The Multiverse and Creationism

I have, in the past, written about the multiverse–the idea, usually offered in answer to the fine-tuning of this universe, that there exist trillions upon trillions of different universes, if not, in fact, an infinite amount of such different universes, all with different physical laws and constants–and I have also written about how certain atheists often appeal to the multiverse as a “get anything you want or need naturalistically” card, and though I have also shown that atheistic appeals to the multiverse might not be as beneficial as atheists believe them to be, I will, in this thought, also note that another funny point about atheistic appeals to the multiverse is that although atheists often rail against creationism and chant that accepting creationism is utterly irrational and “anti-science”, it actually is the case that if the multiverse does exist, then, the fact is, it is highly likely that many “creationist-style” universes exist given that, in a multiverse, such created universes could easily be made by some kind of hyper-advanced being–in fact, if an infinite number of universes exist, then there are arguably a massive plethora, or even an infinite number of such creationist-styles universes that exist; and what this means is that if the atheist wishes to push the multiverse card as a means to account for the fine-tuning of this universe, then, by extension, such an atheist should arguably become silent about creationist-style ideas, for the fact is that in a multiverse, there is no way of knowing whether or not we are presently in a creationist-style universe–essentially, a universe which was intelligently designed and which appears old (based on our current science) but which is, in reality, actually only a few thousand years old–and so, in appealing to the multiverse, atheists give serious legitimacy and weight to creationism in general, for indeed, though such an idea might not necessarily support orthodox Christian creationism per se, atheistic endorsements of the multiverse without doubt make general creationism (and even a creationism very closely resembling Christian Creationism) eminently rational to believe in, which is a particularly humorous result given the general antipathy that most atheists feel towards creationism of any form…and perhaps the funniest issue is that in seeking to avoid the fine-tuning problem by appealing to the multiverse, atheists actually completely support the idea of the intelligently designed fine-tuning of this universe, for a creationism universe is an intelligently designed one, and thus atheistic attempts to defeat the problem of fine-tuning actually make fine-tuning that much easier to believe in.

An Anti-Theist, not a Cowardly Atheist

I have a confession to make:  I am convinced that very strong arguments–arguments which are essentially beyond a reasonable doubt–exist which support the claim that God exists and that Christianity is true (or rational to believe), and while the rational side of me knows this, and while the rational side of me also knows that the problem of evil is a pseudo-problem that can be easily answered from a purely rational and emotionless perspective, I must admit that when I see a child suffering or hear of a child or woman who suffered some horrendous abuse, I do not, at a rational level, doubt the existence of God nor even His goodness, but I do tremble with rage at the idea that that omnipresent and omnipotent and omniscient son-of-a-bitch (God forgive me) would allow such evil to occur to a little one without vanquishing that evil and suffering in the very instance that it happens (although, once the rational side of me kicks back in, I do then fall on my knees and say “Thy will be done”, for I know that not only does God have good reasons for this evil, but He is the only one who can rectify it in the end, and so my protestations against Him, though emotionally satisfying, are folly from a rational perspective…not to mention that I also thank God that He is not emotion-filled like me concerning evil, for if He was, He would have wiped out humanity a hundred times over given the pain and evil each of us cause on a daily basis (and I myself, by my own standard, should have been destroyed a thousand times over, for my rage against evil and injustice is only matched by the evil and injustice which I myself commit on a daily basis but which God so mercifully overlooks rather than striking me dead on the spot, as He should, by all rights, do)); and yet, in admitting all this, my point is that to me the atheistic point of view is, in a way, cowardly, for I, if I was ever to fall into apostasy, I would  do not see atheism as a sound point-of-view to the evidence, but rather, my response would be sheer anti-theism where I would not deny God’s existence but I would fight against Him tooth-and-bloody-nail even undo death…and so this is why, in many ways, I often see atheism as a type of psychological cop-out–a avoidance of the fight, if you will–although I obviously understand that my view is not necessarily the view of anyone else.

