Somebody asked an atheist why he got so angry with people who believe in God but didn’t get mad at people who believe in Santa Claus and he responded with:
I’m mad because people who believe in Santa Claus don’t interfere with social issues but Theists are always bringing their make believe God into conversations.
This is a waste of anger. There are many causes that would be better use of your outrage.
The reason you don’t hear from Santaclaus-ians in public debate
…is because everyone who believes in Santa is 3-years old.
True belief in Santa disappears the instant a person is able to contemplate the plausibility of flying reindeer.
Belief in God is much different from belief in Santa. There is a rational reason for believing in God. I’ll explain what I mean…and I’ll stick with the Santa theme because you seem to enjoy Christmas.
Imagine it’s Christmas Eve and you are marooned on a tiny sandbar surrounded by miles of empty ocean.
You drift off to sleep with visions of sugar plums dancing in your head.
In the morning, you find a stocking filled with toys and candy lying on the sand next to you.
How do you suppose that stocking got there?
You could say it just appeared from nowhere.
But deep down…
…in the place you never write about online
…you know that’s not what happened.
What happened was…
…somebody put the stocking there while you slept.
We can argue about what to call the culprit.
Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny or The Tooth Fairy…
…or God.
I know how you feel about God so…
…let’s go with Santa.
The stocking lying next to you makes Santa a necessary being.
Without Santa, there would be no stocking full of joy.
I’m sure I don’t need to connect the dots for you…
…but I will anyway.
Intelligent beings like you and me don’t appear out of nowhere.
Yet, here we are.
So there is, necessarily, an explanation for our existence…
…and it ain’t bigfoot.
From one man he made all the nations, that they should inhabit the whole earth; and he marked out their appointed times in history and the boundaries of their lands. 27 God did this so that they would seek him and perhaps reach out for him and find him, though he is not far from any one of us. 28 ‘For in him we live and move and have our being.’[b] As some of your own poets have said, ‘We are his offspring.’
Act 17:26
25 Responses
It’s weird how Theists always laugh at people who say “I don’t know,” but when asked anything they can’t explain, they just say that ‘God works in mysterious ways,’ which is just another way of saying “I don’t know.”
Like, okay, suppose this God did create us. Well where did he come from? They either say He came from nothing, which then means they have to admit that the idea of anything coming from nothing is actually possible, or that he was ‘always there’ which is equally confusing and explains nothing and isn’t a real answer. There is no basis for saying that.
Don’t know how other Theists have reacted but I haven’t laughed at anyone claiming they don’t know.
If you don’t like saying, “God works in mysterious ways” would you be able to agree with the statement, “The Universe is a mysterious place”?
My article is meant to explain (very simplistically) the idea of a ‘necessary being’. God exists necessarily in order for there to be a universe. It’s not much different from saying, “Skyscrapers didn’t appear from nothing. Humans are necessary beings in order for there to be skyscrapers.”
Asking, “If people made skyscrapers, where did the people come from?” is not relevant. It doesn’t matter how people came to exist. They are still the best explanation for skyscrapers.
Would you agree that God as you would describe him (or as you believe him to be) is more impressive and complex than the universe we live in? If so, why would such an impressive and complex being not be required to have a creator, but we would?
If I had to choose between God and our universe… I would think it infinitely more likely that our universe could exist without cause; whereas I would think it infinitely less likely that God could exist without cause. After all, the impressiveness and complexity of our universe and all the life on Earth is infinitesimally small when compared to God as he is described by theists.
Yes. We can agree that God is more impressive & complex than the universe. He would have to be. He couldn’t be less complex than whatever He creates.
The fact that he is ‘more complex’ is only troublesome when we think that God exists the same way that we exist.
Let’s say you wanted to make a cake. You would probably gather the various ingredients, mix them together, pour the mixture into a bowl, place it in the oven, wait until it’s ‘baked’, remove it from the pan and finally (if you have ANY sense about what makes cake good) you’d frost it. Baking a cake is a simple process for you.
