Where Is Your God?

Creationists: Please read a book

Posted by Brandon On November - 13 - 2008

I watched a documentary at work during lunch today. It was Richard Dawkin’s “The Blind Watchmaker” and it was a fascinating, if not slightly old, film debunking the watchmaker argument. Though that specific argument will definitely be something I address in a future article, I want to talk about a certain revelation I had.

I was watching this documentary and thinking about the arguments Dawkin’s was using and the various computer simulations he designed to emulate how evolution works in nature. The arguments he made were sound and even intellectually poetic to me. But I realized that some of these arguments were not easy to understand always. Don’t get me wrong, they were simple enough, but I could see some people (can we say religious?) not really analyzing the evidence he presented.

God is easy to understand; there’s not much to it. A supreme, invisible being, created the universe and loves us and made everything happen using his supernatural powers. You only have one book that describes, in basic terms, how existence came about. Saying that reality was created with “magic” (or equivalent thereof) is not hard to understand, even a child can figure it out. But to actually devote yourself to studying evolution, astronomy, geology and various other sciences isn’t so easy. It’s really the same phenomena as any other supernatural experience that people have. Either someone doesn’t have enough understanding of the universe, or they want to believe and will mold perception to fit their preconceived notions.

This is really easy to observe. Just watch a debate between someone pro evolution and someone pro creation. They will say something to the effect of “Oh this all happened by chance?” or “The human eye is too complex to have sprouted up magically” or “We all evolved from monkeys?”. All of these prove, without doubt, that they have never once even looked at any data on the subject. But this isn’t really what I’m getting at, we all know theists have no sense of logic or understanding of their surroundings. What I’m trying to get at is why?

Personally, I attribute this lack of critical thinking to two things: One is the fact that science doesn’t offer something that most people find comforting. I think all people wouldn’t mind living forever and knowing that if they’re good people they will live in heaven for eternity. To put it crudely “Shit in one hand, wish in the other. See which one fills up first.” Yeah, that was pretty gross but it makes a good point that desiring for something doesn’t make it true. The second thing is what I said earlier in the post: Evolution, and various other fields of science, are difficult to understand in a few, poorly phrased sentences that Christians use to explain them to their followers. If you’re a theist and have doubts about Darwinian evolution you really need to do some independent study on the subjects without the extreme bias of someone who can barely understand it. I mean, seriously, on one side you have scientists who devote their lives to study these areas of science and on the other hand you have creationists who don’t even know that evolution doesn’t say we came from apes. If you can’t even understand that apes and man have a common ancestor then you lose all respect in my eyes.

This article ended up being quite a bit longer than I had originally wanted it to be. The main point I’m driving it is towards the religious: Please, please, read about the subject you are arguing about before you try and debate someone who understands the subject much better than you.