All my moral and intellectual being is penetrated by an invincible conviction that whatever falls under the dominion of our senses must be in nature and, however exceptional, cannot differ in its essence from all the other effects of the visible and tangible world of which we are a self-conscious part. The world of the living contains enough marvels and mysteries as it is—marvels and mysteries acting upon our emotions and intelligence in ways so inexplicable that it would almost justify the conception of life as an enchanted state. No, I am too firm in my consciousness of the marvelous to be ever fascinated by the mere supernatural which (take it any way you like) is but a manufactured article, the fabrication of minds insensitive to the intimate delicacies of our relation to the dead and to the living, in their countless multitudes; a desecration of our tenderest memories; an outrage on our dignity. — Joseph Conrad, note to The Shadow Line
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So after spending quite a bit of time reinstalling Windows XP and the gazillion updates that have been released since I installed the OS, I am now getting back to reading through this book, which at this point in Chapter 3, is beginning to dredge up the very tired and very bad arguments for God from Saint Thomas Aquinas, arguments that have already been picked apart by numerous others. The authors here are attempting to put forward what they call 20 arguments for the existence of God. I haven’t time to get to all of them, but I’ll start with Aquinas, whose sophistic arguments, and many arguments in the above book, may make a lot of sense to folks who by their faith have erected a thick set of blinders, but they don’t make much sense to the rest of us. Not the least of whom is Richard Dawkins, who deals with Aquinus’ popular five main points ably enough:
The five ‘proofs’ asserted by Thomas Aquinas in the thirteenth century don’t prove anything, and are easily – though I hesitate to say so, given his eminence – exposed as vacuous. The first three are
just different ways of saying the same thing, and they can be considered together. All involve an infinite regress – the answer to a question raises a prior question, and so on ad infinitum.1 The Unmoved Mover. Nothing moves without a prior mover. This leads us to a regress, from which the only escape is God. Something had to make the first move, and that something we call God.
2 The Uncaused Cause. Nothing is caused by itself. Every effect has a prior cause, and again we are pushed back into regress. This has to be terminated by a first cause, which we call God.
3 The Cosmological Argument. There must have been a timewhen no physical things existed. But, since physical things exist now, there must have been something non-physical to bring them into existence, and that something we call God.
All three of these arguments rely upon the idea of a regress and invoke God to terminate it. They make the entirely unwarranted assumption that God himself is immune to the regress. Even if we
allow the dubious luxury of arbitrarily conjuring up a terminator to an infinite regress and giving it a name, simply because we need one, there is absolutely no reason to endow that terminator with any of the properties normally ascribed to God: omnipotence, omniscience, goodness, creativity of design, to say nothing of such human attributes as listening to prayers, forgiving sins and reading innermost thoughts. Incidentally, it has not escaped the notice of logicians that omniscience and omnipotence are mutually incompatible. If God is omniscient, he must already know how he is going to intervene to change the course of history using his omnipotence. But that means he can’t change his mind about his intervention, which means he is not omnipotent.…
It is by no means clear that God provides a natural terminator to the regresses of Aquinas. That’s putting it mildly, as we shall see later. Let’s move on down Aquinas’ list.
4 The Argument from Degree. We notice that things in the world differ. There are degrees of, say, goodness or perfection. But we judge these degrees only by comparison with a maximum. Humans can be both good and bad, so the maximum goodness cannot rest in us. Therefore there must be some other maximum to set the standard for perfection, and we call that maximum God.
That’s an argument? You might as well say, people vary in smelliness but we can make the comparison only by reference to a perfect maximum of conceivable smelliness. Therefore there must exist a pre-eminently peerless stinker, and we call him God. Or substitute any dimension of comparison you like, and derive an equivalently fatuous conclusion.
The argument from design is the only one still in regular use today, and it still sounds to many like the ultimate knockdown argument. The young Darwin was impressed by it when, as a
Cambridge undergraduate, he read it in William Paley’s Natural Theology. Unfortunately for Paley, the mature Darwin blew it out of the water.
The authors’ fifth argument is from design, and they over and over assert that the only two alternatives to explaining how immense complexity exists today is either through some intelligent design or by chance. But evolution by natural selection has nothing to do with chance, and to say it is the result of mere chance fails to understand the premises put forth by science. If mere chance were the only option making us living, breathing, thinking human beings, scientists wouldn’t think such a theory held much creedance. The argument for religion by chance is absurd. Here, I would recommend Dawkins’ The Blind Watchmaker or Climbing Mount Improbable. No one knows how life sprang from this planet. Theories suggest that the ingredients for life came from a more highly developed species or that the ingredients for life (enzymes) were transported to Earth from another portion of the Universe via one of numerous comets or astroids that struck the planet in the distant past. But what we do know is this, and I’ll assert it again: we exist on a spiral arm on a minute corner of the Milky Way, one of an unknown number of millions of galaxies in the universe. Prime the calculators, and that means that millions, or more likely, billions of planets do or have at some time existed in the universe. The sheer number of planets that do or have at one time existed is astounding. Earth and earthlings are a speck of dust tossed about in the vastness of the universe, and already, our telescopes can view moments just after the big bang. The light from stars that, perhaps, just hit some astronomer’s telescope came from light years away, and that light, greedily viewed from the astronomers eye, has come to the end of its gigantic journey across the cosmos.
Still, the authors of the above book insist that “It is surely up the nonbelievers to produce a credible alternative to design. And ‘chance’ is simply not credible.'” Chance isn’t even what is claimed, it’s only a crux for believers clambering to make some sense out of their beliefs. So, I might ask: who would be the judge of what is credible and what is not? Believers? No. The onus is squarely on believers to explain why they seek to introduce an infinitely complex being into the already complex universe, which science is, by degrees, at least attempting to explain scientifically. Occam’s razor cuts to the quick on this point, for to introduce a creator to explain away the exquisite nature we see around us is a very boring attempt at some theory, and frankly, it complicates matters further, while a simpler explanation will do. Indeed, that immense complexity grew, in tiny degrees over millennia, from simpler forms presents an exceedingly more remarkable and more believable reality.