Atheist Doesn’t Have Answers! 🫠 #apologetics

Frank Turek walks a skeptic though the holes in his own logic. #jesus #christian

[TM]

The argument "If a computer wasn't designed..." Seems simple to answer. My answer would be yes as long as it worked. As long as it has utility and works for what I need it to what's the difference.

It like a tree that has fallen across a river. It wasn't designed to be a bridge but if it can hold my wait I'm going to use it to cross the river.

[AnotherViewer]

In the 18th Century, David Hume counter-argued against the Argument from Design by pointing out that, although we know that man-made structures were designed because we have seen them being built, the analogy does not necessarily hold for non-man-made structures. For the analogy to hold, the theist must be able to demonstrate that natural objects in the universe (such as trees, rocks and humans) were manufactured in some way. This in turn requires the demonstration of the existence of an intelligent designer, the very thing the argument purports to be trying to prove.

In fact, our ability to recognize design depends on our ability to discern characteristics that are not found in nature, and designed objects such as watches and airplanes stand in stark contradistinction to the characteristics of natural objects such as rocks and trees. When we see a watch, we may look for a watchmaker, but when we see a dog, it does not follow that we would look for a dog-maker, because we know that dogs are produced through the well-understood natural processes of mammalian reproduction. Proof of design cannot therefore be produced within the context of nature itself.

If a design has to have a purpose - and identifying a purpose seems to be essential to recognizing design - then we need to know the intentions of the designer. But, before we can know God's intentions, we must first prove that he exists, so it is necessary to begin by assuming as true the very thing in question, the existence of God (a fallacy known in logic as “begging the question”).

The argument also begs the question of how, if orderliness in the universe requires the existence and intervention of God, God’s mind itself can be orderly. Was God’s mind created by an even greater God? Certainly, to say that God’s mind is in some way self-explanatory or necessarily existing begs the same questions already refuted in the Cosmological Argument. Insisting that it is just a brute or ultimate fact is unjustifiable, and the same claim could be equally made for material orderliness.

Order appears to be an inherent characteristic of the universe itself, and the assumption that a god of some sort is needed to impose the order is unwarranted and indefensible. Additionally, order and complexity are very much dependent on subjective judgments: where one person may see order, another may see chaos; where one person may see indecipherable complexity, another may see elegant simplicity.

The implicit assumption in the Argument from Design is that we humans are somehow the purpose of the universe, rather than ants or bacteria or star systems or black holes, and that we are not in fact just some irrelevant and rather unfortunate by-product. This in itself seems an unlikely scenario and certainly an unjustifiable conjecture.

The theist argues that, when blind chance operates, there are billions of different possible combinations of atoms that could come into being and, if out of all those billions the one successful one that we see occurs, then it must have been the result of divine interference. However, we should be very wary of jumping to the conclusion that the existence of a galaxy or of an eye, for example, is a planned event just because it is statistically improbable. Winning the lottery is statistically improbable, but someone wins it almost every week.

The spontaneous origin of life on Earth, for example, may have been improbable, but it only had to occur once. Indeed, in the billions of galaxies throughout the immense reaches of the known universe, over a period of billions of years, it would be extremely unlikely if such an unlikely event did not occur. Even if the odds against it were billions to one, that would still point to life arising in billions of planets throughout the universe. In fact, it is quite possible that it occurred several times independently on the very early Earth, when conditions finally became propitious.

It seems strange to speak of present conditions as designed when these conditions differ, sometimes radically, from those of the distant past, and are in constant transition under the evolutionary forces of mutation and natural selection. The Argument from Design is forced to assume that all parts of a complex system must always have functioned expressly as they do today. Otherwise, it would imply a designer who is always at work adjusting or fine-tuning his creations, which were presumably faulty to begin with. The theory of evolution gives a much more convincing explanation of the constantly unfolding changes observed by science, and provides a workable and testable explanation of how complexity arose from simplicity.

Although science would never claim to understand everything about how the universe was created and how it works, we certainly understand much more than we did five hundred years ago (or even a hundred), and phenomena which then seemed miraculous turn out to have rather mundane scientific and natural causes and mechanisms. While we may never completely understand the workings of the universe, it seems likely that we will continue to progress in explaining apparently unexplainable things.

[TrippWre]

I’m an atheist but I live everyone the same cus I have christen cousins but I believe in the Big Bang theory for house we where created and then we evolved different over time for different things

[MaceySparrow]

Right, and the answer is God... of gaps.

[fishdude]

🤣 outside of true believers, franky's arguments are just bad. But when you presuppose a god's existence, his arguments make sense.

[Makers]

You’re saying “I don’t know” is an inferior answer to your religion? You’re religion (pick one) is so painfully obviously nonsense but it gives you comfort to have an answer I guess so go for it