The Holy Spirit told me God isn't real

Read the Bible to find a God

The Holy Spirit told me he God isn't real. "How can that be?," you might ask. Let's begin by discussing what people mean by "the Holy Spirit".
What is the Holy Spirit, and how can we know when it's talking to us?
I was going to share my personal opinions based on my experiences as a Christian, but that would only lead to charges that I'm wrong. Instead, I'll use some GotQuestions "answers" [Emphasis is my own]:

But how do we recognize the Spirit’s guidance? How do we discern between our own thoughts and His leading? After all, the Holy Spirit does not speak with audible words. Rather, He guides us through our own consciences (Romans 9:1) and other quiet, subtle ways. 

One of the most important ways to recognize the Holy Spirit’s guidance is to be familiar with God’s Word. The Bible is the ultimate source of wisdom about how we should live (2 Timothy 3:16), and believers are to search the Scriptures, meditate on them, and commit them to memory (Ephesians 6:17).

So what do I mean when I say "The Holy Spirit sold me God isn't real"? I mean that:

• It's knowledge of the Bible that emerged from my conscience,
• This knowledge was revealed to me over the course of months or years of routine study of the Bible as a believing Christian, and 
• The revelation occurred as a series of smaller revelations, such that the entire faith was internally consistent at any one time.

1. An loving and ethical God wouldn't punish me for thinking for myself. God is loving and ethical, so it's safe to think for myself. (This was the key to freedom)
2. A fair assessment of biblical stories must include all reasonable explanations
1. One potential explanation is that the people who wrote the bible were sincere but deceived
2. Another explanation is that they were insincere
3. Another is that the message was corrupted or manipulated during canonization
4. Finally, there's a chance that a god with the omni's wrote it.
3. There are a great many serious problems with that final hypothesis::
1. If a God wrote the Bible, it really ought to be in agreement with the emerging discoveries of science rather than conflicting with them.
2. A just and loving God wouldn't chose to ban shellfish and permit slavery
3. An intelligent god would understand that we are rational creatures and require reasonable evidence to accept a claim.
4. There are many reasons to believe the Bible could be sincere yet false
1. Even in the modern era, it's common for people to interpret events inaccurately
2. Much of the Bible (especially OT) is known to be pre-literate Jewish oral tradition.
3. Even many of the NT Books are of unknown authorship or are written generations after the alleged events.
5. When I stopped to reflect on the communications I'd had with God / Jesus, I realized
1. They were never specific enough to make a prediction of an outcome
2. They never provided me with objective insight which I didn't already have. 
3. In these VERY REAL ways, my communications with "god" were not possible to distinguish from my own imagination.

Of course, there's also this gem:

Knowledge of God’s Word can help us to discern whether or not our desires come from the Holy Spirit. We must test our inclinations against Scripture—the Holy Spirit will never prod us to do anything contrary to God’s Word. If it conflicts with the Bible, then it is not from the Holy Spirit and should be ignored. 

But what is "God's Word"? Obviously, they think it's the Bible (which version)? Other people think it's the Quran or the Book of Mormon or some other book.  But we all have seen how the Bible contradicts itself. A cursory review of the breadth of Christian denominations proves that one can read anything one wants into the Bible. It's like a Rorschach Test for believers. In any case, that's not a rational way to approach any test. Reasonable people recognize that the Bible they were handed was handled by men in the following chain from their hands:

• Store
• Delivery
• Printer
• Editor
• Many hundreds of years (in some cases)
• Translator
• Many hundreds of years
• Canon selection (allegedly divine, impossible to verify)
• Original Author (mostly anonymous)
• Source material (allegedly divine, impossible to verify)

So when it comes down to it, we realize that the book we hold in our hands could have been corrupted in ANY of the preceding steps (some more likely than others). Two of the steps are so fraught with potential error that theists are taught to believe divine intervention somehow protected the Biblical word.  Returning to GotQuestions:

... he who searches our hearts knows the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for the saints in accordance with God’s will” (Romans 8:26–27).

