A well-written essay is on the internet called, "Why I am Not Christian" by Richard Carrier (on the left). It's long, respectful, and well written. It compels a response. His criticisms of Christians are well founded but his charges against God are mistaken and unfounded. The essay was written in 2006 and is divided into six parts. I'm going to interact with his responses and divide my essay also into six parts. His words will be in black and mine will be red. His Top four reasons for rejecting Christianity are:
1. God is Silent.
2. God is inert.
3. Inadequate evidence for God.
4. Christianity predicts a different universe.
Here is my refutation of point 4.
4. Christianity Predicts a Different Universe
I mentioned before that the Christian hypothesis actually predicts a completely different universe than the one we find ourselves in. For a loving God who wanted to create a universe solely to provide a home for human beings, and to bring his plan of salvation to fruition, would never have invented this universe, but something quite different. But if there is no God, then the universe we actually observe is exactly the sort of universe we would expect to observe. In other words, if there is no God then this universe is the only kind of universe we would ever find ourselves in, the only kind that could ever produce intelligent life without any supernatural cause or plan. Hence naturalist atheism predicts exactly the kind of universe we observe, while the Christian theory predicts almost none of the features of our universe. Indeed, the Christian theory predicts the universe should instead have features that in fact it doesn't, and should lack features that in fact it has. Therefore, naturalism is a better explanation than Christianity of the universe we actually find ourselves in. Since naturalism (rejecting the supernatural) is the most plausible form of atheism I know, this is what I shall mean by "atheism" from here on out.[8] Let's look at a few examples of what I mean.
This is not a a good argument it is based on the following sentence:
"For a loving God who wanted to create a universe solely to provide a home for human beings, and to bring his plan of salvation to fruition, would never have invented this universe, but something quite different. "
But this is not what the Bible says.
15He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation. 16For by him all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities; all things were created by him and for him. 17He is before all things, and in him all things hold together. - Colossians 1:15-17
Origin and Evolution of Life
First, the origin of life. Suppose there is no God. If that is the case, then the origin of life must be a random accident. Christians rightly point out that the appearance of the first living organism is an extremely improbable accident. Of course, so is winning a lottery, and yet lotteries are routinely won. Why? Because the laws of probability entail the odds of winning a lottery depend not just on how unlikely a win is
Therefore, the only way life could arise by accident (i.e. without God arranging it) is if there were countless more failed tries than actual successes. After all, if the lottery was played by a billion people and yet only one of them won, that would surely be a mere accident, not evidence of cheating. So the only way this lottery could be won by accident is if it was played countless times and only one ticket won. To carry the analogy over, the only way life could arise by accident is if the universe tried countless times and only very rarely succeeded. Lo and behold, we observe that is exactly what happened: the universe has been mixing chemicals for over twelve billion years in over a billion-trillion star systems. That is exactly what we would have to see if life arose by accident
The theory stands rejected as sated here. He started out talking about the origin of the universe and then talking about how life began. They are not the same thing. There is no proof of billions of failed attempts to start a universe. And no proof of billion of failed attempts to start life. Show me a failed universe.
Of course, we haven't yet proven any particular theory of life's origin true. But we do have evidence for every element of every theory now considered. Nothing about contemporary hypotheses of life's origin rests on any conjecture or assumption that has not been observed or demonstrated in some circumstance. For example, we know porous rocks that can provide a cell-like home were available near energy-rich, deep-sea volcanic vents. We know those vents harbor some of the most ancient life on the planet, indicating that life may well have begun there. And we know these vents would have provided all the necessary resources to produce an amino-acid-based life, and that they had hundreds of millions of years of time in which to do so. In a similar way, we have evidence supporting every other presently viable theory: we know homochiral amino acids can be mass-produced in a supernova and thus become a component of the early comets that bombarded the early Earth; we know that amino acids that chain along a common crystalline structure in clay will chain in a homochiral structure; we know simple self-replicating chains of amino acids exist that do not require any enzymes working in concert; and so on.[9] So by the rules of sound procedure, the accidental theory is well-grounded in a way intelligent design theory is not. We have never observed or confirmed the existence of any sort of divine actions or powers that God would have needed to "create" the first life
Is accidental origin proven or not. He ended the previous paragraph by saying it was. Now he saying that no theory has been proven.
