Question from my friend about existence of God

[robvalue]

Hello, welcome

It's a stupid argument, because it's admitting to actually being completely selfish himself. If people are doing good things in order to impress some weird God thing, then they're doing it for their own benefit. It's a means to an end, and is pretty much an admission that otherwise they'd have no reason to do good things.

Now I don't believe it's actually true, most of the time. This is religious brainwashing in action. Loads of people have gone from that very mindset, to realising religion is bullshit, to finding out that actually they want to be a good person because it's the right thing to do.

Plenty of atheists do amazing, selfless things. Of course someone who has already concluded atheists aren't really capable of this is going to wave away all examples as not real.

On the whole, people care about other people because we have evolved as a cooperative species. People unwilling or unable to study the science of this instead call it magic. It's a common problem.