Which is Easier to Believe, that Life Was created by God or by Chance?

OK, this question gets asked a lot by theists in a lot of different ways. At its core, it’s simply a form of the classic “Argument from Design” that I addressed here:

The Argument from Design

But let’s look at this from a slightly different perspective, shall we?

Time and again, we see theists claiming that it is just too improbable or inconceivable to imagine that life could have originated “by chance” and therefore the most reasonable explanation is that it was created by the omnipotent, omniscient, all-loving and perfect God described by the particular religion of which they happen to be a member.

Unfortunately for theists, the life we see on earth is far from what we would actually expect to see if it were actually created by an omnipotent, omniscient, all-loving and perfect God, the way we would expect to see a finely crafted watch from a master watchmaker. Instead of perfection and fine craftsmanship, we see eyes that have blind spots, vestigial organs that occasionally burst open and kill us, cells that periodically start reproducing uncontrollably (cancer), a propensity for genetic flaws that cause all sorts of diseases such as Downs Syndrome and Tay-Sachs disease, a whole system that gradually breaks down as you get older, etc., etc., etc. So much for “fine craftsmanship,” eh?

And that’s just the human condition! Sure, it’s pretty amazing that plants and animals so closely depend on each other for survival and it’s so cool that bees are attracted to beautiful flowers who need the bees to spread their pollen. What a great design! How perfect! But then you also have the fact that there are parasites that have to lay their eggs in living hosts so their larva can hatch and eat their way out to survive. Not quite so beautiful and perfect. And then there’s the whole predator/pray relationship where some animals have to brutally kill other animals to survive (and the prey animals have to be brutally killed in order to not overpopulate and starve to death). And don’t forget that the rest of the animal kingdom also gets nasty diseases and suffer accidents and experience pain and agony. Oh, look — A Tasmanian Devil with face cancer:

[Where’s the perfect design in all of that?]

As a result, theists find themselves in the position of coming up with a whole bunch of additional justifications and rationalizations as to why life is so flawed when it was supposedly created by a perfect being, including one or more of the following:

• All of nature used to be perfect before Adam sinned and caused the entire universe to enter a fallen state. Which means, what, God is a sadistic bastard who set up a system whereby ALL OF NATURE would need to suffer for the sins of one person instead of just punishing that one person?
• God specifically gave us these flawed bodies to provide us with obstacles in life to be overcome or to test our faith or some other reason known only to him because he works in mysterious ways. And I guess all those cute, furry animals that die horrible agonizing deaths also have important lessons to learn as well, huh?
• It doesn’t matter whether life is flawed right now, since life is but a twinkling of an eye compared to all eternity and we’ll all have perfect bodies in the next life.
• “You are assuming the human body can be better designed under these circumstances. Maybe it can’t. You are also assuming it is not a work in progress. You can probably imagine the first watches were not fine tuned machines.” [An actual response I received from a theist, who apparently thinks an omnipotent, omniscient, all-loving and perfect being needs theists like him to make excuses for His shoddy workmanship and who doesn’t understand what “omnipotent” actually means.]

It doesn’t matter what your personal favorite justification is. The point is that, despite what theists claim, the evidence of our senses does not automatically give us reason to believe in the sort of God that most theists claim to believe in (omnipotent, omniscient, all-loving and perfect) and theists MUST tack on other conditions for which there is no evidence.

Naturalism (or “atheism”, if you insist), on the other hand, requires no such additional caveats and conditions and justifications to be believable. We know from observation that there are natural laws that govern how the universe works. And, although we may not have perfect knowledge of every natural law, there is no reason not to believe that those laws can explain every single observed phenomenon, including the origin of life itself.

So, which is easier to believe? That the natural world evolved to be the way it is — warts and all — due to purely the natural processes that govern the universe, or that the natural world was designed by an omnipotent, omniscient, all-loving and perfect God who, for some reason we can’t quite figure out, decided to make the world look as if it had evolved to be the way it is — warts and all — due to purely the natural processes that govern the universe? My money is on the former.

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One final thought. To many theists, there are only two options — either life was created “by God” or else it happened “by chance.” And “by chance” apparently means completely randomly, entirely by coincidence, etc. This is a false dichotomy, however. “By chance” in this context simply means without being directed by any sort of intelligence, yet still according to natural laws that guide and constrain the outcome.

Doesn’t the Beauty and Majesty of the Natural World Prove that God Exists?

