In my personal capacity I now post a number of important atheistic/agnostic counter-arguments from the old thread, to bring the discussion up a notch and to save having to repeat them. (Rebuttals are taken from
www.talk-orgins.org.)
Arguments against theism
•
Why you cannot use a religious text to prove God’s existence
•
Rebuttal: The first cause argument
•
Rebuttal: The design argument
•
Rebuttal: My religious text is scientifically and historically accurate
•
Rebuttal: Prophecies prove the accuracy of my religious text
•
Rebuttal: First law of thermodynamics claim
•
Rebuttal: Creationism explains what science cannot
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
• Why you cannot use a religious text to prove God’s existence
The claim here is that the religious text (Bible, Quran, etc) proves that God exists. This argument makes the fallacy of
begging the question (or circular reasoning). When the argument is set out clearly this becomes obvious:
How do we know God exists?
God exists because the Bible says so.
Why should we believe the Bible?
Because the Bible is the word of God.
How do we know God exists?
God exists because the Bible says so.
Why should we believe the Bible?
Because the Bible is the word of God.
How do we know God exists?
(etc, ad infinitum.)
You cannot use the conclusion you are trying to prove (that God exists) as one of your premises. The premise “the Bible is the word of God” already assumes the truth of the conclusion.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
• Rebuttal: The First Cause Argument
Claim:
Every event has a cause. The universe itself had a beginning, so it must have had a first cause, which must have been a creator God.
Response:
1. The assumption that every event has a cause, although common in our experience, is not necessarily universal. The apparent lack of cause for some events, such as radioactive decay, suggests that there might be exceptions. There are also hypotheses, such as alternate dimensions of time or an eternally oscillating universe, that allow a universe without a first cause.
2. By definition, a cause comes before an event. If time began with the universe, "before" does not even apply to it, and it is logically impossible that the universe be caused.
3. This claim raises the question of what caused God. If, as some claim, God does not need a cause, then by the same reasoning, neither does the universe.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
• Rebuttal: Design Arguments
Claim:
Complexity indicates intelligent design.
Response:
1. This is an argument from incredulity. Complexity usually means something is hard to understand. But the fact that one cannot understand how something came to be does not indicate that one may conclude it was designed. On the contrary, lack of understanding indicates that we must not conclude design or anything else.
Irreducible complexity and complex specified information are special cases of the "complexity indicates design" claim; they are also arguments from incredulity.
2. In the sort of design that we know about, simplicity is a design goal. Complexity arises to some extent through carelessness or necessity, but engineers work to make things as simple as possible. This is very different from what we see in life.
3. Complexity arises from natural causes: for example, in weather patterns and cave formations.
4. Complexity is poorly defined.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Claim:
Intelligent design has explanatory power. It accounts for a wide range of biological facts. This makes it scientific.
Response:
1. Merely accounting for facts does not make a theory scientific. Saying "it's magic" can account for any fact anywhere but is as far from science as you can get. A theory has explanatory power if facts can be deduced from it. No facts have ever been deduced from ID theory. The theory is equivalent to saying, "it's magic."
2. "Intelligent" and "design" remain effectively undefined. A theory cannot have explanatory power if it is uncertain what the theory says in the first place.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Claim:
Life looks intelligently designed because of its complexity and arrangement. As a watch implies a watchmaker, so life requires a designer.
Response:
1. Nobody argues that life is complicated. However, complexity is not the same as design. There are simple things that are designed and complex things that originate naturally. Complexity does not imply design; in fact, simplicity is a design goal in most designs.
2. In most cases, the inference of design is made because people cannot envision an alternative. This is simply an argument from incredulity. Historically, supernatural design has been attributed to lots of things that we now know form naturally, such as lightning, rainbows, and seasons.