The Multiverse Does Not Necessarily Help Atheistic-Naturalism

It is without a doubt that certain atheists appeal to the idea of a “multi-verse” as a means of combating the problem of the fine-tuning of this universe, but one of the things that is often overlooked and forgotten by such atheists and unbelievers is that even if the multi-verse is a viable and plausible means of addressing the problem of fine-tuning from an atheistic perspective–and this point is itself debatable–the fact remains that the multi-verse, as just a general posit, not only does not necessarily help the atheist, but may actually make the problem for him astronomically worse, for imagine that we somehow gather evidence of the existence of trillions upon trillions upon trillions of other universes, and yet every single one of these other universes is also fine-tuned to permit the existence of embodied intelligent life and yet did not have to be so (essentially, there is no necessary reason that they had to be that way); in such a case, the inference to design has exponentially increased even though the multiverse exists, and so the atheist, in order to make his appeal to the multiverse plausible in terms of its support for the atheistic-naturalistic hypothesis of “it’s just chance”, must not only provide evidence that the multiverse exists, but he must also provide evidence that the multiverses being generated by some universe-generating force (itself possibly fine-tuned) is actually producing a wide variety of different universes with different constants in them, for if the universe-generating force could create any type of universe, and yet was creating only universes which were life-permitting, then this would simply be more evidence for theism, not evidence for atheism (by analogy, just imagine a candy dispenser which could randomly dispense any one of the hundreds of different candies in existence, and yet it only spit out your favorite candy over and over and over again…after about a dozen such occurrences, you would be entirely rational to believe that a ‘mind’ was behind the dispensing, not mere ‘chance’)…and so, as stated, the multiverse, as an idea in and of itself, offers no help to the atheist, for what the atheist needs is a certain type of multiverse, and good luck providing any evidence for that!

Does the Reasoning of Atheists Undermine Evolution?

One of the most used atheistic catch-phrases in modern times is that “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence”, and while there is much wrong with this phrase there is also much much right with it when properly understood, and yet what is most often overlooked with this idea is that when it is turned on beliefs associated with and linked to the atheistic-naturalistic worldview, the fact is that its effect is utterly devastating to that worldview, for consider, for example, not only that the grand blind-watchmaker interpretation of evolution is something totally alien to our experience, and thus an extraordinary claim, and therefore needing extraordinary evidence, but things are actually astronomically worse than is for the evolutionary narrative, for it is actually the case that one could consider each major claim in the naturalistic evolutionary story as an individual extraordinary claim, and so each of the vast multitude of such claims requires extraordinary evidence, and it is actually needless to say that the grand naturalistic evolutionary story by no means has extraordinary evidence for many (if not most) of its claims (in fact, it does not even have any ordinary evidence for many of its claims…just think of abiogenesis, the Cambrian Explosion, sexual reproduction, consciousness, rationality, etc., etc., etc.); so, in an interesting twist of irony and reasoning, it is actually the very skeptical slogans championed by atheistic-naturalists which give us the grounds and justification to reject ideas integral to the atheistic-naturalist worldview, such as the grand blind watchmaker evolutionary narrative…and so, the next time an unbeliever balks at your rejection of the blind watchmaker version of evolution, and questions your rationality because of it, just reply that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and since no such extraordinary evidence has been provided (“just-so” stories and “we just need more time” pleas do not count) then one is entirely rational to reject the claim until such a time as the extraordinary evidence required to believe all the various myriad extraordinary claims is provided.

Thought on the Possible Illusion of Pain

As part of the so-called ‘Problem of Evil’, atheists and unbelievers routinely argue how the pain that exists in the world is clear evidence against the existence of a benevolent and loving God, but while I contemplated this issue, and inspired by my background in the martial arts, I must admit that I have wondered about the possibility that pain actually does not exist, that it is some kind of illusion, for I have both seen and experienced the fact that through physical and mental control, borne from philosophical and spiritual reflection, a person can literally take an event that would normally result in either physical and/or emotional pain and let the pain pass through them in a way that there literally is none of the expected pain from that event (and this is not just ignoring the pain, but literally being able to not experience the pain as pain), and if this is the case, then this raises the question of whether pain, or at least a great deal of pain, is simply dependent on our reaction to it, and being so dependent, can be removed to the point of non-existence; now this fact, even if true, does not remove the whole problem from the issue of suffering and pain, but if a great deal of pain is little more than a mind-dependent illusion which could be controlled, mitigated, and removed with the proper degree of knowledge and training, then this fact could, in my view, seriously reduce the force of the so-called problem of evil.

