Why There Is No God: Simple Responses to 20 Common Arguments for the Existence of God by Navabi Armin

Author:Navabi, Armin [Navabi, Armin]
Language: eng
Format: azw, epub
Publisher: Atheist Republic
Published: 2014-10-06T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter 11: “If there is no God, where did everything come from? Without God, there is no explanation.”

The origin of the universe is one of the greatest unanswered questions in the history of mankind. Humans have been debating it for thousands of years, and every religion attempts to posit a different explanation. In Chapter 1, we discussed the issue of complexity and touched on the origins of life. Questions about the origin of the universe – or, indeed, the origin of reality in general – are more challenging for science to tackle head-on. The simple answer is: we don’t know. We may never know exactly how the universe was formed or what, if anything, came before it, although science does have a few ideas to explore. However, not knowing the answer does not give us free range to make something up.

It’s human nature to be uncomfortable with the unknown. Historically, humans have filled these uncertain areas with a deity or other supernatural claims to explain what they have yet to discover. This creates a “god of the gaps,” wherein God is invoked as an explanation in events that humans don’t yet understand. The problem with this, of course, is that scientific knowledge is always expanding, and the gaps continue to grow smaller. We have identified many of the natural causes behind these gaps throughout our history and have yet to come across God in any of them. It’s possible that this pattern will continue in the future, leaving little room for God as a weak explanation, and the current monotheistic ideas of God will become as outdated for future generations as the Greek pantheon is today.

The Prime Mover

The cosmological argument for God is an attempt to infer God’s existence from the known facts of the universe. Essentially, this argument states that because everything is derived by cause and effect, something must have caused the universe to be created. However, although many physical laws of the universe do generally work in a cause-and-effect way, that does not necessarily mean that God is the cause.

If you follow events backwards through time, you will always find a preceding event that led to it, but theists reason that this chain of events could not go on forever. Something must have started all of it into motion. Since events cannot cause themselves, something else must have existed first to cause all of these things.

This might seem like a reasonable argument, but it falls victim to the same problem as the hypothetical God behind the argument from design, as discussed in Chapter 1: if everything has a cause or a creator, then who created God? And who, then, created the entity that created God? Rather than solving the problem of infinite causality, the cosmological argument simply recreates the problem using different terms. God is used as an answer, but in reality, the issue of God simply raises new questions. You cannot solve a mystery by using a bigger mystery as the answer.

This issue falls prey to

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