3. Life as a whole looks very undesigned by human standards, for several reasons:
- In known design, innovations that occur in one product quickly get incorporated into other, often very different, products. In eukaryotic life, innovations generally stay confined in one lineage. When the same sort of innovation occurs in different lineages (such as webs of spiders, caterpillars, and web spinners), the details of their implementation differ in the different lineages. When one traces lineages, one sees a great difference between life and design. (Eldredge has done this, comparing trilobites and cornets; Walker 2003.)
- In design, form typically follows function. Yet life shows many examples of different forms with the same function (e.g., different structures making up the wings of birds, bats, insects, and pterodactyls; different organs for making webs in spiders, caterpillars, and web spinners; and at least eleven different types of insect ears), the same basic form with different functions (e.g., the same pattern of bones in a human hand, whale flipper, dog paw, and bat wing) and some structures and even entire organisms without apparent function (e.g., some vestigial organs, creatures living isolated in inaccessible caves and deep underground).
- As mentioned above, life is complex. Design aims for simplicity.
- For almost all designed objects, the manufacture of the object is separate from any function of the object itself. All living objects reproduce themselves.
- Life lacks plan. There are no specifications of living structures and processes. Genes do not fully describe the phenotype of an organism. Sometimes in the absence of genes, structure results anyway. Organisms, unlike designed systems, are self-constructing in an environmental context.
- Life is wasteful. Most organisms do not reproduce, and most fertilized zygotes die before growing much. A designed process would be expected to minimize this waste.
- Life includes many examples of systems that are jury-rigged out of parts that were used for another purpose. These are what we would expect from evolution, not from an intelligent designer. For example vertebrate eyes have a blind spot because the retinal nerves are in front of the photoreceptors. Orchids that provide a platform for pollinating insects to land on, the stem of the flower has a half twist to move the platform to the lower side of the flower.
- Life is highly variable. In almost every species, there is a spread of values for anything you care to measure. The "information" that specifies life is of very low tolerance in engineering terms. There are few standards.
4. Life is nasty. If life is designed, then death, disease, and decay also must be designed since they are integral parts of life. This is a standard problem of apologetics. Of course, many designed things are also nasty (think of certain weapons), but if the designer is supposed to have moral standards, then it is added support against the design hypothesis.
5. The process of evolution can be considered a design process, and the complexity and arrangement we see in life are much closer to what we would expect from evolution than from known examples of intelligent design. Indeed, engineers now use essentially the same processes as evolution to find solutions to problems that would be intractably complex otherwise.
6. Does evolution itself look designed? When you consider that some sort of adaptive mechanism would be necessary on the changing earth if life were to survive, then if life were designed, evolution or something like it would have to be designed into it.
7. Claiming to be able to recognize design in life implies that nonlife is different, that is, not designed. To claim that life is recognisably designed is to claim that an intelligent designer did not create the rest of the universe.
8. As it stands, the design claim makes no predictions, so it is unscientific and useless. It has generated no research at all.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
• Rebuttal: My religious text is scientifically and historically accurate
Claim:
My religious text’s accuracy on various scientific and historical points shows its overall accuracy.
Response:
1. The accuracy of the text is not remarkable. All of its accurate points can be explained by simple observation of nature or by selective interpretation of scriptures.
2. Accuracy on individual points does not indicate overall accuracy. Just about every thesis that is wrong overall still has some accurate points in it.
3. Claims about accuracy assume that the purpose of the religious text is to document scientific data. There is not the slightest indication that the text was ever intended as a scientific textbook. It is intended to teach people about God; even those who claim scientific accuracy for it use it with that intent.
4. Specifically, the Bible is not entirely accurate. If its value is made to depend on scientific accuracy, it becomes valueless when people find errors in it, as some people invariably will.
5. If occasional scientific accuracy shows overall accuracy of the text, then the same conclusion must be granted to the Bible, Qur'an, Zend Avesta, and several other works from other religions, all of which can make the same claims to scientific accuracy.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
• Rebuttal: Prophecies prove the accuracy of my religious text
Claim:
The religious text contains many prophecies that have accurately been fulfilled, proving it is a divine source.
