For decades I thought that the universe and matter and whatever had to come from somewhere. How could they have always existed? The answer must be that there was an unmoved mover — an uncaused cause — to begin everything. No, not Aristotle's God or Zeus or Allah or Baal or Ra — the first cause had to be Yahweh, of course. Who could argue against that? Well, it turns out Richard Dawkins could. One day, while watching one of his lectures, he dismantled this argument in a few sentences. He said what was more probable — that a few basic elements always existed, or that an infinitely complicated, perfect, loving, just, trinitarian, eternal God existed? Well when you put it like that, of course the simpler one is more probable. Here is how Dawkins put it in The God Delusion:
It is futile to try and explain an improbable event with a deity, because by definition the deity will be far more complex and thus improbable. It doesn't explain anything, except the unreasonableness of the believers position. It's also futile to invoke a designer because everything on earth looks designed. "Everything on the earth shows order and complexity — how can it all exist without being designed by God?," a believer asks. But by their own argument they have shot themselves, for doesn't their designer-God show order and complexity? Who designed him? We don't know everything about how our universe came to exist (if it ever did). Science is young. But we're learning, and perhaps someday we will know. We do know that there is no evidence for a God, however, and that there is much evidence for natural processes that make sense of our world. Humans always put God in the gaps, and we have been squishing him out for centuries. There are only a few gaps left, and those too will be filled by science. Who then will believe? Bookmark/Search this post with: |
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