The Problem with Christians

[Esquilax]

You are right, Jorm. But does this muffin analogy actually damage the overall argument? Or is it generally useful? 

If you were walking alone in the woods and you came upon black metal box with hinges and a padlock in the middle of the trail, would your first thought be like that of Bertrand Russell, "Well, locked black boxes like this just are, and that's all there is to it"? Or would you assume implicitly that someone made the box, locked it, and placed it in the path?

And if the box can be presumed to have a maker, why not something larger...like a house, for instance? Or an aircraft carrier? Or a planet or even the universe itself? Does the size of the thing in question really change our willingness to conceive of its maker?

So, there's two basic problems with your argument here: one is an issue of false equivalence, and the other is a factual error.

To begin with the false equivalence, your discovery in the woods doesn't really match up with what you're seeking to make a comparison with, does it? I don't know whether you did this intentionally or not, but you selected an item that we already have evidence for its design, which we do not have for the universe. If you were to find a locked black box in the woods, you're already equipped with a vast swathe of data about how locks and boxes come to exist, and for what reason that is, but when you're talking about the universe, none of that is true and, in fact, we only have a single universe to examine, and it had already been around for a long ass time before we ever showed up to do so. You don't have the requisite information necessary to make the same assumption with the universe that you might with the locked box.

Now, there is a valid form of your analogy, we just need to tweak a variable: if you were walking alone in the woods and you came across an object, previously unknown to you, of which you only know of this single example in front of you, that you are only able to examine the smallest fraction of it, and are unable to ascertain what purpose it might have, or even if it does have a purpose... would you assume design? There's a conversation to be had there about how we even recognize design, but the fact is, that conversation needs to be had, because we're on far, far shakier ground talking about the universe than we are about locked boxes.

The factual error is simpler to explain, which is that you're unjustified in the assumption that universes even need a cause in the temporal sense we understand. Time and space are properties of the universe, and what data we have been able to ascertain about the big bang and points beyond seem to suggest that the physical constants within our universe stop applying as we understand them at the point of the big bang: causation stops mattering, for example, because you've reached the point at which our notion of time began, and "before time" is nonsensical as a concept. Cause and effect necessarily require linear time in which to occur, which did not exist prior to the Planck time, so when you say the universe requires a cause, the simple fact is that you've got no reason for saying that at all.