddeness, the problem of evil, etc. People can verify with each other that their version of god also told the same moral rules.

Hinduism

It doesn’t matter how many times and how many Hindus repeat that ancient Indians had nuclear bombs, airplanes, internet, etc [Source]. No amount of chest-thumping ethnocentrism and superiority complex will make these ridiculous things true history. It is a matter of fact that we Indians are one of the last civilizations to get scripture and there is no shame in accepting it for a rational person. See this list. Egyptians had scripture in 2690 BC. Sumerians had in 2600 BC. Old Chinese script came in 1250 BC. Hebrew scripture came in 10th century BC. Old Arabic in 8th century BC. Latin in 7th century BC. Old Persian in 500 BC. And finally, in 260 BC, Ashokan Prakrit was there, which is the oldest discovered Indian sculpture. Edicts of Ashoka are the oldest known Indian scriptures. Just to prove how unreliable Indian history is, let me remind you that Ashoka was forgotten for more than 2000 years before some Britishers found these. Until this time, scriptures were orally passed on for many generations. Even after the introduction of scripture, routinely, these scriptures were changed for a few centuries. One can only imagine how many changes were made by the time scripture came. So, how can we believe that these scriptures were not corrupted by many humans?

According to Bg. 4.1, Bhagavad Gita was originally spoken to the first man Manu. But as it is forgotten, it is again spoken to Arjuna by Kṛṣṇa 120,400,000 years after the previous time. Why are these gods not talented enough to send the message a single time and make sure that it reaches everyone in the first attempt itself instead of coming every few million years once?

A Hindu might claim that because this is Kali Yuga, we don’t see gods often among humans but in previous yugas, they were not so secret and used to roam among people. But this is again not a rationally justifiable claim because we have a lot of evidence for example that dinosaurs existed but according to Hinduism there were also Hindus and Hindu gods roaming around that time but we have no evidence for that.

In many Hindu myths, important announcements by gods will be done by Akashvani in Sanskrit which will be heard by all people in a very big region like a city. Even this is not a good way of communicating with humans. It should be said such that everyone hears in their own mother tongue and it should be audible to everyone in the world instead of a city. This way historians can cross-check different cultures and verify that it is indeed a miracle that all people heard the same thing in different languages and then it might seem more likely that a supernatural entity is behind this message.

Geography: Why is this supposedly important information only sent to people on our subcontinent? Why not to other places like the American continents, Africa, Europe, China, Arabia, etc?

Abrahamic religions

Geography: Why is this supposedly important information only sent to people in the Levant region? Why not to other places like India, the American continents, Africa, Europe, China, Arabia, etc? God sent prophets just to a tiny part of Earth with messages/commandments that he wanted everyone on Earth to follow. This is easily explained within atheism, the people of that region created stories so of course, an ethocentric superiority complex is bound to be there and they of course would expect that the creator of the universe has a special priority for their ethnicity.

Even the way he revealed to such a tiny place was very incompetent. The books claimed to be his message sent by him via the so-called prophets were never written during the life spans of these prophets. These prophets had literally one important job to make sure humans get this information right and yet they failed to do this one task. This gave to rise the routine claim that an old Abrahamic religion is updated by another one. For example, Christianity claims to be an update of Judaism, Islam claims to be an update of Christianity and Ahmadiyya claims to be an update of Islam. I expect an omnipotent being to be competent enough to just send a single concrete message instead of sending different messages and having to update frequently.

“Updated” versions of Canaanite religion (polytheistic): Yahwism (polytheistic)

“Updated” versions of Yahwism (polytheistic): Judaism, Samaritanism

“Updated” versions of Judaism: Christianity

“Updated” versions of Christianity: Islam, Mormonism, Rastafarianism, Hong Xiuquan, Simon Kimbangu, Apollo Quiboloy, etc. See also this big list.

“Updated” versions of Islam: Baháʼí Faith, Druzism, Ahmadiyya, Nation of Islam, Yarsanism, etc

Also, he should have sent the message to many people at once like Akashvani in Hinduism because a single prophet can manipulate and change God’s message. If there are more people there will be less scope for such manipulation.

Even though science and technology have helped the Abrahamic god to more readily share his message via online websites of the bible etc, it is still true that billions of people on this planet do not know about his message. My own parents and grandparents know very little if anything about the Abrahamic god. So, despite the help from science and technology even now he is not competent to share this information with everyone in this world.

Nontheistic religions

Buddhism and Jainism consider the gods of Hinduism as mere people with supernatural abilities. Buddhists still think these Hindu deities need nirvana and until then they are also slaves to their desires. Even these deities’ final goal should be to escape from the cycle of rebirth and death.

In these religions, people like Siddhārtha Gautama, Mahāvīra, etc are not considered gods. The message of Siddhārtha is very different from the message of the Abrahamic god. The Abrahamic god will torture anyone who doesn’t believe in his message for infinite time and yet he irresponsibly sent this message in an extremely incompetent way. The message of Siddhārtha was a method for people to escape the cycle of rebirth and suffering. Siddhārtha didn’t claim to be an omnipotent being so his inability to share this information in a way that everyone on earth can find it is not his mistake.

So, my argument doesn’t work for nontheistic religions. But it does seem to work for all theistic religions, at least in this sense it is better than the problem of evil which only explains the nonexistence of the Abrahamic god but can’t explain the nonexistence of the other theistic gods.

See this post which works for even these religions.

Note: The crux of this argument was made by me on 11th July 2021 as a comment on a post by Aron Wall. But this post is written in 2024.