Is stating that god has created the universe like saying a magic fairy moves a car piston?

From: james

how do we respond to comments evolutionists/atheists make stating that claiming god has created the universe is like saying a magic fairy moves a car piston? or that a turtle created the universe?

Transcript

This is an AI-generated transcript and may contain some errors.
question from James how do you respond to the comments by evolutionist atheists stating that claiming god has created the universe is like saying a magic fairy moves a car piston or that a turtle created the universe answer firstly this is a disanalogy analogy means when two concepts are unfamiliar concept is explained by comparing the familiar concept disanalogy means that when the two points that are being compared have such major differences that the comparison the analogy breaks down and disanalogies are often a part of sophistry, sophistry is false arguments which are used to mislead and misinform people so in fact the idea that comparing god’s designership of the universe with the magic fairy moving a car piston is a disanalogy because the assumption that god is like a magic fairy is unproven and the idea that god’s designership is as fanciful as some magic fairy is moving a car piston that also is unwarranted let me examine this more critically magic fairy moving a car piston so today much of science uses what is called naturalistic world view naturalism can either be methodological or metaphysical naturalism basically means that nature is all that exists and everything in nature must be explained through other natural causes so methodological naturalism says that this is a matter of method and metaphysical naturalism says that actually this is a matter of fact of reality that there is nothing beyond nature or matter in this world so now scientists may argue that when we move a car piston we know the mechanism by which the car piston is moved and that’s why we don’t need to bring in any magic fairy to move the car piston so this is valid there is the car piston is designed in such a way that we can know a material mechanism and that’s why there is no need for a magic fairy but does this apply to the way the world works so this example is valid for the point of view of how science explains nature and science does not need supernatural elements to bring to explain the working of man made phenomena like cars or car pistons but let’s look at the way nature works so there was a design argument that was advanced historically by Thomas Aquinas in the western tradition and subsequently by other rational theologians that means rationalistic theologians are theologians those who study and talk about God and try to do it based on rationality based on logical arguments not so much in scriptural revelation so the design argument has made certain propositions which from which we infer that certain factors of nature cannot be explained without pointing to an intelligent agency so now this is not so what scientists argue is that as soon as you bring an intelligent agency a super intelligent agency you could say into nature then you are going out of nature you are getting into supernatural causes and science doesn’t deal with supernatural causes and therefore you are bringing in fantastic elements like a magic fairy however the problem with this reasoning and the problem with this analogy is that unlike a car piston where we know all the mechanisms by which the car piston moves in several cases we don’t know the mechanism by which nature works and not only do we not know the mechanism, scientists may argue yes we don’t know the mechanism now but in the future we will find out the mechanism but going further there are several cases, several examples where we know that such a complex mechanism could not have come about without intelligent without an intelligent agent acting so the converse or the opposite of a natural agent is not necessarily a supernatural agent it can be an intelligent agent for example if scientists are studying, if researchers are studying crime and when they come to a house where somebody has been found dead and they find that the window has been broken and the window glass has gone to the stomach of that person that’s how the person has died now by looking at the way the window glass has entered into the person one can make out whether that was an accident or that was by intention so if the window glass has been specifically, has specifically been, has gone into the stomach in a very specific way and it has been pushed left and right it has caused the severe damage in a way that was definitely meant to kill, then one can conclude from this that that was a crime and what it means is that this death of a person, of the victim was not by a natural cause, it was by a intelligent cause, intelligent cause means some person, some criminal some murderer did that so the opposite of natural is not supernatural, it is intelligent so even in criminology researchers investigators do look at features in their observations and try to check whether this has come by a natural cause or by an intelligent cause similarly when scientists look for say, life on other planets and they have missions which probe signals which are coming from other planets, at that time they try to study the pattern of the signals and check pattern of the wave which is coming and then try to evaluate whether this signal has come this particular pattern of the waves has come by chance or is it so intricate and precise that it must have been designed and that it must have come from an intelligent source so has it just come from some radiation in the universe or has it come from an intelligent source, so again here it is not a matter of bringing some magical factor because we cannot explain something that we observe in nature by natural causes, no it is when we observe something in nature we infer from that observation that such a pattern requires an intelligent designer so there are several respectable scientists who have talked about the design inference William Dembski and others have pointed out that when a certain level of order and complexity is found in a particular pattern we normally infer that this could not have come by natural causes it must require an intelligent cause so we use this in cosmology to detect signals, we use this in criminology to infer whether a particular victim was a victim of accident or of a murder and similarly it is used in archaeology when certain artifacts are found with certain marks whether those marks were caused by human agents by human beings or they were the marks of nature by looking at the complexity and the intricacy of the markings one can infer whether this has been caused by a natural cause or by a intelligent cause and then if they find that it is complex enough that it could not have been caused by natural cause, natural factor, natural agent then they infer there must have been life on there must have been life in this area long ago and that life that intelligent life, this human life or some ancestor of humanity some predecessor of Homo sapiens must have lived and brought about this, caused this particular design so especially as the researchers have gone deeper and deeper into nature for example when they have gone into the study of the cells and within the cells we have studied the genome and the gene code and they have found it is just like a extremely well written and exhaustive book that is bigger than any library in the world and it is all written with precise code that is all essential for our survival so now this kind of precise alphabet like arrangement of all those elements which are there in the DNA that by careful observation one can infer that this cannot come, this level of complexity cannot come by a natural cause and therefore it requires not necessarily supernatural cause but an intelligent cause so therefore the point is that we are not bringing in God as an explanation of that which we cannot explain by alternative material causes, rather God is being brought in because that from the material effects itself we can infer that it requires an intelligent cause and so it is not an abandonment of naturalism to resort to supernaturalism but rather it is a inference from naturalism towards intelligent design, towards intelligent causality, so therefore this is a complete disanalogy and it is meant to mislead and bias people against what is irrefutable argument that has been, irrefutable evidence and argument that has been provided by scientific research itself so I’ll summarize this answer the idea that God creating the world is like a car piston, a fairy running a car piston is a disanalogy because firstly the mechanism for the car piston is known and there is no need for a fairy to explain that and there is no indication that a fairy is a fairy even exists for pushing a car piston on the other hand when we look at many of the patterns in nature for example we look at the pattern of the DNA the human genome or for that matter the pattern of the DNA in various living beings also, the design and the arrangement is so complex that we are not saying because it is so complex it cannot come by a natural cause, no, whatever the point here we are making is that by parallel reasoning that we do in other fields like criminology, like detection of extraterrestrial life and like an archaeology when we see patterns which are of a sufficient level of complexity then we infer that this cannot have come by natural cause so it requires not a supernatural cause but an intelligent cause. So similarly when we see the complexity of the alphabet like arrangement within the DNA it’s almost like a computer precisely written computer program then we can safely infer that this cannot come by just a natural cause it requires an intelligent cause so it’s not a running away from an explanation to resort to supernaturalism as a magical explanation it is an inference from the evidence which points towards an intelligent