A question that gets frequently asked of atheists is how we can possibly look at all the wonders of the natural world and not believe in God? Now, sure, this is partially just a restatement of the classic “Argument from Design” (which I cover in detail here), and it also involves a fair amount of arguing from ignorance or incredulity (“I can’t personally imagine how such a thing is possible without God, therefore it must not be possible”). But I think it actually goes a little deeper than that.

After all, once upon a time, we really did have no idea what caused sunsets, how mountains formed, how rock structures came to looked like they were carved into interesting shapes, etc., so it only made sense to think that such things were specifically created for our benefit. But now we obviously are able to explain how all these things are caused by purely natural forces and principles, so this question can’t just be due to sheer ignorance of how the natural world works. There must be more to it than that.

But hey — maybe all this means is that God created all the natural laws in the first place and therefore is ultimately responsible for it turning out the way it has. Sure, God didn’t personally sculpt the amazing rock formations seen in Utah’s Zion National Park or the Grand Canyon, but can’t we still give Him the credit for creating the rocks and wind and water and setting up a natural system whereby rocks can be eroded by wind and water? And sure, maybe God doesn’t personally paint every single beautiful sunset by hand, but we can still praise Him for creating the water cycles that causes clouds to form and making it so that sunlight refracts when it strikes water droplets, etc., right? And, OK, so maybe God didn’t personally cause those majestic mountains to rise out of the crust and get covered with snow, but we can still worship Him for coming up with the idea of plate tectonics and snow in the first place, right? After all, God created the entire universe from scratch, and therefore every beautiful and awesome and great thing we see in that universe must therefore be the result of God’s will, right?

So, maybe the argument is not simply about how could all these things exist without God but instead why would they all be so majestic and beautiful and awe-inspiring without God. Surely God must have set things up so that the end results would be so amazing, right?

OK, let’s play that game. The natural world is full of amazing, beautiful, wonderful and awe-inspiring things that prove that God exists and loves us enough to share all this beauty with us. Gotcha. Now let’s take a look at all the things in the natural world that aren’t so great shall we? Let’s look at the volcanic eruptions instead of just looking at the majestic mountains. Let’s look at the vast dust storms instead of just looking at the pretty sunsets. Let’s look at the floods and earthquakes and droughts and lightning strikes and tornadoes and hurricanes and tsunamis instead of just looking at the amazing rock formations. And then go look at the children dying of genetic diseases and the ugliness of things like Ebola and smallpox and parasitic infections and flesh-eating bacteria. Care to look at some picture of people with half of their face eaten off? Seriously — go ahead and do a Google image search for flesh-eating bacteria. It’s OK, I’ll wait for you to finish vomiting at the sight and come back here.

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Still with me? Wonderful. Now, after looking at all that ugliness in the world, you go ahead and tell me that it’s all a testament to just how depraved and sadistic and cruel God is, since He created the universe from scratch and therefore every horrible and ugly and terrible thing we see in that universe must also be the result of God’s will.

• No, you can’t claim that the ugliness is just random stuff not under God’s direct control or all the work of Satan.
• No, you can’t claim that all the bad stuff is the result of man’s exercise of free will, since I didn’t even mention anything related to man’s inhumanity to man.
• No, you can’t claim that Adam and Eve sinned and somehow caused the entire universe to enter a “fallen” state since (a) that would mean that a supposedly loving God decided to punish the entire universe for the sins of two people and (b) it would also negate all the previously “great” things that you previously gave God credit for. I mean, seriously — either the world is full of ugliness because it is in a fallen state or else it is full of beauty and greatness because of God. You can’t have it both ways.

So, please. Go ahead. You admit that all the ugliness in the world is evidence that God is a sadistic bastard (or, perhaps doesn’t exist at all), and I’ll admit that the beauty in the natural world is evidence that He does exist and loves us so much that He wants to share His glory with us. You don’t get to just look at the good and ignore the bad and claim that it somehow proves something.

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Having said all that, let me just make it clear that I do think there are many beautiful, majestic and awe-inspiring sights in the natural world, both here on earth and out in the rest of the known universe. And no, I don’t think the entire universe is a dark and depressing place just because there are also many ugly, hideous and scary things as well. I take the good with the bad and understand that this is what happens when you have a universe that operates on impersonal natural principles and that wasn’t designed specifically for our benefit.

The Logical Impossibility of God

Is God constrained by the laws of logic?  It's an important question, and the answer seems to be, "Yes, but only when it's convenient to say that He is."

