A Challenge for the Atheist

[Esquilax]

1. Are you absolutely sure there is no God?

No, because absolute certainty, outside of some very basic axioms, is an illusion useful only to braggarts without evidence for the things they believe. The other two questions are simply not applicable.

2. Would you agree that intelligently designed things call for an intelligent designer of them? If so, then would you agree that evidence for intelligent design in the universe would be evidence for a designer of the universe?

Intelligently designed things would, by definition, requite an intelligent designer. However, given the paucity of evidence for intelligent design in the universe, one cannot really apply that statement to the world in which we live.

3. Would you agree that nothing cannot produce something? If so, then if the universe did not exist but then came to exist, wouldn’t this be evidence of a cause beyond the universe?

No, I would not agree to that, because that be an argument from ignorance; the best one could say is that we haven't seen something coming from nothing, and even that is spurious, in the face of certain elements of quantum theory that I'm not particularly educated enough to comment on. As to the second question, no it wouldn't, because we don't know the origin of every possible cause, so we can't rule anything out.

4. Would you agree with me that just because we cannot see something with our eyes—such as our mind, gravity, magnetism, the wind—that does not mean it doesn’t exist?

Sight is not the only measure of what is detectable.

5. Would you also agree that just because we cannot see God with our eyes does not necessarily mean He doesn’t exist?

Name me one person who ever actually said it does.

6. In the light of the big bang evidence for the origin of the universe, is it more reasonable to believe that no one created something out of nothing or someone created something out of nothing?

One follows the evidence, in order to be reasonable. There's no evidence for god, and plenty for the big bang. Tentatively, we accept the latter, as reasonable people, while discarding the former until evidence is presented.

7. Would you agree that something presently exists? If something presently exists, and something cannot come from nothing, then would you also agree that something must have always existed?

Do you even need to ask the first question? As to the second, the first premise of it contradicts the conclusion it's trying to establish.

8. If it takes an intelligent being to produce an encyclopedia, then would it not also take an intelligent being to produce the equivalent of 1000 sets of an encyclopedia full of information in the first one-celled animal? (Even atheists such as Richard Dawkins acknowledges that “amoebas have as much information in their DNA as 1000 Encyclopaedia Britannicas.” Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker (New York: WW. Norton and Co., 1996), 116.)

DNA is merely chemicals interacting. The fact that we can read DNA as a kind of information is down to us picking patterns out of it, not due to some inborn, physical quantity called information.

9. If an effect cannot be greater than its cause (since you can’t give what you do not have to give), then does it not make more sense that mind produced matter than that matter produced mind, as atheists say?

"If."

10. Is there anything wrong anywhere? If so, how can we know unless there is a moral law?

I know where this is going...

11. If every law needs a lawgiver, does it not make sense to say a moral law needs a Moral Lawgiver?

It's us! The moral lawgiver is us, and the reality that we exist in.

12. Would you agree that if it took intelligence to make a model universe in a science lab, then it took super-intelligence to make the real universe?

No. I can make a model tree out of lego, it doesn't mean every tree needs a super intelligence to create.

13. Would you agree that it takes a cause to make a small glass ball found in the woods? And would you agree that making the ball larger does not eliminate the need for a cause? If so, then doesn’t the biggest ball of all (the whole universe) need a cause?

A cause need not be a god, and a universe is not necessarily the same as all the physical matter within it. That's a fallacy of composition.

14. If there is a cause beyond the whole finite (limited) universe, would not this cause have to be beyond the finite, namely, non-finite or infinite?

Not necessarily. Why would it need to be that? It could just be finite but larger than us, off the top of my head.

15. In the light of the anthropic principle (that the universe was fine-tuned for the emergence of life from its very inception), wouldn’t it make sense to say there was an intelligent being who preplanned human life?

What reason do I have to accept that version of the anthropic principle as true?