Concepts of God: universe too big for Him? (The nature of a \'Creator\')

by dhw, Tuesday, November 14, 2017, 12:04 (2327 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: Go back and look at the original entry in this series. They use quotes from the Bible to make assumptions about God and the universe and then support atheism by saying the universe is too big.

Oh dear, then we’d better repeat the whole course of this discussion. The biblical assumption about God is that he is human-oriented, and that is precisely your assumption about God. Then they say that "If God is human-oriented, wouldn’t you expect him to create a universe in which humans feature prominently? […] Yet that isn’t the kind of universe we live in. Humans are very small, and space, as Douglas Adams once put it, “is big, really really big”. And “The spatial and temporal size of the universe gives us reason to be atheists.”

Then come qualifications of the argument:

"The fact that atheism is the simplest reply to the mismatch doesn’t mean that other explanations aren’t possible. Perhaps God exists but his motives for not creating humans sooner, or on a bigger scale, are unknowable. The divine is, after all, mysterious.
"Perhaps the swathes of space strung with gossamer nebulae serve some aesthetic purpose, beauty wrought on an inhuman scale. Or, perhaps, God exists but isn’t as human-oriented as we thought. Perhaps God values rocks and cosmic dust more highly than humans
.”

And so the authors still opt for atheism as the simplest solution.

Your comment on this, followed by my own:
DAVID: “The fallacy of this reasoning is obvious. It is not clear that the Bible's description of God's purpose and thoughts are accurate, since the books of the Bible are written by humans who would like God to be close and prefer doing nice things for humans. Not a reason for atheism.”
dhw: And yet you believe that God’s prime purpose for creating life was to produce the brain of Homo sapiens! If anthropocentrism is a fallacy in their reasoning, then it must be a fallacy in your own as well. And so, if God exists, perhaps he had other reasons for creating the “really really big universe”.

Would you like to start again from there? Or would you agree with my later comment, and put an end to this rather unproductive discussion?

Dhw: The Bible makes God human-oriented, and so do you. May I suggest that ALTHOUGH you agree with the Bible’s teaching that God is human-oriented, you do not regard the giant universe as a reason for atheism. For you the fallacy in the authors’ reasoning would then be that your God must have had a human-oriented reason for the giant universe, even though you can’t think of one. Alternatively a different type of theist could argue that the giant universe merely indicates that God was NOT human-oriented but had other purposes in mind.


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