One of the arguments for the existence of God is nature itself. The fact that we have eyes, lungs, brains, organs and a functioning body. We look in awe and wonder at our bodies and the universe and say “There must be a God”
The Teleological argument (also known as the Watchmaker analogy or sometimes as Intelligent Design) claims that if you would see a watch, you would know there is a designer. In the same way when you look at nature and most specifically, the complexity of us human beings, you can assume there is a designer because it’s like the watch.
Abiogenesis
In this article, I am not going to be addressing abiogenesis, which is how life first came about. As far as we know, from the muddy primordial soup that existed on the early Earth, something sparked life to start. It started as RNA, then DNA which is the basis of all life. Scientists in 2009 were able to replicate recreating RNA per conditions they thought resembled early Earth, and research is still ongoing to simulate the creation of DNA. There are other possibilities as well, that life originated outside Earth and came to Earth on an asteroid.
In fact, we have found creatures (Tardigrades) that can survive in the depths of space. This doesn’t solve the question but changes the conditions.
We have to be honest that there is also the possibility that there was a deity involved who created life. This is one possibility. But this does not mean that any of the world religions are true. They could still all be false. This entity may or may not have a personality and may not have interacted with humanity whatsoever (a concept known as deism). This creator may even be described as a force rather than a personal God. In order to move past deism and see if particular God idea is true (say Jehovah or Allah), we must observe its holy books and claims.
The first issue with this argument is evolution.
Evolution destroys this argument. The process of evolution which has refined us and shaped us over billions of years by the process of natural selection is probably the biggest argument against the watchmaker analogy. There is so much evidence for evolution. As of now, we understand evolution very well and we no longer need to rely on “intelligent design.”
To understand the following points, you need to understand some basics about evolution (natural selection and random mutation).
Random mutation occurs in DNA. These are either from the environment or they are during the copying process when it replicates it doesn’t copy perfectly. They are one way that an organism changes over time. When a child is born, he or she gets half of his chromosomes from his mother and half from his father. The combination of DNA results in a change to the child. If there is any small advantage to any of the children, it means its DNA will be more likely to be passed on to the next generation. Over time, this shapes a population by selecting for certain features. This 11-minute video explains it well. Understanding this simple idea is vital before reading this article.
If we are arguing that humans and by extension the universe is intelligently designed why do we see the following?
Ask yourself when you read this: Am I seeing something that was designed intentionally, or does this seem more like the blind emotionless force of nature shaping it?
Why are there flaws in our design?
Why would God design our eyes to have a blind spot? Find your blind spot here. If we compare the human body to a car, and the car had a flaw in it, whether small or big, we would wonder about the all-powerful all-wise designer. The blind spot in cars is a flaw of the design. Now with technology some cars remove the blind spot by using cameras.
In the small, round area where the optic nerve meets the retina, there are no rods or cones. If light from an object lands on this spot, the image is essentially invisible. This area is called the optic disk, or the blind spot. In effect, it’s a black hole in the retina’s projection screen.
This missing area in the field of vision is not normally noticeable. The brain fills this blind spot with the colors and patterns of the objects surrounding environment. It uses information received fractions of a second prior from a different distance or angle and what the opposite eye sees to create a complete, uninterrupted picture.
Not all animals have blind spots. This is not a universal issue. It’s a by-product of how we evolved that we have a blind spot.
In vertebrate eyes, the nerve fibers route before the retina, blocking some light and creating a blind spot where the fibers pass through the retina and out of the eye. In octopus’s eyes, the nerve fibers route behind the retina, and do not block light or disrupt the retina. The cephalopod eye is “wired” in the opposite direction, with blood and nerve vessels entering from the back of the retina, rather than the front as in vertebrates. This means that cephalopods do not have a blind spot
Some parts of nature seem to be without purpose – nipples on a man for example. Did God just make nipples on men as an erogenous zone? As I was told, male nipples can be stimulated for sexual pleasure but I haven’t looked into this! Evolution can explain this just fine, if body parts give an advantage or they had an advantage at some point in the past, they will remain unless selected against (i.e. causing harm and reducing the chance of survival and reproduction).
