Atheism Fails Fail

There’s a certain comfort in knowing that when I get back from a two week long vacation that is mostly devoid of the internet and news, the world will still be as crazy as when I left it. I submit as evidence this gem found on Facebook in which a theist attempts to use philosophy to argue for the First Cause Argument as evidence for a creator. Here is the text in its entirety:

"But who created God?" is an invalid and tedious argument. It is logically impossible for the "cause" of time to be dependent upon time. Thus, the primary "cause" was "always there" (or it "never was"). Due to the level of fine tuning of the universe, which is orders of magnitude greater than any human engineering achievement, the "cause" of the universe must be an agent which is not restricted by the laws of nature (the "cause" is above nature) and it is indirectly responsible for the applications of science and logic. Due to the algorithmic complexity present within every single cell of every living system (and due to the fact that the digital information therein is not reducible to nature), it can be inferred that the primary "cause" is a personal being which is potentially unbounded in power. When the atheist\naturalist appeals to science or logic (formal disciples which are indirectly the result of the Creator and only possible due the uniformity in nature - evidently the Creator upholds the universe in a consistent manner) in an attempt to refute the existence of the Creator (or assumes that natural processes can explain the origin of natural processes), they demonstrate short-sighted irrational behavior which is not consistent with logic or science. It is outside the realm of science to "disprove" the reality of a Creator and it certainly isn't based on logic. Thus, atheism is merely a metaphysical naturalist philosophy.

So let’s break this down.

"But who created God?" is an invalid and tedious argument. It is logically impossible for the "cause" of time to be dependent upon time. Thus, the primary "cause" was "always there" (or it "never was"). OBJECTION: There are several problems with this line of reasoning for if there was no cause, or, the cause was always there, the cause itself is unchanging and therefore can have no effect on temporal things such as the universe (supposing the universe did have a beginning); that which does not change cannot be a cause as causes are changes. Time may also have always been a dimension of what preceded the universe, if anything did. Though even scientists suspect that time began when the universe began, the reality is that they actually do not know for certain. Moreover, if God had no beginning, this tells us that we know at least one thing didn’t have a beginning. Problem is, for all we know, there may be other things without a beginning, such as the universe.

Due to the level of fine tuning of the universe, which is orders of magnitude greater than any human engineering achievement, the "cause" of the universe must be an agent which is not restricted by the laws of nature (the "cause" is above nature) and it is indirectly responsible for the applications of science and logic. OBJECTION: Again, several problems. This line implies human beings are already at the pinnacle of their knowledge with no chance of going any further. The author is in effect attempted to argue that because human being haven’t perfected cosmological feats of engineering, this means God did it. But since no one knows what it takes to create a universe, doing so may be a simple matter of having the right knowledge or power or both. Certainly human beings do not know how to create a universe, but this doesn’t mean it will never happen. Nor is the universe fine-tuned for life as ‘tuning’ implies a conscious agent. The laws of the universe happen to be what they are and given this fact, there was a 100% chance that life would arise in the universe. (I don’t know why this is hard for people to wrap their heads around, but it is only proper to speak in terms of chance when we don’t know what is going to happen next.) Sure, if the laws of the universe were off just a little tiny bit, life – as we know it – wouldn’t exist. This doesn’t mean life can’t exist in a universe with different laws. (Granted, a definition of ‘life’ would be useful here.)

Due to the algorithmic complexity present within every single cell of every living system (and due to the fact that the digital information therein is not reducible to nature), it can be inferred that the primary "cause" is a personal being which is potentially unbounded in power. OBJECTION: Fancifully worded reasoning does not lend the reasoning itself any credence. The appearance of complexity in any system is simply a matter of degree to which one understands the system. A mechanic or engineer that has worked on or built one type of car for 50 years will find that car less complex than a modern electrical motorcycle that actually has less parts. Just because our DNA looks complex does not mean it is; to a suitably knowledgeable alien, our DNA may appear like child’s play. Even if we grant that there was a cause to this complexity within us, this tells us nothing about the creator. If we know anything about the way in which most things are built, we should suspect that the universe was built by multiple creators. When’s the last time a single person built a skyscraper by themselves? This question alone deflates the insistence of a lone creator seeing how much more ‘complex’ the universe is than a skyscraper. Finally, there is no digital information in our cells; the information may be construed as digital information, but it is not in actuality ‘digital’ information.

It is outside the realm of science to "disprove" the reality of a Creator and it certainly isn't based on logic. Thus, atheism is merely a metaphysical naturalist philosophy. OBJECTION: Oddly enough, the author is trying to use logic to make a case for a creator (based on the First Cause Argument) and then says right here logic can’t be used to deny God’s existence…in other words, you can use logic to prove God but you can’t use logic to deny God’s existence. That’s like saying you can use logic to prove 1+1=2 but you cannot use logic to prove otherwise (even though you can). Moreover, look at all the things science has explained that used to be in the realm of religious explanations but are no longer because those explanations were false, e.g. thunder, disease, the Geocentric model, etc. If scientific explanation are better than religious ones and we continually find this to be the case, we can safely infer that God doesn’t exist. Therefore, theism is merely metaphysical wishful thinking.