When one sets out to decide whether they will believe or not believe in an intelligent creator, they (should) weigh each side against its alternative. For which alternative is there the best evidence? As I will lay out, while there is not sufficient evidence to prove that an intelligent designer exists (or whatever you choose to call this creator), there is sufficient evidence that our existence through random chance is so unlikely that we should reasonably assess what else could have caused our existence.
The task at hand is also not as difficult as it seems, nor as difficult as it once was. Most atheists believe in free will, which is to say that most atheists believe in the supernatural in the literal sense of the word — that there is more than can be logically explained by the natural world.
According to atheism, we are simply organic robots that process information. Robots do not have free-will: there would be no way for us to escape the coding that predetermines how we will process and respond to information and our environment, and thus no way for anyone to freely choose anything. Thus, if one believes in free will, one believes in something that Science not only has no explanation for but that Science says cannot exist. (If you would like more explanation on why Science says free will is impossible, see the bottom of the post*.)
And yet, it’s likely no atheists (or at least very few) truly believe we do not have free will. If someone believes there is no free will, they would also necessarily need to believe there is no right and wrong: if people do not have free will, we can’t say that anything is right or wrong to do because people have no control over their actions. And, if no one could choose to do anything at all, life would lose all of its purpose because there must be a reason, design, or intent for anything to have purpose.
Instead, most atheists believe in free will and even entertain the idea of a simulation thesis (that we are potentially living in a virtual world created by a more advanced being, aka “a god”). As it appears to me, there are very few atheists in the strictest sense of the word. I think atheists more typically believe that a personal god does not exist — such a belief is entirely rational. But true atheism (believing that nothing supernatural, such as free will, exists or that it’s impossible that we live in a simulation) is rare.
Thus, the vast majority of people enter the discussion of an intelligent designer with the sneaking suspicion that there is one — whether that intelligent designer cares about us or is entirely indifferent to us is another matter entirely.
But let’s look at some facts that back up that sneaking suspicion.
Origin of the Universe
I think it is sufficient to state the obvious: there was a Big Bang, and no one can prove what caused it. Any pure materialist who alleges that there cannot be a god is not truly basing their views on the facts at hand. The fact that the universe had a beginning and that the cause of this beginning is unknown should, on its own, cause us to wonder what caused that beginning and whether that beginning was caused by a being far more intelligent than ourselves.
Fine-Tuning
The universe, and even the Earth specifically, is more finely tuned to support life than we can come anywhere close to comprehending.
For example, if the rate of the expansion of the universe was different by 1 divided by 10120, then life could not exist (if it was slower, everything would have snapped back together right after the Big Bang; if it was faster, everything would be flung apart too fast to come together into stars and planets). There is no way to comprehend how large 10120 is, but let’s try a bit. To get some sense of how large of a number that is, the observable universe is 93 billion light years in diameter (so it would take light, traveling at roughly 670,000,000 miles per hour, 93 billion years to cross it). There are an inconceivable number of galaxies, stars, planets, and thus atoms in all of that space. Scientists estimate that there are roughly 1080 atoms comprising all of those galaxies, stars, and planets. If the cosmological constant dictating the rate of the expansion of the universe was off by the equivalent of one atom out of more than 1080 atoms in the universe, life couldn’t exist.
But large exponents really don’t make sense to the brain. There are about 1023 (~4,650,000,000,000,000,000,000) atoms in just one dime. The number of atoms in a dime probably seems too similar to the number of atoms (1080) that make up all of the observable universe and the millions of galaxies, but that’s the incomprehensible nature of exponents. For instance, 1022 and 1023 are already very different because 1023 is ten times larger than 1022. So when you keep 10x’ing a number over and over and over and over again, you get astronomically different numbers. So let’s try a bit more to better comprehend 10120.
You would need to take all the atoms (1080) in the observable universe and multiple that number of atoms by 1040 (10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000). If the cosmological constant was off by the equivalent of just one atom in all the atoms in 1040 of our universes, life couldn’t exist.
And that’s just one element of fine tuning. There are many more that have to exist in a narrow range in order for life to exist.
- Gravity: If gravity were different by 1 divided by 1034, then life could not exist: either it would be too strong and stars would burn up far before life could begin, or it would be too weak and stars would not be stars at all (there would be no nuclear fusion).