Now imagine you are a virus that wanted to bake a cake. (As an aside, the fact that you even have an idea about cake is miraculous.) Every single step would be a feat of unimaginable complexity. It is EXTREMELY unlikely that you would ever gather the first ingredient, let alone frost a finished cake.
You (as yourself, not the virus) are infinitely more complex than cake. The method by which you came to exist is vastly different than the process used to create your cake. Your level of complexity allows you to perform the necessary steps to create things that are less complicated than yourself.
So it is with God. He is more complex than His creations. His existence doesn’t have to rely on the same processes by which He creates.
Now imagine that you want to introduce yourself to your cake. How would you do that? How could you teach your cake about yourself? Silly notion, I know.
But it makes me wonder how mankind got the notion of God. Where did we get the idea? It isn’t possible for one cake to introduce you to another cake. Neither cake has any idea about you. If we are merely ‘cosmic cakes’ that sprang unintentionally from some unguided process, who told us about God?
I don’t think anyone or anything would have to tell us about God for us to contemplate the existence of God. I can at the very least respect the conclusion that many people come to who believe that God must exist… after all, there was a point in my life where that seemed like the most logical conclusion. I am confident that intelligent life in both types of universes (one with a creator and one without a creator) would naturally wonder how/why they exist and eventually conclude that there must be some sort of super intelligent creator responsible for all of it.
In a universe without a creator, I would expect to see holy books written by man… because let’s face it, who else is going to write them? That is perhaps one of the biggest inhibiting factors that make it so difficult for me to even scratch the surface on being able to believe the claims of Christianity. If Christianity is not true, it makes perfect sense why man wrote the Bible–because that was the only option available. If Christianity is true (keeping in mind the numerous other methods available to God to deliver his word to us), why is it that God would choose the precise manner of communication that would be required only in a universe without a creator? It seems to me that it is either the biggest coincidence ever… or simply not true.
Additionally, why do we have internal organs? They would clearly be required in a universe without a creator, but why should we expect them to be required in a universe with a creator? God could simply use his own formula (never to be deciphered by man) to allow people to be alive without any internal organs. Then when our time on Earth is up, we would simply stop functioning–because after all, in a universe with a creator (insofar as Christianity is concerned), God is in control. In that kind of world, I suspect there would be a lot fewer atheists, because it would seem like magic that we would even be able to walk around with no known driving forces in our body to reverse engineer.
Of course, like you have said before… I also cannot prove any of this. But these things should offer some context into why I lack a positive belief in the existence of God, or at the very least, why I lack a belief in the claims of Christianity.
I’m a little puzzled by your logic. You expect holy books to be written in a universe without a creator. Are you implying that holy books wouldn’t be written in a universe WITH a creator?
The gist of your arguments is that the universe doesn’t exist the way you think it should. In essence you’re saying “If I was God, I wouldn’t give people internal organs. I wouldn’t write my laws down in a book. So God probably doesn’t exist.”
You’re method of asking, “What would we expect?” is correct. It’s important to ask that question from a position of neutrality. You have to look at reality as it is, not as you think it should be.
I am not implying that holy books wouldn’t be written in a universe WITH a creator. I am however implying that in a universe WITH a creator, there are an endless number of other ways that the creator might deliver his original message, other than inspiring people from archaic eras to write them. In a universe WITHOUT a creator… there is only one way, and that is for mankind to write holy books. I don’t believe it is a coincidence that that is precisely what has happened throughout history. Mathematically, the probability of it happening the way it did in a universe WITHOUT a creator, is a guaranteed 1 out of 1. The probability of it happening the way it did in a universe WITH a creator is 1 out of .
It is not that I think “I would do this if I was God” or “I wouldn’t do that if I were God.” I am merely pointing out that everything about reality as it happened and as it is currently happening would be “requirements” in a universe WITHOUT a creator. But in a universe WITH a creator, we could not call them “requirements,” because an all powerful creator would be infinitely creative—if they were to truly exist. That is why I said above because the possibilities are endless if an all powerful creator exists.