In any case, the end result is that we know it's god or the holy spirit because you're studying scripture, or praying, it feels real, and it agrees with scripture -- something poetic and open to many interpretations. In talking to many Christians, it came across that God or the Holy Spirit were talking when things were suddenly clear and understandable.  This was the measure Christians seem to tend actually to use.
As I reached the age of reason, I studied the Christian teachings I'd been taught as a child. I searched my soul to understand the ethics of the God / Jesus model I had been taught. Some things became clear:

• A just God wouldn't torture for disbelief due to missing evidence. In a just system, deeds must be the basis of reward and punishment, not beliefs.
• The Jesus I was taught to believe in was not hateful or discriminatory, and certainly didn't lash out for honest mistakes. The fire and brimstone preachers were caught up in their own personal anger and projecting it onto their version of god.

The clarity of these personal revelations was convincing evidence of their divinity to my Christian self. They made it possible for me to think openly about the strength of the evidence for the things I was taught to believe as a child.  I didn't need to worry about torture because God is just and wouldn't torture without reasonable cause. 

In short, a rational review of the reasons for by beliefs helped me recognize the circular logic and simple collection of human cognitive frailties which lead to and reinforce superstitious beliefs. Central to those are the power of community belief, and confirmation bias. But surely there must be evidence of god which stands up to scrutiny that accounts for these cognitive biases!

There wasn't. I looked and didn't find it in any of the places I expected to. Of course, I heard that "Absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence", but given the superstitious nature of early people, I couldn't shake the possibility that my religion was just as much a superstition as all the others.
I was atheist for decades before I really even knew the word, much less found authors or community.  There wasn't a sudden switch, but a gradual increase in my doubt for god. Example after example showed that God was no more likely than other mythical creatures.  

• Intercessory Prayer (Prayer for others) [FAIL]
• Better health of believers [FAIL]
• Trustworthy clergy [FAIL]
• Miracles [FAIL]
• Firmament and heaven up in the sky [FAIL]
• Genetics or archeology to confirm any ancient books [FAIL]

One by one, the loving interventionist god I'd been raised to trust fell to the cold hart facts of reality: These things don't happen. People interpret any little positive thing as god, and ignore the negatives. True interventions that align with any objective and intelligent purpose simply don't happen.
If God is real, it has no detectable interaction with reality which I've been able to uncover. And belief without reason is unhealthy.
Maybe I'll meet a  god some day.  I doubt it, but if I do and it's ethical and benevolent, it will understand and accept my nonbelief.

A Response To: Science Increasingly Makes the Case for God

The Original Article

This was written in response to my dad, who as a Presbyterian Christian shared Eric Metaxas’s article from the Christmas WSJ Op-Ed page. Dad and I haven’t really discussed religion much since he found I’m an atheist. He is the treasurer and has served as a deacon in our church.

It’s behind a paywall, but here’s the link:
http://www.wsj.com/articles/eric-metaxas-science-increasingly-makes-the-case-for-god-1419544568

Eric Metaxas

Dec. 25, 2014 4:56 p.m. ET

My Response:

Dad,

I hope you're feeling better.  We were all sad that we didn't get to see you and mom this weekend.

I also hope you wanted an honest and thoughtful response to the article you sent. I've taken an interest in philosophical debates over the last year or two, so I'm quite familiar with this particular style of god claim, as it's in fashion right now.  I'm happy to have these discussions any time.  Here's a sampling of my current thinking on this subject.  I'm sharing my thoughts and opinions on the article, which aren't going to be supportive. Keep in mind that I'm criticizing the article here, not you.  I'll do my best to be respectful to Mr. Metaxas, but I think he's been sloppy in his argument and in the claims he makes.

For starters, the headline is just plain wrong, and striking in its ignorance of the scientific method.  It's common to have flashy headlines in the media, so it's not surprising.   Nevertheless, science most certainly does not "Make the Case for God", and I'm not sure how to restructure the scientific process such that it actually could make such a case.  Science deals with the construction of models which accurately predict the observable behavior of the natural world around us.  To do this, science requires verifiable, repeatable experimentation to demonstrate the validity of clearly stated, falsifiable hypotheses.  Theistic claims of a god generally place the god in a nebulous "super-natural" or "spiritual" realm which is firmly outside any ability to test and validate. By definition, this is outside the realm of science. Furthermore, as an intelligent agent, a god with "the omni's" (omniscience, omnipotence, and omnibenevolence) would not follow pre-definable orderly rules we seek to establish with science. As far as I know, there's no reasonable way to study any god claim using science.

