Before I start, we must deal with the idea that atheism intends to 'disprove' the God hypothesis. To be clear, I have not set out in any way to disprove God. No reputable atheist has. However, this does not mean that we cannot look at the God hypothesis in terms of probability, even if such a hypothesis fails to make predictions. The culture of science has a term for unfalsifiable claims: not even wrong. These strong words are applied to any God hypothesis.
And then we must deal with the popular notion that the God hypothesis is out of the reach of science or reason or logic. Any definition of God demonstrates a claim to an at least partial understanding of God. It is a contradiction in terms to suggest that ‘God is indefinable or beyond human reason’, not to mention very nearly credo quia absurdum: ‘I believe because it is absurd.’
Furthermore, there has been an all but absolute tendency in the history of man's belief in gods to attach moral commandments to belief. It may be less clear, but believing in anything beyond the Deist god-metaphor has implications. If belief in God didn't encourage many of my fellow citizens to regulate marriage by His standards, or justify (to the jihadists) the destruction of 3,000 innocent human lives not to mention two large buildings, or cause any number of countless, sometimes imperceptible but always present interruptions in my life and, more importantly, the lives of nearly every child, then perhaps I would let this go. There is no doubt that belief in God has caused men to do both good and bad and, whatever our views on that balance are, I don't think it needs to be pointed out that all of these causations result from a claim to, at least partially, understand God and His divine Will. Any view that ‘Trying to explain God in human terms is a mistake and a fallacy in itself.’ flies in the face of every preacher, every theologian, and every churchgoer that I have ever heard of from any religion. Nobody ever said ‘Well, we'll never really understand God in human terms, but you should stay abstinent until He blesses your marriage.’ Basically, what I mean to say is that as some person can claim a definition of God, I am just as able to make a claim about the nature of that definition. There are no ‘off-limits’ arguments for God.
Now, the most tired examples of God’s conflict with science are the Big Bang, Evolution, and Natural Selection theories. I will offer my best inadequate simplification of each. The fact that the universe originated with the Big Bang means that unless we define God metaphorically, something I am no longer inclined to doing, He most certainly was not present at the birth of the universe. The fact that life today has been developed from some very simple origin by evolution means that we must do some very damaging contortions of logic to make room for God at the beginning of life on Earth. The fact that evolution operates by natural selection means that, even if you don't see the second point, God is most certainly not ‘designing’ anything, no matter how intelligent He appears to be.
The Big Bang Theory describes the origin of everything we know in our universe (and presumably everything we don’t as well) from an "extremely dense, hot state" at a finite time. A note on astrophysics: relative terms such as 'extremely' should never be taken lightly. The theory was based first on explanation (Einstein's General Relativity was used by Alexander Friedman to offer an alternative to Einstein's Static view of things) and then observation (for example of red shift from Edwin Hubble-who incidentally taught Spanish, Physics, and Mathematics at New Albany High School). Finally, the theory’s extravagant predictions would turn out to be right on with our best estimations of the universe. The theory does not (cannot, will not) explain the origin of the starting point, but for this argument we don't need to know about that. At the beginning, all of the energy that would over the next 13.73 ± 0.12 billion years come together to form yourself, my dear reader, did exist, but neither you nor I can be said to have existed at the birth of everything. And so God cannot have. We do not need to understand the Big Bang thoroughly (though, I do encourage it, and will be working toward it for some time) to be able to note that no Creator could have been about smashing antiqarks with quarks during the first 10-11 second of time. There is a lot that remains to be explained about the origins of our universe, but suggesting that something omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent, and most of all unfalsifiable--in short purely, supernaturally perfect--is responsible for these gaps in our understanding will almost certainly lead to further heliocentric-type embarrassments as these gaps are filled.
Each life form deviates very finely but very routinely from the recipe of that life form's parents and not instead from a perfect or standard model (as Aristotle suggested and as most believed before the Theory of Evolution). Something has non-randomly chosen which of the many random deviations live on. If we follow the regression (x is the child of y is the child of…) through Earth’s long history we observe a weak trend in complexity. Few species—not individuals—become less complex, some stay the same, and some still find a way to become more complex. Based on this, looking back we see a very long, crooked arrow pointing toward some origination. Like the Big Bang, the explanation behind the starting point is an interesting topic that we can reserve for another argument. The important thing is the trend from a very simple starting point. This trend is Natural Selection’s fault, but for argument’s sake lets consider the other possibility: ‘Intelligent Design’. The problem with ‘Intelligent Design’ is that it proposes the height of complexity—to poke at the God that was perpetually presented to me in the Apostle’s Creed, a God who not only created all, but also begets humanish progeny, causes parthenogenesis in humans, raises life from the dead, forgives and presumably hears our sins, judges based on whatever standards, and finally admits us to either eternal ecstasy or torment—to have been present before anything evolved. Yes, this is simply a discontinuity in the 'complexity of life versus time' graph, but it also leaves behind more, bigger questions than it takes care of. Without Intelligent Design, the process by which life has come about on Earth has clearly and satisfactorily been explained and this elegant explanation has been tested and supported. With Intelligent Design, not only do we lose the vast explanatory and, more importantly, predictive power of Natural Selection, but we are also back to the start. With ‘Intelligent Design’ we might have explained away the development of life on Earth, but now we must answer the questions of ‘Who is this God, and where did he come from?’ before we can predict anything. The great Friar Ockham would not approve.
Natural Selection is what has determined the changing frequency of old and newly mutated genes throughout the history of life on Earth, and thereby designed the multitudes of life of Earth. What do we mean by Natural Selection designing things? Well, the deviations within a species that I mentioned earlier can contain beneficial or detrimental changes as well as entirely neutral changes. How well a particular animal’s phenotype deals with the many factors it encounters throughout its life is what determines the probability that the corresponding gene will be passed on, and therefore eventually determines the frequencies of every gene in a species’ gene pool. This means that any serious changes must take place over thousands of tedious, generally imperceptible steps. That is why our eyes are upside-down and backwards, and why the recurrent laryngeal nerve takes the scenic route to the neck (look at a Giraffe’s). Unless an 'Intelligent Designer '(or the devil himself) were somehow attempting to fool us by making everything appear as if Natural Selection were the designer, this is our only explanation.
Sure, anybody could say ‘God is beyond our physical quantification and existed beyond matter or life at the beginning of time of the universe or life on earth,’ or ‘God does not personally chose which genes thrive and which are discarded, but the system that he created, the environment in which everything lives, does and so God designs everything most indirectly.’ And, yes, this would be strictly possible. However, the human ability to conceive of possible explanations for anything does not make those explanations any more probable. In fact, what we do know of the universe and life around us makes God much more improbable. What makes anyone think that God is reading my mind? What has led anyone to believe that God is not only supernatural, but so perfectly supernatural to have been able to exist for all time and defy logic in many varied ways? Even more important, what makes anyone (there are a lot of them) think that God is in any way interested in human affairs? As if a perfect creator could do no better. I trust I do not need to reiterate the ‘burden of proof’ argument, or any of its cute, farcical examples. I can spend the rest of my days chipping away at every single varied definition of God, demonstrating that each is either (and every single one falls into one of these three categories) impossible, grossly improbable, or a superfluous metaphor for something we already know or are working hard to understand. But I don’t need to. The Gods that are offered, when strictly within the realm of possibility, all have one thing in common: they are not even wrong.
is a quick survey of the New Atheists such as Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens and others, and the responses to them. As an atheist, I was impressed by how accurately the views of each of these New Atheists were reproduced. Dr. Mohler made no attempt to cheapen the discussion with oversimplification or pettiness.
