There is No Rational Reason to Believe in God

Hello Mhykiel, and thank you for accepting! Before I begin, I would like to clarify what I am arguing. I am arguing that there is no rational reason to believe in God. I am not calling every theist irrational as a whole, just this particular belief. My goal will never be to insult anybody (though it will probably happen at least once), but rather to encourage people to think about what they choose to believe. I will now address some of the most common arguments for the existence of God and demonstrate their flaws. The Cosmological Argument (aka the First Cause Argument) states that everything that exists has a cause. The universe exists, therefore it had a cause. That cause must have been God. Ergo, God exists. When asked "what caused God?", many theists claim God does not need a cause. If this is true, it contradicts the first assertion which states that everything must have a cause, which is just special pleading (aka making an exception for a premise). To counter this dilemma, the argument was reformed into the Kalam Cosmological Argument, which states that everything that has a beginning of its existence has a cause. This argument makes the assertion that God exists outside of time, meaning he has always existed. Clearly, this is quite a heavy claim. Not only are theists claiming to know God exists, there are also claiming to know how he operates, without expecting to carry their burden of proof. Besides, if God (who is believed to be the most complex thing) did not need a cause, is it so ridiculous to postulate that the universe did not need a cause? Next is the Moral Argument, which says that if there is no God, there is no objective morality. So what if there are not objective morals? We can still be good people with subjective morality. Theists often ask atheists "if God does not exist, how do people get their morality?" I think there are options people have not considered. For example, there are several basic tenets which the vast majority of life on Earth appear to live by, especially other social animals. To borrow from Matt Dillahunty, the notion that life is preferable to death, or that pleasure is preferable to pain, seem to be universal across all animals. From these basic templates, we can see how millions of years of evolution could transform these into our modern standards of right and wrong. The basic knowledge that survival is generally easier in a group rather than by yourself, thus we should care for each other, likely evolved into a form of behavior we currently call empathy or compassion. Many other social animals demonstrate systems of right and wrong. Our cousins, chimpanzees, have even been observed ostracizing members of their group for poor behavior such as stealing or acting violently. We do not need God to be good people. The Teleological Argument or the Argument from Design states that God must exist due to the fine-tuning of the universe; our world appears so perfect, so well designed to contain life, it could not have possibly come about by chance. First of all, the universe is not fine-tuned for life. The majority of the cosmos as we know it is inhospitable. Even our own planet does not seem fine-tuned. Less than one percent of Earth's water is drinkable, let alone easily attainable. Look at all the natural disasters that kills thousands of lives and all the animals that could easily kill us. Backing up to the bigger picture, the main problem with this argument is how could we possibly know that the universe is perfect, when we have nothing to compare it too? We have never seen a different universe, so how we can say ours is perfect? When the telephone was created, it was likely believed to be perfect because it was the first device to successfully transfer voice between two ends. But it was also the only working telephone at that time. Currently, we are able to say that our phones are perfect (or at least better) by comparing them with the first telephone and noting the superiority of our phones. We cannot claim our universe is perfect when this universe is all that we have ever known. Many theists mention how the Earth is situated just the right distance from the sun in a way which we neither freeze nor burn, so there must be a designer who put the planet in its proper position. In reality, the more rational explanation is that life simply evolved and adapted to survive on the Earth's environment. If the Earth was at a slightly different distance away from the sun, life would most likely just look different than what it looks like now and better suited for a hotter or cooler environment. The Teleological Argument is often explained by the watchmaker analogy, which says that upon finding a watch on a beach and noting its obvious purpose and perfection, one can only conclude that the watch was designed by some sort of intelligence. I cannot see the rationality of comparing a watch, something we know so much about, with the universe, something we know little about. We can find the creator of the watch. We can watch him/her create more watches. We can understand how materials are compiled in the right way to form a watch. We cannot do these with respect to the universe. Every argument for God that I have heard makes great assumptions on things which we simply do not have enough knowledge about. Humans naturally crave knowledge due to the fear of the unknown. In an attempt to alleviate their fears, people make extraordinary claims to fill in the gaps in knowledge that lack reason and evidence. Personally, I believe it is not only okay that we do not know everything, it is actually quite beautiful. It means that there is always something new to learn, something else to discover. To me, saying "God did it" is not satisfying. The notion that a deity created the entire universe, all of its billions of galaxies, its billions of stars, its billions of planets, and on this one planet that is home to millions of animal species, he cares about this one particular animal called humans... how lucky and convenient that is for us. In my eyes, this egotistic view is similar in nature to the once accepted geocentric theory, which asserted that we are the center of the universe. We are certainly part of the universe, but we are not the center of it. Just because there are things that science is currently unable to explain does not mean we should be invoking supernatural claims as a placeholder for truth. The truth is something we must work at finding, not something we should make up. I look forward to my opponent's response!