By seeing the variety of eyes in nature, we can understand that they are the product of shaping by the environment and gradual improvements. There is no all-powerful deity sitting up there thinking “hmmm, let me design humans with a blind spot.”
God seems to make a lot of mistakes
Certain body parts prone to cancer like prostate glands and breasts.
Umbilical cord can choke babies, and amniotic bands that can occur inside the womb due to potential partial rupture of amniotic sac can dismember fetuses.
Many babies get stuck in birth canal and need medical intervention to save them.
For example, many years ago, my wife had an ectopic pregnancy. It means our baby was in the fallopian tube. Ectopic pregnancies are life threatening. The baby must be removed right away or it can cause the mom to die.
Ectopic pregnancy is the most common cause of pregnancy-related deaths in the first trimester of pregnancy. There are more than 40 deaths per year in the United States. It accounts for about 10% of all pregnancy-related deaths. However, the number of deaths per ectopic pregnancy is decreasing dramatically because of earlier diagnosis and treatment.
Saved by medical intervention.
Another example – Have you ever seen how large babies’ heads are? Before medical forceps and C-Sections, how many women would die during labour?
Perhaps the first written record we have of a mother and baby surviving a caesarean section comes from Switzerland in 1500 when a sow gelder, Jacob Nufer, performed the operation on his wife. After several days in labor and help from thirteen midwives, the woman was unable to deliver her baby.
Just look at the example of Rh disease. How mere incompatibility in blood type between a husband and wife causes wife’s immune system to attack all subsequent fetuses after exposure to the blood from the first borne? Medical intervention is required to allow subsequent pregnancies to succeed.
There are several conditions that also lead to autoimmune related pregnancy loss such as endometriosis and polycystic ovarian syndrome. These all require medical intervention that has been developed only recently, prior to which miscarriages for women affected was the norm. No amount of prayers could save pregnancies in such women.
Hagar in the stories of the revealed texts and Zacharias’ wife, we were told were given a child despite advanced age and infertility except in practice medical intervention has been shown to work a lot more than any amount of prayer or piety.
Evolution would have done better to deliver the baby straight through the tummy. But alas it can’t start over, it can only work with minuscule gradual changes on an existing organism. It can’t redesign from scratch, it has to work with what it has.
I always used to wonder as a kid why God made people be able to choke and die so easily. On something small like a peanut. It seems like a severe flaw yet again.
In regions where malaria is common, people tend to get a certain gene that gives them immunity to this disease. When both parents have this gene though, the result can be terrible for their offspring – they get sickle cell anemia. By the parents getting the resistance and by how DNA is copied to offspring and the fact that the two combined genes result in a harmful gene in the child.
Signs and symptoms of sickle cell disease usually begin in early childhood. Characteristic features of this disorder include a low number of red blood cells (anemia), repeated infections, and periodic episodes of pain. The severity of symptoms varies from person to person. Some people have mild symptoms, while others are frequently hospitalized for more serious complications.
Again we are left wondering, did God intentionally design life to lead to children getting a genetic flaw due to their parents’ immunity to a disease? It is mind-boggling to imagine a God would intentionally make things this way. This leads into the problem of evil. Why would a merciful God build the world with so much suffering in it? But this is a different argument.
Why do animals have to eat meat and harm other animals to survive?
As my friend Hassan Radwan said,
God started with a blank page. He decided that he’d create creatures that need to bite, chew & digest stuff to stay alive. He then decided that what they need to bite, chew and digest is *each other*. It seems twisted to me. If I had unlimited powers and I was going to create a world of creatures I definitely wouldn’t make them die if they don’t eat each other.
Animals tear apart other animals alive in the most brutal of ways. Most of the time there is no anesthetic for them while they get eaten. They simply suffer it through. And they suffer a lot. People with pets understand all too well that animals feel pain and have feelings too.
Vitamin B12 must be acquired from flesh of other animals by many mammals, including humans. It is essential to our development. We require consumption of animal flesh to thrive. There are many inefficiencies in a purely vegan diet.
