Does God Exist?

1. Atheists’ Implicit Arguments are Very Bad - Much Worse Than Their Explicit Arguments

I will first go over two bad arguments against the existence of God, then I will explain the most important positive argument FOR God’s existence. (adapted from this video)

1.1 The Big Rocks Argument

A popular argument is one which I call the Big Rocks argument. The argument is that Earth, the world we live on is just one planet, and there are also other planets out in the Universe, and some of the other planets are bigger than Earth. And there are asteroids - big rocks hurtling through space - and there are comets which are big pieces of ice, and so the argument is: “How can you say that life is meaningful when there are lots of big rocks?!” (And there are stars which are much bigger than Earth. Maybe it should be called the Big Balls of Gas Argument.)

I’ll put it a bit more charitably. People who make this argument point to other planets or stars or galaxies or other big things in outer space and they say: “Look how big those things are. How can you say that the things happening on Earth are important when there are objects in outer space which are so big and we are so small?” Or they say: “Stars are big and people are tiny, so if God created both stars and people, wouldn’t God care more about the thing which He made big than the thing which He made tiny?” Or they say: “The Earth is only one tiny piece of the vast physical universe. How can you say that the human drama unfolding on Earth is the big story for which the Universe was created?” Here’s an example of Carl Sagan making this argument:

Interviewer: There is something very humbling about that picture we’ve just seen though isn’t there, I mean - does it strike you that way?

Sagan: Oh certainly, I mean - here we are, like mites on a plum, and the plum is this little planet and it goes around an insignificant local star, the sun. And that star is on the - on the obscure outskirts of an ordinary galaxy, the milky way, which contains 400 billion other stars. And this galaxy is just one of something like 100 billion other galaxies that make up the universe. And it is now beginning to look like this universe is one of an enormous number, maybe even an infinite number of other closed off universes. So the idea that we are CENTRAL, that we are the reason there is a universe, is pathetic.

Mr. Sagan said “The Earth is a little planet that goes around an insignificant local star, the Sun. The Sun is on the obscure outskirts of an ordinary galaxy the milky way. And there are 100 billion other galaxies. Quote: So the idea that we are central, that we are the reason there is a universe, is pathetic.”

That’s a non-sequitur. It just doesn’t make any sense. How is the fact that big things in outer space exist relevant to the meaningfulness of our lives? It’s not relevant. More to the point, how could a rock, no matter how big, be more important than a living thing? And notice that they never make this argument about the difference between the size of the human body and the size of the Earth. Compare the size of your house and the size of your body. Your house is bigger than your body. Does the fact that your house is bigger than you mean that your house was not created for you? No, of course it doesn’t mean that. Of course your house is bigger than your body. Your house is the place in which you live. Compare the size of the human body with the size of the Earth. Of course the Earth is much larger than the human body. The Earth is the place in which human beings live. The Earth is a playground for people. The Earth is the setting in which we face adversity, achieve, love, fight, and live out the stories of our lives. And one day we will expand outward through the Universe, exploring and colonizing new worlds. Exploration and expansion is part of the drama of the lives of intelligent beings. It is part of God’s plan for us.

1.2 Atheism as Sneering Rhetoric

Sometimes the Big Rocks Argument is presented not quite as an argument, but more as a scornful rhetorical sneer. Something like: “Oh, you think you’re so important? Well your planet is TINY compared to some other planet. You’re not the center of the Universe! The Earth is just a tiny speck of DUST!” Carl Sagan’s speech “Pale Blue Dot” is a perfect example of this kind of rhetorical sneer.

Sagan: From this distant vantage point, the Earth might not seem of any particular interest. Thousands of confident religions, ideologies and economic doctrines [🎶 ridiculous sad piano music playing in the background 🎶] Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot.

