Could atheists successfully refute this writing?

Question

The most basic proof of God’s existence is simply what He has made. For since the creation of the world God's invisible qualities, His eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly seen; moreover, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse. The Heaven declares the glory of God and the sky proclaims the work of His hands.

If I found a wristwatch in the middle of a field, I would not assume that it just appeared out of nowhere or that it had always existed. Based on the watch’s design, I would assume it had a designer, but there is far greater design and precision in the world around us. Our measurement of time is not based on wristwatches, but on God’s handiwork, the regular rotation of the earth, and the radioactive properties of the cesium-133 atom. The Universe displays great design and this argues for a great designer.

If I found an encoded message, I would seek out a cryptographer to help break the code. My assumption would be that there is an intelligent sender of the message, someone who created the code. How complex is the DNA code that we carry in every cell of our bodies? Does not the complexity and purpose of DNA argue for an intelligent writer of the code?

Not only has God made an intricate and finely tuned physical world, He has also instilled a sense of eternity in the heart of every person. Mankind has an innate perception that there is more to life than meets the eye; moreover, there is an existence higher than this earthly routine. Our sense of eternity manifests itself in at least two ways: law-making and worship.

Every civilization throughout history has valued certain moral laws, which are surprisingly similar from culture to culture; for example, the ideal of love is universally esteemed, while the act of lying is universally condemned. This common morality—global understanding of right and wrong—points to a supreme moral being who gave us such scruples.

In the same way, people all over the world, regardless of culture, have always cultivated a system of worship. The object of worship may vary, but the sense of a “higher power” is an undeniable part of being human. Our propensity to worship accords with the fact that God created us in His own image.

Answer 1

"God" is Yahweh, the god of the Hebrews and later the Christians and also various others. "God" did not create the cosmos. The cosmos didn't exist when god was created, or more accurately, distilled out of an amalgamation of already existing deities. The cultures responsible for the concepts in the various monotheistic traditions could not possibly conceive of the discoveries of the last century in either the macro or the micro. What you're doing is rationalizing a belief you have in this supposed ultimate designing force because you can't conceive of any other mode of "creation." We're just dumb people on a rock floating around in something we have only just begun to gain the scope of. We know nearly nothing of the true consistency or workings of the "Universe." And you want to attribute everything you can and can't imagine to some mishmash of ideas that objectively have little to any relation to their origins. "God" isn't dead, it's an idea and like all ideas, it lives and grows and evolves. And when we're all gone, these ideas will die with us.

Answer 2

Sure we can. In fact, I can refute it using a set of completely different approach.



(1) Let us assume that God, indeed, created the Universe. In this case, you need to answer the following:

- Why do you assume that God (as in, Christian version of God) was the one creating the Universe? Why not Allah, or about 100+ other gods allegedly responsible for the creation of our world?

- Why do you assume that there was only one God? Not a team of them operating each on a separate section of the world?

- Creating everything does not equalize with a set of qualities attributed to God - omnipresence, omnipotence, universal good, so on.

- Why do you assume that God is still active today? For all we know, the creation of the Universe might've killed him.



(2) Let's address the watchmaker argument.

Most of the world is actually pretty chaotic. Take a look at the example you are using - DNA. Our DNA is choke-full of sections that are, essentially, non-functional. They don't carry any data. If this is a design, it is ridiculously crappy. Any modern engineer can do a better job.

We cannot live on most of our planet - it is covered by water. If this is also by design, it is yet another example of a failure.

Our bodies contain a whole lot of bad designer decisions - appendix, cross-wiring of our eyes, blind spots, so on.



If God, indeed, designed all this, he has failed. Quite miserably at that.



(3) Now, as for moral - moral laws are actually pretty far from being similar from culture to culture. Is kidnapping a person good? Well, in some cultures, kidnapping a bride is a part of their marital ritual. How about cannibalism? It is still practiced in some tribes in Brazil and Polynesia. For them, eating a flesh of one's enemy is an honorable thing.



There is no such thing as universal good and evil. Never was.

Answer 3

How old are you, 15? This is some of the most trite copy-and-paste arguments I've seen on here in a while.



>>The most basic proof of God’s existence is simply what

>>He has made.



Just because something exists doesn't mean it was a creation. The North Pole and presents exist, but that doesn't prove the existence of Santa Claus.



>>If I found a wristwatch in the middle of a field



The "Watchmaker" argument is one of the most cliche arguments in theological history. I can't believe people in the 21st century are still trying to use it.



Some of the many flaws of the Watchmaker argument:



1) The story assumes that the watch is not part of nature because it is ordered, and therefore stands out from the randomness of nature. Then it assumes the universe is not random, and shows elements of order. So the argument is internally inconsistent.



2) It's not analogous to the type of creation that monotheists are claiming. A watchmaker creates watches from pre-existing materials, whereas God is claimed to have created the universe from nothing. So it's a really poor analogy.



