Quite a lot of arguments for the existence of God get their start along the lines of, “Where do you think all of this came from?” (“This” obviously representing the sun, planets and moons of our system; the vegetation and organisms of Earth; oceans and mountains; etc.) Indeed we have available coherent (and godless) explanations for where quite a lot of “this” comes from, but at any rate, here’s what I need help with: How and why is a super-powerful and creative presence capable of making our universe more likely to exist independently than our universe? The world and goings on as we interpret them absolutely are complicated and orderly, but why, do you think, that a God qualified to initiate this situation is any more likely than just the situation, by itself?
Further, if you do in fact maintain that our world is so complex as to necessitate a designer, does it not follow that such a designer would by definition be even more complex, and thus require another, still better designer of Her own? Really. If complexity is a criterion by which you decide whether something has a designer, why haven’t you decided that God, too, should have one? On what grounds is it sensible to dismiss this requisite in talks of God? Because, nonbelief in God allows for the notion, not that something can come out of nothing, but that the complex comes from the simple (the theory of evolution by natural selection being a fantastic example of this premise). In the case for belief, though, what’s endorsed is that something complex comes from something even more complex, that for some unavailable reason is capable of selfsustaining its complexity. In this way, the creationist worldview is internally inconsistent to the point of self-destruction.
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