God is meaningless as a concept, has no special emotion, and is purposeless, but people adhere to it anyway for other reasons.
Richard Dawkins is an evolutionary biologist and atheist who jousts regularly with theists. Dawkins says that he cannot disprove the existence of God but that he has never found an argument for the proof of God that is convincing and that would seem sufficient for me and him to think that there is no God. If no argument ever works, what is a God so obscure as to allow a reason for His existence? Wouldn't it have been cruel of God to withhold that evidence? I, on the other hand, do make a further assertion. Contrary to St. Anselm, who said there were any number of proofs of the existence of God when he composed his ontological proof, I would assert there are many disproofs of the existence of God and I will produce some of them that seem to me conclusive and go along with the famous LaPlace statement that asserts that God is an unnecessary hypothesis which means to me that the world can be explained without God and so does not exist. Here are some other arguments I think as well to be weighty, even if there are some well known ones that are not weighty, such as why God allows children to suffer, which reduces God to being a social worker when anyone could think of reasons why God punishes people including those who are innocent. God might exist even though he is fearsome rather than nice.
Here is what might be called the exactness argument. Suppose God exists. Most people would say that meant He was invisible and universal. But does He also have a larynx, which would have to exist in a time and place? And yet people say that God speaks to them either through a burning bush or to their internal consciousness, like Noah. But even religious people do not affirm that they exactly heard a voice.They have experienced something else that can be treated as if it were the voice of God., such as a concatenation of a coincidences taken as omens of God’s plans or instructions or when an inspired personage comes calling, whether he calls himself the Son of God or not and listens to do what you are inclined to do anyway or appeals to a pang of conscience that will lead you to act or feel differently. Or there may be a cataclysm such as a pandemic or political unrest which reminds you of powers beyond yourself. In all these cases, saying such events are speaking to you is a metaphor for what is going on which is God's intervention with people.
But if every indication of God is a metaphor of what God does, and people regularly use the word of God in that way, as something otherwise inspired, including the gospels, who are written down as God’s words but seem to be also just a book that has been given special authority as directly inspired by God, then what is left of god other than a set of metaphors? You cannot give to God a definite description of what God is, as Bertrand Russell would say, only a set of metaphors sufficiently regularly invoked so that you treat them as if they were adequate descriptions of something real. What is god other than a metaphor for an exaggerated hierarchical power like a king or potentate whose will is supreme and to be obeyed because people crave being subservient to a leader? There is no God because the word is without meaning, just a metaphor of something else. If a concept can't be defined it doesn’t exist, like a squared circle, which is inherently contradictory, even if unicorns could exist assuming that it was biologically possible to settle a horn on a brow, and that happens with some animals such as a rhinoceros. God is not just implausible; the word itself is just gobbledegook. Try the experiment of trying to say something about God literally, and that does not work, much less something dogmatic, such as that Jesus is the Son of God. What could that possibly mean? He did not have coitus with Mary and if He is the father then he could not coexist together because fathers precede sons, much less consider, as Christopher Hitchins asked, why God lingered for eons before having Jesus visit Earth when so many generations remained unenlightened. It is the idea of Christianity that sets a timeline from the beginning and would have to explain the necessity of that ordering but not doing so regarding such inquiries as mischievous as when Augustine asks how people in the afterlives will be both the children and the patriarchs of their distinctive families and concludes that god will sort out how that is possible. To want logic is to be mischievous.
Sometimes metaphors are so easily taken as literal that theology can, for its own reasons, that a fanciful and contradictory set of ideas is taken as accurate. People say Jesus is the son of God and mean something more than that He is a follower or disciple of God. They call Jesus that even though He is also considered to be coterminous with God even though a son, even a metaphorical one, is descended in some sense from the father, has to be subsequent to its father, whether the Enlightenment is the son of seventeenth century or my mentor or professor is the father in the sense of significant influence on a student. Theological constructs are sloppy in mixing metaphors with exactitude however much St. Augustine tried to make sense of the Trinity.
If the word God is meaningless and so nothing to convey, then people can assert the existence of God by reference to experience, to what are the emotions of life which testify to the experience and therefore the existence of god. There is the awesomeness or beauty of nature or the experience of satisfaction at being subordinate or the smile of a child even if all of them are metaphors for something else, such as when Updike's pigeon feathers an answer to H. G. Wells alluding to something beautiful and fleeting and delicate,just like an apperception of the grandeur of God. But it also happens to be the case that there is no experience to religious people which is not available to non religious people. They can find a seashore or a sunset awesome and treat it as aesthetics . They too can understand why people find it satisfying to be subordinate and indeed note that people struggle to be otherwise, to be free and equal. Non believers can find a Mass or other liturgy moving, and so non Catholics can compose a Mass. Nonbelievers can marvel at the intricacies of a mammalian creature while treating it as a science.
The only thing that a nonbeliever cannot believe is the experience of a religious belief as being true, feeling it to be truth. But that is a weak scaffold for a platform, having restricted God and religion to a special experience to belief itself when what is looked at is an experience that attests to truth, even internal conviction external in that any non believer can have convictions, which is an ordinary thing. Believers will say that everyone has to believe something, whether the working class or the perfectibility of mankind, and so why not God as some concepts to rely on, when a nonbeliever can say it is a different thing to assert a generalization or possible outcome or an inclination or some other qualification of a true false statement rather than the absolute assertion of the certainty of god and also god is so peculiar an assertion that it needs a definite rather than just definitive proof to make it so even if the concept itself made sense. A sunset won't cut it. That is just the artifact of air pollution.
