The Universe
The God of the Gaps Argument
Science has revealed an extraordinary number of things about life, humanity, and the Universe. In particular, it can now trace the history of the Universe back to the Big Bang billions of years ago. However, science has not (yet) found what caused the Big Bang. Believers, however, claim to know how the Universe came into existence: God created it! They use the same reasoning (“God created it”) to answer a myriad of other questions, such as: Why is there life? Where does beauty come from? Why do people behave morally? For a believer, all of these questions can be answered by saying that “God wanted it this way”. The God of the Gaps Argument says that this answer is the most plausible answer to these questions, and that, hence, God must exist. While adherents of the Abrahamic religions use God as their answer, adherents of other religions turn to their own gods, spirits, or extraterrestrials. We shall now see several variants of this argument and explain why they do not convince atheists.You cannot solve a mystery by using a bigger mystery as the answer.
The first cause
The problem with this argument is that it contradicts itself: If everything needs a cause, then so does God. Believers commonly reject this, and postulate that God does not need a cause. However, if God does not need a cause, then we can equally well argue that the Universe does not need one either. The addition of a god is of no help in answering the question of how the Universe came into existence. On the contrary: The argument first creates an artificial problem (by postulating that there must be a first cause) and then creates an artificial solution for that problem (God).
In reality, there is no reason to postulate a first cause at all. Our thinking goes that the Universe must somehow have “started”. But that might be a wrong assumption in the first place. As British mathematician Bertrand Russell observed: “There is no reason to suppose that the world had a beginning at all. The idea that things must have a beginning is really due to the poverty of our thoughts.”1
of the Reclining Buddha in the Wat Pho temple in Bangkok, Thailand
For example, one possibility is that the Universe oscillates between expansion and contraction. Another possibility is that time itself came into existence only when the Universe started. The reason for this hypothesis is that time runs slower in the vicinity of large masses. Since the nucleus of the Big Bang had a practically infinite mass, time may just have slowed down to an infinitely slow pace from our perspective2, such that one can never get to the start of the process at all.
In the end, the search for the “first cause” could well be no different from the futile search for the ultimate physical support of the Earth that bothered ancient peoples: If man stands on his feet, and his feet stand on the floor, which is laid on the ground, which is held by the rocks underneath, and so on, then what is the foundation upon which everything rests? The Indians thought it was a giant turtle3. Today, we know that this question does not make any sense, because there is no “ultimate support”. It may well be the same with the origin of the Universe. In the same way that the “ultimate support” of the Earth turned out to be the Earth itself, there may be answers to the question of what was before the Big Bang that we cannot currently imagine. Postulating that there must be a first cause, which so happens to be God, is of no use in this endeavor. On the contrary, it may actually discourage us from searching for a scientific answer to the question.
Apart from that, the claim suffers from the typical problems of the God of the Gaps Argument, which are shared among all its variations and which we will discuss at the end of this chapter: The theory is not based on evidence; it cannot be falsified and thus does not make predictions; it does not provide an explanation in the technical sense of the word because it does not compress information; it does not prove that it was any particular god who did the job, and not some other deity or force; and it wrongly assumes that theology delivers better answers than science.
If you lived two or three millennia ago,
there was no shame in holding that the Universe was made for us.
It was an appealing thesis consistent with everything we knew.
But we have found out much since then.
Defending such a position today amounts to willful disregard of the evidence
and a flight from self-knowledge.
Argument by Design
The Universe is an immensely complex system, with billions of stars and planets in the observable Universe alone. It is very hard to believe that this complexity came into existence on its own. Therefore, many people believe that the Universe must have been designed by a “designer”.There are several problems with this argument. First, it is false. As we have seen in the Chapter on the Universe, complexity can arise from simplicity: The beautiful structure of snowflakes, the intriguing patterns on plants and animals, and swarm behavior all arise from simple components.
Second, the argument contradicts itself. If complexity can arise only from complexity, then the designer must be complex as well. And if the designer is complex, then it, too, must have arisen from some other complexity. This is the question: Who designed the designer? At this point, it is usually argued that the designer is an exception to the rule. This, however, is an arbitrary claim. We can equally well claim that the Universe itself is an exception to the rule. There is no need to add one more entity to the story.
Simple molecules combine to make powerful chemicals....
Simple cells combine to make powerful life-forms...
All things are created by a combination of simpler, less capable components.
Therefore, a supreme being must be our future, not our origin.
Intelligent Design
A variant of the argument by Design goes as follows: Whenever we see something highly ordered (such as a piece of art, a rose garden, or a city), we know it has been created by some intelligent being (humans). Since the world itself is also highly ordered, it follows that there must be some intelligent being who created it. This theory is called Intelligent Design.We first note that the theory is false. As we have seen in the Chapter on the Universe, there are plenty of highly ordered things that were created by purely natural processes, including snowflakes, swarm behavior, hands, or, indeed, the Earth. Therefore, the theory is to be rejected.
in the Jardin du Luxembourg in Paris
- Some species, such as Neanderthals or dinosaurs, came into existence but then went extinct. If the design of the world were perfect, then a species would not have been created only to disappear. Some of these extinct creatures were particularly odd: The Opabinia, for example, had 5 eyes (see picture) and a mouth that faced backwards. No wonder it died out, one may think.