 

Is the Problem of Evil an ‘Atheism of the Gaps’ / Incredulity Argument

Not a day goes by in the debate between atheism and theism where one does not hear some unbeliever intone that some argument for God is either a ‘God-of-the-Gaps’ / ignorance argument (essentially, and crudely, an argument which claims that we do not know how something happened, so God did it) or an argument from incredulity (where the believer allegedly claims that he simply cannot believe some naturalistic explanation, and so it is false), and yet what is fascinating about this atheistic desire to label so many arguments for God as ‘gap’ and / or ‘incredulity’ type arguments–even when they are clearly nothing of the sort–is the fact that arguably the greatest, most significant, and most well-known atheistic argument, namely the ‘evidential argument from evil’ (an argument which claims that since God would not permit gratuitous suffering to exist (either qualitatively or quantitatively), and since gratuitous suffering does exist, then God most likely does not exist), is actually an ‘atheism-of-the-gaps’ / unbeliever’s incredulity argument, for note that what the unbeliever is ultimately saying when he offers forth the evidential argument from evil is that he cannot understand or see any explanation for some evil that exists, or that he simply cannot believe that God would have a morally sufficient reason to permit some allegedly gratuitous suffering, and yet the former claim is just a ‘gaps’-type claim (namely:  there is no explanation for this evil that I can see, so God does not exist) while the latter claim is just a claim of incredulity (namely: I cannot see any explanation for this suffering, and so there is none); and yet note that the standard answers that atheists use against ‘God-of-the-Gaps’ arguments (namely: “Scientists are still working on it” or “We just need more time”) or the answers they give against arguments from personal incredulity (namely: “The fact that you can’t come to believe the answer does not make it false), can just as readily be used by the theist, for the theist can always say “Theologians are still working on it” or “We just need more time to understand the reason for this evil” or “The fact that you [an atheist] cannot accept this explanation of this particular evil does not make the explanation false”…and so it seems that the unbelieving community is stuck in a dilemma, for 1) if many arguments for God are claimed to be ‘gap / incredulity’ arguments and are thus considered invalid, then the same reasoning can be turned on many atheistic arguments, thus rendering them invalid as well via their parity with theistic arguments, or else 2) the atheist denies that his arguments are ‘gap / incredulity’ type argument (or, alternatively, accepts the legitimacy of such argument types), and yet thereby gives the theist the ability to claim the same thing, but either way, the unbeliever loses a significant intellectual advantage which he falsely believed that he had over the God-believer.

The Impotence of the Issue of Evil in light of Everlasting Life

One of the things that I find many unbelievers fail to appreciate, especially when speaking of the so-called problem of evil, is both 1) the radical value / good that an everlasting life with God brings with it as well as 2) what the value of this morally good thing means for the issue of evil and for the issue of what God would permit to happen in the world so that even but one person received this everlasting good, and so to illustrate what I mean, I wish to use an absolutely extreme example, but one which will illustrate my point well:  for the sake of argument, consider a situation where God knows that a certain person will only come to freely accept the gift of everlasting life with God if and only if a trillion other people experience pain and suffering, but if those other trillion people do not experience this pain and suffering, then the one specific person will not freely embrace everlasting life with God, and so when placed in such a situation–and, of course, all other things being salvifically equal (meaning that no one, including the trillion people, will lose their salvation because of the suffering of this trillion people), then not only would God permit the suffering of a trillion people to eternally save the one, but He–I would argue–is actually morally obligated to do so given His loving nature, for given that the salvation and never-ending bliss / happiness of merely one soul is an essentially infinitely greater good than the finite suffering of any finite amount of people, then in light of this moral calculation, God would indeed not only have a morally justifiable reason to permit the suffering of these one trillion people to save one soul, but He should actually be morally praised for doing, and we should and would all do the same if we reflected on the matter thoroughly (and note that this reasoning is nothing more than an explanation of Jesus’ parable concerning the shepherd leaving the 99 non-lost sheep in order to save the one lost sheep); and yet, note that the matter gets even worse for the unbeliever, for not only would God be morally right and good to allow a trillion people to suffer to give salvation to the one–again, all other things being salvifically equal–but God would be justified doing so even if the person that was saved would not exist for hundreds, or thousands, or even millions of years after the trillion people suffered (perhaps, for example, the person reads about the past suffering of the trillion people and that is the only thing significant enough to make her hardened-heart call out to God for a sign and/or to begin the journey of even thinking about God and His potential existence), and so in light of these two points, then it becomes quite clear that there is literally no coherent or reasonable way for an unbeliever to ever claim that some evil or some instance of suffering is gratuitous, for there is no way for them to have any coherent or reasonable idea of the effects that that evil / suffering will have in the far future…and so, when all is said and done, it seems, at least to me, that in light of these ideas, the guts of the so-called problem of evil are ripped out, and there is not much force left to the argument on an intellectual or rational level (and lest you think this is just some form of abstract reasoning, I note that in my own life, my return to the Truth was caused entirely by the writings of arch-atheist Richard Dawkins, for it was only after reading his ‘God Delusion’ book that I realized that if the arguments for atheism were as weak and shallow as his, then I seriously needed to investigate the Christian side of the argument, and so, even in my own life, I can see an instance of God allowing an evil to occur (namely, Richard Dawkins’ writing on God) which would seem to have no connection to me, and yet lead me back to salvation).