It's an old chestnut of a question, but whenever theists start talking about how their particular version of God is "omnipotent" some atheist wag will invariably ask, "If God is omnipotent, can He create a stone so massive that He can't move it?"  To which the theist will usually respond, "that's a logical impossibility and being omnipotent means being able to do anything logically possible."  OK, so no creating a stone too massive for Him to move, no creating a square circle, etc.  Got it.  And, presumably, this is because logic transcends human understanding and provides general principles of existence.  There isn't "human logic" and "God logic," there's just logic.

With me so far?

OK, now one of the fundamental principles of logic is the so-called Law of Non-contradiction, which in its basic form states that, "Contradictory statements cannot both be true in the same sense at the same time."  This means that the two propositions "A is B" and "A is not B" are mutually exclusive.  It also means that something cannot simultaneously be two opposite things.  This is why, for example, there can be no such thing as a square circle or an married bachelor since both concepts involve a self-contradiction.

So, is there anything about God's supposed nature that violates the Law of Non-contradiction?

Well, one place to start would be to examine the relationship between him supposedly being  both omnipotent (all powerful) and omnibenevolent (all loving).  This apparent contradiction was perhaps best stated by the ancient Greek philosopher Epicurus, who put it this way:

God, he says, either wishes to take away evils, and is unable; or He is able, and is unwilling; or He is neither willing nor able, or He is both willing and able. If He is willing and is unable, He is feeble, which is not in accordance with the character of God; if He is able and unwilling, He is envious, which is equally at variance with God; if He is neither willing nor able, He is both envious and feeble, and therefore not God; if He is both willing and able, which alone is suitable to God, from what source then are evils? Or why does He not remove them?

Or, as it is commonly put:

Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then He is not omnipotent.
Is He able, but not willing? Then He is not benevolent.
Is He both able and willing? Then whence comment evil?
Is He neither willing nor able? Then why call Him God?

So that's it, right?  The so-called "Problem of Evil" proves the logical impossibility of God since (a) Evil cannot exist if there is an omnipotent, omnibenevolent God and (b) we know from our own experience that there is, in fact, evil.  Well, not quite...

Although this argument has been sufficient to convince many people throughout history to reject the idea of God, those who cling to their beliefs have come up with numerous ways to get around the apparent contradiction:

• "Evil," they will say, "is the result of human free will, and since God values free will more than anything He allows evil."  Except, of course, this only applies to evil acts done as a result of human free will (murder, rape, robbery, etc.) and wholly ignores things like pain and suffering caused by genetic diseases, natural disasters, accidents, etc.


• "When Adam and Eve sinned against God in the Garden of Eden, the world fell into a fallen state, so all the evils in the world are a direct result of those actions."  Except, of course, this doesn't explain why God would need to punish the entire world (not to mention universe) because of the actions of two people.  Why not simply punish Adam and Eve (and all their descendants if God were feeling particularly vengeful) and leave the rest of the natural world alone?  Why make animals die horribly painful and cruel deaths just to teach us a lesson?  Wouldn't it be a more powerful lesson if everything in nature was blissfully happy except for us?  Besides, God is the one who set the whole system up in the first place, so it was his decision to make the whole universe suffer for the sins of Adam and Eve and not their free will.


• "This life is a test, and how we deal with suffering will determine our eternal fate."  Well, OK, but that seems awfully callous when applying it to, say, young children who are born with horrible genetic diseases that cause them to lead painfully short lives.  It also doesn't address all the pain and suffering throughout the rest of the natural world.


• "This life is but a twinkling of an eye when compared to all eternity, so any pain and suffering we experience while alive will seem like a mere pin-prick when compared to the rest of our existence."

And the list goes on and on.  The bottom line is that there's always some way to define "omnipotent", "omnibenevolent" and even "evil" to avoid inherent contradictions, even if the newly defined terms don't really make much sense or accord with experience.  "An all-loving God is one who lets His children have free will, not freedom from suffering."  "Pain and suffering are actually good things, not evils."  You get the idea.  As I said, a lot of people are not convinced by these rationalizations, but they do make it hard to state unequivocally that God is logically impossible solely due to the so-called Problem of Evil.

OK, how about this?  In order to create the universe, which is the totality of all time and space, God must exist outside of time and space.  Which means He must not be composed of matter or energy Himself.  But, if God is not composed of matter or energy, how can He possibly have created matter and energy in the first place and how can He continue to interact with it today?  That seems like a logical contradiction, doesn't it?