Does the way I have attempted to clarify my logic make a little more sense now? Sorry about capitalizing with and without so many times… it seemed to actually make it easier for me to follow along with my own logic, lol.
Here is how I understand your logic. If I’m off base, please tell me where I go astray.
1. A supernatural Creator has infinite possible ways of communicating with His creation.
2. Books are the only form of revelation available in a universe without a Creator.
3. It is unlikely that a supernatural creator would choose a natural method of revelation.
4. It is therefore likely that reality exists without a Creator.
Again, I’m open to further clarification if I’ve misunderstood.
The difficulty with this line of reasoning is it assumes that written word is the ONLY form of revelation.
But as you concede, a Creator would not be limited to pages in a book. A Creator would be able to ‘speak’ through dreams, thoughts, feelings and various ‘religious experiences’ that are meaningful only to the individual. Of course, these types of things cannot be tested or proven.
(Strangely, the Bible does speak about God’s tendency to ‘use foolish things to confound the wise’. I really don’t know what that means but it seems appropriate here.)
At the same time, it seems presumptuous to rely completely on logic or thought since there is no empirical proof of these things. We understand what thinking is because of our personal experiences, not because someone wrote about it. But a book on Psychology might help us understand some things about our thinking experiences. It would be an act of faith to accept the claims of that Psych book.
Have I even come close to understanding what you were saying? That was a lot of words just to find out that I’m totally off base 🙂
I think you have come very close to understanding what I was saying. Good feedback too 🙂
If I was marooned on a tiny sandbar of an island in the middle of the ocean and Santa dropped off a stocking but didn’t offer me a ride back to civilization, I would be more ticked off at him than an atheist is at God-who-doesn’t-exist.
Sorry I didn’t have time to dig into Santa’s moral obligation to rescue castaways he encounters during his travels. I’m with you though. Unless the stocking contains some kind of GPS locator, he should have offered to give you a lift.
No one said you appeared from nowhere. Nice try though.
Jumping to the conclusion that an invisible, magical deity is responsible is equally absurd as thinking you popped from nowhere. You’d most likely think you were not alone on that island and go looking for a material person.
When arguing or presenting an argument, you shouldn’t put words in their mouth and assume they think you came from nowhere simply because their an atheist.
Godless Cranium, I don’t want to put words in your mouth. If we weren’t created deliberately by a necessary being and we didn’t appear from nowhere…how did we get here?
I’m taking it you’re not talking about evolution or a biogenesis but the origin of everything? Perhaps the big bang or what caused the big bang?
Sometimes, being honest and admitting you don’t know is OK. We can wait for the evidence instead of jumping to the conclusion that a super, invisible being did it.
Magic has never been the correct answer to anything. We’ve never taken a scientific theory and changed it because magic was the cause. However, magic explanations have been routinely replaced by rational explanations.
Oh, and thank you for not putting words in my mouth. 🙂
Are you saying that you’re not certain how we got here, but it’s definitely not God?
No. I’m saying I don’t know. If evidence were to show it was god then I’d believe. Otherwise, I’m not going to pretend I know the answer.
I get that you don’t know. Nobody does. What kind of evidence do you need?
…and did you REALLY call me out for jumping to conclusions about an invisible deity so you could assert that ‘you don’t know’?
Yes. One answer is honest and the other is not, since you’ve already admitted you don’t know either. You dishonestly portrayed the atheist position to be jumping to the conclusion we all came from nothing and then compounded that by asserting your position was much better, even though you have no evidence to support the hypothesis that a super, invisible, immaterial being did it all – let alone your particular version of super, invisible, immaterial being.
As to your other question, I’m not sure what it would take to convince me. I think it would have to be evidence that is testable and you could reproduce results consistently by testing it. It would have to make sense, not contradict itself. It would have to be validated using independent sources.
One other thing to consider is that any super deity worth the name, who was both all-powerful and all-knowing (something the Christian God claims to be) would both know what would convince me and easily be able to produce it with no drain to itself.
