Atheist Book Review

Review of, How to Know God Exists (review by Steven J.)

(Chapter 1 part 2) Ray argues, in the opening chapter of How to Know God Exists, that we have no reason to ascribe a cow to evolutionary processes if we can't, ourselves, make a cow (out of nothing, furthermore). But his hypothetical stone-age tribesman could not make a skyscraper, out of nothing or even out of dirt and vegetation. That does not mean that the skyscrapers were not made by beings very like the builders and designers that the tribesman had known. By the same token, our inability to explain or duplicate every detail of naturalistic origins does not imply that we are wrong to seek explanations in terms of observed, natural causes, from gravity to natural selection.

Ray offers one further argument in this introductory chapter (of which, to be sure, fully developed arguments should not be expected; that's what the rest of the book is for): atheists are a minority. In much of the world, even people who accept evolution and a natural origin for stars and worlds are a minority. How likely is it that non-creationists are right when so much of the world is wrong? Of course, this argument has its problems: four hundred years ago, heliocentrists were a minority, and ten or fifteen centuries before that, people who thought the Earth was ball-shaped rather than flat were a minority. Evidence, not mere numbers giving uninformed assent, is relevant here. Ray varies the appeal to the wisdom of the masses with an appeal to the wisdom of geniuses: Einstein, he assures us, believed in God. Not necessarily a personal God, not a God Who inspired an inerrant Holy Bible, and especially not a God Who judged and forgave us, but Something that Einstein thought was not quite the same as the universe itself (Einstein did not want to call himself a pantheist). Oddly, Ray doesn't present us with Einstein's arguments for God (or perhaps this is not so odd, as Einstein didn't actually present such arguments), but appeals to the authority of cosmologists as he appeals to the authority of popular opinion.

AUTHOR REBUTTAL:
You said, "By the same token, our inability to explain or duplicate every detail of naturalistic origins does not imply that we are wrong to seek explanations in terms of observed, natural causes, from gravity to natural selection." How did you make a leap from the creation of everything from nothing, to "our inability to explain or duplicate..."?

I didn’t challenge anyone to "duplicate" nature like some sort of photocopy. I said that we cannot "create" something from nothing. Go ahead, make me a living, breathing, thinking, flying, reproducing, singing bird, or a croaking leaping frog, or a colorful growing flower or a tree. Make a seeing eye linked to a thinking brain, or even a tiny singular grain of inanimate sand--from nothing. No, you can't use creation to start with. Do it from nothing. You can’t. The combined intellect of ten thousand Einstein’s couldn’t do it. We don't know where to begin. So how intellectually dishonest is it for you to presume that all this incredible creation came into being by itself?