Although I have found no proof in my life of the existence of god, I have seen plenty that corroborates his absence.
– or –
While the beauty of the universe is compatible with both the existence and the absence of any god, the horrors of the world are compatible only with his absence.
That is the whole argument. What follows is routine maintenance, for those who enjoy disagreeing. And there is always someone who feels like disagreeing, especially on a full stomach.
Proof is what discriminates
A fact only counts as proof if it would have come out differently under a different hypothesis. If two opposing theories predict the same observation with equal ease, the observation says nothing.
This is where almost every argument for god dies, and dies comfortably, surrounded by its admirers.
Take the standard exhibit. A spiral galaxy. A cell dividing. The face of someone you love, in morning light. The believer says: it cannot be an accident. The non-believer says: gravity, chemistry, deep time, and a brain that evolved to find symmetry and structure rewarding. Both explanations are complete. Neither leaves a residue the other cannot fill.
And beauty has a worse problem than the first. We are a product of this universe. Our aesthetic reactions were calibrated in here, from the inside, over hundreds of thousands of generations. A creature shaped by a world will find that world beautiful. A tautology. Calling it a signature is like admiring the handwriting on a letter you wrote yourself, drunk, and no longer remember.
So beauty cancels itself out. It hands you the lukewarm feeling of confirmation without confirming anything. It is a Rorschach blot with an excellent PR department.
The horrors do not cancel out
Now let us apply the same test to the other half of the world.
If nobody is minding the shop, the horrors are predicted with precision. Suffering gets distributed by tectonics, virology, errors in cell division, and the arithmetic of predation. It falls on the just and the unjust in exactly the proportion that the just and the unjust happen to stand in its path. There is no moral logic to the distribution because there is no moral agent doing the distributing. The theory fits the data without a single correction.
If instead there exists an omnipotent, omniscient, and perfectly good being, the same facts require an explanation. An elaborate one. A permanent industry of explanation, millennia old, still in business. The only company in the world that has never once delivered a product and keeps collecting deposits.
The asymmetry is the whole argument. One hypothesis explains the world. The other has homework due and keeps asking for an extension on the exam.
Grading the homework
Free will.
The best of the justifications, and it covers roughly a third of the syllabus. It accounts for the torturer, the pogrom, the man who beats his wife. It accounts for absolutely nothing in an earthquake, a birth defect, a childhood leukemia, a forest fire with the animals still inside. Nature has no will of its own, and nature produces most of the victims. And notice what this justification concedes even where it does work: it places the torturer's freedom above the child's body.
It is a moral order I would refuse to sign, and my own moral ledger is fairly modest.
Soul-building.
Suffering builds character. True. I have some of that character myself, and I can testify that the exchange rate is terrible. But the argument collapses exactly on the cases that matter: the infant who dies before understanding anything, the mind destroyed before it can learn a single thing from its own destruction, the animal burning alone with no lesson and no audience. Suffering that builds nothing is the overwhelming majority of suffering. A pedagogy that kills almost all of its students needs a different name, and we already have the name, all of us know it.
The greater good beyond our grasp.
Here we reach the last room in the house. Here believers are safe forever, at a price they rarely work out.
The cost of the last room
The final defense is that god's reasons are beyond us. The child's cancer serves a purpose we are not equipped to perceive. Our moral judgment is a small instrument pointed at an infinite object. It is the lawyer asking the jury not to look at the photographs.
Fine. Let us accept it. And then follow it all the way down, which is the only place worth following anyone or anything.
If god's goodness is compatible with every possible observation, if there is no event that could ever count against it, then the word "good" has been quietly emptied of its meaning and filled with something else. A goodness that never shows up in a single identifiable case, that is not recognizable anywhere, that behaves in every measurable respect like indifference, is indifference with a name tag pinned to it.
At that point the believer and I are describing the same universe, with the same contents, in the same order. The disagreement is about vocabulary. The vocabulary is entirely his, and as far as I am concerned, he is welcome to keep it.
This is what I mean by proof that corroborates absence. The problem does not stop at the missing trace. The claimed presence has been redefined until it can no longer leave any trace at all. Whatever is, in principle, indistinguishable from its own absence has already conceded the point, gracefully, in Latin.
In my own life
The personal half of the sentence deserves its own line, because the argument above belongs to anyone while this part is only mine.
I have gone through the good, the very good, the terrible, and the horrific. I watched. Without looking away, and not always from a comfortable position. Prayers, mine and other people's, were answered at exactly the rate you would expect from chance and human effort. Decent people suffered on time, like the trains used to run. Rotten people prospered with the same punctuality, if anything with a better life. Nothing ever intervened in a way that was not explainable by science, luck, or someone's stubbornness, usually someone's stubbornness.
Sixty-odd years is a small sample of a large universe. I grant that. But it is the only sample I was assigned, and the results are consistent.
What I am not claiming
The argument bites one specific animal: the omnipotent, omniscient, and perfectly good god, all three at once. It is a strong claim, and strong claims are cheap to sink.
A limited god survives. A distant god survives. A god who started the operation and lost interest survives comfortably, and against him I have no argument, only a shrug. A cruel or careless god survives entirely, and in fact fits the data rather well. Nobody has ever raised the problem of evil against Zeus. Zeus would have accepted the premises and asked where you were going with it, thunderbolt and sardines already loaded.
The trouble is that the surviving gods are the ones nobody wants. You cannot pray to them, they promise nothing, they console no one. The god people actually believe in is the one with all three attributes, the one who counts every hair and notices every sparrow. The same god disproven by a single afternoon in a pediatric oncology ward.
Once more
The beauty of the universe is a coin that lands the same way under both theories. It decides nothing. It never could have.
The horrors are a coin that lands on one side only.
I did not design the experiment. I only read the result, and had the bad manners to report it.