- Dolphins and whales live, but cannot breathe, underwater.
- Humans’ digestive and respiratory tracts cross, so that they are at constant risk of choking.
- After copulation, the testicles of the male honeybee explode, leaving part of the penis inside the female and causing the male to die5 — hardly an intelligent way of copulating.
- Bonobo apes engage in sex for pleasure — between males and females, males and males, and females and females6. A god such as the one imagined by the proponents of Intelligent Design would never have allowed this species to exist.
- Nature is full of vestigial structures, i.e., structures that may have served a purpose earlier in evolution but are now useless. We discussed the pelvis bones of whales and the nonfunctional eyes of blind mole rats in the Chapter on the Universe. But humans, too, have vestigial structures. For example, some people have physical remnants of the vomeronasal organ7. This nonfunctional smell organ is absent in others, leading us to ask why it exists at all. And males have nipples that serve no purpose.
- People have a natural disposition to love fat and sugar. While this was useful for early humans, who were in constant need of energy, it leads to obesity today, a predominant health problem in rich and poor countries alike8.
- If a baby’s head is significantly larger than the pelvic opening of the mother, the baby cannot be born naturally9. Prior to the development of caesarean section, such a complication would lead to the death of the mother, the baby, or both. (Until 1910, 1% of mothers in the US died in childbirth; giving birth was about as dangerous as having breast cancer is today26.) This is hardly a perfect design.
- People suffer from all kinds of congenital diseases, i.e., structural or functional anomalies that exist at or before birth (examples are long-term disabilities or Down syndrome)10. Some of these are caused by genetic abnormalities, meaning that neither the baby nor the parents could have prevented them — a phenomenon that is hardly intelligently designed.
- Myopia, the common cold, and allergies cause discomfort for people all over the world without any apparent intelligent reason.
- Humans have an extra pair of teeth, known as wisdom teeth, that are prone to medical complications. When such complications arise, the teeth have to be surgically removed11. The lack of these teeth causes no discomfort or disadvantage, leaving us to ask why they existed in the first place.
If I were granted omnipotence, and millions of years to experiment in, I should not think Man much to boast of as the final result of all my efforts.
The Watchmaker Analogy
One of the ways in which proponents of Intelligent Design justify their belief in a creator is by the so-called Watchmaker Analogy: Imagine you were walking on the beach and found a watch. Would you assume that it evolved naturally or that it was created by a watchmaker? Surely, you would assume the watchmaker. In the same way, believers assume God to be the creator of the Universe.But look what happens when we extrapolate this analogy: Assume that we continue our walk on the beach and we find a watchmaker lying in the sand. Would we assume that the watchmaker had no first cause and that he had been born without parents? No, surely we would assume he has parents. In the same way, we should then conclude that God has parents. This, however, is not typically a conclusion that a believer would draw. Let’s say we continue our walk and come upon an atomic power plant. Would we assume that the watchmaker made it? Probably not. Most likely, the power plant was built by a large number of unrelated people. Therefore, we should conclude that there is not one god but a large number of them. Again, this is not a conclusion that Abrahamic believers are willing to draw.
All of above shows that the Watchmaker Analogy does not hold water. In particular, it cannot be used to deduce the existence of a god — much less the existence of the unique, omniscient, all-powerful, and loving god that Abrahamic believers would like to establish.
[And what] can you produce, from your hypothesis, to prove the unity of the Deity? A great number of men join in building a house or ship, in rearing a city, in framing a commonwealth; why may not several deities combine in contriving and framing a world?
Everything from nothing?
As the attentive reader will have noticed, science makes no such claim. Nowhere does this book or a scientist say that the Universe came from nothing. Rather, science says that so far, we do not know where the Universe came from (if that question even makes sense to begin with). And as long as we do not have validated evidence for a theory that explains where the Universe comes from, we keep searching. That’s all.
Concerning the question of where the Universe came from, science says nothing, not “nothing”.
Nobody knows the origin!
Believers do not know how to explain where God came from, and atheists can’t explain where the Universe came from. So, aren’t both views equally unsupported?The answer is no. We know that the Universe exists, and hence it makes sense to search for its origin. However, we do not know whether God exists. Therefore, before venturing to explain where God came from and what he’s done, we should first prove that he exists. Believers are still stuck at this stage of the process.
In comparison, atheists are one step ahead: They know that the thing whose origin they search for (the Universe) actually exists.
How do atheists explain the origin of the Universe when even science has no concrete theory about it?A hundred years ago, someone may have asked: “How do you explain the origin of lighting and thunder when science has no concrete theory about them?” The only honest answer that an atheist could have given at that time would have been: “I don’t know”. The theist, however, would have replied: “The explanation is God!” Today, science has advanced. Theistic thinking has not.
Made for us
It seems that the world is so tailored for us that it must have been made just for us. If that is so, would it not allow us to deduce that there was a maker?While this question may seem logical to a theist, the belief that the world was made for us is actually just an artifact of our self-centered thinking. If the world were made for us, we would not have evolved alongside several other humanoid species, even mating with them before they disappeared. If the world were made for us, we would not live on the fourth of eight planets, orbiting around a star that is in every aspect like thousands of others, moving in a galaxy that is nothing more than a random place in a universe that contains billions of them.
