Some days ago I wrote an article proposing uncommon modern way of dealing with theological issues. Today I would like to use my theories practically against popular anti-Creator arguments. I will go through arguments listed at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy_of_religion and attempt to disprove them one by one in the way I would respond to thirsty-for-discussion atheists. If you are a believer though, I recommend you try to respond to them first before looking at my opinions. Can you come up with better answers? Do you have answers at all? Let’s dive into it right now.

Ultimate Boeing 747 gambit

Let Wiki speak!

The argument is a play on the notion of a “tornado sweeping through a junkyard to assemble a Boeing 747” employed to decry abiogenesis and evolution as vastly unlikely and better explained by the existence of a creator god. According to Dawkins, this logic is self-defeating as the theist must now account for the god’s existence and explain whether or how the god was created. In his view, if the existence of highly complex life on Earth is the equivalent of the implausible junkyard Boeing 747, the existence of a highly complex god is the “ultimate Boeing 747” that truly does require the seemingly impossible to explain its existence.

I cannot simply side with creationists here, because in my opinion abiogenesis makes sense and is not contradictory to the idea of a Creator. I am in the middle of the two extremes:

• God created everything personally (in 6 days if you like),
• everything just happened.

Why could not God set up the rules and constraints and then let the evolution do its business? This attitude is compatible with both religion and the teachings of Darwin. Moreover, from a programmer’s point of view, observing such world is much more fun.

But the argument point is not really about orthodox creationism. If God created this complex world, who created (logically more complex) God?

I do not know that (no one does), but I DO KNOW that this argument cannot be used to support atheism, because it uses false implication God must have been created by even greater God => There is no God. This was explained in the previous article, but for the sake of completeness here it comes again.

The God Chain

The so-called “God chain” idea may be difficult to grasp, therefore use Sims analogy for easy imagination: If we launch a Sims game, we are essentially creating new world and becoming its god (assume we are also the creators of the game, so we are omnipotent, too). Now one of our beloved creations starts its “PC”, launches its own “Sims” game and also becomes (albeit lesser) god. New world is created, let’s refer to it as Sims². That can go on ad infinitum and is limited only by computational power designated for each subsequent layer. We now demonstrated that the God chain can practically exist. Now two options arise:

1. The God chain does not have a start at all – we have infinite number of Gods above us. That logically means our God does exist.
2. The God chain has a defined start. For traditional believers it would be God -> Us -> Sims -> Sims²…, for atheists only Us -> Sims -> Sims²…, or the start is anywhere above. Can you see the flaw in the argument now? Those chains are not too different. We do not know where the start of the chain is, therefore it is possible that God does exist and we are not at the top. Maybe the opposite is true, but have fun proving it…

Note: If you would like to learn something about genetics, low level biochemistry and abiogenesis, check surprisingly not boring The Vital Question book.

Atheist’s Wager

Consider these 3 binary statements:

• A benevolent God exists.
• You live a good life.
• You believe in God.

Now consider all combinations (there is 8 of them). What is your gain for each possibility?

• 00X – God does not exist, you live a bad life. No matter whether you believe in God or not, you leave a negative legacy => some negative gain.
• 01X – God does not exist, you live a good life. No matter whether you believe in God or not, you leave a positive legacy => some positive gain.
• 10X – God exists, you live a bad life. Both bad atheist and bad believer would go to hell. Infinite negative gain.
• 11X – God exists, you live a good life. Good believer would go to heaven. Good atheists would go to heaven as well (benevolent God would agree; Christians that disagree are not consistent). Infinite positive gain.

The Atheist’s Wager simply says that belief in God is irrelevant, it is worth to be good. Nothing more, nothing less. I have no reason to disagree, although I believe staying good without faith must be considerably harder.

Evil God Challenge

Evil God Challenge is a thought experiment, asks why an all-good God should be more likely than an all-evil God and states that there is no reason to accept that God is good and can provide moral guidance before finding a satisfactory answer. How do we know the God is good? Can we see what is good?

That is tricky. Let’s start with goodness in family. This is not a matter of morale, consciousness or religion. Evolutionary, parents take care of their offsprings – protecting them before they hatch, feed them while they cannot feed themselves, teaching them how to survive. This applies to many species at least for the last 65 million years (because I remember the T-Rex mother protecting her nest in Walking with Dinosaurs series), maybe more. Sure, sometimes they also kill them, but that is an anomaly – either the offspring is ill or the environmental conditions are too bad. Under normal circumstances individuals in family are good to each other.

To be truly good, you should be good to anyone, not just to your family. That means 1) protect others from harm and 2) do not cause the harm. What is harm? Remember that if somebody steals from you, beats you, rapes you or murders you, you are not really happy? This, I believe, is simplified way of how to know that you are doing good things. Feel happy, but not at the expense of someone else (which can sometimes be very difficult to assure).

I hope we agree that theft, rape and murder are bad. These are forbidden in many religions, at least in the most influencing. If the God is all-evil he would not forbid such deeds (as in Tob 4,15, 10 Commandments and more). Why would he? They sound like fun (at least according to Sandor Clegane)…

Paradox of free will

If we have free will, how could omniscient God know what we will do in the future? This is the core of the paradox of free will. And this is a tough one.

