What is the atheist's idea of God?

This is a fair question, I think. The decision to reject God is evidently informed by some idea of God. So how do atheists imagine him? What are their sources? And does this add up to a sufficient argument for atheism, or something else?

Scripture would seem to be the atheists' greatest authority on God. They are very fond of citing it. Yet at the same time, they point out that the God of scripture comes from superstitious Bronze Age goat herders, who had no evidence of God, no scientific understanding, and the worst analytical skills. So isn't it paradoxical that their understanding of God remains authoritative, while they themselves have been denied authority on the subject!

In that case, what can attacks on the God of scripture prove? Cheap shots at Deuteronomy, Noah's ark, or Adam's rib, notwithstanding the amusement they bring to our lives, are but veiled personal attacks on the people who believe in such things. They are aimed at the wrong objective. Any moderately clever believer will soon (in the course of centuries) sort out the acts of men erroneously attributed to his deity, amend his theology with new interpretative texts, shift his focus from myths to values, appeal to faith when all else fails, and we will find his God still standing. More or less.

The most we can hope for, is to prove that a certain kind of God-concept is incorrect. This is the road I try to take here. God is not, logically, any of these 10 things below. But that is all I will be able to show, and no more. Unless we are inflexible about traditional definitions of God, this is not actually an atheist position. That leap remains a personal choice.

(1) Concept: God is a creator and the first cause.
Source: Dictionary.
Critique: Evidently this can't be true, since absolutes can only generate more absolutes, yet nothing in our experience or science is like that. We live in a finite universe, and finite effects cannot prove infinite causes. All phenomena are transient, and cannot be traced to unchanging realities. All knowledge is experiential, not a priori (save maybe for a few categories identified by Kant, but even these may have biological underpinnings). Time and space are relative, subatomic particles play dice, human values are constructed, even mathematical axioms are not independent of our definitions, and there are emergent causes at every level of reality differentiation.

(2) Concept: God is knowable through revelation, whether that happens to be an act of creation, an intervention in history, or a personal communication.
Source: This is a characteristic of theism in general.
Critique: The word of God is every bit as absolute as God, so the critique from point (1) applies here too. God must be a silent deity. Anything else we might be tempted to consider a revelation would be contingent on its historical context, on human culture and language, on the choice of prophet, on personal interpretation, etc. So it can't ever be objective knowledge of God.

(3) Concept: God has a grand design for the universe, and a plan for us.
Source: “I have planned it, surely I will do it.” (Isaiah 46:11)
Critique: This belief is grounded in points (1) and (2), and doesn't stand alone. If there is a design in creation, it didn’t come from God. And since he is a silent deity, how can there be a plan to follow?

(4) Concept: God wants something from us. Like obedience, or worship, or a covenant. Maybe a sacrificial lamb. Above all, it seems, he wants us to "be good", and takes a keen interest in our morality.
Sources: “He has shown you, O mortal, what is good. And what does the Lord require of you? To act justly [...]” (Micah 6:8).
Critique: We’ve seen in point (2) that God doesn’t impose his direct revelation on us. So in what sense could he possibly need, want, or ask anything? As for his supposed meddling in our morality, I will refer you to any number of devastating posts on Atheist Republic. You already know this to be absurd, and I want to spend more time on things you haven't heard a hundred times before.

(5) Concept: God gives us religion.
Source: Your pastor.
Critique: That can't be true either. Such a religion would be a form of revelation (see point 2). Besides, the source of religious tradition is scripture, and we already agreed that this is a human invention.

(6) Concept: God gave us free will.
Source: “You are free to eat from any tree in the garden [...]” (Genesis 2:16)
Critique: "In their hearts humans plan their course, but the Lord establishes their steps" (Proverbs 16:9). So why give us free will at all? What's the point?

Free will is extremely difficult to reconcile with the God-with-a-plan from point (3). Any worldview that tries to accommodate them both must include other ad hoc beliefs and propositions. This problem has plagued the philosophy of religion since Late Antiquity.

Rather, the true basis of our freedom is God's silence and inaction, the very opposite of a divine decree.

Again, God exists at a level of reality that is existential, unchanging, absolute, and infinite. Whereas our reality is experiential, evolutionary, and contingent. By whatever technique or trade-off (action through finite intermediaries, retreat in interpersonal/subjective reality, or whatever), God must break the symmetry between his level of reality and ours. Our universe is not the result of his direct will, but of his retreat before creation.