On the contrary, our world is a rather hostile environment. It took nature billions of years for life to emerge, and it took millions more before the first humanoid species came on the scene. It then took humankind hundreds of thousands of years to tame the threats of nature (wild animals, the cold, heat, drought) — many of which still remain. Every year, millions of humans perish due to illness, floods, famines, or other natural disasters. This is not a world made for us.
We have to turn the argument around to make sense of it: We were made for the world (by the process of natural selection). All organisms that did not adapt to their environment were filtered out. The assumption that there is a creator is just a consequence of our inability to understand this process. Maybe English author Douglas Adams phrased it best:
Imagine a puddle waking up one morning and thinking, “This is an interesting world I find myself in, an interesting hole I find myself in. It fits me rather neatly, doesn’t it? In fact, it fits me staggeringly well. It must have been made to have me in it!”
The probability is so small!
The scientific theory of the Universe relies on chance: Molecules happened to be aligned in the right way for life to emerge, cells happened to have a nucleus, and mutations happened to create eyes, wings, and feathers. Believers wonder whether the chance that all of this happened is too small of a probability to be real. As English astronomer Fred Hoyle suggested in his Junkyard Tornado argument: “The chance that higher life forms might have emerged in this way is comparable to the chance that a tornado sweeping through a junkyard might assemble a Boeing 747 from the materials therein.”17 Therefore, the argument goes, chance alone cannot have been the reason for life on Earth. The reason must have been divine.Let us first put the probability in context: Nature runs her experiments in parallel on all planets of the Universe. If the chance for life to emerge on a single planet is one in a billion, this still means that there will be life on one billion planets, because the Universe just has so many planets18. Furthermore, nature runs her experiments for billions of years. If the chance that some configuration of molecules will appear during a given year on a given planet is one in a billion, then it is near-certain that this configuration will appear, because the Universe is several billion years old. The fact that this just so happened to be the planet on which we find ourselves is merely the consequence of the anthropic principle.
Apart from this, most processes in nature are actually not guided by chance. Rather, they are guided by natural selection. Take Capuchin monkeys, for example. This species was not created from scratch by a random meeting of atoms. Rather, starting from simple vesicles, natural processes generated thousands of different life forms. In each generation, thousands of models were discontinued by natural selection. Only the most fit for their environment got a chance to continue. Again and again, thousands of different variations of these survivors were generated. This process continued for hundreds of thousands of generations before landing on the Capuchin monkey we know today.
To illustrate this process, British evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins suggested18 that we think of natural selection as a combination lock with five number wheels. Finding the right combination requires trying out all possible numbers: 10,000. However, evolution does not try out all possible numbers. Rather, it begins with the first number on the wheel, i.e., one particular constellation of genes in a species. When the right number is found (i.e., when the species survives), it proceeds to the second number, i.e., a more complex life form. It is as if, with each wheel, the right number clicks into place. If we proceed from right to left across the combination lock in this way, we actually need, at most, 50 steps.
Attacking competing explanations doesn’t prove your favorite one right.
Even if you could disprove evolution, you'd still need to prove your god did it.
The Fine-Tuning argument
There are a number of physical constants that govern the processes in our Universe: the gravity constant, the strength of the nuclear force, and so on. If any of these constants had a different value, then the Universe would not have come into existence the way it did. For example, if the gravity constant were different, then our stars and plants may not have coalesced. Even slight variations of the values could have made life in our Universe impossible. This begs the question of why these constants have these exact values, and not any of the other myriad possible values. The Fine-Tuning argument says that the most plausible answer is that God chose the constants in this way, and that, hence, he must exist.Science has not yet settled on an explanation. One possibility is that our Universe is just one out of millions19, all of which would have different values for the natural constants. Only in one of them would life have emerged, and this is, of course, the one in which we live. Or there could be some yet undiscovered physical laws that constrain the constants so that they cannot have any other value.
However, even if the search for answers is ongoing, this does not mean that God must be the answer. As we’ve discussed, it could be any other god instead of the Abrahamic one (for example, Gaia). It could even have been several gods (as in Shintoism). More likely, though, there is a purely natural explanation. History shows us that many phenomena that were once ascribed to the gods (such as rain, the seasons, lightning, the movement of the Sun, etc.) can now be explained by purely natural processes. That should make us careful when postulating gods behind the unknown.
If we really wanted to find the answer to the question, we should not actually postulate any god at all. This is because filling the spot with a god presupposes an answer and, thus, impedes open enquiry into the question.
Science says: We don’t know, but we’re trying to shed light on it.
What are you doing to shed light on it?
A probabilistic variant of the Fine-Tuning argument
Australian theoretical astrophysicist Luke Barnes proposes a variant of the Fine-Tuning argument that uses formal probability theory20. It goes as follows:- The physical constants take some values that permit life, and we don’t understand why.
- We assume a uniform probability distribution over all possible values of the physical constants between a reasonable minimum value and a reasonable maximum value.
- We show that the probability that the constants take their value by chance is vanishingly low.
- We show that the probability of the constants taking their value is higher if we assume a conscious agent (God) who set them that way.