Darwin who himself believed in God noticed this and found a problem with this idea:
I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent & omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidae (Parasite wasps) with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of caterpillars, or that a cat should play with mice. — Charles Darwin
Cruel mating rituals
The male bedbug inserts his sperm by the method of “traumatic insertion” where he stabs the female in the stomach and the sperm travels through the female’s blood stream into sperm receptacles and eventually into her ovaries.
With seals, the males forcibly rape the baby cubs and sometimes even crush her to death. In fact, mating leads to 1 in every 1,000 female elephant seals getting killed.
Male lions who take over a pride will kill all the cubs from the previous father. There are example after example of violence and cruelty in nature. Are we to believe a merciful God designed the world in this manner?
Why design a world where sexual coercion is the norm? Where the physically larger males threaten to drown their mate, call predators to coerce sex, immobilize or forcibly mount and inseminate their mates?
Why not design more species like birds? Most birds mate with the males balancing on top of the females and touching cloacas in a “cloacal kiss”; this makes forceful insemination very difficult.
The world is cruel, ridiculous, impractical, and contrary to life. A flawed, cruel world implies a flawed or cruel creator. If you believe a God intelligently designed us this way, then you must explain why God would build in some of the cruel and disturbing realities of our life. Of course, there is no creator designing such a cruel system. These examples came about by the process of evolution. Evolution is the blind watchmaker. The process leads to some disturbing and painful realities in life. In the past, we may have tried to use religious myth to explain things, like saying that the pain of childbirth is due to Eve disobeying her husband, but now today we know better, that the blind emotionless force of evolution is what shaped us to be what we are.
A response
This is the typical response to these arguments:
- It’s a test
- We don’t know why God did it
- Atheists are arrogant
- It’s a test
There you have it. Problem solved – It’s a test.
References:
- Please see this video – A crash course on teleological argument.
- Horrifically violent animal mating rituals
- Sickle Cell Disease
The problem of mankind is confusion. Confuse not yourself. Look at yourself. Whether you are a man or woman, equal is both. What you do the other cannot do, and what the other can do you cannot do. Man is not without woman and woman is without man. If you are not able to respect or value both alike, you are a fool.
Same, when you use the word God, be specific. A god is the Maker. Creation, the made is so sophisticate. Liking disliking is your problem, don’t name it as, flaw. Look in to history, living things were eating only vegetation. Without blood shed there was violence, so that generation was wiped out.
Look at the universe, so systematic, for us and other life on earth.
To remove your confusion: You are three in one.
‘You’, ‘your body’, and ‘your mind’.
You to the earth by two. ‘your father and mother’.
3/2, confusion.
You are here to become a child of Him who is CAUSE.
Your parents were CAUSE and have become parents.
The Maker, not any god, is CAUSE for us on earth.
With parents’ life in you still, is their child.
If you ALLOW the LIFE of your Maker, only by personal choice or will.
Is His child. “I am the LIFE” – Jesus. John14:6.
3/3, confusion free.
Totally confused. How do you know Jesus is God?
The evil in the world, as I had argued before, is more convincing that the complete non-existence of evil. Can you imagine a world without that? When you’re arguing with your wife, at one point it becomes impossible, even ridiculous, because you just understand each other perfectly.
People would just end up reading peoples minds.
People would float off cliffs. Every machine would work. There would be no competition, everyone would be given exactly what they wanted. And yet most of us want the same thing. Does that make sense?
There woukd be no distinction among brutal animals and humans that can think – yet your examples show there is. Doesn’t that tell you something about our purpose, to be better than mere animals?
Recent information may cast doubt on evolution. Check it out. But evolution doesn’t reqlly disprove a god. It just suggeste that it took a long time for things to happen.
What recent information casts doubt on evolution?
