A Good List, But not Long Enough

A listing at amazon on Atheism and Morality.

Interesting, if a bit old. if I were 20 or so I might get het-up about it.

One interesting insight here:
To my mind what the authors come close to proving (in the most painstaking fashion) is that the usual definitions of God are inadequate, thereby allowing one to derive contradictions from those definitions, contradictions that prove that God, defined in such and such a way, cannot exist. For example (and several of the contributors use variations on this theme), God cannot be all-powerful, all-knowing, and all-benevolent since there exists the palpable presence of evil in the world. Actually the editors break this down more finely and throw out three categories of "disproofs" which might be called, (1) the argument to disproof from definition; (2) the argument to disproof from evil; and (3) the argument to disproof from doctrine. In the latter, what is demonstrated is that a particular formulation of God is inconsistent with a particular religious doctrine, demonstrating that THAT God cannot exist.

The astute reader will note that all three categories rest on demonstrating a disconnect between definitions. What the various authors are trying to do is NOT to prove that God does not exist, rather that it is impossible to define God in such a way that contradictions do not arise. As the editors point out in their introduction, the real task here is to show that God is a logical impossibility, and therefore, like a square circle, cannot exist.

Basically, it comes down to the simple truism, any god which can be defined cannot exist without contadicting facts observable in the universe. Since (almost) all religions depend on defining a god and embuing it with moral authority, those religions are based on something which does not exist. It doesn't mean their moral logic is necessarily wrong, it just isn't proven by their assumptions about their gods.
Hence agnogisticism or atheism.

If you're a Christian already, it won't convince you of anything since you've already made peace with the contradictions. For the rest of us, it's an interesting academic argument.