The point of Sagan’s speech is just to ridicule everything that anyone has every cared about. His point is to, without using any logical argument, to rhetorically make people feel small by pointing at big empty regions of outer space. Taken literally, Sagan’s speech is nonsense. What is it supposed to mean? That big empty regions are more important than people? That the activity of a big body of rock or gas in outer space is more important, in some objective sense, than the activities of human beings on Earth? How is big stuff in outer space supposed to be more important than living things? It’s a non-sequitur.

1.3 The Big Rocks Argument for Awe at Nature

The usual form of the Big Rocks argument is that life has no meaning, or at the very least, that our lives are not very significant in the grand scheme of things because there are Big Rocks in outer space. But there’s also another more rare form of the Big Rocks Argument that says that life IS meaningful BECAUSE of big rocks. Here’s Christopher Hitchens:

Or read a page of Steven Hawking. Hawking has a colleague who looked at the event horizon of the black hole, do you know what 'I’m talking about?... The event horizon is the point at which the black hole is pulling everything into itself, so over into the black hole goes light itself. It’s so strong it can pull light back into itself. It’s really awe-inspiring… Pulling the light into itself, the event horizon just reorganizing nature. So that if you could get to that lip, the lip of the event horizon and fall in and go in, you could in theory see the past and the future stretching before and in front of you. You would see time. But Hawking has a colleague who says that if he was dying of a terminal illness, that’s how he’d want to go out. Over the lip of the event horizon. That would be majesty, that would be magnificence, that would be awe-inspiring.

How is that meaningful? Being put into a black hole, into a gigantic star and having your body ripped apart by gravity? A person who thinks that would be meaningful doesn’t know what meaning is.

2 The Inefficiency Argument (a variant of the argument from natural evil)

Another popular atheist argument is the argument from inefficiency. Atheists point to some part of the universe or the human body that they say is designed inefficiently, and they say that since God would only design efficient things, the fact that something is designed inefficiently means that there is no God.

2.1 Reductio ad Absurdum of the Inefficiency Argument

I once met an atheist who made this argument from inefficiency about pooping. The atheist with whom I conversed argued that:

1. The human body poops

2. Therefore the human body does not completely all of the food which it consumes, or in his words, the human body is Imperfect

3. Since the human body is imperfect there is no God.

But that argument doesn’t make sense. Why would God want to design non-pooping creatures? What good would that accomplish? This atheist said that the fact that the human body poops means that the human body is imperfect, well imperfect by what standard? Why would the ability to digest every morsel of food and not poop, why would that be the standard by which we judge the perfection of a person’s life? Now admittedly, that’s an extreme form of this argument, but the basic argument that something is inefficient and God would only design efficient things, and so if anything is inefficient about our body or about the physical Universe, then there’s no God, that basic argument is very common in atheist debates. Here’s Hitchens again:

Hitchens: By our terrible dentition and by many other things, our adrenal glands are too big our prefrontal lobes are too small, we’re not the finest primates that could have evolved.

Our adrenal glands are “too big” by what standard? Is the purpose of life, is the purpose of our existence to have small adrenal glands? Is the purpose of our existence to have organs which create an endocrine system which is the maximally physically efficient endocrine system? Is that the meaning of life? I don’t think so. So it doesn’t make sense to point to some aspect of the human body and say it’s inefficient when there’s no reason why we should expect physical efficiency to be the goal of the designer.

3. The Meaning of Life

Use your common sense, use your intuition. Is the meaning of life about morality, struggle, loyalty, love, perseverance, honor, making choices, rejoicing with friends, commiserating after defeat, living the story of your life and fulfilling your destiny? Or is the meaning of life about food digestion and big rocks?

4. Talking About Physical Things Misses The Point

4.1 Atheist Rhetoric Indicates That Atheists Don’t Understand What Theists Actually Believe.

Both the Big Rocks Argument for Atheism and the Inefficiency Argument for Atheism are too focused on physical things, and I think they reveal a misunderstanding in the Atheist conception of what God is. Atheists often talk as if the idea of God is of a powerful sky man who has a physical body and can shoot lightning bolts at sinners. Here’s an example of this misconception from the Atheist TV show Rick and Morty.