The situation is even worse than that, really. For the Christian theory does not predict what we observe, while the natural theory does predict what we observe. After all, what need does an intelligent engineer have of billions of years and trillions of galaxies filled with billions of stars each? That tremendous waste is only needed if life had to arise by natural accident. It would have no plausible purpose in the Christian God's plan. You cannot predict from "the Christian God created the world" that "the world" would be trillions of galaxies large and billions of years old before it finally stumbled on one rare occasion of life. But we can predict exactly that from "no God created this world." Therefore, the facts confirm atheism rather than theism. Obviously, a Christian can invent all manner of additional "ad hoc" theories to explain "why" his God would go to all the trouble of designing the universe to look exactly like we would expect it to look if God did not exist. But these "ad hoc" excuses are themselves pure concoctions of the imagination
Christians don't have to prove why God has "wasted" so much time and unused stars because how can Carrier assert that it is waste? Just because we don't know the purpose does not mean it's a waste or unneeded. Again, Carrier is assuming that He knows what the perfect created universe should look like and no human could possibly know that. I'd say that given the purposes God has in mind, the universe is what it should be to bring those purposes to fruition.
The same analysis follows for evolution. The evidence that all present life evolved by a process of natural selection is strong and extensive. I won't make the case here, for it is enough to point out that the scientific consensus on this is vast and certain.[10] And as it happens, evolution requires billions of years to get from the first accidental life to organisms as complex as us. God does not require this
The assumption that all species evolved from one single cell is an assumption yet to be demonstrated. Through Natural Selection we do see changes into a species but a fish to an amphibian; an amphibian to a reptile; a reptile into a mammal; and then finally us has not been proven.
Even DNA confirms atheism over Christianity. The only way life could ever arise by accident and evolve by natural selection is if it was built from a chemical code that could be copied and that was subject to mutation. We know of no other natural, accidental way for any universe to just stumble upon any kind of life that could naturally evolve. Also, as best we know, the only chemicals that our present universe could accidentally assemble this way are amino acids (and similar molecules like nucleotides). And it is highly improbable that an accidentally assembled code would employ any more than a handful of basic units in its fundamental structure. Lo and behold, we observe all of this to be the case. Exactly as required by the theory that there is no God, all life is built from a chemical code that copies itself and mutates naturally, this code is constructed from amino-acid-forming nucleotide molecules, and the most advanced DNA code only employs four different nucleotide molecules to do that. The Christian theory predicts none of this. Atheism predicts all of it. There is no good reason God would need any of these things to create and sustain life. He could, and almost certainly would, use an infallible spiritual essence to accomplish the same ends
DNA is perfectly plausible for Christian Theism. God maintained that all living things would reproduce after their own kind. DNA was discovered independently of atheism, theism, and evolution. It points to theism because it shows design, not undirected accidents. Large mutations are by-and-large never beneficial. The goal of reproduction is passing DNA sequences exactly to the next generation.
Again, the only way a Christian can explain the actual facts is by pulling out of thin air some unproven "reason" why God would design life in exactly the way required by the theory that life wasn't designed by God
Carrier has inadequately proven that the universe is one that does not show that God exist so it is a circular argument.
We can find more examples from the nature of life. For example, a loving God would infuse his creation with models of moral goodness everywhere, in the very function and organization of nature. He would not create an animal kingdom that depended on wanton rape and murder to persist and thrive, nor would animals have to produce hundreds of offspring because almost all of them will die, most of them horribly. There would be no disease or other forms of suffering among animals at all. Yet all of these things must necessarily exist if there is no God. So once again, atheism predicts what we see. Christianity does not.
None of that proves that there is no God, only that you have no idea why it is not the design. In order to believe in God you don't need to understand exactly why the universe is the way it is. What if I complained about the way you write and told you, "I wouldn't have said it that way! Therefore you don't exist!"This is the argument that Carrier is using. It makes no sense.