This argument has several problems: First, the probability of an observation is always higher if we assume the involvement of a conscious being. For example, let’s assume that we throw a die 100 times to obtain a sequence of numbers. What is the probability of us obtaining that exact sequence? It’s one in 1077. Now, what is the probability of obtaining this sequence if I am a sorcerer who is able to roll that exact sequence? This probability is one. Therefore, Barnes' argument (as stated in Premise [1] of his Fine-Tuning argument20) says that the observation “strongly favors” the hypothesis of me being a sorcerer.
By the same token, all types of other metaphysical explanations (aliens, gods, etc.) are considered more likely than naturalism in Barnes’ argument. The argument does not require these explanations to be probable by themselves. Even if it did, it would be hard to determine the probability of the existence of a conscious being who has the power to set the values of physical constants and who precedes the genesis of the Universe. What is the probability of that being’s existence, and on what basis would we estimate it? If we just assume that this probability is high because “God” is our go-to hypothesis, or because God is “simple”, then we still do not actually prove a high probability of God’s existence. Rather, we presume it.
In reality, the physical constants are not chosen from a uniform random distribution. That is merely an assumption that springs from our ignorance. Thus, while it is interesting to investigate why these constants take these values, we are not entitled to suspect that an intelligent agent set them.
Furthermore, despite its sophistication, Barnes' argument suffers from similar weaknesses as the other arguments that we have examined in this chapter. First, the argument is not (and does not aim to be) a proof for the existence of God. It does not provide evidence in the sense of a true theory that predicts the hypothesis. This is why the argument does not allow us to make predictions beyond what we already know (namely that the constants take these values). Thus, the argument is not an explanation in the sense of this book.
More importantly, the argument suffers from the same problems as the argument for a first cause: It argues that a scientific explanation (if it were to be found) would still beg the question of why that specific explanation holds. At the same time, the argument does not address the question of why a god would exist, how he would come into existence, why he would want to create life, and how he would have done it. In this way, the argument unfairly scrutinizes the scientific hypothesis more than the theistic one.
Finally, the argument would have failed to explain other unexplained phenomena in the past. For example, it would have preferred a god moving the Sun across the sky to the naturalistic explanation we now know to be true. If the argument has failed in the past, there is no reason to assume that it would be correct in the present. The scientific theories about the Universe also need continuous adjustment, but in the meantime, they make verifiable predictions about things that we did not know and that we then find to be true. This allows us to validate the theories, to correct them, and to use them. This justifies our confidence in them. The same cannot be said of the Fine-Tuning argument.
I don’t want to believe. I want to know.
God is simpler!
Scientific theories about the genesis of life are rather complex. They involve the random permutation of proteins, protein-based replication, and millions of years of evolution. The God of the Gaps Argument is rather simple by comparison. It requires only one new entity (God), and explains not just the genesis of the Universe, but also of life and of humanity. For example, one could just say: “God created life”. In this way, the theory “God did it” has an extraordinary capacity for compression.However, let us look at the predictions that the theory makes. The theory that God created life essentially predicts that life exists — and nothing else. As it so happens, the same prediction can be made by the theory “Life is there”. There is no prediction that the first theory makes that the second one does not; adding “God” does not add any new predictions. In this light, the theory that God created life is quite complex: It does not add any predictions but does require a new metaphysical entity of unknown origin who decided to create life. Thus, the theory is actually simpler without God.
This holds true for most explanations that involve God: They tell us only the predictions we knew anyway, and nothing more. Besides, the theory “God did it” is unfalsifiable. We can equally well claim that any other entity is the reason for some phenomenon. For example, we can claim “Gaia did it”. The other problems with this type of argument apply accordingly.
“I don’t know” does not mean that you can fill in the blanks with your favorite fairy tale.
Everything Else
Where does beauty come from?
There are many questions in life that we cannot (yet) answer by science alone. Examples include: Why do cats have pretty stripes? Why do the millions of insect species have such startling beauty? Why do humans feel guilt? Why does anyone have a will? Where does personality come from?Faith in God, goes the argument, can provide answers to these questions: The reason is God (i.e., cats have pretty stripes because God wants them to have stripes).
in the Kanha National Park in India
This explanation is obviously false. Animals do not get their stripes by mating in front of almond trees. Rather, animals have stripes when this provides an evolutionary advantage such as camouflage. This also explains why animals are often the same colors as their environment (frogs are green, lions are yellow, rabbits are brown, and polar bears are white).
Second, the argument “God did it” is commonly applied to all the beautiful things in life. Yet, there are arguably many more ugly, dangerous, and brutal things in life than there are beautiful ones. Tapeworms, for example, live in the intestines of animals and humans and can grow up to 10 meters long21. Much less theological effort has been devoted to explaining the existence of these animals.
Third, attributing phenomena to gods is basically an argument from ignorance: If we do not know the answer to something, then we say it’s God. This is, however, not a valid way of reasoning.
Finally, the claim “God did it” suffers from the typical problems of the God of the Gaps Argument, which we will discuss at the end of this chapter : It cannot be falsified and therefore does not make predictions; it does not provide an explanation in the technical sense of the term; it does not prove that it was any particular god who did the job; and it wrongly assumes that theology delivers better answers than science. It also encourages us to stop searching for a scientific answer to the question.
If you accept the explanation that God did it,
then your curiosity has been sedated rather than nourished.
How do you explain the soul?
