I would believe in God if...

[BrianSoddingBoru4]

Are you pondering the personal "why" did God create the universe, as in to what purpose?

Ex:  Why did my wife and I choose to have children?   For our amusement, edification, to instill our values, procreation of the species, or to have someone to pass our gold bullion to?

Or is there a reductionist argument as to why the universe was/is a creation?

Ex:  The universe has an observable beginning where time and matter came into existence.  The universe appears governed by laws and constants and order not chaos permeates it. Life, consciousness, humanity, nature, etc appear designed.  This implies a designer. Thus there must be a designer.

Take a look at this:



I suppose you could make the argument that the snowflake appears designed. I don't dispute that the appearance must make some people think of them as exceedingly delicate works of deliberate art. But this is what happens when a droplet of water freezes. And it would happen precisely the same way if there were a designer or not.

I strongly suspect that 'appearance of design' is a provincial prejudice. Human beings have evolved a stunning level of conceit (this is not a bad thing, it is a survival trait), and thus people who advocate for the Argument From Design almost always crow something like, 'Look at the human eye!' or 'Look at our great, big, throbbing, tumescent consciousness!' and leap from there to the (no offense) idiotic conclusion that the universe was designed with human beings in mind.

There are microbes that eat sulfur. There are bacteria that happily feast on petroleum, others that consume plutonium, there are extremophiles that live in water hot enough to poach an egg, and lichens that dissolve frozen rocks to get the minerals they need. Something like 90-95% of the planet we live on is closed to us. The depths of the oceans teem with life at pressures and temperatures that would kill any unprotected human, camels can survive for 10 days in conditions that would kill you or I in 10 hours. The notion that the unimaginably vast universe in which we live was designed for a single species of bipedal primate is, quite simply, untenable.

Isn't it just as likely that things appear designed because we ourselves are designers?

Boru