Take the atheist challenge?

Question

Looking at an automobile I can see by its complexity, that it didn't just happen, it was created. Taking into perspective that the Earth alone, not the entire universe, is infinitely more complex; it seems to reason that it must have also been created by an intelligent force. Far more intelligent than us. Just looking at the systems and sub-systems that keep everything in order, we have an ecosystem that is in balance without our inteference obviously. Mathmatical laws can be formulated and results reproduced from these laws.
How can a case be made that there is not an intelligent creator behind all of this? I'm not referring to any God or deity. I'm not using the bible in my argument. Can you give me a case that stands on its own merit that there is no creator?

I'm afraid that those of you that used my argument to prove your own are disqualifed.

Also those that used your argument to disprove God are also disqualified.

I thought you claim to be enlightened yet you can not follow simple instructions.
A case that stands on its own merit.

I'm not attacking your beliefs simply trying to understand the basis for them.

That leaves only a few of your answers that qualify.

Again many of you are making too many assumptions about my beliefs in your arguments. This is not a issue of morality. I'm simply interested in your view point of how everything came to be without there being a intelligent force behind it that also keeps it from going into utter chaos. If it takes billions of year, it takes billions of years. Actually time is not the issue. Time is a man made measurement to help us put things in order.

Answer 1

There is not way to prove there is not creator!!!!! There is no way to prove that there is!!!! There is only evidence to base your individual beliefs on. The Big Bang, evolution, and surivival of the fittest explain life just as well as the creator theory.

Answer 2

"Looking at an automobile I can see by its complexity, that it didn't just happen, it was created. "
Right. But there is evidence for its creator(s)... the manufacturer, the names of the people who contributed to its design and building.

"Taking into perspective that the Earth alone, not the entire universe, is infinitely more complex; it seems to reason that it must have also been created by an intelligent force."
If you're a monotheist, which is apparently the mindset you are pushing. You're not fooling anyone. I'm more than willing to bet that if I asked you to define this "creator", you'd specify the Christian god. Why can't it be multiple gods? It seems to reason that the universe could have been created by an amorphous blob. Your reasoning begs itself, as expected from an ID advocate.

"How can a case be made that there is not an intelligent creator behind all of this?"
How can a case be made that there is? You certainly haven't presented any proof as of yet. You've only begged your own assumptions. You must concede that because the universe is infinitely complex, its creator must be even more complex and therefore have a creator, ad infinitum.

"Can you give me a case that stands on its own merit that there is no creator?"
Here we go again with these stupid "prove a negative" questions. Can you give me a case that stands on its own merit that you do not owe me $10,000?

Answer 3

There are several flaws to your argument -- let me point them out to you.

First things first, you aren't actually making an argument, you're making an analogy. Analogies are useful teaching aides, but they don't prove anything. For example, your analogy:

1. All designed things are complex.
2. The universe is complex.
3. Therefore the universe is designed.

suffers from the same flaw as this one:

1. All crows are black.
2. Fluffy is black.
3. Therefore Fluffy is a crow.

It just doesn't work. Fluffy could be any number of different things.

Secondly, even if you were making a correct argument, your solution violates the premise. An intelligent designer is infinitely more complex than its creation, and therefore, by the premise, would also require a SuperDesigner. (And so on ad infinitum...)

Thirdly, bad argument aside, your premise is flawed. The litmus test for design is not complexity. The word "design" exists in contradistinction to "natural." You recognize something is designed by how much it separates itself from being naturally made. Therefore, expanding the word "design" to include all of nature obliterates this distinction and the meaning of the word. If a group of scientists designed and built a rock that was exactly identical to natural rocks in size, shape, color, composition, etc... -- you would not be able to tell that it was designed, regardless of how complex the molecular structure was! The litmus test for design is not complexity, it is "unnaturality" -- its difference from nature.

Fourth. You, like many ID advocates, focus on things that are "good" -- the balanced ecosystem and whatnot. Well, what about a hurricane or tornado? Those systems are extremely complex. Trillions of air molecules working together to form one massively stable, destructive system -- that's way more complicated than a car. So it must be designed, right? ID advocates are usually very selective about what they call "designed," because although they say they are just looking for a "designer force," it's actually a creationism argument, and they don't want their creator to be associated with morally reprehensible designs.

(Sidenote: The only time they don't do this is when they don't know what they're talking about. Bacterium flagella, a poster child of the ID movement because it's supposedly "irreducibly complex," is the main ingredient in the disease of diarrhea. Diarrhea is not something to laugh about -- it is the #1 killer of babies in the world, especially in third world countries. Does the "intelligent designer" like killing babies?)

Fifth. Your argument is based on an automobile, whereas some of the most complex things on this planet are living. The ability to reproduce is a HUGE jump that your argument makes that is not defended. Self-replication means I don’t need a designer, because my “designer” and producer is my parents.

Sixth. Even if I granted your entire flawed argument and premise, the most you have established is an “intelligent design force.” This force need not be alive, nor need it be concerned with the welfare of humans, nor need it be singular. So even if you’re right, you haven’t established much of anything.

