The Existence of God

"Think for a minute of a marble table in front of you. Do you think that, given a trillion years or infinite time, this table could suddenly or gradually become conscious, aware of it's surroundings, aware of its identity the way you are? It is simply inconceivable that this would or could happen. And the same goes for any kind of matter."
Antony Flew

Today one of my reoccurring brain-melting thoughts came back to me. I was on my lunch break staring at my empty coke bottle and realised that the fact that anything exists defies all logic. The glass bottle shouldn't exist. Neither should the table it's sitting on. Everything that exists must have been created by something preceeding it.

And therefore nothing should exist.

Not empty space, not time, not a vaccum, not even the colour black. They are all things that came from somewhere. The fact that existence exists is insane. But here we are, in an incredibly complex, finely tuned universe; and it defies all reason.

You cannot believe that the universe has always been there.

Whether you believe in a universe or a multiverse, or that the Big Bang / Big Crunch cycle has occurred millions of times; it all had to come from somewhere. Nothing comes from nothing. An eternally existing universe is inexplicable. An eternally existing God makes sense. It's not a 50-50 take your pick.

You can ask all the same questions about God which you ask about the universe. Where did God come from? What caused him to exist? How can he have no beginning? But God is spirit and he is completely separate from the universe. How can you reason through, study, understand or theorise about a being in which you have no scientific knowledge and can never observe? His existence is entirely different from ours in every way.

As Flew puts it, "God's existence is inexplicable to us, but not to God".

Somewhere in the middle

Most of my friends and people I've met over the years haven't been atheists. But you couldn't really describe them as agnostics or theists. They're floating around somewhere in the middle, sort of believing in a God but not really sure.

Antony Flew's book, "There Is A God", which I'm reading through at the moment came up with some very interesting points:

"Anthony Kenny ... suggested that it takes more effort to show that you know something than that you do not (this includes even the claim that the concept of God is not coherent)."
p54

It's so easy not to have a thought-through set of beliefs or at least opinions. It requires effort – a little bit of study and research. Even as a Christian you can be absent from any real convictions. Because convictions require a backbone of knowledge and understanding, and those are formed by gradual growth over time.

But your convictions are surely what makes you useful as a human being.

Interestingly, going back to Flew's book...

"The Thomist philosopher Ralph McInerny reasoned that it is natural for human beings to believe in God because of the order, arrangement, and lawlike character of natural events. So much so, he said, that the idea of God is almost innate, which seems like a prima facie argument against atheism."
p55

No one's born a Christian. And it seems no one's born an atheist or an agnostic. All those things require a system of belief, a formation of opinions, which babies don't have. It seems that floating around somewhere in the middle is the default position. A point from which not everyone progresses.

––––––

Similar blog: It's good to have an opinion, even if you're wrong

Antony Flew on Evolution

Some more from Antony Flew:

In my book Darwinian Evolution, I pointed out that natural selection does not positively produce anything. It only eliminates, or tends to eliminate, whatever is not competitive. A variation does not need to bestow any actual competitive disadvantage. To choose a rather silly illustration, suppose I have useless wings tucked away under my suit coat, wings that are too weak to lift my frame off the ground. Useless as they are, these wings do not enable me to escape predators or gather food. But as long as they don't make me more vulnerable to predators, I will probably survive to reproduce and pass on my wings to my descendants. Darwin's mistake in drawing too positive an inference with his suggestion that natural selection produces something was perhaps due to his employment of the expressions "natural selection" or "survival of the fittest" rather than his own ultimately preferred alternative, "natural preservation".

'There Is A God' by Antony Flew, p78-9

I also read a few years ago, I think in some Christian scientist magazine, that any mutation that did prove beneficial to an animal (something that's never been witnessed), within a few generations that mutation would become so dilute in the gene pool it would be as if it never occurred.

Antony Flew on the "Monkey Theorem"

Here is an outrageously long quote from Antony Flew, which I've included for the simple reason that it's really good, and I love it. Made a few highlights.

I was particularly impressed with Gerry Schroeder's point-by-point refutation of what I call the "monkey theorem." This idea, which has been presented in a number of forms and variations, defends the possibility of life arising by chance using the analogy of a multitude of monkeys banging away on computer keyboards and eventually ending up writing a Shakespearean sonnet.

