Sunday, November 21, 2010

Argument from scale

Christians time and time again continue to point to the awesome beauty and majesty of our universe as evidence for the existence of God. Everything from the existence of stars, the sky, clouds, trees, plants, animals, all attest to the glory of God according to our Christian friends. Is this true? Does the existence of everything declare the glory of God and show his fingerprints? I contend that not only does the cosmos lack evidence of a designer, but how the cosmos behaves is exactly how we would expect it to behave if there is no creator.

In theism, human beings are the jewel of God's creation. God created the cosmos with human beings in mind. If this is true then we should expect to see a universe that is hospitable and caters to human life. Let's first direct our attention to the stars above.

Theists adore the night sky and attest that the beauty of the stars above is God's way of showing his majesty and divine craftsmanship for all of humans to see. But the stars that we see from earth are those which are located in our milky way galaxy. What purpose do the stars in other galaxies serve if they cannot be witnessed by human beings? This leads us to the point of how big the universe is and how really insignificant we are in comparison to it. The universe is 93 billion light years in diameter and is continually expanding which means that virtually all of it is inaccessible and even unobservable by human beings.

According to science, only 4% is conceptually accessible to us since the other 96% consists of either dark matter or dark energy. Even this 4% is comprised of empty space some two degrees above absolute zero which is lethal to human life. So even that which is accessible to human beings is constantly trying to kill us.

Our galaxy is one of more than a hundred billion galaxies. We occupy just one part in 100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, and that does not even count the empty space between each solar system. So 99.999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999% of the universe is entirely off limits to human beings and even lethal to us being filled with deadly radiation filled vacuum.

Theists, like William Lane Craig, adore the idea of physical constants and how they are perfectly fined tune to allow the universe to promote life. But these physical constants allows the universe to be a perfect black hole generator. Life as we know it is merely just a by-product of this universe which has the perfect combination of cosmological constants to make the universe dedicated to being a black hole generator.

If theism was true, then we should expect to see a universe that would appear and behave the way that early christians thought it did. It would be one solar system that is hospitable and friendly to human life, with the earth being the center of the universe. We should not expect to see a vast universe where planet earth is an insignificant tiny microscopic speck of dust.

Directing our focus now to planet earth, theists inform us of the beauty of our planet looking from space and attest that there must have been a creator. Indeed, it is beautiful. But for every thing beautiful in nature there is also an equal amount of ugliness. The earth is not so beautiful when looking at it from ground level. Nature mindlessly slaughters innocent women and children through hurricanes, tornadoes, earthquakes, floods, drought, lightning, fires, starvation, and epidemic disease. We see a mixture of beauty and ugliness which should leads us to conclude that nature is not governed by a god. For every beautiful "God given" child that comes into this world, there is another child dying of leukemia.

Theists like to claim that if the distance between the earth and the sun was any different then life would either freeze or burn. Not only is this false but theists seem to forget that the same sun that provides life to our planet is that same sun that causes skin cancer. The same sun which gives warmth and energy to some, it is killing others via dehydration and heat strokes.

Theists adore the beauty of plants and flowers in nature and will tell us to just look at the trees and see the beauty. But yet it is the same plant kingdom that produces countless of poisonous plants that will kill humans upon ingestion.

Christians claim that even the rain is a gift from God and is a sign of his kindness towards us. But yet it is the same rain that floods and kills entire nations.

With all the so-called beauty, this planet is hardly hospitable to human life at all. 70% of the planet is covered in salt water that we cannot stand on, live in, or breathe or drink from. Of the remaining land, half of that is taken up by uninhabitable mountains, glaciers, deserts, and other unlivable terrains. On the tiny amount of land that we can live of, nature is constantly trying to wipe us out with the disasters such as tsunami's and other disasters that I mentioned earlier.

The same Christians who claim that earth is finely tuned for human life are the same people who live in homes that are heated during the winter and cooled in the summer. If we were to strip humanity of their amenities -- clothing, shelter, technology etc, and allow them to reside on this planet in their natural state, the way that God originally created them, most of the human race would be wiped out by extreme weather conditions and by all the countless infections that we would otherwise be able to treat with medication. And just so you forgot, it is God that brought deadly pathogenic microorganisms into existence.

A possible theistic objection could claim that if we lived in a naturalistic world that was not governed by any deity then there would not be any beauty and order at all in the world, only chaos. The theist could claim that even though there is a mixture of chaos and order, the order still needs to be accounted for.

But this is a non-sequitur. There is nothing about natural law that necessitates that there cannot be any order or forms of beauty. If anything, my worldview necessitates that a certain degree of order must exist, because without such order we would have never been able to evolve on this planet. Furthermore, with stars producing billions of planets throughout the universe, its not surprising that there would be a few planets out of the billions that would possess the necessary amount of order to allow for the evolution of life. And planet earth is simply one of many planets that have came into existence from dying stars that became friendly to a certain extent to allow our form of life to evolve.

This is why I do not see any evidence for the existence of God around us. The fingerprints and majesty of a creator is completely absent.