Seventh. Your call for atheists to “give you a case that stands on its own merits that there is no creator” is attempting to prove a negative, and is (again) a flawed request. Can you prove to me that Zeus and Thor don’t exist? If not, then they must, right? You can't say answers are invalid if the question is invalid to begin with...


Your argument is terrible.

Answer 4

Things are the way they are because there is a propensity of them to be this way. The universe started at an infinite point, which was the time there absolutely no way to be more orderly. Since the Big Bang, the universe has been going from order to disorder. When we build a car, we are causing things to from disorder to order, yes that is true. However we are causing more disorder to happen somewhere else. This action is how we perceive the passage of time.

For just one example of a possibility, of which I have many, many more;
1) There exist now propositions about everything that might happen in the future.
2) Every proposition is either true or else false.
3) If (1) and (2), then there exists now a set of true propositions that, taken together, correctly predict everything that will happen in the future.
4) If there exists now a set of true propositions that, taken together, correctly predict everything that will happen in the future.
5) Whatever will happen in the future is already unavoidable.
6) What is the need for a god.

Answer 5

Interestingly, there happens to be engineering research that bears upon this topic. If you go to an academic library and find the Transactions of the IEEE Society, it was in one of them in the last two years.

Biological systems fail, it seems without exception, under a probability distribution known as the bathtub curve. It gets its name from the high early mortality that drops off suddenly and then suddenly increases. Although the distribution varies from species to species and nation to nation, the shape is preserved. This implies that natural laws govern the topology of biological failure.

Automobiles and other intelligently designed systems only exhibit this distribution when non-professionals or incompetent engineers design them. Intelligently designed systems do not have high initial failure rates, such as infant deaths from birth defects, in fact they do increase with time, but on a completely different curve with a completely different topology.

Likewise, dynamic systems (I use that term in the mathematically technical sense http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_system ) behave differently when they are engineered than if they are created by natural forces. If a God created the universe then he was, from all observation, an unintelligent creator.

Just a note, the engineering research had nothing to do with religion but rather with using biological systems in the design of engineering systems.

On the unlikelihood issue, most people think in terms of normal distributions. This is reasonable as at most static points in time, physical systems for important mathematical reasons, tend to be normally distributed. Because these static points have a normal distribution, dynamic systems can be Cauchy distributed.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cauchy_distribution

Cauchy distributions have very wide tails. If you, for example, would draw a normal distribution to 12 standard deviations and the distribution were 1 inch tall to represent that something involved in small changes could be the result of chance, the equivalant Cauchy distribution would be aproximately 20 miles high, or 1.5 million times more likely. Small changes can generate enormous relative changes over time so that you can go from a prokaryote to a parakeet, if you have enough time and it would be reasonable to expect such a thing would occur.

Second, it wouldn't require a creator at all. Nothing in physics today, or biology, or chemistry or the social sciences requires the existence of a God to explain the universe or any event in the universe.

The scientific data is overwhelming that there does not need to exist a divinity to explain pretty much everything and the data one would use to support a divinity, such as design related data, contradicts the idea of a divinity. Further, research into prayer, where there have been controlled experiments to see if praying alters outcomes, has found that there is no effect. When you see things on TV saying people who pray live longer, ask yourself who attributes their longevity to prayer.

Someone actually did a controlled experiment to see if praying altered patient well being. They found that when people were not told they were being prayed for (or not being prayed for in the case of the control group) there were no differences in outcome. When they were told they were being prayed for (whether they were or not) they deteriorated at a faster rate. Apparently they felt put on the spot and had anxiety from being told they were being prayed for and they died at a statistically higher rate and those that didn't die had worse outcomes.

Answer 6

Looking at an automobile, I see that MANY created it together. A singular creator deity doesn't make sense. An omniscient loving deity, in our comprehension, wouldn't create an eternal place of suffering for it's own creation.
A-theists only believe what can be shown to them. When they've been shown real proof of a creator, the philosophy they're familiar with of that character or set of chasracters, is still undetermined until said person(s) shows otherwise.

Answer 7

When I look at a car, house, or ancient stone tools or flakes of rock that come from the manufacture of a stone implement, I see evidence that some one has manipulated it, i.e. transformed the materials from a natural state to a different one.

When we look at the earth's and the universe's histories we see a progression but we do not see any sign of manipulation from an outside source. So yes, we see life developing around 3 billion years ago as small bacteria like creatures and progressing thought the ages into many strange and unusual forms. But no evidence that that progression was manipulated.

Answer 8

Our Universe is a Volkswagen in the 1700s

Everyone looks at it and wonders where the hell it came from. People take it apart, try to figure out how it runs. But the truth is only time and science will determine the answer.

Answer 9

The main problem with your analogy is that which Bettierage mentioned: cars don't have baby cars. You can't compare manufactured and biological.

But even if I twist logic around like a pretzel, I can still contend that cars evolved (and in only a few thousand years, not the millions that it took to make us).

First there was a chariot, then a simple wagon, a carriage, a model-T, a minivan.

Answer 10

Yawn. Automobiles are made from start to finish in a few hours. The universe took billions and billions of years.

There is no proof of God. If you believe, that's fine. Stop trying to rationalize a matter of faith with proof that doesn't exist.

Why can't a cool car just be a cool car?