In the common understanding of the word, the soul is the nonphysical essence of a human being. In many religions, the soul can live on when the body has died. So, what is the soul in an atheist world?The soul is basically what makes humans different from machines. However, in the naturalistic view of the world that this book promotes, humans are not so different from complex machines: They are intricate systems of billions of interacting cells. In this worldview, there is no space for a soul.
As American writer Marshall Brain has argued2223, the absence of a soul is just a consequence of the theory of evolution : Every species derived from simple, single-cell organisms over the course of hundreds of millions of years. There is no part of the scientific explanation of evolution that says: “A mythical supernatural being reaches in right here and installs a soul.” The same goes for the development of a baby. An embryo is at first just a single cell (a zygote) before developing into a small human. From a biological perspective, there is no moment in the process where a soul is inserted into the body.
In the terms of this book, what we call the soul is just an auxiliary notion for the mental abilities of a human. We use the word “soul” to mean that a human has the capacity to reason, feel, and think, and that we have consciousness, qualia, memory, and perceptions. These abilities, however, are not mystical or supernatural. They are natural processes that happen in the brain, and that emerge from the complexity of the chemical interactions there. When a human dies, these processes stop.
The idea that the soul lives on is an illicit extrapolation of this auxiliary notion (a ghostification, in the terms of this book). Most likely, people invented as a way to explain the phenomenon of consciousness, and to help them come to terms with their own mortality. This, however, does not make the soul pop into existence.
Whatever we make of the question of consciousness, positing an immaterial soul is of no help at all. It just tries to solve one mystery with an even bigger mystery.
Why do things happen?
It is one of the fascinating (and sometimes frightening) facts of life that some things are outside of our control. A loved one may suffer an accident, a friend may fall terminally ill, or we may win a million dollars in a lottery. The reasons for these events are beyond our understanding, let alone our influence.In light of this, believers assume that there must be a superior being who makes these things happen. This is an understandable conjecture, based maybe on the human tendency to find a story behind what happens. Let us make the hypothesis more formal: There is a higher power that coordinates the events on Earth. Now, is there any way we could prove this hypothesis false? That is, can we imagine any event that would show that life is not coordinated by a supreme being? It turns out that there is no such event; whatever happens will always be the will of the higher power. This means that our hypothesis is unfalsifiable.
As the reader knows by heart by now, unfalsifiability has two consequences. First, the hypothesis has no implication whatsoever for our lives on Earth. It tells us nothing about what will or will not happen, because we have no idea what that higher power aspires to do. Thus, both a believer and an atheist are equally unable to predict the future. Both are victims of the same random processes. Technically, the hypothesis “There is a higher power” does not imply any perception statements, and it is thus literally meaningless.
The second consequence of the hypothesis’ unfalsifiability is that we can invent any other unfalsifiable hypothesis that contradicts it. For example, we can claim that “There are two higher powers, who work together to coordinate the events on Earth in alternation. On Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, it is mainly the first power, and on Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday, it is mainly the other power. Sunday is actually uncoordinated, real randomness.” This hypothesis contradicts the original hypothesis but it cannot be proven false either. This shows that we can come up with an arbitrary number of contradictory hypotheses, each of which could “explain” the events of life and never be proven false. And this is what people do. They call it “religion”.
Unfalsifiable as it may be, the belief that everything must happen for a reason is not just some harmless erring. It has very concrete consequences. It entails that when bad things happen (such as an accident, a disease, a famine, or poverty), people try to find the agent responsible24. Throughout history, people have readily blamed ethnic minorities, religious groups, witches, magicians, or other marginalized individuals for disasters — often with dreadful consequences. For example, in 14th century Europe, Jews were widely blamed for the Black Death and thousands were massacred. And during the witch hunts of the 16th and 17th centuries, tens of thousands of women were killed for supposedly causing storms, illnesses, or other mishaps. If no such target could be fingered, people often believed that their misfortune was a collective punishment from a higher power, and that they had to adapt their behavior. At times, this entailed following a leader who claimed to be able to please said higher power — often to that leader’s advantage. Preachers, priests, and shamans have all benefited from such gullibility, and to this day, televangelists make millions with very similar strategies.
Nowadays, such explanations are less popular. However, one still is: If a benevolent higher power such as the Abrahamic god dishes out misfortune, then a plausible interpretation is that the receiving party deserved said misfortune. This idea is called the Belief in a Just World (BJW), and it can lead people to victim blame. For example, people can come to believe that the victim of a crime is responsible for their own suffering, that poverty is self-inflicted, and that people are to blame for the illnesses they suffer. Several studies have shown such reactions towards victims of bullying, illnesses, poverty, rape, and other violence 2524. Revolting as this thinking may be from a humanist standpoint, it is unfortunately a logical consequence of the belief in a higher benevolent power.
This is just one of the problems with such arguments. The others apply accordingly.
Look, I understand that religion makes it easier to deal with all of the random shitty things that happen to us. And I wish I could get on that ride, I'm sure I would be happier. But I can’t. Feelings aren’t enough. I need it to be real.
Where does moral law come from?
The Morality argument is inspired by German Enlightenment philosopher Immanuel Kant and was fleshed out by British writer Clive Staples Lewis2627. The argument states that all people have an instinctive sense of what is right and wrong, and that this sense must have come from someone or something outside ourselves — from God.However, ancient cultures had moral rules long before the Abrahamic god appeared on the scene. Babylonian and Sumerian laws, for example, date from the year 2000 BCE. They regulated marriage and relationships, property, leasing, debts, and warranty, and stipulated both punishments and the presumption of innocence. Ancient Romans and Greeks, too, had sophisticated legal systems, all of which were invented long before Moses, Jesus, or Mohammed.
