Who made God? An invalid argument against theism

Geplaatst door

Titus Rivas (publicatiedatum: 3 May, 2011)

Samenvatting

Atheists sometimes ask theists by whom their God was created. Titus Rivas dismisses this question as incoherent.

Tekst

Who made God? An invalid argument against theism

by Titus Rivas

Although I'm not an outspoken theist while writing these words, I really wish to comment on a widespread and much too influential argument used against theism.
Its essence is like this:

(1) Scholars who believe in a theistic creator or 'intelligent designer' often point to empirical evidence for an irreducible order in biology that could not have originated by the laws of physics alone.
(2) The intelligent designer supposedly responsible for the irreducible complexity in biology is characterised himself by an irreducible order.
(3) Therefore, the intelligent designer cannot be the result of chance alone, and we should assume that the intelligent designer was created by another intelligent designer.
(4) This leads to an infinite regress.
(5) Therefore, there can be no intelligent designer.

The flaw in this argumentation can be discovered quite easily and it is the result of a misrepresentation of the argument from the irreducible complexity in biology or evolution. It is implicitly assumed that theists claim that any irreducible order must be the result of an intelligent designer, whereas in reality, they exclusively claim this for types of order of which one assumes that they have not always existed.
It is the combination of having had an origin and being irreducibly ordered that leads certain theists to postulate the theory of an intelligent designer for just this type of order. So they certainly do not claim that all irreducibly complex entities had a beginning. From such a perspective, the question "Who made God?" is not a very rational question. In other words, there really is no infinite regress and the argument is simply invalid.

Compare this online videoclip: What Caused God? by William Lane Craig

Contact: Titus Rivas

This online paper dates from 2009.