I’m too scared to put this in GD for a couple of reasons:
GD is full of super-heavyweights, which is a class I am not sure I’m in
I don’t want to appear pretentious
So let’s start it in here and see how we go.
I believe the idea that the universe has an intelligent creator makes more sense than not having an intelligent creator. If you look at matter’s basic building block, the atom, and observe all of its magnificent complexity, structure and functionality, it surely makes “more sense” that it was designed.
A quick pre-emptive strike:
“But CalD, if complexity requires a designer, who designed the designer?”
My answer -> Complexity requires a designer in the known physical world. In a non-physical world without space/time/matter, this constraint may not exist.
I believe that this universe is the result of matter being sucked into a black hole in another universe and expelled into what was formerly nothing. Nobody knows what the Big Bang was and nobody knows what happens beyond the event horizon of a black hole, so it’s as good an explanation as any. A creator? Sure, if that makes you feel better.
Nope, not at all. I happily fluttered between atheism and agnosticism for years. My belief in a creator is based purely on the “evidence” I see before me.
Not to me, it doesn’t. That’s the problem with the “doesn’t it just seem like this to you?” arguments: to a lot of people, it doesn’t just seem like that. Also, the basic building block is arguably the quark, not the atom.
What about all the imperfection in the world? Why would someone create a bunch of stuff that doesn’t work well? Surely he’s not all that talented if this is the best he can do.
An intelligent creator only sounds like it makes more sense, because it sweeps everything that isn’t explained or understood under a carpet and then nails the carpet to the floor.
And statements like
create even more unanswerable questions. And note that it seems to imply a creator isn’t necessary.
Can you give an example of how an atom created by an intelligent designer might differ from one that came about via different means that haven’t yet been “explained or understood”?
Regarding the question of the complexity and functionality and how that just looks like it ought to have been designed, I wonder if that’s as much an artifact of looking at things with human eyes and a human brain. I mean, we exist in this world; our senses and our brains are geared toward operating in this world, of course this world is going to make sense. I’m not saying that this is evidence of there not being a creator, but I wouldn’t say that it’s evidence of that there is.
That’s not what I meant. There may not be any difference, but you’re proposing that a designer exists, and created everything (or maybe only some things, or maybe started a couple of things and the rest is sort of the mess we’re left with when he got bored, or anything in between) which means we now can’t think about how atoms came into being at all, or why they act like they do, or anything like that - they’re created by God, period. That’s what I mean by sweeping questions under the carpet - it doesn’t explain anything at all.
If anyone wants to believe in a creator, that’s fine by me. Just don’t claim that it usefully explains anything.
The moment that cemented my conviction that there is absolutely no need for a creator was when I was in college, taking a geology class. I was learning about the qualities of different elements, of how they come together to form molecules, of how those molecules as a necessary and physical function band together, forming the same shapes over and over again, not out of design but simply as a result of natural laws. A sculptor with a chisel and hammer might easily mimic the basal cleavage of mica, but the sculptor is unnecessary when the hexagonal arrangement of the mica’s atoms have already taken care of this.
We may not understand life or the universe as well as we understand rocks, but considering the beautiful complexity that minerals can exhibit by virtue of simple physical laws, I see no reason as to why the universe itself needs a divine sculptor.
The “god of the gaps” argument might say that this creator is the one who made up the physical laws, so that, eventually, the universe would have its current configuration. If that’s the case, then this is something that can’t be proven or disproven, which changes absolutely nothing about the universe itself, and is utterly meaningless to me beyond providing believers with the warm surety that “somebody’s out there.”
The idea that some mystical being outside of time and space set up a grand universal simulation, designing particles and physics so that, eventually, I would wake up this morning and have a fried onion sandwich doesn’t make sense to me. It doesn’t comfort me. It takes away the profound beauty and mystery of the universe, reducing it to a cheap parlor trick that was designed to fool us.
