God's existence

Arguments offered for God's existence

These are some common statements cited as proof of God’s existence:
  • Complexity can only emerge through deliberate, premeditated design. Thus all complex things must have had a designer. Complex things exist. Thus God the designer exists.

  • Life exists in our universe. There is a clear distinction between life and non-life. A property as wonderful and special as life must have emerged from the mind of God. Thus God exists.

  • The universe exists. It must have been created by something external to itself. This something must be God. Thus God exists.

  • Humans occupy a unique place in the universe and have a special role to play, even if this elevated position is not recognised by other organisms. The conditions governing the universe are superbly tuned to suit our needs. This tuning must have been carried out by God. Thus God exists.

  • Moral codes have been established within human societies. Our sense of right and wrong could not have materialised spontaneously without the provision of God’s guidance. Thus God exists.
Religious proponents use this stable of arguments to expound their beliefs. Many of these statements are proclaimed on websites, through books and pamphlets that are self-published or published by companies with religious affiliations, and delivered in sermons and public speeches.

Such proclamations, regardless of their source, tend to use the same sequence of arguments, make the same indefensible jumps in logic, and rely on the same, flawed assumptions. They vary slightly in the exact ways in which they misappropriate scientific discoveries and cite them as ‘evidence.’

If any of these trains of thought seem sound and acceptably logical to you, you might like to give it another round of evaluation. Each one of these arguments, or series of arguments, has at least one thing fundamentally wrong with it, from my point of view.

In each of the five arguments, the advocates are mixing up two separate concepts:
  1. One concept addresses a question in science for which we do not yet have a complete answer (or which is currently beyond the understanding of many people).

  2. The other addresses the question of whether God (as defined by the religion) exists. The error made here is an automatic misattribution of a poorly understood process to God, following its identification.
Imagine that you wake up one morning to find a bunch of flowers at your door, from an unknown admirer. You do not know who sent them and have no way of finding out. After waiting days and days with no clues of their provenance, you finally decide that God was the probable cause.

Or here’s another example: there’s a rainbow in the sky, and a young child, not knowing about how different spectral components of sunlight are refracted as they move from a medium of one density to another, thinks that God put the rainbow there, specially for people to gaze at in admiration.

Just because one does not fully understand how a process works, or how some system arose, does not mean one must feel compelled to attribute it to God.

Put it down to ‘sources yet unknown’ and be reconciled to the fact that ‘God’ is not the best explanation for everything. History is replete with examples of natural phenomena that were poorly understood, and thus attributed to God, by people living during those eras.

(For a description of how scientific enquiry revealed key principles and displaced 'God' as the default cause behind events, refer to the section on Scientific Discoveries.)
Misconceptions explained
Links to the following sections examine the arguments listed earlier in detail:
  1. Complexity can only emerge through deliberate, premeditated design. Thus all complex things must have had a designer. Complex things exist. Thus God the designer exists. (Evolution of Complexity)

  2. Life exists in our universe. There's a clear distinction between life and non-life. A property as wonderful and special as life must have emerged from the mind of God. Thus God exists. (Life and Creation)

  3. The universe exists. It must have been created by something external to itself. This something must be God. Thus God exists. (Unsolved mysteries)

  4. Humans occupy a unique place in the universe and have a special role to play, even if this elevated position is not recognised by other organisms. The conditions governing the universe are superbly tuned to suit our needs. This tuning must have been carried out by God. Thus God exists. (Hierarchy of Species)

  5. Moral codes have been established within human societies. Our sense of right and wrong couldn't have materialised spontaneously without the provision of God’s guidance. Thus God exists. (Moral Codes)
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