The Contradictions of the “Ordered Universe” Argument for God
…at least if a Christian makes them:
Dinesh D’Souza (and many others before him) makes a very clever argument for the existence of a God - that out of all the possible universes that could have existed, one must have been created that is suitable for life. He doesn’t shoot himself in the foot like bible literalists by suggesting that science is a vast conspiracy, but rather admits the validity of, e.g., the big bang theory, continental drift, biological evolution, etc. He then points out (correctly, last I heard) that if certain universal constants were only slightly off, the universe would be unsuitable for life, the first sparks would have never occurred and evolution simply would have been rendered impossible. Clever, but flawed as a defense of Christianity.
Dinesh is known for saying “God could have made an arbitrary universe or he could have made an ordered universe” (paraphrasing), and goes on to attack the silly notion of each happening being the direct will of God. We can falsify the idea of an arbitrary universe quite easily. The fact that we can predict things using mathematics and theorems shows that the universe acts based on certain principals. It shows that if there is a creator God (s)he adamantly refuses to violate his/her own rules. The problem is Christianity is a belief in an arbitrary universe, since a miracle is by definition a violation of the laws of nature, as is immaculate conception, resurrection, etc.
One could respond to this by suggesting that the universe is mostly ordered and sometimes God intervenes. Certainly, if I were God, I’d put the universe on autopilot and intervene when things go wrong (like I do with my pond, my garden, etc.), but that’s because I’m not perfect and I could have made big mistakes in making the world. However, an even partially arbitrary universe is an arbitrary universe. Where we see apparent violations of the laws of nature, it is always where our understanding is incomplete and never correlates with prayer nor piety. Never has there been a verifiable instance of a prayer resulting in something that violates the laws of physics. To use an argument Shermer likes to use, people may pray to recover from cancer (something that might happen anyway), but people don’t pray to grow a leg when their leg gets blown away. Heh, clever.
So, in conclusion, I suppose your faith in God might increase from the ordered universe argument if you are a deist or a naturalistic pantheist - in other words, your God is 100% non-interventionist; that is really a separate and weird argument that I won’t bother getting into right now (it doesn’t deal with morality). But if you are a Christian, it should severely challenge your idea of Jesus as an avatar of God (or something like that), rather than merely a philosopher and primary founder of Christianity.
Tags: deism, ordered universe