- Strong Nuclear Force: This binds the nuclei of atoms together. It had to be within 2% of what it is (out of the infinite possibilities that it could have been).
- Weak Nuclear Force: +/- 2% of its current strength.
- Electromagnetism: +/- 4% of its current strength
- Proton-to-Electron Mass Ratio: +/- 2%
- Ratio of Strong Force to Electromagnetism: +/- 2%
- Density of the Early Universe: +/- 1 divided by 1060
- Matter-Antimatter Asymmetry: +/1 divided by 109
Keep in mind that any of these constants could have been infinitely higher or lower, and the preceding are just some of the cosmological constants that are finely tuned (others are neutron-proton mass difference, sum of neutrino masses, baryon-to-photon-ratio, etc.).
That sneaking suspicion, even at this point, should seem justified. If you flip a coin, you’re very unlikely to get more than a few heads in a row — for instance, you have less than a 0.1% chance of flipping heads 10 times in a row. If you start flipping a coin and it lands heads 100 times in a row, would you really just marvel at your luck? Or would you think that maybe random chance isn’t the sole determinant of the outcome of the coin flips? Now, maybe it is. It’s theoretically possible to randomly flip 100 heads in a row (if you flip that coin once per second, it would take roughly 3 trillion times longer than the age of the universe to get 100 heads in a row — again, once you get into exponents, or 2100 in this case, you start getting unimaginably large numbers). So, if you flip 100 heads in a row, you can certainly believe that nothing special is happening here. Or, perhaps, you might start to suspect that the outcome of those coin flips isn’t random chance.
And yet, although the universe is incomprehensibly finely tuned to support life, there is significant reason to suspect random chance did not give rise to life: the universe has no mechanism to start life. While the universe is like an exquisitely finely tuned, nutrient rich soil (or petri dish, if you prefer the simulation thesis), nothing could grow in it without a seed. As we will see, there is no reason to believe this seed happened by accident.
Origin of Life
Despite what some might project, no one has any idea how life could have originated on its own. Every year you’ll read some new theory about how “no, it wasn’t in a swamp that life originated; it was by a thermal vent in the ocean,” and then the next year, “no, it wasn’t by a thermal vent; it was brought here from outer space via meteor,” etc. That’s literally the span of actual theories — from the ocean depths to outer space. In short, no one has any idea.
There was significant excitement in 1953 when the Miller-Urey experiment showed that organic molecules could be produced naturally. Since then, despite all our advancements, essentially no real progress. And having organic molecules is functionally as helpful for the origin of life as having pieces of metal is for building a 747 airplane: necessary, but totally useless without innumerable other inputs and someone to put them all together.
But we have been able to build 747s. We are nowhere close to being able to build a simple life form, let alone one that could survive and reproduce — and this is after being able to study cells, not invent them from scratch. If life could arise on its own, it should be simple enough that we could replicate what we can already see and observe. Still, we are unable to come close to doing it. Instead, the more we learn about life, the more complex we find out it is. We can take a 747 apart and put it back together, but life is so much more complex than a 747 that we have zero idea how we could make it ourselves.
With no idea how it could have happened on its own and with certainty that life is incredibly rare and so complex that we cannot assemble it ourselves even with the blueprints to do so, it’s curious that people assert that it must have come into existence on its own. The common refrain at this point is that it would just happen after such a long time: the Earth is about 4.5 billion years old, and a generally accepted estimate is that life began about 1 billion years after the Earth formed. A billion years is certainly incomprehensibly long, but it’s also not a magic wand. In a billion years, has a drinking glass ever assembled itself? No. Glasses don’t assemble themselves. Neither do 747s. And both of those are far simpler than even the simplest single-celled organism.
Unicellular Life
The simplest single-celled organism that lives on its own is Pelagibacter. It still has 1,308,759 DNA letters that would have had to randomly come together on their own. If you had a slot machine with 1,308,759 DNA letters that you spun once per second, it would take 10787,944 years to randomly produce that sequence. How long did it take for life to originate? One billion years, which is 109. The Earth is about 109.6 years old. The universe is 1010.4. So, yes, 109 years is incomprehensibly long, but there’s no reason to believe that it’s nearly long enough for life to have occurred on its own.