Rick: Hey, so what’s next?

The Borg: After I become a Type I civilization this world will be invited into the galactic federation. From there I’ll have access to countless planets and species. One by one I will unify them, I will become the Universe and I will be what the single-minded once called the God!

An alien which takes over all life in the Universe and then controls everyone’s thoughts and actions is not what most believers have in mind when they think about God. Most believers believe that God is outside of space and time and most believers feel that talking about physical things at all really misses the point of what religion is all about. When intelligent religious people say that they believe in God, they mean something that is hard to fully articulate, but it’s something like: belief in a deep moral order to the Universe that the material world is not everything that life is not just a bunch of atoms floating around. That the creator of everything is aware of their actions.

4.2 No possible piece of physical evidence could be evidence for or against God’s existence, because there is little reason to believe that God would want to create such evidence.

Furthermore, when talking about physical evidence for or against God, which I don’t think Atheists or proponents of Intelligent Design have ever addressed. Physical evidence for God is not like physical evidence for any other thing. Because by hypothesis God is omnipotent, the only reason there would be a physical trace of His work would be if He deliberately put it there. Why would God want to create physical evidence of his existence? Would a great artist want to put his signature on top of his painting? At the very least isn’t it at least plausible that a great artist would not want to put his signature on his painting? So ordinary natural phenomena can be examined on the basis of physical evidence which by the laws of nature would tend to be associated with those phenomena, but with physical evidence for the existence of God, we must base our consideration on pure game theory. Would God want to prove that He exists? Suppose He did prove His existence. Suppose that God put some physical mark in the Universe which showed irrefutably that He had designed the Universe intelligently. Then presumably all intelligent scientific men would see this mark and believe in God. But it seems that if their belief in God were the result solely of their knowledge of scientific fact, then their belief in God would be a mundane matter of fact belief, like the belief that Las Vegas is 300 miles from Phoenix. We who are genuinely curious about religious questions all have a sense that mere belief in the proposition <A God, i.e. intelligent designer of the Universe, exists> is not quite the same thing as BELIEVING IN God. And suppose again that there was some mark in the physical Universe which proved that the Universe had been intelligently designed. In such a world, in which belief that the Universe was the work of an intelligent designer was as universal among educated men as belief that the world is round, would men act morally out of fear of divine punishment? Would a man weigh the costs and benefits of an immoral action just as he might weight the costs and benefits of a particular retirement plan? A man might know that the police exist, fear the police, and therefore not cheat his business partners because he knows that if he cheated his business partners he would be punished by the police and he does not want to be punished. But if a man refrained from immoral behavior only because he knew that if he did immoral things he would be punished by God, it still seems that he doesn’t properly BELIEVE in God.

4.3 Would miracles really be evidence for God?

And now suppose that God - or someone purporting to be God - did come to Earth and reveal himself physically. Suppose that some thousand foot tall man with lightning bolts in his hand, seated on a gigantic throne suddenly appeared in Mesopotamia. Suppose that he pronounced a set of laws and struck down thieves and adulterers with lightning bolts. Would that be God? Would it be good to worship him? Or would that reduce you to the blind, servile obedience of a child rather than the doubt, temptation and duty of judgment of a man?

And if you think it would, if you think that it would diminish the seriousness of Man’s responsibility for his own life if it were possible to know God as a mundane ordinary fact, then you understand why a good God would not create any physical sign of himself in the Universe. And therefore why the absence of any such sign is poor evidence against the existence of God. A good God would not put physical proof of his existence in the Universe because to make the question of the existence of God a matter of mundane scientific fact, and to provide divine instruction on every choice would be contrary to the proper relationship between God and Man, and it would destroy the drama, uncertainty and responsibility that make our lives worth living. Revealing the answers to everything all at once might put us in a state of maximum enlightenment but it would take all the living out of life.