(7) Concept: God is a controller of the universe, and our destinies.
Source: “He changes times and seasons; he removes kings and sets up kings [...]”(Daniel 2:21)
Critique: See points (1) and (6). If God erased himself from the universe to make space for randomness, evolution, free agents, and emerging causes, then how is he a controller?

Is he holding back proton decay, or is that the strong nuclear force? Did he protect Europe from the Turks, or was that Jan Sobieski? Is he arranging your next job interview, or is that you?

(8) Concept: God did evil things like flood the Earth, or told people to do evil things, and it's all part of his plan. He arbitrarily elected some, angrily damned others, and capriciously changed his mind about a few, who were successful in their pleas and bargaining with him.
Source: Scripture.
Critique: See source.

(9) Concept: God is still unleashing evil things today like mosquitoes, Katrina, cancer, and all those terrible things visited on children.
Source: CNN Live.
Critique: But if God is not a creator (see point 1), and not interventionist (see point 2), then how is he doing this?

(10) Concept: God is an SOB for allowing these evil things. He should reveal himself, intervene, and fix our problems for us!
Source: Atheist Republic commentators. And sometimes theists too.
Critique: This is a deeply flawed, not to mention terrifying, line of argumentation.

If I were God’s advocate, I would ask: What is evil made up of? Statistically speaking, isn't death by hurricane trivial compared to death at the hands of other human beings? Is Nature evil? Is death evil? How much post-disaster suffering was made far worse by our own actions or inactions? For that matter, how much natural disaster and disease today is our own fault! Did God force anyone to dump mercury in the ocean, or dig that oil well, or dose children’s cereal with sugar? Is human slavery or environmental collapse a result of God's monetary greed, overconsumption, and institutional failure, our ours? Is being born with Down's syndrome, or blind, or the wrong sex, a terrible thing in and of itself, or made far worse by prejudice? And if we put as much resources into prevention, cure, and the preservation of Earth, as we did in maintaining trillion dollar standing armies...

What obligation does God have to fix our messes? What value or lesson is there in that? And where does that stop? While theists beg for God's help, and atheists accuse him of indifference, I would suggest that they both be very, VERY careful what they wish for!

God revealing himself would be a cataclysm of cosmic proportions. For a moment of temporal relief, we would condemn ourselves, and every other intelligence we might be sharing the universe with, to an absolute dictatorship for all times. With monolithic moral law handed down from God, there would be no need to develop our own ethical thinking. Our superficial compliance would not produce intrinsically moral individuals. Our development would be capped at the childish conformist stage. With Superman swooping in to fix our problems, there would be no reason to take responsibility and grow up. Under absolute rule, free will would actually be pointless. Sadistic even. The same could be said for life, love, even consciousness... Our affairs would be under total micromanagement and surveillance. Our minds wouldn't be our own. Better to be a mindless automaton. We'd be shallow people, with shallow relationships, in social arrangements dictated from above. There would be no mutually constructed social reality. Creation would be non-participatory. We would be in a cosmos closed to the potential realities that once resided in Infinity. God would have made himself tiny, trapped in the state in which we captured him. All ends would be fixed, all aspects of reality determined. We would have perfect certainty. All our innovations and pursuits would terminate. All our efforts would become meaningless. Art would be the mere act of copying. Knowledge would be finite. Verdicts would be final. There would actually be divine reward and punishment. God would actually become the SOB from the scriptures!

This is inevitable, because all things willed by God must return to unity with him. It is hopelessly circular. Theism carried out to its furthermost logical conclusion leads to a dead-end cosmology.

This closed cosmological model, by the way, was patented by Plato, whose world of perfect shapes and ideas was precisely that kind of limited aspiration. Once upon a time, in the golden age of Atlantis, we lived in harmony with this perfection. But we lost our way and forgot about it. In this present age, the world is but an imperfect copy of the Platonic one, a degenerate shadow. Therefore we need a philosopher to interpret the "real" world for us again, and to lead us out of the cave back into the light we came from. St Augustine merely replaced this Platonic otherworld with the Kingdom of God, Atlantis with the Garden of Eden, and the Philosopher King with a priesthood. Then came Descartes who replaced Heaven with mathematical realism, and paved the way for scientists to replace priests. And today scientists have come up with new stories about our circular beginnings and ends. Thus closed cosmology survives in completely non-religious form in Big Bang theory! But Plato, St Augustine, and Descartes were all in the same business, because they all assumed a knowable, finite, and deterministic universe.