It could be argued that these systems, too, were inspired by God, because God gave humans some basic moral standards. However, moral standards are not absolute. They change over time and across cultures. Slavery, for example, was widely legal and morally acceptable in the Middle Ages. Nowadays, it is nearly universally condemned. Polygamy is considered immoral in some places and permissible in others. The death penalty, likewise, is considered necessary by some people and immoral by others. Even God’s self-declared shepherds changed their opinion on the death penalty in 2015, defying the idea that moral standards come from God.
More plausible, from an atheist perspective, is that moral systems arise spontaneously within human societies: Humans have an inherent self-interest in protecting our own life and limb. We realize that we can achieve this goal best when we team up with other people. We then notice that this teaming up needs some rules to work and, hence, we come up with such rules. There is nothing divine in that.
Did people really not know that they should not kill before Moses told them?
Why should people behave morally?
We have argued that moral laws do not come from God. But no matter where the laws come from, we are left to wonder: Why should we actually follow them? The theistic response is that we should follow the law because God commands us to. And in case this answer is not sufficient, we should follow the law because otherwise God will burn us in Hell for eternity.In the atheist view of things, there is no God and no Hell. Believers may then ask: “If there is no God, then what prevents someone from stealing or killing?” Turning the question around, we may ask the believer: “If there were no God, would you steal and kill?” If that were the case, then the believer would be morally defunct. But if there is another reason why the believer would not steal or kill, then God is no longer needed as a reason and, therefore, the question does not prove his existence.
Fortunately, there is a rather simple explanation for why we should follow basic moral rules. Would you like to live in a lawless society where people can kill and plunder as they wish? Probably not. The majority of your compatriots think similarly. Therefore, the majority of your compatriots, as well as yourself, presumably, follow the moral rules of your society. That is all that is needed for the explanation of moral behavior.
The other problems of the God of the Gaps Argument apply accordingly.
It is often argued that religion is valuable because it makes men good,
but even if it were true, it would not be a proof that religion is true.
Santa Claus makes children good in precisely the same way,
and yet that doesn’t prove his existence.
The God is a Lapse
Problems with the God of the Gaps Argument
We have seen the God of the Gaps Argument in several variants. We will now argue that all of them suffer from the same problems:- They are not based on evidence.
- They are not falsifiable, and thus, literally meaningless.
- They do not compress information, and are, thus, not an explanation in the technical sense.
- They do not prove that it was a particular god who “did the job” and not some other one.
- They assume that theology delivers better answers than science.
Furthermore, we will argue that the God of the Gaps Argument is not just false, but also unhelpful in the search for answers to the big questions. It is even pretentious to assume that one’s own god would be the solution to all of humankind’s conundrums, as we will later argue in the Chapter on Criticism of Religion.
Whom do atheists turn to when faced with a situation that logic cannot explain?I do not turn to anything. There are some things we don’t know, and making up answers to fill the holes, and then believing that the made-up answers are true is completely idiotic.
No evidence
The God of the Gaps Argument asserts that God created the Universe (and basically everything else to which there is currently no scientific explanation).It is indeed a possible hypothesis that God created the Universe. The rule “If God created the Universe, then the Universe exists” is a special case of the more general rule “If someone creates something, then that something exists” — which is generally true.
The problem is that the rule works only in one direction: If God created the Universe, then it exists. This does not mean that, vice versa, if the Universe exists, God necessarily created it. Anything else could have created the Universe. Or the Universe could not have been created at all. Applying the rule this way, as believers do, is a type of reasoning called abduction. As we have seen before, abduction generally does not lead to correct conclusions. It is thus not a valid way of reasoning.
The only way to deduce a hypothesis is to have evidence for it. Evidence for a hypothesis is a true theory that predicts the hypothesis. That is: We need a true rule that has “God exists” not in the premise but in the conclusion (i.e., “Since XYZ, God exists”, not “God exists, and hence, XYZ”). Up to now, no such rule has been found (as we have argued in the Chapter on Proofs for God). Therefore, there is no evidence for the idea that God exists. It is just a hypothesis that hangs in the air.
Absence of evidence is evidence of absence.
Unfalsifiability
In its most popular variant, the God of the Gaps Argument says that God is the ultimate cause of the Universe. Interestingly, we can never prove this claim false. There is nothing that could happen in the present or future that a believer would accept as a proof that God was not the ultimate cause of the Universe. For example, even if one day we found out how the Universe come into existence, the believer can still argue that God caused whatever it was. There is no way to show that God did not ultimately do it.As always, this unfalsifiability has two consequences: First, we can come up with many arbitrary, contradictory theories as to how the Universe came into existence. (We will later discuss several of these). Second, the claim makes no predictions. By assuming that “God did it”, we are no wiser than before. A believer knows nothing more about this world than a nonbeliever. Not a single concrete prediction about how the world is, or how the world is not, can be derived from the statement “God did it”. And this is why religious people fare no better in the randomness of this world than nonreligious ones (they fare worse, actually).