The Human Brain
As a more specific example, consider the size of the human brain. If God exists, then it necessarily follows that a fully functional mind can exist without a body
What?! First off, "made in his image" does not mean that we should not need physical brains like God. If you are going to use that you might as well argue that we don't need physical bodies either. So this breaks down to the argument:
If I were creating the universe and I was all benevolent, I would create the universe to look like such. But because the universe is not such, there is no God. Here is the fatal flaw: God is not like you or me.
In contrast, if a mind can only be produced by a comparably complex machine, then obviously there can be no God, and the human brain would have to be very large
Carrier, if the human brain is so inconvenient would you like to give up yours? No?neither would I.
But this enormous, problematic brain is necessarily the only way conscious beings can exist if there is no God nor any other supernatural powers in the universe. If we didn't need a brain, and thus did not have one, we would be many times more efficient. All that oxygen, energy, and other materials could be saved or diverted to other functions. We would also be far less vulnerable to fatal or debilitating injury, we would be immune to brain damage and defects that impair judgment or distort perception (like schizophrenia or retardation), and we wouldn't have killed one in every ten of our mothers before the rise of modern medicine. In short, the fact that we have such large, vulnerable brains is the only way we could exist if there is no God, but is quite improbable if there is a God who loves us and wants us to do well and have a fair chance in life. Once again, atheism predicts the universe we find ourselves in. The Christian theory does not.[11]
Again, a lot of conclusions made without any proof. Who said that your design of the Human Brain is better than the one we have. And if there is continued conscious existence after death, as the Bible says, then you don't need to a brain for consciousness. Prove there is no continued consciousness after death.
Finely Tuning a Killer Cosmos
Even the Christian proposal that God designed the universe, indeed "finely tuned" it to be the perfect mechanism for producing life, fails to predict the universe we see. A universe perfectly designed for life would easily, readily, and abundantly produce and sustain it. Most of the contents of that universe would be conducive to life or benefit life. Yet that is not what we see. Instead, almost the entire universe is lethal to life
Again Christian teaching is misrepresented. No where does the Bible teach that the whole universe was set up to sustain our lives. If Carrier disagrees i would like to know where does the Bible teach us that? It's not even a part of CS Lewis' definitions that Carrier said he was using to define Christianity.
The fact that the universe is actually very poorly designed to sustain and benefit life is already a refutation of the Christian theory, which entails the purpose of the universe is to sustain and benefit life
Only true if you think God's intention was that we could inhabit anywhere in the universe. It wasn't His intention at all.
24"The God who made the world and everything in it is the Lord of heaven and earth and does not live in temples built by hands. 25And he is not served by human hands, as if he needed anything, because he himself gives all men life and breath and everything else. 26From one man he made every nation of men, that they should inhabit the whole earth; and he determined the times set for them and the exact places where they should live. 27God did this so that men would seek him and perhaps reach out for him and find him, though he is not far from each one of us. 28'For in him we live and move and have our being.' As some of your own poets have said, 'We are his offspring.' - Act 17:24-28
Smolin explains how a universe perfectly designed to produce black holes would look exactly like our universe. It would be extremely old, extremely large, and almost entirely comprised of radiation-filled vacuum, in which almost all the matter available would be devoted to producing black holes or providing the material that feeds them. We know there must be, in fact, billions more black holes than life-producing planets. And if any of several physical constants varied by even the tiniest amount, the universe would produce fewer black holes
You can't say why the universe is designed this way - for the purposes of generating black holes - only that it is.
Think about it. If you found a pair of scissors and didn't know what they were designed for, you could hypothesize they were designed as a screwdriver, because scissors can, after all, drive screws. In fact, there is no way to design a pair of scissors that would prevent them being used as a screwdriver. But as soon as someone showed you that these scissors were far better designed to cut paper, and in fact are not the best design for driving screws, would you stubbornly hang on to your theory that they were designed to drive screws? No. You would realize it was obvious they were designed to cut paper, and their ability to drive screws is just an inevitable byproduct of their actual design. This is exactly what we are facing when we look at the universe: it is not very well designed for life, though life is an inevitable byproduct of what the universe was more obviously designed for: black holes. So if the universe was intelligently designed, it clearly was not designed for us.
