An argument for strong atheism

I came up with an argument for strong atheism today that attempts to avoid the genetic fallacy even while arguing from the origin of belief in God. It's also a kind of argument from silence (or lack of evidence) that avoids committing the fallacy of argument from silence (or lack of evidence).

1. Belief in God originated either from evidence for God or from imagination.
2. Belief in God did not originate from evidence.
3. Therefore, belief in God originated from imagination.
4. If belief in God originated from imagination, it would be an enormous coincidence if he also happened to exist in reality.
5. It is more reasonable to believe in the non-existence of God than to believe in enormous coincidences.
6. Whatever is most reasonable to believe is most likely to be true.
7. Therefore, the non-existence of God is most likely to be true.

I'm sure the fourth and fifth premises could be cleaned up, but you get the idea. If you're an apologist, then you're most likely to attack the second premise. But you could also attack the first premise on the basis that there's a third possibility--that belief in God is "properly basic" or that it's a priori or something along those lines. Maybe belief in God is hardwired, and we have a natural inclination to believe in God. Maybe God himself zapped us with belief.

Of course a person could turn around and say that if God were known in this third way, then God's existence would be self-evident. Our natural internal awareness of God could, itself, be considered a kind of evidence for God. But then we'd just be quibbling over the definition of "evidence," and if we accepted that natural awareness is a kind of evidence, then we'd be back to attacking the second premise.

One could also raise a presuppositional argument for the existence of God. But I think such an argument would reveal that presuppositionalism isn't that different than evidentialism. If you claimed that God must exist in order to even make coherent sense out of the argument, or that you must presuppose the existence of God before being able to argue coherently, then you're essentially using logic and coherence as evidence for the existence of God.

One might also say that people believe in God because somebody told them stories when they were kids. But I don't see why that couldn't be considered a kind of evidence. We could quibble over whether it was good evidence or not, but if a kid looks up to and trusts their parents, then their parents' word on something serves as a persuasive reason to think it's true. So it's a kind of evidence.

Appeal to parents would be irrelevant to the first premise, though. It might explain the origin of some individual's belief in God today, but it wouldn't explain the origin of belief in God altogether. That is unless the parent made it up and didn't just take their own parents' word for it. Then we'd be back to imagination.

But if we're talking about the absolute origin of belief in God, and not the origin of some individual's belief in God today, then it would be hard to defend that second premise. One might defend the second premise on the basis that all the arguments for God fail. But it would be hard to prove that God never explicitly revealed himself to somebody in the past who then passed on the account, and you'd need to rule that out before you could make a good argument for the second premise. It seems like the best you could do in favor of the second premise is to make an argument from silence. While you might be able to argue that there currently is no evidence for God, you would be hard pressed to argue that there has never been any evidence for God available to anybody, anywhere, at any time.

I think the real reason a lot of people believe there is no evidence for God is not simply that they're unaware of any evidence for God but because they are presupposing the non-existence of God. If God doesn't exist, then we shouldn't expect there to be any evidence for him. So if you don't believe in God, it stands to reason that you're going to doubt there is any evidence for God until you see it for yourself. Of course you couldn't use the non-existence of God to prop up the second premise because that would make the whole argument circular.

And now that I think about it, there's a fourth possibility besides evidence, imagination, and being hardwired for belief in God. There's also the possibility that somebody came to believe in God through a faulty line of reasoning. Maybe they considered thunder to be evidence for God when it really wasn't. In that case, there person isn't just making up God. They really believe in God for what appears to them to be a good reason. But can you really say their belief in God wasn't based on evidence? I mean maybe thunder wasn't actually evidence for God, but it served as evidence for the person who took it to be evidence.