Happy Friday everyone! Did you know that on this day in 1955 Disneyland opened it’s gates for the first time? There’s nothing like a little Magic Kingdom to jump-start your Friday.
Today’s post will be more serious than most, but hang along for the ride, you may find you enjoy it. As of late, I’ve been reading The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins and discussing it with a friend as I go through the book. Today, I want to address one of the things that frustrate me about one the arguments.
The main argument that breaks down in this book about the disproof of God is that Christians rely too much on a lack of information or using super complex things to point to God. It is presented in this way. If I can’t explain A, than it must mean that it is because of God. Dawkins gets quite angry because this often allows most Christians to live in ignorance. While I may agree that the Christian world isn’t as conducive to academic thought than other worldviews, it also doesn’t mean that it is an automatic proof against God. Dawkins brings up the point many times that too often science is dubbed as the how things work and religion as the why things work. He brings up the question of why should religion be allowed to have the why if you can’t test and prove it with scientific fact.
I’ll break this more down some other day, but the point that I want to get to is that science still doesn’t explain why things were created the way they are. The Christian points to God, but the atheist says it must be something else. That something else is the anthropic principle. This states that although the conditions to have the creation of life are statistically huge, the statistic obviously happened once because we are here. In this idea, the idea of intelligent design is torn apart because it is stated that if the conditions for life are so improbable, than the fact that there could be an even more powerful creator is even more improbable.
The atheist says then that because the chances are so unlikely, God doesn’t exist. But here is the part that boggles my mind. The anthropic principle doesn’t state how everything came to be. All it states is that the statistics have worked out once. In essence, instead of saying that God created the universe, it is saying mere chance created the universe. In the anthropic principle, statistics and numbers have taken the place of a deity. I’d like to put forth the notion then that the anthropic principle doesn’t have anything new to say, but is just the same old arguments with a new “god.”
Let me know what you think. Hit me back in the comments.