Not sure my portrayal of atheist position is ‘dishonest’ when the only counter position offered is, ‘I don’t know’. Either we are created or we came from nothing. It seems dishonest to say, “No! There is another option. We’re just awaiting evidence to determine what it is.”
I would suggest (and it’s only a suggestion) that you construct a defense of what you DO believe. The immaterial being hypothesis seems implausible to you so offer something better. You suggested earlier that I should go looking for a ‘material being’ when I find a stocking on the beach. The Universe is the stocking on the beach. Go searching for a material explanation for how it got there.
Yes. The counter position is honest while your position is dishonest. You’ve already admitted you don’t know either. There is no shame in not knowing something.
There’s no need to construct a defense of something neither of us knows.
Got it. No need to construct an explanation for the existence of reality.
It does not seem coherent to suggest that we came from nothing if you are using the term “nothing” in the same way that philosophers describe nothing—often known as “nothingness.” To do so, means that you cannot use the word “from” before “nothing,” because doing so actually promotes “nothing” to “something.” I don’t believe it is possible for “nothing” to exist.
If I were to try and construct a defense for my lack of belief in a creator… it would be that there is no evidence that “nothingness” was ever an actual state of existence. Try formulating a statement about nothingness being a state of existence, and you will find yourself promoting it to something because there doesn’t seem to be a coherent way to even word it. I have often asked myself – “How could there be nothing rather than something?” Then I realize that question is incoherent because of the word “be.” The word “be” completely contradicts the use of the term “nothing,” because “nothing” cannot “be.” To “be” is to “exist.”
That is why I think the default state must be “something.” That does beg further questions though. Such as – Why did the default state of something happen here and not somewhere else? Why did it happen 13.72 billion years ago and not14 billion years ago or at some other point in time? I think this is where we start to get into the Multiverse hypothesis. I see no reason at all why there wouldn’t be a never ending number of universes out there beyond the horizon of our own universe. Each universe could have its own reference point in time and location. Perhaps there are a never ending number of universes that have already suffered their final heat death… and maybe there will be a never ending number of universes that continue to be born in other locations. When I use the term “reference point,” I am only speaking of a reference point relative to other universes. For example, time did not exist in our universe before its birth (so really there is no “before its birth” in our universe’s location), so the only type of reference point it could have in “time” would be whether our universe existed before, after, or during another universe’s existence. Of course, with time ticking at different rates in different locations… that probably adds a lot more complexity to it all. It is all rather mind-bending, and of course I am sure there are probably flaws in how I have spoken about it too… which I can accept. I wrote a post about why I believe the Multiverse is at least worthy of being a good hypothesis. Please feel free to check it out: https://logicfountain.wordpress.com/2015/07/03/defending-the-multiverse-hypothesis/
Your thoughts on ‘nothingness’ and the multiverse are interesting. You’ve obviously done a lot of thinking on this subject.
I hope you’ll forgive me for saying this, but your eloquent explanation about how ‘nothing’ doesn’t exist hints at spirituality.
Your multiverse theory could easily accommodate a universe devoid of matter as we know it. This universe doesn’t contain time or even ‘space’. It contains only an infinite energy. Energy that we would understand as ‘thought’ or ‘intellect’. This energy could ‘move’, unencumbered by physical restraints, between every other universe. Indeed, it could ‘exist’ in these universes simultaneously as time itself is meaningless. Maybe in our universe, the energy would ‘condense’ into physical matter but also maintain a presence in what we understand to be the natural laws. Maybe this energy is gravity. Maybe it facilitates abiogenesis. Maybe this energy divides cells. Maybe it generates magnetic fields too.
AND this energy interacts with us. Maybe it actually becomes part of us. We can’t feel it with any of the 5 senses, but we sense it when we laugh. We sense it when we fall in love. It causes us to believe that kindness, empathy, honor and friendship are real things. It makes us feel that our lives matter. And this energy has desires too. What it wants most, is a relationship with us…
Just a theory. I’ve no hard proof of any of it.