Well, not quite.  Even if we accept that God is composed of neither matter nor energy, we cannot state unequivocally that He would therefore be unable to interact with matter and energy.  In the same way that energy can interact with matter despite not being composed of matter, God could be composed of some entirely different substance (let's call it "mind" or "spirit") that can interact with matter and energy in some way we just can't understand.  Of course, we now know that energy actually is composed of matter in a very real sense, but that just means the analogy (commonly used by theistic apologists) is a bad one.  It doesn't change the fact that God logically could be composed of some other substance that allows Him to interact with matter and energy without being composed of matter or energy Himself.

OK, so the mere fact that God somehow interacts with matter and energy while being composed of neither is not, in and of itself, a logical impossibility.  I think we are getting very close, however...

In order to avoid any apparent contradictions inherent in the notion of a God who is timeless and not composed of matter or energy, Christian apologists over the years have declared that God is both "Transcendent" and "Immanent".  According to Wikipedia,  the two terms are defined as follows:

Transcendence refers to the aspect of a god's nature and power which is wholly independent of the material universe, beyond all physical laws. This is contrasted with Immanence, where a god is said to be fully present in the physical world and thus accessible to creatures in various ways. 

Or, in other words, God is both wholly apart from the material universe and wholly within the material universe. At the same time.  He is simultaneously B and not B.  His very nature is therefore in violation of the Law of Non-contradiction and He is therefore logically impossible.  Q.E.D.

Now, some will argue (and believe me, they have) that it doesn't matter if God is logically impossible since we're only talking about human logic here and God is above such things.  Well, fine, except then why do you claim that an omnipotent God can't create a rock too massive for Him to move or can't create a square circle?  Aren't those just principles of human logic as well?  It seems that if you want to apply some logical principles to God, you would have to apply all of them (not just the ones that are convenient).

It seems that theists are left with three possible responses to this:

1. They can claim that God isn't bound by anything whatsoever and therefore can actually create a rock too massive for Him to move, create a square circle, etc.  Of course, once you throw all logic out the window it becomes rather pointless to discuss anything, but some theists are apparently willing to do just this.


2. They can claim that Immanence and Transcendence aren't actually opposites despite the plain definitions of the words.  But, since the whole idea of God being both Immanent and Transcendent is a way to explain how He could create the universe and still be part of the universe, there's no real way of getting around the fact that they are, in fact, complete opposites.  A lot of theists do go down this path, but they are usually the same ones who will write dissertations on how God can simultaneously be three distinct beings and one unified being that is absolutely not made up of three distinct beings whatsoever ["We worship one God in trinity, and trinity in unity, neither confounding the persons nor dividing the substance. For the person of the Father is one; of the Son, another; of the Holy Spirit, another. But the divinity of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit is one, the glory equal, the majesty equal. Such as is the Father, such also is the Son, and such the Holy Spirit. The Father is uncreated, the Son is uncreated, the Holy Spirit is uncreated. The Father is infinite, the Son is infinite, the Holy Spirit is infinite. The Father is eternal, the Son is eternal, the Holy Spirit is eternal. And yet there are not three eternal Beings, but one eternal Being. So also there are not three uncreated Beings, nor three infinite Beings, but one uncreated and one infinite Being. In like manner, the Father is omnipotent, the Son is omnipotent, and the Holy Spirit is omnipotent. And yet there are not three omnipotent Beings, but one omnipotent Being. Thus the Father is God, the Son is God, and the Holy Spirit is God. And yet there are not three Gods, but one God only. The Father is Lord, the Son is Lord, and the Holy Spirit is Lord. And yet there are not three Lords, but one Lord only. For as we are compelled by Christian truth to confess each person distinctively to be both God and Lord, we are prohibited by the Catholic religion to say that there are three Gods or Lords. The Father is made by none, nor created, nor begotten. The Son is from the Father alone, not made, not created, but begotten. The Holy Spirit is not created by the Father and the Son, nor begotten, but proceeds. Therefore, there is one Father, not three Fathers; one Son, not three Sons; one Holy Spirit, not three Holy Spirits. And in this Trinity there is nothing prior or posterior, nothing greater or less, but all three persons are coeternal and coequal to themselves. So that through all, as was said above, both unity in trinity and trinity in unity is to be adored. Whoever would be saved, let him thus think concerning the Trinity."]


3. They can just wave their magical Wand of Definitions^TM and state that God is defined as the sort of being who can be both Transcendent and Immanent without there being any sort of logical contradiction involved.

The bottom line, as far as I am concerned, is that God is absolutely and undeniably logically  impossible, a self-contradiction (at least as commonly depicted and worshiped).  The only question is whether theists actually care about this fact or whether cognitive dissonance will force them to compartmentalize and ignore it so as to not feel any angst about their beliefs.