First of all, by logic, an omniscient God should not exist for a random, non-deterministic, world. That makes the problem more philosophical rather than theological – we can use determinism instead of omniscience. Then we see the problem is actually the Libertarian free will vs. Hard determinism. Check https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vCGtkDzELAIf for some insight, it is very helpful. I like the hard determinism part – our actions have invisible causes that happen in our brains. We do not know enough about consciousness yet and therefore I expect “free will” actually have causes that are mostly of psychological (and thus biochemical, and thus physical) nature. Any sane atheist with belief in science must agree.

Deterministic world is compatible with omniscient deity. In addition, this also matches my knowledge about randomness in computers and the world, as briefly stated in The Divine Programmer post. It seems likely that we live in a deterministic world. Are we really responsible for our actions, then? That is something I do not know, due to the fact that the concept of free will is not understood enough. I will stick with this explanation for now…

Hitchens’s razor

According to Wiki, Hitchens’s razor is presented as “What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence” and is similar to Sagan standard “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence” and Russell’s Teapot. In other words it states that it is a job of a believer to prove the existence of God, otherwise their opponents need not argue at all.

Nonsense. Atheism is not a baseline, it is equally unproven theory. I can say in the same spirit “If you think God does not exist, prove it first before talking to me”. Next!

Avoiding the wrong hell

This problem, also known as Inconsistent revelations, is based on theological conflicts among distinct religions or even within and therefore implies that, in these circumstances, the existence of one God is unlikely. There are thousands of discrepancies, including:

1. Jesus is the Son of God/just a prophet. (Christians vs. Jews)
2. Holy Spirit is at the same level as Father and Son. (catholic vs. orthodox)
3. God can have multiple avatars. (Hinduism vs. Abrahamic religions)

These conflicts must be solved individually. The problem usually lies in the fact that the statement is misinterpreted, not fully defined or not important at all. Overall I find core ideas universal across major religions. On the other hand, strong contradictions seems to be rarely significant at all. To respond to conflicts above, I say:

1. The term “Son of God” is not scientifically defined and the definition of “son” (in terms of genetic information being passed on) is in principle incompatible with Jesus’s origin.
2. Yeah, not really important. If the theory opposing your beliefs would be true, what changes? Nothing.
3. The Divine Programmer Theory implies that hinduists are closer to the truth. Moreover, I believe that the difference between following a deity or a holy individual is negligible. I will dive more into this in the future.

Nonbelief

If perfectly good and loving God existed, every reasonable person would have been brought to believe.

The interpretation of “brought to believe” is the key here. Mankind could be forced to believe by the God himself, but that would strip us from freedom of choice. Essentially, we would become pre-programmed robots. On the other hand, if you take “brought to believe” as an act of intellect, anyone is free to do so. As you have been exposed to the idea of God (right now at least, because you are reading this post), you can deny it, but it is just your choice now. By the way, those who have never been exposed to faith (dead infants for instance), are NOT doomed, because, according to Torah, Bible and other sources, survivability is not a relevant criterion.

Again, as in Free will paradox, we are limited here by the insufficient understanding of consciousness.

Omnipotence paradox

We dealt with omnipotence in the previous article. Questions such as:

• Can God create a stone so heavy that even He could not lift it?
• Can God create a prison so secure that he cannot escape from it?

do not make sense because God is outside the world and words “lift” and “escape”, respectively, cannot be applied in their natural context. Questions attacking formal definitions are different. For example:

• Could God make 1+1=3?
• Could God create a 3-edged square?

In our laws or logic, the answer is no. If you can redefine those laws, though, it is perfectly possible (you can easily implement a calculator that will yield 3 when you attempt to compute 1+1 or model a 3-edged polygon in Blender and name it Square). If the world is created by a divine entity, so are the physical and mathematical laws. The deity could therefore redefine them to fit such silly questions.

Poor design

An omnipotent God would not create organisms with suboptimal designs.

Why not? Neural processes (both natural and artificial) are based on the idea of suboptimal solution that is improved over time. The same applies to the evolution. If you ever came across neural networks or evolutionary algorithms, you know that they work, and more importantly, it is FUN.

What is suboptimal anyway? Are people of 21st century more optimal than farmers from 7000 BC? In terms of intelligence, understanding of universe, rate of creation of YouTube content, sure. In terms of ecological impact for instance, not so much… Who is more optimal – Stephen Hawking or Usain Bolt?

Problem of evil

Why would an omnibenevolent God let evil exist?

According to the Divine Programmer Theory, we are merely observed subjects. Our lives are assessed with regards to our constraints. In this context, illness, death or natural disasters are not evil, they are just circumstances for us to be tested against (however cynical it may sound). Regarding interpersonal evil, the offender uses his free will to become the source. God could prevent that, but at the cost of stripping him of free will, degrading him to a robot. From a global scale anyway, for victim this is just another circumstance.

Problem of hell

Why would an omnipotent and omnibenevolent God let hell exist?

The Divine Programmer Theory suggests that our actions are being assessed. If we prove ourselves worth, we might be used for something advanced. That makes sense – a programmer will keep own program/script/neural network that works as planned. If you perform poorly, you will be forgotten. This explanation is 100% compatible with Christianity.

What should one do to match the criteria? Most prevalent religions give the same answer, which can be paraphrased as “Don’t be a dick”. Every religion has its own nuances, but the core is the same and, in my opinion, the core is essential.

Conclusion

In this post I attempted to destroy most popular arguments against religion. I believe I was quite successful, the only real caveat for me lies in the insufficient knowledge of consciousness. Am I right? Am I wrong? What do you think?

Next post is probably going to be about something I call the Levels of Enlightement.