Response:
1. There are several mundane ways in which a prediction of the future can be fulfilled:
- Retrodiction. The "prophecy" can be written or modified after the events fulfilling it have already occurred.
- Vagueness. The prophecy can be worded in such a way that people can interpret any outcome as a fulfillment. Nostradomus's prophecies are all of this type. Vagueness works particularly well when people are religiously motivated to believe the prophecies.
- Inevitability. The prophecy can predict something that is almost sure to happen, such as the collapse of a city. Since nothing lasts forever, the city is sure to fall someday. If it has not, it can be said that according to prophecy, it will.
- Denial. One can claim that the fulfilling events occurred even if they have not. Or, more commonly, one can forget that the prophecy was ever made.
- Self-fulfillment. A person can act deliberately to satisfy a known prophecy.
There are no prophecies in religious texts that cannot easily fit into one or more of those categories.
2. In biblical times, prophecies were not simply predictions. They were warnings of what could or would happen if things did not change. They were meant to influence people's behavior. If the people heeded the prophecy, the events would not come to pass. A fulfilled prophecy was a failed prophecy, because it meant people did not heed the warning.
3. Specifically, the Bible contains failed prophecies, in the sense that things God said would happen did not (Skeptic's Annotated Bible n.d.). For example:
- Joshua said that God would, without fail, drive out the Jebusites and Canaanites, among others (Josh. 3:9-10). But those tribes were not driven out (Josh. 15:63, 17:12-13).
- Isaiah 17:1-3 says that Damascus will cease to be a city and be deserted forever, yet it is inhabited still.
- Ezekiel said Egypt would be made an uninhabited wasteland for forty years (29:10-14), and Nebuchadrezzar would plunder it (29:19-20). Neither happened.
4. Other religions claim many fulfilled prophecies, too.
5. For Christians, divinity is not shown by miracles. The Bible itself says true prophecies may come elsewhere than from God (Deut. 13:1-3), as may other miracles (Exod. 7:22, Matt. 4:8).
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
• Rebuttal: Rebuttal: First Law of Thermodynamics Claim
Claim:
The first law of thermodynamics says matter/energy cannot come from nothing. Therefore, the universe itself could not have formed naturally.
Response:
Formation of the universe from nothing need not violate conservation of energy. The gravitational potential energy of a gravitational field is a negative energy. When all the gravitational potential energy is added to all the other energy in the universe, it might sum to zero (Guth 1997, 9-12,271-276; Tryon 1973).
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
• Rebuttal: Creationism explains what science cannot
Claim:
Cosmologists cannot explain where space, time, energy, and the laws of physics came from.
Response:
1. Some questions are harder to answer than others. But although we do not have a full understanding of the origin of the universe, we are not completely in the dark. We know, for example, that space comes from the expansion of the universe. The total energy of the universe may be zero. Cosmologists have hypotheses for the other questions that are consistent with observations (Hawking 2001). For example, it is possible that there is more than one dimension of time, the other dimension being unbounded, so there is no overall origin of time. Another possibility is that the universe is in an eternal cycle without beginning or end. Each big bang might end in a big crunch to start a new cycle (Steinhardt and Turok 2002) or at long intervals, our universe collides with a mirror universe, creating the universe anew (Seife 2002).
One should keep in mind that our experiences in everyday life are poor preparation for the extreme and bizarre conditions one encounters in cosmology. The stuff cosmologists deal with is very hard to understand. To reject it because of that, though, would be to retreat into an
argument from incredulity (fallacy).
2. Creationists cannot explain origins at all. Saying "God did it" is not an explanation, because it is not tied to any objective evidence. It does not rule out any possibility or even any impossibility. It does not address questions of "how" and "why," and it raises questions such as "which God?" and "how did God originate?" In the explaining game, cosmologists are far out in front.
