Why I don’t believe in god–pt3: Design
Again, many of my more philosophically inclined friends have summarily dismissed the “proof theories” as worthless rubbish, and I acknowledge that, but they’ll need to forgive me for continuing on with these posts. These friends of mine are not the intended audience for these posts, the posts are more of a personal clarification of the “why’s” and “how’s” of my current viewpoint. (The funny thing about viewpoints is perspectives change, so I should note that I similarly do not cling to strongly to any current belief and I’ll probably look back on these posts after some time and say “what the hell was I thinking?”)
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The argument always went: “Look how intricate the world is, see the many requirements to sustain life, and how they happen without our effort? See if one little thing changes, like the salinity in the oceans, everything falls out of balance. How can you look at that and not see an intelligent designer behind it all?”
I long held to this argument, one of my favorite teachers, Rob Bell, was a proponent of this argument in his DVD (lesson? Sermon? Talk?) “Everything Is Spiritual.” It seemed to make sense to me, and I guess on some quasi-logical level the “Go for the best explanation, even it if isn’t 100% conclusive” argument swayed me. God, then, must have been the designer of the world, for the amazing intricacies and beauty of nature supposedly call his name. I think it often growing up it was said “The sunrise is God’s signature.” Cheesy, but it gets the point across.
I have no problems admitting to the beauty of the world, indeed my next tattoo (to complement my now ironic YHWH tattoo, that says “I am not lost” underneath it) will be “Mono No Aware”—the English pronunciation of a Japanese phrase meaning “the ahh-ness of things,” since this world is full of moments that fill us with the feeling of “ahh,” such as a beautiful sunrise, or this sunset I captured the other day driving down the road. But do these really speak to the existence of a creator? Derek actually responded to this claim a bit the other day, so I’ll defer this point over to his comments, and address the subject from a different standpoint—one of acceptance.
Taking that God is the designer, the question becomes, where does the so-called design stop? Can you get god “off the hook” for the deaths, destruction, wars, and famines prevalent all over? For if god is the designer of it all then these things are necessarily part of god’s design, or perhaps it’s best to say, the result of god’s design. To borrow the argument from Russell, if an inventor designs a machine that goes horribly wrong, and then inventor is prescient enough to know that the machine will hurt, maim, destroy, or in any way inflict damage upon others, then it is the designer who should be held to account for the failures of the design. We similarly hold designers of buildings, bridges, and vehicles that fail to understand the flaws and failures in their design to account when the magnitude and gravity of the failure of the design is made apparent. Can the designer then be called “good” if s/he knows full well the ramifications of the failure yet continues to put the design out there?
To be fair, an open deist would argue that god didn’t have the foreknowledge of the current situation thus cannot be held to account, but the deists rely on the argument of “first cause,” which I’ve already addressed, so even they cannot put forth any sort of convincing notion of god. (More on this last sentence latter, so all of you stop thinking I’m some atheist clinging to black and white definitions of everything.)
Thus I stand now with my previous foundations for the belief in a deity lain bare and shown too weak to hold such a weighty notion.
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