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scribbled: This article is too long and convoluted for me to bother to disprove its every point, one at a time. I shall restrict myself, given limited time, to what I see as its most egregious excesses.
The article spends two full pages proving that Earth is an extremely unusual planet, and that planets that could even theoretically support life are probably exceedingly rare. This is absolutely true, and no scientist denies it. However, this provides absolutely no support, even in a statistical sense, for the idea that the earth was designed by some creator. The reason is a simple fact called the "anthropic principle", which christians seem to have a great of difficulty understanding. The anthropic principle says the following: Since we are here talking about how common earth-like planets are, it must be the case that we are on an earth-like planet to begin with. Therefore, even though earth-like planets are very unusual, it should come as no surprise to us that we happen to find ourselves on one, since otherwise, we would not be able to notice the fact.
The same simple counter-argument applies to the common "knob-twiddler-theory" advanced on page 4. According to this theory, the settings of the fundamental constants seem perfectly tuned to produce a universe capable of life; therefore, they must have been so tuned by some god. This theory again falls to the anthropic principle. Since we are here talking about the settings of our physical constants, it implies that they must be set in such a way that life is possible. In other universes, no one would be there to notice that they were set in that way.
It annoys me - though I have come to expect it - to see him misquote Stephen Hawking yet again. Hawking unfortunately ended one of his books with the sentence "for then we would know the mind of God". Christians anxious to adopt such a great thinker as their own have widely interpreted this to mean that Hawking believes in God. However, on numerous occasions, Hawking has stated very clearly that he does not and never has believed in any sort of higher power, and that in this unfortunate sentence, by "God" he meant only something like "the structure of the universe" or "the laws of physics" or some such thing.
The worst part, really, is that even if some of the pseudo-scientific theories advanced in the article are true - for example, the knob-twiddler theory, that really wouldn't do much at all to advance the underlying claim. Obviously, the author does not care to argue that some arbitrary higher being created the universe - as opposed only to the atheist's view that life evolved on its own. The point of the article is to prove that the particular Christian god advanced in the New Testament is the one that did all this. It is quite impossible to leap from some theory about quantum mechanics to saying that clearly, it must be the Christian God responsible for the tuning of the quantum parameters, as opposed to Allah, Zeus, Thor, Wotan, Baal, or the Flying Spaghetti Monster.
The primary evidence advanced in favor of this extraordinary leap is - as always - "The Bible says it is so". The circularity is of course appalling. Those who do not believe in God do not believe in the bible either, and so quoting scripture at them is quite like an evolutionary biologist trying to prove evolution by saying "Darwin said it was so". Interestingly enough, evolutionary biologists never say things like that; instead they argue based on direct evidence.
In the final page, the article abandons its initial question, "Does God Exist?" and switches instead to a very different question "Would it be a nice thing for the world if God existed?". I find this question also interesting, but it is important to realize that the answer to the latter question has no bearing on the answer to the former. Even if - and this is not in any way the case - not believing in God would cause people to commit moral atrocities and bring our civilization to an end, that would still not cause God to exist.
I was pleasantly surprised to see that the essays does cover the alternative humanistic theories of morality, instead of simply assuming, as so many Christians do, that without a belief in God, we would all run around killing and raping each other. Nevertheless, I wonder when the author then asserts that the world would be better if we set aside humanism and instead obeyed the biblical laws as our source of morality, whether he has really read Leviticus. What does he make, I wonder, of the fact that in the Old Testament, what his God was really concerned with was not whether people were nice to each other, but rather about how many goats and sheep were sacrificed to him, and in precisely what manner. In wonder what the author thinks of the fact that is says quite clearly in the bible that the penalty for adultery, or being rude to one's parents, or picking up sticks on the sabbath is death, usually by public stoning. Probably he
from Jedi Ninja
A free ebook produced by the United Church of God.