Hey Atheists, Look Around You!
I was watching a clip from a local news in Alabama which was covering the American Atheists convention. One of the Christians interviewed made the argument that all an atheist has to do is look around and see God’s miracles in the trees or something. I hear this a lot and even big bad Bill O’Reilly used a version of this one.
This is probably one of the most used Christian arguments. It is more simplistic version of the Argument by Design. Forget the watch and the watchmaker, I can’t make trees therefore God did it.
I don’t want to say that those who use his argument are stupid, because many of them probably are pretty smart, but this really is a stupid, child-like argument despite that there are many children that are much smarter than this argument.
The tides go in and the tides go out with no miscommunication. How does that happen? It is called the moon’s gravitational pull on the water. How did trees form, there is a naturalistic explanation for that too. I’m not a botanist, so I can’t give you the details, but science does have some idea. And even if it didn’t know how these things came about, that doesn’t mean that God did it. We would need some evidence for that.
The phrase, “I don’t know” is always applicable. Just because science doesn’t know an answer right now doesn’t mean that religion has the validity to make up an answer. This is the old God of the Gaps argument.
My question for believers is, “Hey Christians, look right in front of you. See that computer screen? Science made that using our knowledge of the natural world which directly contradicts what God wrote in the Bible. How can you explain that?”
Related articles
- You Can’t Prove Santa Doesn’t Exist! (dangeroustalk.net)
- QotD: Atheist Doubt (unreasonablefaith.com)
- PZ’s food for thought [Thoughts from Kansas] (scienceblogs.com)
Filed under: anti-intellectualism, Argument by Design, culture war, god of the gaps, Religion, science