Arguing the Affirmative: JOHN THE ATHEIST
Arguing the Negative: RANDAL THE CHRISTIAN
John’s Opening Statement
Sam Harris tells us that “examples of unintelligent design in nature are so numerous that an entire book could be written simply listing them.”[76] He’s right!
Evolution cannot start something over. All it can do is select the next best thing available for survival. We see this in the human spine, which is an ineffective solution for supporting our weight as upright creatures because standing puts a huge strain on it. But that’s how evolution worked out a solution for creatures who found that standing on two legs was better than being on all four—because doing so aids in food gathering, hunting, and running from predators.
We see this best in the human brain. David J. Linden, professor of neuroscience at John Hopkins School of Medicine, tells us the human brain “is, in many respects, a true design nightmare . . . built like an ice cream cone with new scoops piled on at each stage of our lineage.” The human brain “is essentially a Rube Goldberg contraption.”[77] Gary Marcus, professor of psychology at New York University, describes our brain as a kluge (kludge). A kluge “is a clumsy or inelegant—yet surprisingly effective—solution to a problem.”[78] Just picture a house constructed in several stages by different contractors at each stage and you can get the picture. Without starting all over with a completely new floor plan, we get a kluge.
Because this is how evolution works, we have three brains built on top of one another that do different things: the hindbrain (or reptilian brain), the midbrain (the limbic system) and the forebrain (the neocortex). Because of this, it affects how we think. Marcus shows us in detail how it adversely affects our memories, beliefs, choices, language, and pleasure. He argues: “If mankind were the product of some intelligent, compassionate designer, our thoughts would be rational, our logic impeccable. Our memory would be robust, our recollections reliable.”[79] But this is not what we find because of how our brains evolved.
In this same manner evolution produced the back of our throats containing both the esophagus (for swallowing) and larynx (for breathing); the relatively short rib cage, which does not fully protect most internal organs; our eyes, which are wired backward; and the male prostate gland, which in one of every two males at some point blocks the flow of urine. We have vestigial organs that no longer perform the function for which they evolved, such as the appendix, a tail (the coccyx), and tiny muscles attached to each hair follicle, which cause our hairs to stand up. We have a few thousand nasty dormant vestigial genes, the worst of which are called endogenous retroviruses.
Consider also all of the naturally caused suffering in our world, such as floods, tsunamis, droughts, fires, famines, volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, tornados, and monsoons. There are heat waves, blizzards, and hurricanes. There are poisonous species like the black widow spider, brown recluse spider, cobra, rattlesnake, scorpions, and many parasites, some of which are lethal and kill one person every ten seconds. There are poisonous plants including lethal ones like the autumn crocus, castor bean, daffodil, hyacinth, hydrangea, jimson weed, lily of the valley, mistletoe, morning glory, wild mushrooms, hemlock, sumac, white snakeroot (which was one of the most common causes of death among early settlers in America), and English yew, which is one of the deadliest plants on the planet (eat it and you die within minutes—there is no antidote). There are chronic diseases like cancer, emphysema, leukemia, cardiac problems, lupus, arthritis, and diabetes. We suffer from allergies, colds, migraines, Alzheimer’s disease, anemia, asthma, bronchitis, colitis, Crohn’s disease, epilepsy, gallstones, gastritis, glaucoma, gout, abnormal blood pressure, kidney stones, chicken pox, small pox, polio, Parkinson’s disease, psoriasis, strokes, sudden infant death syndrome, thrombosis, tumors, typhoid fever, ulcers, Lou Gehrig’s disease, Lyme disease, malaria, rabies, rickets, Rocky Mountain spotted fever, tuberculosis, diphtheria, leprosy, measles, meningitis, mumps, pneumonia, rubella, syphilis, shingles, scoliosis, whooping cough, Down syndrome, hemophilia, Huntington’s disease, muscular dystrophy, sickle cell anemia, Tay-Sachs disease, AIDS, infertility, and so on. Major epidemics have decimated us, like the ones occurring in the years AD 542, 1331, 1556, and 1918. There are birth defects that include people born with two heads, with deformed limbs, blind, deaf, mute; and people born with mental deficiencies including dementia, bipolar disorder, and paranoid schizophrenia.
There is much more I could add, but thinking people get the point. There isn’t an intelligent designer. Even if Randal still believes there is one anyway, this supernatural force (or being) is not a benevolent one, much less an omnibenevolent one. To argue that this is all Eve’s fault in Eden is scapegoating.
Randal’s Opening Statement
John believes that if God created the universe then he is incompetent. Come again? This entire cosmos was brought into existence out of nothing approximately 13.7 billion years ago and is governed by surprisingly elegant natural laws finely tuned to a staggering degree of precision. The observable universe, which has been expanding ever since that moment of creation, is presently an incomprehensibly distant 46 billion light years to the visible edge. It is composed of over 100 billion galaxies, each far larger than we can fathom. Our own home, the Milky Way, contains over 200 billion stars and is so large that it takes 100,000 light years for light to cross it (light travels at 300,000 km per second).
