The website http://www.everystudent.com, maintained by Campus Crusade for Christ, has a page titled “Does God Exist? Six Reasons to Believe that God is Really There.” The page claims to offer “candid, straight-forward reasons to believe in the existenece of God…” Sounds good to me. Let’s see what it has to offer.

The prologue begins thus:

Just once wouldn’t you love for someone to simply show you the evidence for God’s existence? No arm-twisting. No statements of, “You just have to believe.”

Yes! I won’t hold my breath, however.

But first consider this. If a person opposes even the possibility of there being a God, then any evidence can be rationalized or explained away. It is like if someone refuses to believe that people have walked on the moon, then no amount of information is going to change their thinking. Photographs of astronauts walking on the moon, interviews with the astronauts, moon rocks…all the evidence would be worthless, because the person has already concluded that people cannot go to the moon.

Granted. However, if the evidence for God’s existence is as strong as the evidence that people have walked on the moon, then I just might have to change the name of this website from anatheist.net to a-theist.net (or maybe convertedatheist.net!). The author of the article, Marilyn Adamson, claims to be a former atheist who, after a year of questioning, converted to Christianity. If that’s true, then hopefully what follows will be the best case that this converted atheist can make.

On to the first reason:

1. The complexity of our planet points to a deliberate Designer who not only created our universe, but sustains it today.

Many examples showing God’s design could be given, possibly with no end.

This is an appeal to the complexity in nature to argue for a designer. I have no doubt that an endless parade of examples could be given, as was tirelessly and tediously done by William Paley as far back as 1802 in his book Natural Theology (or even earlier, by John Ray in The Wisdom of God Manifested in the Works of the Creation, 1691). I write more about design arguments in general in my article on that subject.

Of the two examples that Marilyn gives, one of them is water. As she states, “the characteristics of water are uniquely suited to life.” In other words, as this argument goes, water is somehow designed for life. This seems to be the obvious and intuitive conclusion. But it is not a necessary conclusion. Maybe life was designed for water. Rather than water existing for life, maybe life exists because of water. Charles Darwin turned Paley and these kinds of arguments on their head by illustrating a natural mechanism that is capable of generating complexity without the assistant of a design architect and craftsman. That mechanism, of course, is natural selection. Ever since 1859, complexity is no longer a compelling argument for a designer.

The second example that Marilyn gives is the Earth, but her argument takes the form of a classic “fine-tuning” or anthropic argument:

The Earth…its size is perfect… If Earth were smaller, an atmosphere would be impossible, like the planet Mercury. If Earth were larger, its atmosphere would contain free hydrogen, like Jupiter…The Earth is located the right distance from the sun… Any closer and we would burn up. Even a fractional variance in the Earth’s position to the sun would make life on Earth impossible…And our moon is the perfect size and distance from the Earth for its gravitational pull. The moon creates important ocean tides and movement so ocean waters do not stagnate, and yet our massive oceans are restrained from spilling over across the continents.

And so on and so forth. In other words, we exist on the planet Earth because our planet has the perfect conditions for our kind of life. This must be true, obviously, or we would not be here to discuss it. Nevertheless, the implication is that our planet must be designed for our purposes. What is the probability that an Earth-like planet would naturally form that meets all of these conditions? Who knows, but let’s say that it is extremely improbable – on the order of 1 in a billion chance. If our star planetary system was the only one in the Universe, that would have been a remarkable occurrence. But of course it is not. Astronomers estimate that there are some 100 billion galaxies in the Universe. As a conservative estimate, we might say that there are then a billion billion planets. Given the extremely improbable odds of 1 in a billion against an Earth-like planet appearing, with a billion billion planets we might expect to find 1 billion Earth-like planets in the Universe.

That’s right, 1 billion Earths. Given what we now know about the immensity of the Universe, it is no longer a compelling argument to claim that Earth-like conditions appearing are so improbable that the only conclusion must be that a designer crafted this little speck specifically for life to flourish. Rather, it may be that we just happen to live on one of those billion planets that – fortunately – chance favored.

The second reason is another variation of the argument from design, this time using a specific biological organ:

2. The human brain’s complexity shows a higher intelligence behind it.

Marilyn asks:

A brain that deals with more than a million pieces of information every second, while evaluating its importance and allowing you to act on the most pertinent information… did it come about just by chance? Was it merely biological causes, perfectly forming the right tissue, blood flow, neurons, structure?

Well, most (if not all) evolutionary biologists certainly think so. And the wide variety of brain structures spread throughout the animal kingdom certainly give hints at how such a complex structure could have evolved. Marilyn, however, seems to want us to give up trying to figure this question out and simply assume that God must have designed it directly. Maybe He did. But an argument from ignorance will not prove it.

Next:

3. “Chance” or “natural causes” are insufficient explanations.

The alternative to God existing is that all that exists around us came about by natural cause and random chance. If someone is rolling dice, the odds of rolling a pair of sixes is one thing. But the odds of spots appearing on blank dice is something else. What Pasteur attempted to prove centuries ago, science confirms, that life cannot arise from non-life. Where did human, animal, plant life come from?

Also, natural causes are an inadequate explanation for the amount of precise information contained in human DNA. A person who discounts God is left with the conclusion that all of this came about without cause, without design, and is merely good fortune. It is intellectually wanting to observe intricate design and attribute it to luck.

I’ll say first that I am not aware of science “confirming” that life cannot arise from non-life, given the right ingredients and the right conditions. It has by no means produced definitive evidence for how life may have originated on our planet, but this is not the same as saying that it demonstrates that it could not have by any natural means.

Anyway, notice how God is assumed to be an unproblematic alternative. The problem, so the argument goes, is that life appears to be too improbable to have just happened by chance through natural means. Improbable doesn’t mean impossible, of course, but Marilyn wants you to agree that God is a more likely solution. This, however, is simply assumed and never demonstrated. Any God that is powerful and knowledgeable enough to create life, let alone create the planets and Universe in which that life exists, must Itself be highly complex – far beyond our puny imaginations. Using the same argument, one must conclude that the existence of such a being is even more improbable.

Any ultimate explanation for life must involve a bottom up, step by step, explanation, not a top down, poof here is a creator, hand wave. Evolution by means of natural selection is one such explanation. Even if it is not yet clear how “chance” and “natural causes” can explain the origins of life, such an explanation is more probable than an even more complex and even more intelligent (and apparently nowhere to be found) designer-god.

Three up, three down. So far Marilyn has not offered any really compelling reasons to believe in God. Might her final three clinch the deal? Stay tuned!

Go to Part 2

Posted in Atheism, Christianity, Religion

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