Some have proposed that RNA could be a precursor to DNA for life, but lab-controlled settings show that even getting one functional RNA molecule to arise on its own is unlikely because the more nucleotides that combine, the more unstable the molecule becomes. Under lab-controlled settings, the best we can do is to fail to get nucleotides to combine into a functional RNA molecule. Even if we could get a single RNA molecule to self-assemble and self-replicate, you still don’t get anything remotely approaching life. You would still need a cell membrane (made of phospholipids, proteins, cholesterol, and carbohydrates), a cell wall, energy generation (ATP synthase, control of ion concentration gradients, etc), feedback loops, reproductive capacity, production of proteins and innumerable other molecules, internal pH balancing, DNA repair mechanisms, etc. Descriptions of the complexity of each one of those could, and does, fill volumes of books. It’s fine to believe it happened all on its own in the sense that we don’t have evidence that it didn’t. But to assert with certainty that it did is curious because no one has any idea how it could have, and we don’t see anywhere else anything that even resembles the qualities of a living organism. Additionally, while evolution can explain how living things adapted after life originated, evolution does not help to explain how the first living thing came into existence because evolution only acts on living things (there are theories that evolution can act on non-living things, but there is no actual evidence showing that it can, especially not in a way that would give rise to the complexity of a living thing).
But let’s just say that everything came together perfectly and something jump-started it into life (which we don’t know how to do either, and we’re not even able to bring the simplest cells back to life once they have died, even though all the building blocks are there). Even if life jump-started, it would certainly die. It wouldn’t have been adapted to the world. So, really, you would need life starting billions of times (even though it defies comprehension that it could have started even once) to finally have a life form that could survive. A further problem: this life form would have no reason to reproduce. It’s not conscious. It doesn’t have any desire to pass on its genes, and reproduction is extremely resource-intensive, especially for a single-celled organism that has to split in half to reproduce itself. So then you have to have billions upon billions of life forms that came into existence through random chance that could survive until you have one that also is encoded to viably reproduce.
The facts show that the origin, survival, and reproduction of life appear to be far too unlikely to have occurred by random chance. But I think the largest problem facing those who believe it’s random chance is reality. If life can easily come into existence on its own, then why is every life form that we have ever seen descended from one initial life form? If life took 1 billion years to arise on Earth and it has been 3.5 billion years since it arose, then where are all the new life forms? If life occurs so commonly that there were billions upon billions of new life forms occurring until one could survive and reproduce, then where are all the others since then? Where are the billions still popping into existence, especially now that the world is inundated with organic compounds, parts of living things, and an environment hospitable to life? Atheists have no answers. Thus, reality is the best evidence that life is unlikely to arise on its own. If evolutionary biologists knew how life could arise on its own on Earth, they wouldn’t entertain the idea that life here was seeded from aliens elsewhere. It is simply dogmatic belief that life might have been seeded by an intelligent designer, but that intelligent designer could not have been God.
Multicellular Life
But, perhaps you are still fine believing your coin is still flipping heads through random chance alone. There remains the conundrum of how multicellular life came into existence. We can break life into three domains: bacteria, archaea, and eukaryotes.
While all three have a common ancestor, at some point a single-celled organism (a mitochondria) came to survive and thrive in another single-celled organism (a single-celled eukaryote). This symbiotic relationship is the most notable feature of eukaryotes and enabled them to become multicellular. How do we know that this symbiotic event is exceedingly rare? As far as we know, it has only happened once. In 3.5 billion years, no archaea or bacteria have ingested another living organism and both it and the organism have lived to tell the tale. The book “Power, Sex, and Suicide” (I can personally attest that the 560 page book is dramatically less exciting than its title) traces the origin of eukaryotes and the role of mitochondria. The author, Nick Lane, is a staunch atheist, and yet his extensive research has led him (and others) to conclude that the origin of multicellular life is far less likely than the origin of unicellular life.
That’s saying something, because the origin of unicellular life is itself incomprehensibly unlikely.
A Weighted Coin
The most frequent rebuttals to the above go something like “The universe might be eternal; there could be innumerable alien species elsewhere in the universe; there might be infinite universes and thus an observer selection bias; etc.” Notice anything about those counterarguments? They are all pure speculation with literally zero evidence to back them up. Based on the facts and evidence we actually have, we appear to be unimaginably unlikely.