Leave aside the question of whether God exists and assuming that God could have a purpose and do things, why did he create mankind? The Old Testament answer is straightforward. It is to create law and may just be the same things law in that law like god is invisible and everywhere, its incarnations only the texts of laws carried about in an ark that consists of words so weighty than they are awesome and therefore radically different from gods that are the spirits of trees and mountains, nota thing at all but a set of concepts. The purpose of law is to organize society and slowly arc history towards justice, which means the universal administration of law and whose failure to comply leads to punishment. “Exodus” is an exemplification of law and justice. It is wrong to enslave the Hebrews even if most of them chose to bear this buren and even if other people were also enslaved. And so Moses freed them even if Pharaoh had to be punished by losing his child and his soldiers perished in the Red SDea. Justice was accomplished. The law is a hard taskmaster.
Why the Christian God created humanity is more problematic. He might have wanted humankind to adore him but that would mae a sovereign who needs constant flattery, which is contrary to the idea that a sovereign is the servant of the people, a need for adoration, a deep character flaw. Or maybe, ass St. Paul thought, to redeem people from their original sin, never mind that Adam and Eve were tempted to sin but God placing the tree of knowledge in Eden and explicitly saying they should not do that, God having created what lawyers would call an attractive nuisance, like a vacant lot with loads of junk. The owner, God, is responsible for what ensues, not Adam and Eve..
And Christopher Hutchins asks why did God’s son come to redeem mankind only two thousand years ago and only in one place? There had been humans tens of thousands of years before that. And, I would add, if God and Jesus were out to liberate humanity, why was the liberation only spiritual;? Why cure just a few lepers and leave everyone else to suffer their afflictions?. Quite a puzzle in that spiritual enlightenment means accepting Jesus as the savior, which is again a selfish demand, unbecoming of a god but often the case in a monarch. So the history of religion is unedifying even if not incoherent. We know bad things will happen.
But perhaps the worst of the claim that God is merciful and just rather than a vainglorious creator who insists on his own self importance is not that children are condemned to die of cancer, hardly something a well designed and merciful God would allow unless he was not all that all powerful after all. Worse, I think, and people of more imagination than I can propose, is the fact that God created people who were aware that they would all die, never mind they were restored to life at the end of time, that a much longer outrage than befell Jesus, who lied in the tomb for just three days and there is no record of how he experienced his lack of consciousness and whether the experience scared him. Why would God create people who knew of their doom, and soldiered on, both brave and terrified, the Damocletian sword upon them? It is not that God toys with the ants he has created. He torments those who know their future pain and absence and not just their present. That being the case, God is immoral if one believes that morality is absolute rather than a temporary fashion and independent of God and so a guide against which He can be measured.
Here is the rub against atheists. I have been fighting with the concept of god ever since I was a teenager,and I still find these debates energetic and engaging. Why should that be? Is it peculiar for me to do so in that so many atheists just let God lapse when the scales were removed from their eyes and so the debate was over and not revisited? Or my continued engagement might be a clue to something deeper. Generalize. God is so deep, so necessary, that people cannot dispense with it even if they are trying to obliviate the term as a real word. Revise St. Anselm’s dictum that only a fool says there is no god, which means he can say the words in the sentence without conveying meaning, to mean even the nonbeliever uses the word because there is no other, the word essential for thought. Kant said much the same thing when he thought many words essential and so regarded them as part of the way the universe worked and so the job of philosophy was to interrogate these words such as justice and should, to criticize them in that one looked into what they must mean given that the terms were about reality.
But there is an atheist’s rejoinder to my own and the general adoption of the use of the word or the interaction with the god I must resist blaming for the world just because I think he does not exist, he the cause of children in pain and him not having revealed himself to a conscientious inquirer. God is just a word for other feelings and processes that are part of the human condition and so objects that have to be confronted. There is always hierarchy in social life and so people generalize that there has to be an ultimate authority and some people or even most people think that it is comforting to find one’s place within the hierarchy. Or even more deeply. There is a sense of the word why as not to be restricted to human decisions but applicable to all events and so ask why the cosmos evolves or why there is a sunset when the word why does not apply to physical or biological processes that have no why but only shows because that is the nature of things that are processes. And so, the feelings are deep but only inappropriate to words that don’t compute, that have no meaning which as I have suggested is the bottom line of disproof.
Moreover, my lifelong fight with God is no mystery that reveals a metaphysical; necessity. It is easily explained historically. I am a secular Jew and there is a long tradition of that which goes back to Spinoza and then to Marx and Freud and Simmel. In general, mysteries are reducible to ordinary things and so there is no need to find some special intervention, which is, after all, the point I am making.
There are three levels for the appreciation of God and religion in general. The first approach is to see it as mere superstition, the remnants of ideas and feelings that are obsolete, antiquated and superfluous, residuals from a time without science and with a justification of regal authority. God just sloughs off when a person becomes educated. It is in toto no different from a belief in tree spirits. Second, and that is the period from the Old Testament until the seventeenth century, God and religion are a way to probe and appreciate the deepest p[roblems of existence and to plumb the deepest of emotions and relationships. To deal with the concept of God is to deal with determinism and fee will, the nature of law and social order. The question of God resolves problems of cause and effect, justice, moral preference and all the issues of why the world is as it is. Kierkegaard and St, Paul are the psychologists of mankind and St, Thomas asserts what it means for some things to be better than others, not just that God is the best of everything.The third level of understanding of God which is the current dispensation, is that the concept itself is unintelligible and to grant of God His existence, He is meanspirited and selfish, not admirable characteristics, but ones of an autocrat.. On that I will stand.