Does complexity require a creator?

Photo by thadz

Recently a family member emailed me while traveling to a tropical island. She expressed her amazement at God’s creation, saying, “Sorry, but there’s no way it all just happened.” She also mentioned that the probability of the world falling together randomly into its current state of beauty and complexity would be like that of a pile of Lincoln logs dropped from an airplane falling into an orderly fashion upon hitting the ground. The following is what I wrote in response:

I’m curious as to what you’re basing that statement on. Are you saying that you can’t imagine a way that it could have happened without God doing it or perhaps that you don’t understand how it could have happened without him? It seems to me that you are placing a lot of faith in your own intellect. To put your statement another way, it sounds like you are saying, “I don’t understand how this could have happened without God, therefore it’s impossible that it happened without God.” You are using your current understanding as the measuring stick of whether or not something is possible. Now we’re both saying that each other is depending too much on our own intellect. [Note: this is the Argument from Personal Incredulity logical fallacy]

I think you’re absolutely right that it is incredibly unlikely that all of this just happened by chance, that it all just randomly fell together. To believe that the world and life just fell together randomly would be like believing that Lincoln logs dropped from a plane could land in an orderly fashion. However, I don’t believe that it did just randomly fall together like this–I believe that there are natural processes that can lead to order building up slowly over time (this doesn’t violate the laws of thermodynamics, because we are receiving energy from an outside source, the Sun, which will one day burn out, at which time any order on the earth will quickly descend into disorder). Continue reading »

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God doesn’t believe in atheists

I was raised in a conservative Christian home. I was taught Young Earth Creationism, and my family believed that the Bible should be taken literally and that it was the infallible, inerrant, inspired Word of God.

After graduating from college, I was no longer surrounded by Christians, and I allowed myself to begin questioning what I had been taught. I soon came to grips with the ideas that the Bible is man-made and that evolution is a scientific, historical fact.

I’m not out to bash Christianity on this blog, but the pursuit of knowledge through science sometimes directly conflicts with the claims of religion, especially when you insist on taking your Iron Age scriptures literally, down to the very word.

I realized that, contrary to what I used to believe, most non-religious scientists are not motivated by hatred for God, a desire to attack religion, or a conscious denial of things that, deep down inside, they know to be true. I used to think that evolutionists couldn’t really believe in evolution because of the evidence, but that they just didn’t want to believe in God, and that evolution was the best way to avoid believing in God. In their hearts, I thought, they must know that God exists and that they are responsible to him, but their pride makes them resist that innate knowledge. Continue reading »

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Limitless (2011)

Photo from iamrogue.com/limitless/

Limitless (2011) tells the story of a struggling writer, Eddie Morra (Bradley Cooper), who is on the verge of hitting rock bottom. He’s just lost his girlfriend and is about to be kicked out of his crappy apartment. Lacking self-motivation, Eddie vascillates between staring at his laptop screen and hitting up the local bar. He finds a miracle pill that unlocks the vast power of the human brain, giving him mental superpowers that allow him to write a book in 4 days and make millions on the stock market.

Now I’m not trying to overanalyze the movie, and I thought that the story was a decent one overall, but there were a few little WTF moments during the movie that I found distracting and just a tad implausible. Continue reading »

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