There is an evolutionary pressure to construct reliable mental maps of our world, and it seems we can't shake the need to make other worlds predictable too... Therein lies the entire appeal of closed cosmology. It provides us with a sense of control. All we have to do is transact with the deity, or solve for x (and under certain conditions, the universe will even obey). It is a thing initially driven by our fear of uncertainty, a psychological discomfort that is particularly felt in the early stages of personality development.

However we are now in the age of quantum physics, which teaches us that the universe, at its most fundamental level, is not completely knowable, or deterministic, or even rational. There is actually a role for consciousness and human agency. Therefore, we should not have a problem with free will. Especially if we are atheist, and on board with the Existentialist defence of freedom and personal responsibility...

So now, what is this God that atheists don’t believe in?

Well that would seem to depend on how well they’ve assimilate quantum theory and Existentialist logic. If they slept through those lessons, then they continue the see the world through 18th century lenses, as a sort of giant clock, with bottom up causality flowing from billiard ball-like atoms. I call them "classical atheists". They are trapped in a materialistic reincarnation of Deist cosmology. As a result, the creator/designer God from points (1) and (3) will seem very believable and threatening, and they will go on a mission to scrub Big Bang clean of God. Or they will target point (6), the God that magically gives free will, which they consider an illusion, by hunting down free will in the brain. They will fight absolutes with absolutes, because that’s the kind of universe they believe we're in. Finite. Meaning, there must be a definitive answer somewhere. But of course God is not in the sky, and free will is not in our neurones...

Theists have no choice to accept the 10 God-concepts as absolute because they believe in the authorities; in their attempt to build a coherent worldview out if this ideological mess full of philosophical pitfalls, they struggle to avoid the worst consequences of closed cosmology, and pray that the divine tyranny will be benign to them. Classical atheists don't believe in these authorities, but believe in a secular version of the same cosmology, so they are no better at avoiding the catastrophe of absolutes! The only difference is that, for some reason, they would feel more comfortable without God in the equation. It seems they prefer to think of themselves as robots governed by physical laws, rather than puppets directed by deities. I say, what’s the difference? Theists and atheists are fighting over details. In truth, they have the same end game. They both want to be interprets of reality because that position will give them power!

On the other hand, people who are aware of what happened to scientific epistemology in the last 100 years see a radically different kind of universe. They watch classical atheists and theists debate first causes the way we once watched Catholics and Protestants argue over transubstantiation. It is a surreal and somewhat frustrating spectacle. What we have here is a false problem, resting on a misunderstanding over the nature of reality.

The universe is not one thing. It is many things at once. At times it is highly unified, at times highly differentiated. It appears to us in a variety of mutually exclusive but complementary aspects. Waves, or particles. Mass, or energy. Mind, or body. Life, or chemistry. Etc. A choice is made to observe it that way or another, and that choice determines how reality appears to us, and how it behaves. Furthermore, that isolated slice of reality can be studied independently, because it has its own causal logic, which needs no input from other slices of reality. For example, doctors don’t need help from economists to do their work. Economists don’t need physicists to model market behaviour. Physicists don’t need ecologists to calculate the flight of a rocket. Ecologists don’t need psychologists to study rain forests. And so on. Between these different aspects of reality, the classical chain of causality is broken.

Similarity, the other two scientific paradigms of locality and realism are violated in the phenomenon of entanglement, and the uncertainty principle. Thus, it is impossible to entirely remove the observer from the experiment, or all subjectivity from knowledge. At its core, the universe remains somewhat unknowable, or inaccessible to rational inquiry. Scientific methodology has its limits.

While this may sound like a step backwards to a classical atheist, this degree of freedom at the heart of the universe is precisely why it won’t close in on us. As much as it wants to coalesce into one thing or another, the universe is constantly bouncing back from its centre into other aspects of itself. This indetermination is the engine of endless possibility and perpetual creation. It is the condition of free will we were looking for. And it gives consciousness an important role in the universe.

But there is of course a trade-off. In an uncertain universe, there is no way to take God head on. We can say that a certain kind of God is wrong. But we cannot discount the possibility that, from a certain observer standpoint, reality may appear personal.

Perhaps it will satisfy atheists that knocking down the 10 God-concepts above brings us to a position virtually indistinguishable from their own. It is past time to put theism and deism to rest. Humanity is outgrowing such childish ideas. But I'm not so sure we’re outgrowing God, as long as there is still mystery in the universe, an agitation at the back of our minds, and Infinity to deal with.