3) Most watches you find are not made from scratch by a watchmaker. They're assembled in factories by an accumulation of many but simple small processes. And their design is based on older watch designs, which is based on even older designs, all the way back to the first sundials. So if anything it's a better analogy of evolution.



4) If I kept walking in the field and found a toaster oven, I wouldn't assume that was by the watchmaker. So at best, the analogy implies polytheism.



5) Who made the watchmaker? Surely, he's more complex than the watch. If you're going to fall back on "he didn't need a maker", then this begs the question of why we can't just assume the watch was already there.



>>Does not the complexity and purpose of DNA argue for

>>an intelligent writer of the code?



Here you make the same naive and uneducated assumption that things are always created as-is, from scratch. DNA doesn't need a "writer" anymore than snowflakes would depend on a sculptor. DNA is the byproduct of billions of years of interactions of amino acids. It took a billion years for just the first self-replicating amino acid structures to naturally occur, but complexity grows exponentially from there.



>>Mankind has an innate perception that there is more to

>>life than meets the eye



A penchant for being philosophically minded does not prove the existence of a deity. You fail. Again.



>>Every civilization throughout history has valued certain

>>moral laws, which are surprisingly similar from culture

>>to culture



Actually, there are some drastic differences. The Amish for example would consider your use of a computer to be "evil". And 100 years ago it was OK to go to a minstrel show. But laws that seem to be "universal" come from biology. We know this because we see other animals (especially primates) exhibiting the same behavior: don't kill fellow organisms in your own tribe, don't start trouble if you care for your own self-preservation, etc. Piranha don't attack each other, so tell me: what deity are they worshiping?



>>points to a supreme moral being who gave us such

>>scruples.



Non-sequitur. Just because traits exist doesn't mean they were put there by a big invisible man.



>>In the same way, people all over the world, regardless

>>of culture, have always cultivated a system of worship



No they haven't. But even if we assume they do, that doesn't prove the existence of a "higher power". It just shows that humans tend to personify concepts in order to work out explanations.

Answer 4

*sigh* The Watchmaker argument is seriously oldmeme. Better logicians than I have discussed exhaustively why it holds no persuasive value. I've linked to one such refutation below. Suffice it to say, however, that the natural world is not a watch. We have experiential information that tells us that watches are created by beings with intent (i.e. people); we have no such experiential information about the creation of universes. We have no reason to assume that universes are like watches with regard to their origins, and no reason to assume that a universe requires a creator. In fact, more parsimonious explanations are available, so Occam's Razor suggests that the "intelligent creator" hypothesis is suboptimal.



Complexity is very much in the eye of the beholder.



I have no "innate perception" of an afterlife or a deity.



Morality varies dramatically from culture to culture. Some cultures have deemed slavery perfectly acceptable. There are cultures today that consider female genital mutilation to be morally necessary. The only commonalities among moral systems are those that evolved with us and are required to permit social groups to cohere: do not harm members of your in-group.



The fact that many cultures have invented religion and worship means only that humans are good at inventing explanations when reality fails to provide an obvious answer to our questions. Inventing gods and spirits gives us the illusion of control, because then we can attempt to bargain with, placate, or entreat these beings to grant us their favor or protect us from natural phenomena beyond our control. The answer to why humans worship can be found in psychology, not theology.

Answer 5

The very first sentence is refutable. It is an unproven assumption that there is a God that created everything. It has demonstrated time and time again that there is no need for any intelligent agent to have been involved with anything we see in the natural universe.



All rationally thinking people will discard the entire writing especially since the very first sentence is false.

Answer 6

My argument: The most basic proof of the Flying Spaghetti Monster's existence is simply what He has made. For since the creation of the world the Flying Spaghetti Monster's invisible qualities, His eternal power and noodly nature, have been clearly seen; moreover, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse. The Heaven declares the glory of the Flying Spaghetti Monster and the sky proclaims the work of His noodles.



What? What do you mean that this is a ridiculous argument?



Now do you understand why you fail?

Answer 7

When I examine a watch, I expect to find only useful components. I would not expect to find, for instance, a useless cancerous blob hanging off the side of it. Nor would I expect to find some of the gears' teeth designed in such a way as to invert and grow with the potential to stop the function of the watch.



If your Berserker Dragon God designed me as intelligently as you claim he did, why did my dentist have to shatter and remove my wisdom teeth due to the way they naturally grew? Why is my appendix prone to life-threatening rupture by its own design? Why did I require an operation to correct a congenital heart condition?



ID is great for pondering the wonderful nature of our universe, but it sure does suck at explaining anything that is broken.

Answer 8

"He has also instilled a sense of eternity in the heart of every person."

You are a LIAR.

Like many people who aren't enthralled by invisible sky critters, I know that when I die I will be dead and nothing more will happen to me other than all the waves and particles that made me will disapate back into star stuff.



"The object of worship may vary, but the sense of a “higher power” is an undeniable part of being human."

You are a LIAR.



