Justified True Belief

#1 Everything has a cause, so who caused God? + The claim “everything has a cause” is not what most theistic arguments defend; they argue that whatever begins to exist has a cause. God is proposed as necessary and uncaused, not as one more caused object inside the universe.

#2 Science explains the universe, so God is unnecessary, end of story. + Science explains how physical processes work, but it does not automatically answer why anything exists at all, why the laws of nature hold, or why the universe is intelligible. “We have a scientific mechanism” does not logically entail “there is no God.”

#3 If you cannot test God in a lab, God is not real. + That rule cannot itself be proven by a lab test, so it fails as a universal standard. Plenty of real knowledge is not lab-based (logic, math, moral claims, historical events), so lab-testability is not the gatekeeper for truth.

#4 Evolution disproves God. + Evolution (even if true) is a claim about biological change over time, not a proof that no Creator exists. At most it challenges certain arguments or interpretations, not the existence of God as such. See also: Macroevolution (Bad Claims: Science & Faith)

#5 If God is all-powerful, He could make a square circle, since He cannot, He is not omnipotent. + Omnipotence has classically meant power to do all that is logically possible, not the ability to perform nonsense. A “square circle” is not a hard task, it is an incoherent combination of words.

#6 If God knows what I will do tomorrow, I cannot have free will. + This often commits a modal fallacy: from “God knows I will do X” it does not follow that “I must do X.” Knowledge does not cause choices; God can know future free decisions because you will freely make them, if you were to choose otherwise, God’s knowledge would be otherwise.

#7 If God were good, there would be zero suffering, so any suffering disproves God. + "God plus suffering” is not a formal contradiction unless you add the extra premise that God cannot have morally sufficient reasons for permitting suffering. The argument may aim to make God less probable, but it is not an automatic logical disproof.

#8 God created evil, so God is evil. + Christian theology typically locates moral evil in the misuse of creaturely freedom: God created agents capable of real choices, not “evil stuff” as a substance. God can permit evil without being its author, and evil is often understood as a corruption or privation of the good rather than a created thing.

#9 Morality is just opinion, so God is not required. + In everyday life, we treat certain actions as genuinely wrong, not merely unpopular, for example torturing a baby for entertainment. That ordinary moral conviction suggests that moral truths stand above individual preferences and point to some source beyond ourselves, an external Lawgiver. If “lying, cheating, stealing, and breaking promises” were only matters of personal taste, then ideas like justice, rights, trust, and moral responsibility would lose their foundation. We would have no principled grounds to condemn evil, only the ability to say we dislike it.

#10 Atheism is the default, unless you can prove God with 100% certainty, belief is irrational. + Very few rational beliefs come with mathematical certainty (history, science, even everyday beliefs), yet they can still be justified by evidence and inference to the best explanation. Also, “atheism is the default” is itself a philosophical claim that needs argument, it is not a free win.