In his article, Mr. Metaxas lays out a well known philosophical argument for the existence of god.  The fact that the philosophical argument cites science as its evidence doesn't make it scientific.  There is no "god hypothesis" presented, much less actually tested.  The particular philosophical argument is in the category of "Fine Tuning" or Teleological arguments for the existence of God. The teleological argument on physical constants is one of the best arguments I've ever seen for the existence of God.

Hardly any cosmology scholars are making teleological claims of god's existence as the author seems to want his readers to think.  This sort of claim comes from Christian (and Muslim) apologists. I've studied the teleological argument and I find it unconvincing for several reasons.  I'll outline the four biggies here:

1. At its core, it uses what's called an argument from ignorance fallacy. The argument from ignorance fallacy is when a debater (A) claims that his opponent (B) doesn't know the answer but Aclaims to know the answer, therefore A is right.  In this case, the statement goes, "We don't know why these constants are balanced, but our religion claims God did it, so our religious dogma must be true."  To see just how absurd this debate technique is, notice that the argument works equally well for any conceivable creation myth: a creator pixie; the Aboriginal Rainbow Serpent; or the classic modern parody, Flying Spaghetti Monster.
• Aside: The fact that there are aspects of the laws of nature that we don't yet understand never implies that any god did it. This is called "God of the Gaps". It's an attempt to spread the deity / deities into the ever-shrinking bits of the natural world we don't yet fully understand. We no longer need Ra, Apollo, or Helios to explain why the sun moves across the sky each day, or Zeus to explain lightning, or Poseidon to explain storms at sea. God of the gaps is asymptotically approaching zero.
2. The teleological argument is often presented as an argument for the Christian or Muslim model of an intervening (or theistic) God. In the cosmological constant form, it's AT BEST, a argument for deism, not theism — an intelligent "first cause" with no demonstrable continuing affinity towards humanity, and certainly no "personal relationships" as the Christian and Muslim traditions teach.
3. The argument fails to address the elementary "what created God?" Question. At it's core, this argument implies that the things around us (e.g. cosmological constants) appear to be "designed", so they must have a designer. But surely such a designer must be even more complex than the thing it designed. Why then do we not insist on a second designer to design that first designer?  Apologists, and indeed most Christians I know, get around this by something called "special pleading" – the assertion that we should make a special case for God that they refuse to grant for the universe. Namely, that a complex, all-powerful god could simply exist without needing a cause. Yet for some reason, the universe and all the things within it cannot.  Without special pleading, the intelligent creator deity requires his own creator, which requires a creator, and so on to infinity.
4. The teleological generally starts from the foundational assumption that humans are the ultimate "goal" of the universe, a strikingly arrogant position in my opinion. This is a problem for all religious apologetics I've seen. As a human, it's tempting to to take this position.  After all, it makes me feel special. But on the spatial and temporal scales of the universe, our entire species is insignificant, so we're left to assume that the universe was made just for us?  Seems like an tremendous waste of effort -- particularly the meteors and inescapable eventual destruction of our sun.  

Very few modern cosmologists consider these numbers evidence for God in the way that the article seems to suggest. There are several potential mechanisms whereby these constants could be "tuned" without an intelligence. The Multiverse is one. Very long time scales is another. There are not any fundamental problems with our understanding of the universe that ONLY a god could explain.

In my opinion, these sorts of articles, and apologetics in general, serves only to help believers feel more justified in their beliefs by giving the appearance of a solid foundation for religious beliefs where there is actually none to be had. The argument makes brilliant sense if you read it starting with the assumption that an intelligent creator god exists.  But it doesn't actually provide any clear or compelling evidence that such a creator deity exists in the first place, much less indication of what properties such a deity would possess.  So the honest truth is that:

• We don't (yet) know why the physical constants are balanced, but that doesn't mean a god did it.
• We have no way to determine how likely it is that they would be balanced, but even if it's extremely unlikely, that doesn't mean a god did it.

In the end, religion is based on faith. There is not, nor will there likely ever be any "proof". Until such a time, I remain very skeptical.  But I'm always happy to discuss. I'd like to know if I'm wrong, and I'm not going to find that by navel gazing.

With Love,

• Me