Christianity, like any other religion involving invisible space chappies, is just an anaesthetic to help the peasants get through a life without needing to confront reality; invisible space ‘gods’ were invented to keep the peasants occupied lest they realise this is all there is… and go mad and kill us in our beds as we sleep.

~

Answer 9

When you start off by saying that "invisible qualities" are "clearly seen," you're in trouble right off the bat.



Simply put, it's both an argument from ignorance and an argument from incredulity wrapped up in inductive reasoning -- not valid on at least 3 levels.



Do you understand that you can't claim something that exists was created by a specific deity unless you can *show evidence* that it was created by that specific deity? Just saying it exists and so that's proof it was created by a specific deity is rather silly. It could just as easily be proof that it was created by my Uncle Henry, or by Thor, or by Green Aliens from the planet Thorgon...or that the thing wasn't "created" at all. Without any evidence, those are all equally valid.



Get it?



Peace.

Answer 10

Paley's Wristwatch has been refuted repeatedly.



How is it that believers today don't know this?



Leaving aside the number and type of formal logical fallacies it contains, there is one more - Absolutely fatal flaw - it directly contradicts itself.



Its first premise, that a designed object looks obviously different than the natural world, directly contradicts its conclusion - that the natural world looks designed. All that other stuff in there is just sleight of hand and misdirection, hoping that you won't notice the contradiction.

Answer 11

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Answer 12

We have pretty powerful (though not yet finished) theories of how the universe, the Earth and life on Earth were made without the help of a creator.



You are correct - most people do seek a higher power. But it could simply be because of what I like to call "The Three Big Fears" - Fear of Death, Fear of Insignificance, and Fear of Loneliness.

Answer 13

The watchmaker argument only works if you are asserting a polytheistic religion, as the "God" would need an even more complex God to have formed him.



More importantly, you have offered no actual evidence to substantiate a hypothesis of the existence of magical, Earth creating sky fairies.



In other words: pretty easy refutation.

Answer 14

There have been some really smart scientists who have attempted to refute this watchmaker argument but they have failed.

The failed because they used grossly oversimplified arguments.

They would try to bring in the successive slight modification argument and the co-option argument from Neo-Darwinian Evolution Theory.

The reason why this is very grossly oversimplified is that there is no objective evidence of successive slight modifications or co-opted function for basically every biological item of creatures.

For example, people thought that the irreducible complexity argument was successfully refuted when evolutionists showed up at an event wearing a mouse trap hung on their ties.

They were trying to show that, in theory, a piece of machinery can come about through successive slight modifications because the parts and piece could have been co-opted for different purposes.

But putting a mouse trap on your tie does not provide evidence that this ever occurred in nature.

And biological machinery is so very much more complex than a mouse trap.

And the bigger and more fundamental point to be made is that it took human intelligence and engineering to figure out that a mouse trap could be placed on the tie. It also took a human to interfere with the natural state of the mouse trap and open it up to put it on the tie.

The mouse trap could not have done this itself.



So, just like people would try to refute the design argument, their refutation is always a grossly oversimplified failure.



I really liked the cartoon, in the movie Expelled (even though I didn't really like the movie) where the odds of randomly creating even the simplist bio-mechanical device is shown and compared to hitting the jackpot on a slot machine. In order to match the difficulty of these odds there were like thousands of slot machines all lined up. Than a layman was asked to attempt to go and hit jackpots on every slot machine in a row without missing even a single jackpot. Of course the layman refused to even try, knowing just how absured this notion is. But then the cartoon switched to Richard Dawkins standing at the first one and pulling the lever down, not hitting the jackpot of course, and kicking and yelling at it. He is "giving it a try"! Then the screen zooms out a bit to show all of the slot machines (thousands of them) lined up waiting. Meanwhile Richard Dawkins is still at the first one pulling at the handle, kicking it, and yelling, but not getting any closer to completeing this "simple" task.

That exactly matches the evolutionists position. They imagine that it is not that hard to randomly create complexity and they grossly oversimplify the situation when they put forth their evolutionary theories.

Answer 15

This just gets lamer every time its used.Can't you christian apologists come up with something better?



You can't now or will you ever be able to justify any of your assertions.Nothing you said is proof of anything but your beliefs.

Answer 16

Epically epice Flog

Answer 17

Who designed the designer?

Answer 18

If you think that God works so complexly, why do you think he just poofed the world in 7 days?

Answer 19

Congratulations, you have found the copy and paste funtion.



Did you know that fairies are real? I can tell because mushrooms exist.

Answer 20

The watchmaker argument, again? If all that makes sense to you, fine... enjoy your faith, just leave me out of it...

Answer 21

I'm curious why you assume that God would have to be male - isn't She said to be transcendent of things like gender?

Answer 22

Complexity does not mean design.

Answer 23

watches aren't organic

Answer 24

"Oh Great Wall O' Logical Fallacies, spare us your insipidness..."

Answer 25

TL;DR

Answer 26

No, most atheist just try to copy our successful arguments and replace the words...