Bad analogy becuase Just like someone has to tell you what scissors are for, why would you think you would know what the universe is for. The purpose for the universe is bigger than us.
But that is not the only explanation. If the universe was indeed perfectly designed to sustain and benefit life
Some of these early random universes will just by chance have properties that produce more black holes than other universes, and will thus produce far more baby universes than their cousins do. The more black holes a universe produces, the more likely it is that some of the new universes this causes will also be good at making black holes, or even better. And eventually this chain of cause and effect will generate perfect or near-perfect black hole producers, after an extended and inevitable process of trial and error. Therefore, if the whole multiverse began with any random universe from some primordial chaos, eventually a universe exactly like ours would be an inevitable and unstoppable outcome. Hence Smolin's theory predicts exactly our universe, with all its finely tuned attributes, without any God or intelligent design.
Smolin's theory has not been proven. Wonder what orifice he pulled this one out of?
Now, Smolin's theory has yet to be proven. It is at present just a hypothesis
Carrier says "the fact that unintelligent natural selection can produce incredibly precise fine tuning over time
Even so, there are still some ad hoc elements to Smolin's theory, and therefore it is not yet a fact, just a hypothesis. But suppose for a moment that Smolin's theory is the only possible way our universe could come to exist without a God. It is certainly one possible way. No Christian can yet refute Smolin's theory or prove it is not the correct explanation. There are also other theories now that explain our exact universe without a God, like chaotic inflation theory. But let's assume we ruled out all those alternatives, and all we had left was Smolin's theory and the Christian's theory. Then, if Christianity was false, Smolin's theory would necessarily be true.
Huh? You have more evidence for someone creating the universe then for Smolin's hypothesis.
Now observe the facts: the universe is exactly the way Smolin's theory predicts it would be, right down to peculiar details
Even aside from physics, the nature of the world is clearly dispassionate and blind, exhibiting no value-laden behavior or message of any kind, and everything we find turns out to be the inevitable product of mindless physics. The natural world is like an autistic idiot savant, a marvelous machine wholly uncomprehending of itself or others. This is exactly what we should expect if it was not created and governed by a benevolent deity. Yet it is hardly explicable on the theory that there is such a being. Since there is no observable divine hand in nature as a causal process, it is reasonable to conclude there is no divine hand. Conversely, all the causes whose existence we have confirmed are unintelligent, immutable forces and objects. Never once have we confirmed the existence of any other kind of cause. And that is strange if there is a God, but not at all strange if there isn't one. Nowhere do we find in the design of the universe itself any sort of intention or goal we can only expect from a conscious being like us, as opposed to the sort of goals exhibited by, say, a flat worm, a computer game, or an ant colony, or an intricate machine like the solar system, which simply follows inevitably from natural forces that are fixed and blind.
Given the lack of any clear evidence for God, and the fact that (apart from what humans do) everything we've seen has been caused by immutable natural elements and forces, we should sooner infer that immutable natural elements and forces are behind it all. Likewise, the only things we have ever proven to exist are matter, energy, space, and time, and countless different arrangements of these. Therefore, the natural inference is that these are the only things there are. After all, the universe exhibits no values in its own operation or design. It operates exactly the same for everyone, the good and bad alike. It rewards and craps on both with total disregard. It behaves just like a cold and indifferent machine, not the creation of a loving engineer. Christianity does not predict this. Atheism does.
Atheism does not predict the universe we have...it just refutes a characature of whay Carrier thinks that Christians believe.
The Original Christian Cosmos
A Christian might still balk and ask, "Well, what other universe could God have made?" The answer is easy: the very universe early Christians like Paul actually believed they lived in. In other words, a universe with no evidence of such a vast age or of natural evolution, a universe that contained instead abundant evidence that it was created all at once just thousands of years ago. A universe that wasn't so enormous and that had no other star systems or galaxies, but was instead a single cosmos of seven planetary bodies and a sphere full of star lights that all revolve around an Earth at the center of God's creation
Excuse me. I don't know where Carrier is getting any of this. There is no proof that Paul thought anything Carrier says he did.
