this? That can’t be right.”
And then your friend asks, “Well, then, do you know who or what created it all?”
“No,” you admit.
“Aha, so then it must be God!”
Your friend’s claim has not been proven. Not even close. He’s just basing an entire argument on ignorance. And as atheist writer B. C. Johnson states, “our ignorance of alternative explanations does not justify acceptance of the theistic explanation, because ignorance does not justify explanations—only knowledge does.”13
When it comes to knowledge of how the universe came to be, we are clueless. We remain agnostic. As leading American atheist Sam Harris has so soundly expressed, “no one knows how or why the universe came into being. It is not clear that we can even speak coherently about the creation of the universe, given that such an event can be conceived only with reference to time, and here we are talking about the birth of space-time itself. Any intellectually honest person will admit that he does not know why the universe exists.”14
But surely we know that everything has a cause, right? Religious philosophers, such as Saint Thomas Aquinas and my recent Uber driver, have long reasoned that the universe couldn’t just exist on its own—something had to cause it to come into being. That cause, theists assert, is God. But by the very logic of this assertion—that everything has to have a cause—then God would also need to be caused. If the theists insist that God need not have a cause, then they are being blatantly illogical by their own standards.
To insist that God is somehow the great, single “uncaused cause” is, in the phrasing of American anthropologist David Eller, “word-magic at best and a malignant anti-answer at worst.”15 And besides, if God can in fact be miraculously uncaused, then so too could the universe. Or anything. Again, believing that the universe must have been caused by something else—something supernatural, no less—is not supported by any evidence. It is simply guesswork embedded in magical thinking, peppered with illogical fallacies, and wrapped in the tinfoil of faith. To account for the mystery of the existence of the universe by saying it is all the inexplicable work of an uncaused creator god gets us nowhere. Again from A. C. Grayling: “to explain something by invoking something itself unexplained is to provide no explanation at all.”16
Thus, the reasonable, rational position to take—when it comes to fathoming the incomprehensible existence and wonder of all of creation—is to remain in ignorance and simply admit that we don’t know its origin or cause, or if it even has an origin or cause in any imagined sense of the ways in which we employ such words, and humbly leave it at that. As Charles Darwin wrote concerning the ultimate origins of creation, “I cannot pretend to throw the least light on such abstruse problems. The mystery of the beginning of all things is insoluble by us; and I for one must be content to remain an Agnostic.”17
Complexity and Design
Theistic Claim: The natural world is full of profound complexity and deep design. Consider the intricate composition of the human eye or the complex components of a cell. Surely these things couldn’t just occur accidentally or by chance. Their intricacy and complexity obviously point to the conscious, deliberate handiwork of an intelligent designer. That intelligent designer is God.
Skeptical Response: First off, as Richard Dawkins explains in his book The Blind Watchmaker, and as Philip Ball further reveals in his book The Self-Made Tapestry, mind-blowing complexity and functional intricacy can and do arise without a designer, and the natural world abounds with patterns and designs that all have natural, undesigned, unwilled causes.18 Just look at snowflakes. Or evolution by natural selection, in which genetic information encoded in DNA changes and is modified by haphazard mutations.
Secondly, what we’ve got here is just another appeal to ignorance: because the world is full of complex organisms, it is claimed that this must be evidence for an intelligent creator god. But that’s a fallacious leap. It is more rational to just humbly scratch our heads at this mind-blowing complexity and accept it as mysterious and as yet hard to explain, rather than lazily accept “God” as the answer.
Third, to explain the apparent inexplicable origin of something deeply mysterious—like the complexity and intricacy of the natural world—by saying it was created by something even more inexplicable and ever more deeply mysterious (“God”) is an intellectual dodge. You’re just epistemologically punting: substituting one immediate mystery with an even more profound, more deeply unfathomable mystery. That’s not an explanation—quite the opposite. Consider, for instance, the profound complexities of the human brain and our very consciousness, which involve hundreds of millions of neurons and synapses working together in a nearly unfathomably intricate system. Science hasn’t worked out all the details of this natural, neurological wonder—but as Carl Sagan has pointed out, we don’t know any of the details of a magical invisible deity creating it all, either. To simply claim that “God made it” isn’t explaining anything at all.19
Fourth, theists insist that everything in the universe requires some sort of intelligent designer—except, of course, their God. But if you assert that everything in the universe requires a creator/designer—but that the creator/designer itself doesn’t require a creator/designer—then you’re just being boldly and blatantly illogical. For if God can exist without having been created or designed, then by the very same logic, so too could anything, including the universe. And also, if there was in fact an intelligent designer God, then who or what designed it? Something as amazing and complex as a deity that can create eyeballs and minds couldn’t just come out of nothing and nowhere! It must have been created by an even more intelligent designer! In the frank words of American philosopher Daniel Dennett, “If God created and designed all these wonderful things, who created God? Supergod? And who created Supergod? Superdupergod?”20
As British poet and pioneering atheist Percy Bysshe Shelley reasoned back in 1811, the natural logic and consequence of this theological argument—that because the universe appears designed, it must be evidence of an intelligent creator god—leads to “an infinity of creative and created Gods, each more eminently requiring an intelligent author of his being than the foregoing.” He continues, “The assumption that the Universe is a design, leads to a conclusion that there are infinity of creative and created Gods, which is absurd.”21 And, I should add, lacking any empirical evidence.
Finally, even if one were to simply admit—yes—that the natural world is so truly full of such irreducible complexity and intricate design that, by all faculties of logic and reason, it must be evidence of some nonnatural, out-of-the-universe creator—what evidence is there that this creator is an intelligent god, per se? None. Endless other possibilities abound. As B. C. Johnson once quipped, one could just as easily speculate that the universe “was cooperatively constructed by several generations of billions of minor ghostly beings . . . all of them working together”—and thus—“the design argument, even if successful, does not come close to implying the existence of a God.”22 Or how about this one: all the wondrous design and complexity of the natural world is the result of a small, humble alien being from a mysterious other dimension—a being who is so humble that he didn’t want anyone to ever know that he was the superintelligent, superpowerful source of our entire universe, so he specifically planted the idea of a God in the early minds of those who would eventually create the world’s religions, just to throw humanity off his humble, alien scent.
Like I said, possibilities abound—both imaginable and unimaginable. And none of them should be embraced without any confirming evidence. Including belief in God.
Do
