This question was on AskTheAtheists.com recently:
A case for rational belief in a creator?
I have an example of how belief in God would be rational and I would like your input. Here it goes:
Let’s say you or I are walking through a beautiful meadow, and a log cabin comes into view. Apparently the cabin was abandoned, and yet there is still some evidence that it was occupied at some time. Beautiful artwork is hung on the wall, and hand-crafted furniture is covered in dust. Now, wouldn’t be logical to conclude that somebody built the cabin, that some one painted the artwork, and that the furniture, now worn, was crafted by someone? So why couldn’t it be, that someone created this gorgeous earth, and this brilliant universe, both of which are infinitely more complex and shall I say, imaginative, than that old abandoned cabin. Wouldn’t that someone be greater than that which he/she/it built, just like the man or woman who built the cabin is greater than his/her creation?
And here is my answer:
Can you really replace “heath” with “meadow” and “watch” with “cabin” and call it a rational case? (The wording is very Lee Strobel of you, I might add.) This argument has been around since William Paley penned it in Natural Theology in 1802, before Charles Darwin wrote On The Origin of Species, the first major rebuttal of this fatuous argument.
Since the early 1800’s, science has grown by leaps and bounds and continues to meticulously revise and update our knowledge of the process of evolution. It seems to me, as evidenced by your argument, that religion, in all that time, has only learned to use a thesaurus. After 207 years, the only thing that has changed in this argument, which you’re laughably presenting to us as an exciting new hypothesis, is the wording.
If you’re arguing that life is so complex that it requires a creator, you are stopping short of one of three obvious conclusions to that argument. I’ll concede, for the sake of argument, that your “case” is valid and that cabins and watches prove the existence, somehow, of a creator god. The argument continues in three directions here:
Because creations cannot be more complex than their Creator, Whatever (or Whoever) created God must be even more complex.
And whatever created that Creator, and whatever created that Creator, and so on, ad infinitum. You can either believe that life came from simple beginnings and worked their way up to present form gradually with the energy supplied to it by our Sun, or you can believe that the universe is completely stuffed and overflowing with magical creator gods, because if you believe life absolutely has to have a creator, why should the creator be uncreated? If the creator can be uncreated, what’s to stop nature from being uncreated?
Since life on Earth is so distressingly violent and much of what occurs in nature is so outrageous to our moral senses, whoever created Earth was either uncaring or malevolent.
It’s no secret that life thrives on death. All animals on this planet (and quite a few plants and bacteria) must kill other forms of life and steal their energy in order to live. We call this eating, and even vegetarians are guilty of it, just not in such an obvious way.
Any God who could purposefully design a system where life could not exist without slaughter is not a God that I could feel comfortable spending an eternity with, were I given that choice. How many gazelles have to die from the time a lioness is born to the time she births her last litter and finishes passing on her genes? How many cows, pigs and chickens must die for a single human to live comfortably from birth until death? In 2007, 271,685,000 turkeys were slaughtered in the United States in preparation for Thanksgiving, a day in which we are supposed to give thanks to the God who designed this system.
In this clip from the series Planet Earth, a fungus from the genus Cordyceps infects several insects and hijacks their mind, forcing them to climb to where they can be easily eaten and the fungus can attach itself to a new host. The God who designed your cabin also designed a brain fungus that causes insects to commit suicide.
Which God is it?
You’ve successfully proved to me that God, while he is somewhat of a jerk and is subordinate to an infinite amount of bigger Gods, is real. Congratulations. Now which God is it? I assume you’re going to try and tell me that it’s your own God, and hope that since you’ve already convinced me thusfar, you won’t have to do any more arguing. (It’s obvious you’re a lazy debater since you plagiarised Paley.) I’m credulous, but I’m not that credulous. You’ve only done half the job. Now plagiarise something that will convince me that this Creator God is your Creator God.
You really need to start thinking about where your arguments lead before you present them. Your question led to nothing but more doubt.
Some helpful clarification in the discussion:
1. Generally, Christians differentiate between Creator and creation. The latter would necessarily have a Creator, while the same would not be said for the former. This would explain why atheists who don’t accept this argument tend to cite the same argument ad nauseum (“Your creator must have been created too! PWN’D!) and why a lot of Christians, rather than showing a little forethought and knowledge of their argument, sit slack-jawed wondering what just happened.
The argument is not stuff comes from other stuff, until you get to the biggest stuffer ever. That is dumb. The argument is simply to highlight the distinction between creation and creator and show that creation highly implies a creator.
2. The second objection is actually one of the most honest objections that I find atheists make in various forms to religion and to God, which is just that in their eyes God is cruel, so why serve him. Christopher Hitchens was never more honest than when he said in his most recent book, that even if God existed, Hitchens would be a part of the devil’s party. And looking at the world and seeing that as how things were designed by God, I can’t say that I disagree with that conclusion, except for one little thing…
My religion, Christianity, teaches that the world is not as it is supposed to be. It is screwed up. People are screwed up. Relationships are screwed up. That is pretty much conceded, though there is some disagreement to the degree that sin has affected the world and not just people. The two views being either we (people) are the problem and the world would be “perfect” without us in the equation, and the view that we are the biggest problem, but sin has affected everything in creation as well (I would put myself in the second camp, by the way). So, the good news is that both atheists and Christians should find some agreement in saying, “Something ain’t right!”