Schroeder first referred to an experiment conducted by the British National Council of Arts. A computer was placed in a cage with six monkeys. After one month of hammering away at it (as well as using it as a bathroom!), the monkeys produced fifty typed pages – but not a single word in the English language. Schroeder noted that this was the case even though the shortest word in the English language is one letter (a or I). A is a word only if there is a space either side of it. If we take it that the keyboard has thirty characters (the twenty-six letters and other symbols), then the likelihood of getting a one-letter word is 30 times 30 times 30, which is 27,000. The likelihood of getting a one-letter word is one chance out of 27,000.

Schroeder then applied the probabilities to the sonnet analogy. "What's the chance of getting a Shakespearean sonnet?" he asked. He continued:


All the sonnets are the same length. They're by definition fourteen lines long. I picked the one I knew the opening line for, "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?" I counted the number of letters; there are 488 letters in that sonnet. What's the likelihood of hammering away and getting 488 letters in the exact sequence as in "Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer's Day?"? What you end up with is 26 multiplied by itself 488 times – or 26 to the 488th power. Or, in other words, in base 10, 10 to the 690th.

[Now] the number of particles in the universe –  not grains of sand, I'm talking about protons, electrons and neutrons –  is 10 to the 80th. Ten to the 80th is 1 with 80 zeros after it. Ten to the 690th is 1 with 690 zeros after it. There are not enough particles in the universe to write down the trials; you'd be off by a factor of 10 to the 600th.

If you took the entire universe and converted it to computer chips –  forget the monkeys –  each one weighing a millionth of a gram and had each computer chip able to spin out 488 trials at, say, a million times a second [producing] random letters, the number of trials you would get since the beginning of time would be 10 to the 90th trials. It would be off again by a factor of 10 to the 600th. You will never get a sonnet by chance. The universe would have to be 10 to the 600th times larger. Yet the world just thinks the monkeys can do it every time.

After hearing Schroeder's presentation, I told him that he had very satisfactorily and decisively established that the "monkey theorem" was a load of rubbish, and that it was particularly good to do it with just a sonnet; the theorem is sometimes proposed using the works of Shakespeare or a single play, such as Hamlet. If the theorem won't work for a single sonnet, then of course it's simply absurd to suggest that the more elaborate feat of the origin of life could have been achieved by chance.

'There Is A God' by Antony Flew, p75-8

Antony Flew on DNA

The following is a long quote from Antony Flew's book title "There is a God: how the world's most notorious atheist changed his mind".

The last of my public debates, a symposium at New York University, occurred in May 2004 ... To the surprise of all concerned, I announced at the start that I now accepted the existence of a God ... In the video of the symposium, the announcer suggested that of all the great discoveries of modern science, the greatest was God.

In this symposium, when asked if recent work on the origin of life pointed to the activity of a creative Intelligence, I said:


Yes, I now think it does ... almost entirely because of the DNA investigations. What I think the DNA material has done is that it has shown, by the almost unbelievable complexity of the arrangements which are needed to produce life, that intelligence must have been involved in getting these extraordinary diverse elements to work together. It's the enormous complexity of the number of elements and the enormous subtlety of the ways they work together. The meeting of these two parts at the right time by chance is simply minute. It is all a matter of the enormous complexity by which the results we achieved, which looked to me like the work of intelligence."

'There Is A God' by Antony Flew, p74-5

The truth they were hiding

These quotes speak for themselves really, about how powerful the way a Christian lives his life is. These are quite negative quotes which remind us how damaging it is to claim the name of Christ, yet continue to live a carnal, seemingly godless existence.

You can know all the right arguments to 'be a good witness' but everything that you get up to just hangs off your spirit. People see through the haze...

"I would have liked to convince my father that I had found what he had been looking for, the ineffable something he had longed for all his life. I would have liked to persuade him that the search for God does not have to be in vain. But it was hopeless. He had know too many blind Christians, bleak moralists who sucked the joy from life and persecuted their opponents; he would never have been able to see the truth they were hiding"
Katharine Trait, 'My Father, Bertrand Russell'

"I like your Christ, I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ."
Mahatma Gandhi

“The single greatest cause of atheism in the world today is Christians, who acknowledge Jesus with their lips, and then walk out the door and deny him by their lifestyle. That is what an unbelieving world simply finds unbelievable.”
Brennan Manning