What was it God revealed to man? He did not reveal science. The whole structure of physical science was built up very gradually and tentatively by man. He did not teach man geology, or astronomy, or chemistry, or biology. He did not teach him how to overcome disease, or its nature and cure. He did not teach him agriculture, or how to develop a wild grass into a life-nourishing wheat. He did not teach man how to drain a marsh or how to dig a canal so that it might carry water where it was needed. He did not teach him arithmetic or mathematics. He taught him none of the arts and sciences. Man had no revelation that taught him how to build the steam engine, or the aeroplane, or the submarine, the telegraph or the wireless. All these and a thousand other things which we regard as indispensable, and without which civilization would be impossible, man had to discover for himself.
But isn’t God’s work falsifiable?
We have been harping on about the fact that the existence of God is unfalsifiable. Now, what if we were to say that God makes the Sun rise every day? Is that not falsifiable? If the Sun does not rise tomorrow, then this shows that God does not exist.The theory is indeed falsifiable. However, falsifiability alone does not make a hypothesis true. A hypothesis is true if it is either a perception statement or supported by evidence. So then, what is the evidence that God makes the Sun rise every day? And what is the evidence that it is not, say, Gaia who does so? There is none. In fact, there is evidence against God raising the Sun: We know today that the Sun rises simply because the Earth turns (for natural reasons). The assumption that God raises the Sun (or Gaia, for that matter) is nothing more than a ghostification of the true explanation. With this, it falls into the same class of arguments as the myth of Persephone used by the ancient Greeks to explain the seasons: It illicitly attaches supernatural entities to a purely natural phenomenon.
If someone tells you that you do not understand the world and that therefore you should follow his religion, he’s obviously playing a cheap trick on you. If he really wanted your good, he’d encourage you to understand the world first.
No compression
The explanation that God created the Universe compresses the entire cause of existence of the Universe into a single sentence. However, such an explanation does not actually compress information in the technical sense of the word. To see this, let us start with something more mundane: the existence of a rainbow. Let’s assume the following facts:On Friday, the Sun shines, it rains, and there is a rainbow.
On Saturday, the Sun shines, it rains, and there is a rainbow.
On Sunday, the Sun shines, it rains, and there is a rainbow.
God wants that on Friday, the Sun shines, it rains, and there is a rainbow.
God wants that on Saturday, the Sun shines, it rains, and there is a rainbow.
God wants that on Sunday, the Sun shines, it rains, and there is a rainbow.
A scientific explanation, in contrast, goes as follows:
On Friday, the Sun shines and it rains.
On Saturday, the Sun shines and it rains.
On Sunday, the Sun shines and it rains.
Whenever it rains and the Sun shines, there is a rainbow.
The same goes for supernatural explanations for the beginning of the Universe. The theory that God created the Universe just adds a layer of complexity. To illustrate this, consider the following example: Small children like playing the game of “Why?”, in which they simply and continually ask “Why?” in response to every answer. The game continues until the unnerved parent finally says: “Because that’s how it is”. A theist can answer more questions than the atheist by saying, “Because God wants it that way”. However, when the child asks the next “Why?” (namely, why does God want that?), the theist will have no reply either. Thus, the theist only postpones, but does not actually avoid, the impasse. On the contrary, the hypothesis of a god entails many more follow-up questions: “Where is God?”, “How does he interact with the world if he is not physical?”, “How do we know there is only one god and not many?”, etc. Thus, instead of answering the original question, the assumption that “God did it” just adds plenty of new ones. For this reason, Ibn Abi Al-Awja, an 8th century critic of Islam, reportedly refused to accept any answer that implied that something was done by God. In his view, this merely pushed the question farther back to someone who was not present 29. He was executed swiftly.
A claim does not automatically become an explanation if it uses the word “because”. It also has to capture a general pattern in the past, so that we can make predictions about the future.
God or other gods
At the same time, the focus on gods as the creators of the Universe is mainly the result of a lack of imagination. There are much more philosophical and colorful explanations of how the world came into existence. Buddhists, for example, assume no creation at all. In their view, the Universe has always existed. The Taoist creation story, in contrast, goes as follows: The Tao gave birth to unity, unity gave birth to duality, duality gave birth to trinity, trinity gave birth to the myriad creatures[Tao Te Ching: 42]. This may sound highly philosophical, but that is, from a Taoist perspective, more than adequate for something as foundational as the creation of the Universe. It would be implausible for a Taoist to assume that the Universe is like a watch, only bigger.
Given all these different theories, why should one of them be true instead of any other?
Oh, Kid, I can go on and on
explain every phenomenon:
The tide, the grass, the wind, the ground
that was just me messing around.
The record
Science is like magic but real.
Based on ancient myths
There is another problem with the God of the Gaps Argument: The stories that religions present as explanations for the big questions of life predate Western science. At the time of their first telling, people had not the slightest idea about the modern scientific method, molecular biology, radio-carbon dating, or lightyears — in short, about the concepts that are necessary to explain the genesis of the Universe and of life. That is one reason why the religious stories mostly revolve around magical creatures, wise men, and gods that are basically outsized humans. It is obvious to the atheist that such explanations have no relation with reality.But how dare atheists discard religious explanations when they don’t know the correct explanations themselves? The answer is that it is not required to know the correct answer to know that another is nonsense. For example, take the mathematical problem 765769 × 29310. You may not know the answer off the top of your head. However, you likely know that -3 cannot be the answer. This is because two positive numbers multiplied cannot yield a negative number. In other words: Even if we do not know the correct answer, we can often tell if another answer is false. That goes, in particular, for religious explanations: Even if we do not know why the stripes on animals are so beautiful, we do know that they did not come about by animals mating in front of almond trees, as the Bible suggests.