That is, indeed, exactly the universe we would expect if Christianity were true
All the evidence we now have in hand only compounds Paul's error. For what we know today is exactly the opposite of what Paul would have expected. It is exactly the opposite of what his Christian theory predicted. Paul certainly would have told you that God would never use billions of years of meandering and disastrously catastrophic trial and error to figure out how to make a human. God would just make humans. And Paul certainly believed that is exactly what God did, and surely expected the evidence would prove it. But the evidence has not. It has, in fact, proved exactly the opposite. Likewise, Paul naturally believed God simply spoke a word, and Earth existed. One more word, and the stars existed. That's exactly what the Christian theory predicts. But that isn't what happened.
Again, Christians can fabricate excuses for why God did things differently
The existence of a divine creator driven by a mission to save humankind, for example, entails that his creation would serve exactly that end, better than any other. And that means he would not design the universe to look exactly like it would have to look if God did not exist. Instead, if I wanted people to know which church was teaching the right way to salvation, I would lead the way for them by protecting all such churches with mysterious energy fields so they would be invulnerable to harm, and its preachers alone would be able to work miracles day after day, such as regenerating lost limbs, raising the dead, or calming storms. The bibles of this church would glow in the dark so they could always be read and would be indestructible
So, too, the Christian God would design a universe with moral goals built in. For example, if I were to make a universe, and cared how the people in it felt
But, lo and behold, that is not the universe we live in. Even if a God made this universe, it could not be the Christian God because no God who wanted us to know the truth would conceal it by making a universe that looked exactly like a universe with no God in it. The simple fact is that Christianity does not predict our universe, but a completely different one. Atheism, however, predicts exactly the kind of universe we find ourselves in. So the nature of the universe is another failed prediction, confirming our previous conclusion that Christianity is false.
All of this is wrong. There is no proof that the Bible teaches any of these things that Carrier says that early Christians believed about the universe. None what so ever. Therefore this whole line of argumentation must be thrown out. It's offered with one any background reference as to why Carrier says Christians thought this about the universe.
Mr. God, the supernatural magic man, is silent because it doesn't exist.
ReplyDeleteIf Mr. God, or any other god, ever spoke up, wouldn't that be nice? Then there would be at least one shred of evidence for this ridiculous god invention.
But no, we never hear from this mythical creature. Some people believe in it anyway, perhaps because they're cowards, or because they're stupid, gullible, whatever.
You don't review comments. You just let them get published automatically. I respect that. Thanks.
ReplyDeleteUnfortunately I can't respect your insane belief in Mr. God. It's as childish as believing in the Easter Bunny, which by the way has more evidence than any god.
You wrote "The assumption that all species evolved from one single cell is an assumption yet to be demonstrated. Through Natural Selection we do see changes into a species but a fish to an amphibian; an amphibian to a reptile; a reptile into a mammal; and then finally us has not been proven."
OK. I see your problem. You believe in a MAGIC MAN OF THE GAPS.
Sorry I can't help you. If you're so scientifically illiterate that you deny the facts of evolution, then you're a total waste of time.
You could try educating yourself. I know Christians think science education is a sin (whatever a sin is). However I will give you a benefit of a doubt and suggest this 2009 book:
Why Evolution is True by Jerry Coyne.
I would explain it to you, but like I said earlier, you are most likely a total waste of time. I think your disease is incurable.
Wow! Thanks for showing how uignorant you are! I've got two degree in Engineering I am well aware of and respect science. At least you admit that we have gaps that we have no evidence for. My standards for evidence seems to be a tad tighter than yours. There is zero evidence that shows anything that you are asserting. I will checkout Jerry Coyne's book but might I suggest that you read more yourself. I really would like to see why your evidence for the easter bunny and for macro evolution. That would be richly entertaining. By the way, I'm assuming that you are only ignorant and not stupid. Rather than just say I'm wrong you should provide proof. You ignored all my points and focused on macro evolution which you can't prove.
ReplyDelete