One gets the faintest glimpse of its vastness and majesty by contemplating the Hubble Deep Field—an image created by compiling multiple images from the Hubble Space Telescope. There are about three thousand smudges of light in the image that was drawn from one region of the constellation Ursa Major. And almost every one of those faint smudges is a galaxy more distant than we can imagine despite the fact that it is practically in our cosmic backyard. The universe is unbelievably austere in its size and age and of awe-inspiring beauty and endless mystery. It is little surprise then that the contemplation of its majesty leaves people struggling for words. The psalmist said it well long ago: “The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands” (Ps. 19:1). To sum up, the universe transcends our wildest imaginations in every conceivable way including size, age, beauty, diversity, mystery, and complexity. And the Creator is incompetent how exactly?
I presume that the charge of incompetence is really reflective of incredulity toward the pains of planet earth, a planet where the glory of creation brought forth sentient creatures who have at times suffered greatly. This presents us with a problem of evil that every theist must take seriously. While the problem of evil is difficult, it is also important to keep it in perspective. To dismiss God as an incompetent creator based on your experiences on planet earth is tantamount to dismissing the president of the United States as an incompetent leader based on the cleanliness of a single bathroom tile at Chicago’s O’Hare Airport. This kind of charge smacks of an indefensibly narrow-minded provincialism and anthropocentrism. Indeed, it appears to be the height of hubris to make sweeping judgments about the Creator’s competence based merely on our experience on this infinitesimal pale blue dot called earth.
Perhaps it is a gross exaggeration to charge God with cosmic incompetence based on the suffering on planet earth. Nonetheless the atheist may retort that it is still reasonable to inquire as to why our particular planet has the degree of misery it does. Granted, the earth is a microscopic speck in the vast universe, but could we still not have expected better from the creator of this microscopic speck?
This objection appears to be driven by the following assumption: The amount and intensity of evil and suffering on planet earth is so great that God could not possibly have a reason for allowing it. Consequently, in virtue of allowing it, God is properly deemed incompetent.
The problem with the objection is that the objector simply lacks the broader perspective necessary to make it. He is simply too limited in time and space to say with any conviction that God really ought to have done things differently. Consider a cinematic illustration of the point: Imagine that you are attending the screening of a film that was directed by the foremost critically acclaimed director in history. After watching one minute of the three-hour film, the director’s magnum opus, you are perplexed. That first minute had some great moments, incredible acting, and awesome cinematography. But the first minute also included dialogue and plot points that were so perplexing to you that they left you rethinking the competence of the director.
So what should you think? You may have some legitimate concerns based on that first minute. But would you have enough information to say that the curious dialogue and plot points of that first minute could not be redeemed and explained over the next three hours of the film? Surely it would be the height of hubris to judge the competence of the famous director based on your limited sampling of that first minute. How much more is it gross hubris to judge the Creator’s competence based on something closer to a microsecond sampling of his cosmic story?
John’s Rebuttal
What planet does Randal live on? If God is an omnipotent creator, then why is the vast majority of the universe and our planet uninhabitable by life of any kind, much less human life? Why do the life forms that exist suffer so much if God is good? And if God could not create a better world, then why doesn’t he perform perpetual miracles to alleviate our most intense sufferings?
Randal is taking an irrational leap over the probabilities. A good, intelligent creator should show he cares for each individual on this planet. If he does not, we can reasonably conclude he either does not care or he does not exist at all.
He’s punting to God’s omniscience as an answer—something other theists do to save their own omniscient God from refutation, making faith unfalsifiable. This proves once again that believers must be convinced their faith is nearly impossible before they will consider it improbable, which is an unreasonable standard. Even if God is omniscient and has higher ways than us, we still must know enough of his ways to know that he exists and that he cares for us—and if omniscient, he should know this about us.
Randal’s Rebuttal
John’s argument is as provincial as I suspected. He is confident that his microsecond viewing of the film has equipped him to judge the competence of the director. He assumes that no competent creator would design a less than optimal world. This is like assuming that no intelligent driver traveling from San Francisco to Los Angeles would ever take coastal Route 1 since the interstate is so much quicker. But sometimes the journey is as important as the destination. How could the less than optimal design of our planet’s creatures be formative for the journey? It is tough to say, but John’s microsecond viewing has not equipped him to judge the Creator’s competence.
John claims that since extraordinarily complex systems like the human brain were not designed optimally, we should not believe they were designed at all. That’s like looking at the interior of an old Alfa Romeo Spyder, finding the gear shifter placed where the air conditioning controls should be (Alfas are notorious for bad ergonomics) and concluding that the car had no designer. Less than optimal design, like a winding coastal highway, can exist for multiple purposes without warranting doubt of the designer’s competence, let alone his existence.
John’s Closing Statement
None of Randal’s analogies work. We have every right to judge the United States president even if all we ever observed was that bathroom tile, because that’s all we would know. Likewise, we can’t know in advance that the film director is competent, or that our journey is as important as the destination, or that there is an intelligent Alfa Romeo Spyder designer.
Randal’s Closing Statement
John likes to talk about probabilities, but that’s just the way he refers to what he thinks is probable. How does John calculate the probability that the suffering on our planet couldn’t be for some greater purpose? He doesn’t. All he does is repeat his subjective opinion based on a microsecond of viewing the film.