Even if the theistic answers are not outright false, we are still entitled to doubt their accuracy. Assume that someone tells you that the answer to the computation 765769 × 29310 is 65762898798. Would you believe them? Or would you want to see the steps of the calculation for yourself? What if the calculation involves a step that requires you to not ask how it works? Or if someone else tells you that the answer is 5345365498? At this point, you would almost certainly want to see the steps of the calculation. And what if you asked a different question but the answer remained the same? You would probably start to seriously doubt the reliability of your interlocutor. And it is the same with atheists when they hear the God of the Gaps Argument.
How naive to believe there might be a single answer to every question. Every mystery. That there exists a lone divine light which rules over all. They say it is a light that brings truth and love. I say it is a light that blinds us — and forces us to stumble about in ignorance.
Pragmatic Considerations
Disinterest
We have argued that the God of the Gaps Argument does not hold water. We will now see that the argument is not just false, but also counterproductive in the search for truth.This is because, by claiming a supernatural answer, believers show that they are not really interested in answering the big questions of life in the first place. Let us illustrate this by a short story:
But most religious people do none of this. They limit themselves to claiming that the answers to the big questions of life are provided by their religion. Thereby, they demonstrate that they are not really interested in the questions to begin with. That is fine, of course. However, they should not then claim to have the answers. Such a claim can only be made when one is interested in answering the questions in the first place.
We do not even know the question,
and some people already claim to have an answer.
Pushing God away
Interestingly, the God of the Gaps Argument is not just invalid, it actually does the idea of God no favor. Consider that, in the past, gods or a god were assumed to be behind a great number of life’s conundrums. But nowadays, most of these questions have been answered by science. Thus, the explanatory space allocated for the supernatural has steadily shrunk. If human knowledge continues to progress as it has, the room for gods as explanations for the unknown will become smaller and smaller. If believers bind their god to what is scientifically unknown, they risk abolishing their god in the long run. It may be more reasonable to stop using the god as an explanation for physical conundrums and to focus instead on the nonphysical aspects of religion (moral values such as generosity and charity, hope in the afterlife, etc.) and on a positive view on life in general.This observation was maybe best phrased by Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a German Lutheran pastor:
How wrong it is to use God as a stop-gap for the incompleteness of our knowledge. If in fact the frontiers of knowledge are being pushed further and further back (and that is bound to be the case), then God is being pushed back with them, and is therefore continually in retreat. We are to find God in what we know, not in what we don’t know.
Inhibiting science
The God of the Gaps Argument is not just false, it also inhibits scientific enquiry.The first obstacle to scientific enquiry appears in our mind. For example, if we assume that God created the world, we will have a hard time even imagining that this was not the case. We will be so fixed on the idea that the Universe must have started that we cannot even consider alternative ways of thought. This hinders new ideas about the Universe, such as the idea that it oscillates or that its mass slowed down time. The same goes for other phenomena: If we assume that God gave us a soul, we will keep searching for that soul without giving room to alternative views of the human mind. The same is true for the question of morality: Since ancient times, people have believed that moral law comes from the gods. This has prevented them from correcting and developing these laws, so that the abolition of slavery, freedom of religion, and equal rights for men and women appeared only very late in human history.
But the obstacles are not just psychological in nature. If God is the answer to one question, then it follows that any other answer is a denial of God’s power, and hence, blasphemy. In Christianity, this has led to the inhibition, prosecution, and even execution of some of humanity’s greatest thinkers. Some Muslims hold that Islam has an easier relationship with science and does not contradict it. And yet, many variants of Islam punish apostasy by death. This punishment is affirmed by all four schools of Sunni Islam, as well as by large pluralities of people in most Muslim-majority countries. In these variants of Islam, it is thus impossible to investigate a world model without God.
Science, in contrast, has no such constraints. Nobody is put to death if she or he questions the principle of gravity. In science, a theory is valid if it makes true predictions. If it ever makes a false prediction, it is abandoned. If we assume supernatural gap fillers instead, which do not succumb to these conditions, then we inhibit the scientific analysis of the questions of life. Only if we acknowledge that we do not have an answer will we be able to find one.
If you don’t know, and you think you know,
you will never know.
A Humanist view
We have argued that it is unhelpful to use the supernatural as a stopgap for questions we cannot answer. So, what should we do instead? The Humanist answer is clear: We have to keep searching until we find an answer. Once an answer has been found, we have to continuously validate it, question it, and expose it to criticism to make sure it is really correct. If the counterevidence becomes stronger than the evidence, we must change or even abandon our answer.And what do we do if we really cannot find the answer? Again, the Humanist stance is clear: We have to admit that we do not know it. There are some things we don’t know, and that’s OK. This insight is, in the Humanist eye, much more honest than filling the hole with a made-up answer.
Religion’s claim to higher knowledge is laughable. It doesn’t even have any lower knowledge.
References
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