If you are an American, you are probably familiar with the game "Whack a Mole". Going on Facebook Atheist pages, I am reminded of the game because theists and Christian apologists trot out the same arguments over and over again. Although the book is over fifty years old now, people on Facebook still use many of the fallacious arguments for God's existence found in Paul E. Little's Know Why You Believe. Most of the arguments were debunked in Stubborn Credulity. For example,
1. "… recent anthropological research has indicated that among the farthest and most remote primitive peoples, today, there is a universal belief in God."
As I pointed out in my book, although universal belief may have been the case in the mid-twentieth century, it was not the case in the nineteenth century. Even if there was agreement, so what? As Bakunin argued, "Until the days of Copernicus and Galileo everybody believed that the sun revolved about the earth. Was not everybody mistaken?"
2. Little then proceeded to conflate complexity with design: "No one would think a wrist watch could come into being without an intelligent designer. How much more incredible is it to believe that the universe, in its infinite complexity, could have happened by chance?" No one would think a wrist watch could come into being without an intelligent designer not because it is complex, but because we know how wrist watches come into being. If complexity implied design, then one would be justified in asking "Who made God?" God or at least God's mind would be complex. The complexity would require a designer of the complexity, and we would have an infinite regress.
3. Little brought up the law of entropy. He quoted a Christian source which read, "What the law asserts can be illustrated from a plastic oleomargarine bag which contains white margarine and a small capsule filled with yellow coloring…" Instead of repeating the entire argument, I'll just paraphrase what I wrote in my book: It's not necessarily legitimate to take what we know about a bag and to then apply it to the entire universe. Here is an excerpt:
According to Heinz Pagels, the "law of entropy increase may apply to the universe as a whole because the universe may be a closed system. Eventually it too may fall into ruin, a 'heat death' in which the stars burn out and matter is scattered over the endless reaches of space―a mess with no one to straighten it out" (The Cosmic Code, 1982, 123 & 124, emphasis added). Another scientist, Carl Sagan, reinforced Pagels when, during a lecture, he said, "It's by no means clear, by the way, that the Second Law of Thermodynamics applies to the universe as whole, because it is an experiential law, and we don't have experience with the universe as a whole" ("Gifford Lectures," 1985, The Varieties of Scientific Experience by Carl Sagan & Ann Druyan, ed., [2006] 2007, 157 & 158)…. E. A. Milne cast doubt on the validity of the apologist's argument when he pointed out that "we have no means for assessing change of entropy for the whole universe. … [W]e can calculate such a change for 'closed systems' with something outside them but the universe ex hypothesi has nothing (physical) outside it" (quoted in G. J. Whitrow, The Natural Philosophy of Time, [1961] 1963, 7).
I hope that these points alone are enough to lay the entropy argument to rest.
4. Little then accused the scientists of being unscientific. The charge should be familiar. To paraphrase, Pasteur debunked the theory of so-called "spontaneous generation". According to a scientist, "it became an accepted doctrine that life never arises except from life." The same scientist, however, observed that "most scientific men prefer to believe that life arose, in some way not yet understood, from inorganic matter in accordance with the laws of physics and chemistry." I don't see a contradiction here. To say that life presently only arises from life is not to say anything about what must have been the case under early Earth conditions. Related to this talking point is the quote from DuNoüy which says that "the chance formulations of a typical protein molecule … is of the order of one of [extremely large number], or practically nil." As I asked in my book in a different context, "How do they [the apologists] know that the probability of the supernatural event is higher?"
5. Little's final argument for the existence of God isn't, to my knowledge, used as much as the others. He wrote, "Other evidence for the reality of God's existence is His Clear presence in the lives of men and women today. Where Jesus Christ is believed and trusted a profound change takes place in the individual―and ultimately the community." If Christians wish to take the argument seriously, they will have to consider polytheism. Believers in at least one rival religion have been known to turn their lives around. To cite a rather famous example, in James Baldwin's famous essay "Letter from a Region in My Mind," he wrote, "Elijah Muhammad has been able to do what generations of welfare workers and committees and resolutions and reports and housing projects and playgrounds have failed to do: to heal and redeem drunkards and junkies, to convert people who have come out of prison and to keep them out, to make men chaste and women virtuous…. He has done all these things, which our Christian church has spectacularly failed to do" (emphasis added, <https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1962/11/17/letter-from-a-region-in-my-mind>). What are we to make of Little's argument? Do changes in a person point to something Divine? What if Islam changes a community? And what if it succeeds where Christianity has failed? Just based on what Baldwin reported, the Christian would have to, at the very least, believe that Allah was real. Whether he would have to be a monotheist as well is a different issue. The Christian would be wise to just avoid Little's argument at the outset.
コメント