Did God create the Universe?
© Paulo Bittencourt
In their eagerness to try to prove that God exists, these are the main fallacies that believers commit: Appeal to Ignorance, God of the Gaps and — in particular — Confirmation Bias and Suppressed Evidence.
- Appeal to Ignorance Fallacy: Science does not prove that God doesn’t exist. Therefore, he exists.
- God of the Gaps Fallacy: Science cannot explain the exact origin of the Universe and why it exists. Therefore, it was created by God.
- Confirmation Bias Fallacy: “I’m certain that God exists. Therefore, I only look for evidence that confirms my certainty.”
- Suppressed Evidence Fallacy: “I’m certain that God exists. Therefore, in my research results, I omit any evidence that contradicts my certainty.”
Believers focus on the positive aspects of Nature and ignore the negative ones. For example, they see the beauty of the angel’s trumpet flower (yes, that’s its name!) as a proof of God’s existence. The fact that it’s extremely poisonous, to the point of causing deaths, and, therefore, evidence of God’s nonexistence, they conveniently ignore.
That’s intellectual dishonesty.
Things get really absurd when we mention suffering and disease. For example, around 100,000 children die of cancer — every single year. About that, anyone with even a modicum of intellectual honesty would say: “This is evidence that God doesn’t exist, unless he is either indifferent or evil or sadistic”. Believers, on the other hand, say: “This is not evidence that God doesn’t exist. God exists, and this is not his fault. It’s Satan’s fault”, an invisible being created by the most intelligent and powerful being in the Universe, who, mysteriously, not only grants his archenemy the power to cause suffering but also gives him total freedom to do so, including with the help of henchmen (as invisible as he is).
That’s not only intellectual dishonesty. It’s also ridiculous.
The problem, for believers, is that the Bible says that sin (the reason why there are flawed and bad things) exists only on Earth. It was only here that a mud doll that became a man and a rib that became a woman fell for the fairy tale of a talking snake and ate a forbidden fruit, forcing the most loving being in the Universe to curse Earth and all the descendants of the mud doll that became a man and of the rib that became a woman.
This means that, with the exception of Earth, the Universe should be a paradise. However, what we observe is exactly the opposite. For us humans, it’s a horrible place. It’s infinitely more horrifying than the most horrifying horror movie! If the Universe were a person, it would be a horrific sadist whose sole goal is to destroy us in the most horrific way possible.
These are some of the things in the Universe that are horrible for us:
- Vacuum.
- Extreme cold.
- Radiation.
- Explosions of stars (more than 30, every second).
- Gamma-ray bursts.
- Implosions of stars.
- Neutron stars.
- Black holes.
- Collisions of black holes.
- Stellar cannibalism (stars devouring other stars).
- Collisions of stars.
- Ejections of stars from galaxies.
- Collisions of planets.
- Ejections of planets from solar systems (planets without light, wandering in the darkness of interstellar space).
- Planets without air.
- Planets without water.
- Planets without edibles.
- Planets with a permanent day side and a permanent night side.
- Planets with no nights (orbiting two suns).
- Planets with crushing surface pressure.
- Gas planets (without surface).
- Extremely cold planets.
- Extremely hot planets.
- Planets with supersonic winds.
- Toxic planets.
- Comet impacts.
- Asteroid impacts.
- Solar eruptions.
- Quakes.
Most stars have planets. When stars explode (or implode), they send their planets to the depths of hell and beyond. If one of them contains life, obviously it too is destroyed.
Curb your optimism! Calm stars, like our Sun, also are destructive. They destroy life with all the calm in the world. And no, this is not a science fiction movie: It will take a while, but the day will come when, after frying it, the Sun will devour Earth. This is inevitable because it happens to all stars the size of ours: they turn into red giants. Shortly after, Andromeda will be colliding with the Milky Way, throwing some solar systems and stars out of the galactic disk.
The existence of life on Earth can indeed be considered a “miracle”, but, by all indications, a miracle of chance, not of an Intelligent Designer, since there is no way a universe so inhospitable and rife with cosmic cataclysms could be considered designed, let alone intelligently.
“Galaxy collisions, supernovae, black holes, gamma-ray bursts, neutron stars, inhospitable planets, comets, asteroids, meteorites, volcanoes, earthquakes, tsunamis, cyclones and Evolution are incontestable evidence that the Universe is not the project of any designer, unless the project was to start and abandon it to its own devices.”