Let’s double-click on one rebuttal: “observer selection bias.” In essence, this rebuttal claims that the person who flips 100 heads in a row might think that their coin is weighted, but, if there are enough people flipping coins for a long enough period of time, then someone was bound to do it. The problem is: 1) Given the astronomically low odds, that person should absolutely be wondering if their coin is weighted if it lands heads 100 times in a row, and 2) The observer selection bias hinges on there being infinite universes — that if there are infinite universes, then one of them was bound to produce life. Except we have zero evidence that there are any universes besides our own, so it does not follow at all that a universe with life is bound to exist when, for all we know, there is only one universe. All of the counterarguments rely upon pure speculation.
If we want to believe what is true and not become dogmatic (and thus choose comfortable ignorance), we must always maintain this maxim: “I reserve the right to change my mind according to new information.” There is no shame in changing one’s mind according to new information. Instead, there is shame in not changing one’s mind even if given new information that should change one’s mind. For instance, if evidence arises that the universe has always existed, then that should (and would) cause me to reject the possibility that our universe was created. If it is discovered that there is even a somewhat viable way for life to originate on its own, that would cause me to rethink the probability of a creator. In the same way, if anything was new to you in this blog post and if you prefer truth over dogmatism, then it should cause you to consider whether we are truly only the outcome of random chance.
As previously mentioned, it’s telling that most prominent atheists believe we might live in a simulation (which requires that there is a god, even if we are essentially just organisms in its petri dish). Nearly all of us have a sneaking suspicion that we got here somehow, and that somehow was not by chance.
I have tried to elucidate that this should be more than a sneaking suspicion. There is every reason to suspect that if you are the result of incomprehensibly unlikely odds stacked on top of incomprehensibly unlikely odds, your luck might not be random. After flipping heads hundreds of times in a row, it is reasonable to assume that a coin is probably weighted and that the results are not the outcome of purely random chance. Does this prove we are the outcome of a weighted coin as opposed to random chance? No. But almost.
*More explanation on free will: Why does Science say free will is impossible? Because every output can be known if you know the input (except in quantum mechanics, but that still doesn’t make free will possible because, yes, the output would be unknown but still not under your control). What we typically refer to as consciousness is not enough to have free will because consciousness is solely the processing of information. But processing of information doesn’t mean that anyone actually has free will to determine how they are going to process that information. We could create artificial intelligence that looks like it has free will (and artificial intelligence already does look like that): we give it an input, it very extensively processes that information, and then we get an output with such complexity that we don’t even really understand how the machine gave us that output. But does that mean the artificial intelligence had free will? No. It just has very complex machinery to process information — in our case, organic processing machinery. At the fundamental level, we are not any different from artificial intelligence: we receive inputs, and then we process those inputs into emotions, thoughts, and actions. At no point is there anything in the processing that we have control over. We might think we have control over the processing, but that is the exact same as if the machine thought it had control over the processing: it didn’t. No matter what, the machine was going to process the information according to how the machine was built and coded. Or, another way to approach the matter: how could we have free will? There is no scientific explanation for how we could. Nothing should be able to take information and then, independent of its machinery and pre-determined pathways of processing that information, decide how it wants to process that information. A belief in free will is a belief that there is something happening beyond the natural order, as if there is a “ghost in the computer” that is producing outputs that defy the inputs and the machinery. It is not a new idea in either philosophy or science that free will should not be possible.
In short, in order to believe there is free will (and we all believe we have free will), we need to believe that there is something special about us — something that cannot be explained by nature or science alone.
But, if for whatever reason you think you have free will that is not transcendent, the additional problem remains that, without an outside moral order of right and wrong imposed upon humanity, morality would still be subjective, and there would be no actual right and wrong. That outside moral order could only come from an outside moral Being that has imposed a moral order on created beings. And, even if people say that they don’t believe there is objective truth and objective morality, they actually do believe in objective truth and objective morality because people who say that morality is subjective will quickly start telling you that you did something wrong if you treat them in a way that they don’t like. We all actually believe that there is an objective morality that we should all abide by. In order for objective morality to exist, there would have to be something transcendent, something beyond the purely material. And this cannot simply be an artifact of evolution or something that we can just invent. Because if morality is purely just our feelings that we evolved to have or is our own invention, then we cannot bind other people, especially not those in other cultures (which, of course, everyone still does), to do what some of us simply feel is right or that some of us have simply invented. Why do I bring this up? To prove the point that we all believe in the transcendent already. How do we know we have these beliefs? Because we live accordingly: we live as if we have free will and also as if there is actually right and wrong.