That leads to the second issue in that objection, which is that God is therefore culpable for the misery that is in the world. The good news for believers is that the Bible does have an answer. The bad news is that it really is sin is our fault and not God’s, even though he is all-powerful. If you read the Bible, that is actually what it teaches – man is responsible, God is sovereign. Believe me when I say, Mr. Atheist, I feel your pain. That is a tough pill to swallow, and any sincere Christian should be the first to admit that that is a difficult teaching. It has actually led some to fashion an understanding of God that he is not all-powerful or that man is not a responsible agent, but ultimately the Bible teaches both.
So Christianity is not without its difficulties, but let me say this final thing: taking God out of the equation doesn’t make the situation any better. You still have a screwed up world, you still have evil and violence, but now there is no real solution. That is just the way the world is. At least with God, you have some hope that things will be fixed one day, while without him, you really have no reason to expect things to be any different or better ever. Why should you? Plus, it makes the idea of “better” a moving target, which is a problem in and of itself.
I am not even toying with the idea that this will satisfy everyone, but I do hope it at least allows people on both sides to understand the other a little better.
Comment by Trey Jackson — 28 April 2009 @ 11:41 am
Trey, it was my understanding that clarifications were supposed to clarify, or make clear, the subject of the clarification, not drag it further into the muck and mire of apologetics and tautological bullshit.
As for this statement: “taking God out of the equation doesn’t make the situation any better. You still have a screwed up world, you still have evil and violence, but now there is no real solution,” that’s sort of the point. You’re trying to reconcile all the pain in the world with a loving and omnipotent God. I’m saying the world is screwed up because there isn’t a loving, omnipotent God, therefore pain is all over the place. Nothing changes except I’m not spreading myself paper-thin in all directions trying to justify demonstrably false aspects of your supposed God’s character. I’m not saying that Atheism necessarily makes the world better, I’m saying it better explains the world.
Comment by Rev. J. Reed Braden — 28 April 2009 @ 1:51 pm
Trey,
I’d like to address a couple points you brought up:
“The argument is not stuff comes from other stuff, until you get to the biggest stuffer ever. That is dumb. The argument is simply to highlight the distinction between creation and creator and show that creation highly implies a creator.”
You’ve probably heard atheists disregard the ‘creation requires a creator’ argument as tautological and/or circular, but even besides that is the greater issue that when an atheist looks at your analogy and at the world, they conclude that what you call ‘creation’ most definitely does *not* imply a conscious creator.
We can all see the fingerprint of a house’s maker in a house because we all have great knowledge of houses, and we can see them being built by people. One can appreciate that houses are logically planned out. When you look at a planet, however, or a body, all the mechanisms at work that yield those end products are documented and understandable, and they show no real signs of intelligent planning. I wear glasses because my eyes are not perfect. People get cancer because their bodies are not perfect. Almost all planets are uninhabitable because their orbits are not perfect. So on and so forth. There’s a very clear trail of evidence that explains this… basically everything about us, everything about our solar system is cobbled together by mechanisms that worked just well enough to persist… exactly as science verifies, and exactly not what a perfect creator being would have created.
Your answer to this, is sin. But if this entire universe was created by your god, then sin is either a direct manifestation of his, or a creation of one of his creations. I can envision a more perfect god than yours: one that did not allow for imperfection in his creation. Your god is either unable or unwilling. If man is responsible for sin, then God is responsible for creating man with the ability to ruin all God created. That’s a pretty complicated and convoluted explanation for the imperfection we all acknowledge as existing in the world. Science does a better job explaining it in far fewer steps, and without requiring any mental acrobatics.
In response to your last point,
“taking God out of the equation doesn’t make the situation any better. You still have a screwed up world, you still have evil and violence, but now there is no real solution. That is just the way the world is. At least with God, you have some hope that things will be fixed one day”
We think it does make things better, because it removes the sense of complacency people have with suffering. Christians may sit around waiting for someone else to fix the problem, or they convince themselves that the problem is unfixable, and simply wait for their heavenly reward where nothing is ever going to go wrong.
We atheists realize that there’s nobody out there to take care of our problems for us, so it is up to us to do it. We have no overbearing force telling us not to bother. It’s only up to us to learn enough about our problems that we can in turn solve them.
Rational inquiry, not faith, is the mechanism responsible for every advancement of our society. It gets us 100 year lifespans and air travel and the ability to communicate instantly with anyone, anywhere. It operates far better on far simpler rules. Perhaps most importantly, it makes no such atrocious claim that there is something inherently wrong with being human. We don’t waste any time or energy apologizing for ourselves, which leaves us able to spend that time and energy improving the lives of real people all around us, people who just would not survive on faith alone.
Comment by Riker — 28 April 2009 @ 1:39 pm