Evidence for the Romans 1 Suppression Thesis

It is an interesting thing to note–and, in my experience, I have noted it many, many times–how numerous atheists and unbelievers routinely employ hypocritical double-standards and selective hyper-skepticism when arguing against God and for their own positions, such as when, for instance, 1) unbelievers decry believing anything on blind faith and yet believe that, for example, rational subjective consciousness came from unconscious, non-rational, non-subjective chucks of bouncing around matter even though there is absolutely no evidence for this and it is simply accepted, on blind faith, as having somehow occurred, or when 2) unbelievers mock the fact that religious believers accept testimony for historical claims that are a few thousand / hundred years old, yet those same unbelievers often uncritically accept the testimony of scientists concerning their inferences about things that happened millions upon millions of years ago, or when 3) unbelievers demand extraordinary evidence for extraordinary claims from religious believers even though for the extraordinary claims of abiogenesis and macroevolution, the evidence is paltry, at best, and yet it is still, for some reason, accepted as sufficient for belief; now, in light of the aforementioned points, I note that the ‘Suppression Thesis’, an idea born out of Romans 1, is the claim that unbelievers know that God exists and yet suppress this truth for moral rather than rational reasons, and in contemplating this idea, and in remembering that some fact or observation counts as evidence for one hypothesis (H1) over another (H2) if that fact or observation is more likely / more expected on the first hypothesis (H1) rather than the second (H2), I would like to argue that I believe that one piece of evidence for the Suppression Thesis is the fact that, as stated earlier, many atheists and other non-believers routinely use those hypocritical double-standards and selective hyper-skepticism to argue for their own position and against theism, which is, I contend, precisely what would be expected if the Suppression Thesis were true (for it would be expected that unbelievers wold use any means necessary to suppress the truth in such a case) but not what would be expected if the Suppression Thesis was not true, and thus the fact that atheists do this does indeed serve, I argue, as some evidence towards the truth of the Suppression Thesis.  

Arguments are Best, not Mere Evidence

In the past, we have already discussed the idea that evidence is inseparably linked to argumentation and reasoning, and also that one cannot call some fact “evidence” of something without arguing for it and reasoning about it, and yet, at the same time, it is also worth noting that in the scheme of argumentative strength, what we should be seeking are arguments  rather than mere pieces of evidence, for not only are arguments, such as deductive arguments or even mathematical arguments (2 + 2 = 4, for instance), much stronger than mere pieces of evidence, the fact is also that for “evidences” to become in anyway convincing to the point of needing to be reasonably believed, the evidences need to be combined into a cumulative case argument in order to have the force necessary to be compelling; and so, all this is meant to show that the individual who demands evidence, but not arguments, demands that which is foolish and incoherent, for on the one hand, arguments should be preferred to mere chucks of evidence, for any argument is stronger than some one piece of evidence, and on the other hand, for “evidences” to become powerful and compelling, they must be joined together into an argument which argues that the cumulative combination of the evidences is rationally compelling towards some conclusion, and so again, we see that the constant demand for “evidence” not arguments or reasoning is either an unsound request (for arguments are stronger than a mere piece of evidence) or is incoherent (given that evidences must be combined into an argument to be compelling)…so hopefully this foolish request will finally die the slow death that it deserves.

Another Way to Refute the ‘No Evidence’ Meme

Yet one more way to reduce the ‘no evidence for God and/or Christianity’ meme to dust is to simply note that testimony is obviously and undeniably evidence–just listen to any court of law to see this fact proven–and there is an overwhelming amount of testimony from people who claim to have seen God, and/or felt God, and/or experienced God, etc., and so this testimony, in and of itself, thus serves as evidence for Christianity and/or God; now note that in this particular case, and for the sake of argument, I am not necessarily saying that this testimony is good evidence (although I think it is), nor am I saying that this testimony might not be explained in some other way or rebuffed, but the fact remains that such testimony is evidence, at least to some degree, and so the claim that there is no evidence for Christianity and/or theism is patently false bullshit.