“Evolution” in itself is a concept. Only particulars exist in the real world. Show me “evolution”. Put it on the table. Do not show me development over time of one species to another, because this is simply a succession of phenomena. Evolution is your stand in concept for God. It is like “nature”, or your impersonal “higher power” which you refer to in your video. “Evolution is the blind watchmaker”. You cleverly attribute something analogous to personality to this vacuous concept for one reason, subconscious though it may be: the escape of accountability for your deeds and therefore the dispensation of morality. You want to live life free of the restrictions of the din, so you convince yourself that there is no personal creator, therefore there can be no rules. Let me show you a way to prove to you that God must have the attributes of a personal entity. We know that every material existent, ex definitione, must have a cause. Eventually we must arrive at a cause which is not caused, or which contains it’s own cause within itself, otherwise there would be an infinite regress and nothing could be. Now, how does this cause bring about it’s effects? There are only two types of causes, natural and personal. Natural causes have the characteristic that, because they have nothing within themselves that can set them into motion, they must be set into motion by an exterior cause. A domino relies upon the domino before it to bring about the fall of the proximate domino. A personal cause contains the principle of it’s operation within itself. A person must be there to push the first domino, otherwise the first domino would not have fallen upon the second domino. Now we know that the first cause of the universe cannot be caused, rather it contains the principle of it’s causation within itself. Therefore, it must be a personal cause. In order to initiate this, it must be willful. In order to will, it must have knowledge. In order to have knowledge, it must be living. This is absolute proof that the first cause of the Universe is willing, knowing, and living. Al hayy, al qayyoom. We also know that if it has no beginning, it relies upon nothing, therefore it can have no end. He is al awwalu wal baatin. These are attributes of God which we can derive simply from the light of reason which he has given us. The rest we must learn from revelation. I invite you to repent and accept Islam.
The discovery of a human skeleton millions of years old – or is that crap? I dont know
Oh im sure there are other responses believers in God can come up with… off the top of my head
1.the world is not a perfect place….violence, misery etc go hand and hand with it… which to me explains why islam is not a pacifist religion…. if you really want a better universe do your best to make it into heaven 🙂
2.the child taken to the dentist argument….the perceived evil is infact good for the child….maybe you prefer the eyes of an octopus or the legs of a cheetah but im sure overall we are better of with a blind spot and slower legs..
3.compassion, generosity, empathy etc which islam teaches us to aspire to are all possible to implement bcos of this non perfect world
(btw my email doesnt get updates so dont be suprised if i dont know ive been responded to)
in a way you remind me of the makkans who after Muhammad pbuh rejected their offers to make him King, or the richest man in the city or marry him to 10 women of their choosing… they then went on to say we will believe if you remove the 2 mountains that make makkah narrow and give us castles, gardens, treasures…. or that atleast God should enrich pbuh so he is the wealthiest among them …when he expained he pbuh is only a warner to them with a message…. they then asked for the punishment which was promised to be brought…..one guy i think Abdullah ibn Umayya ( a cousin of pbuh) even said bring a ladder to the heavens and climb up to ask God to sign a document saying you are the messenger and bring it down with 4 angels while i watch…… and even then i wont believe………. u expecting God to have made us super humans in a perfect world reminded me of that incident
I am very sorry to hear your story. To be honest, your arguments in your video for leaving Islam are prima facie infantile. Stories in the Quran were found in the talmud. Logically, it does not follow that the presence of the same information in another text means a reliance upon that text. Correlation does not imply causation. In fact, this argument can be turned on it’s head, and used as a probable proof for the assertions of the Quran that the Jews had these stories and changed them. The fact that we are unable to find Juj wa Ma’jooj, the people buried under the wall of dhul qarnayn. Are you serious? If we could not find certain fugitives with all our technology; if we could not find Bin Laden for years; if we cannot find Al Baghdadi, why is it logically impossible that we cannot find a certain landmark? I ask you to please use your intellect and think. I invite you cordially to repent and return to Islam, for your doubts have been answered. As far as the example of the hadith about the sun going under the ‘arsh of Allah, why are you such a slave of scientism? Whether you believe Islam or you are an atheist, there are certain points past which your intellect cannot pass. Beyond a certain point, there is no more intellectual divisibility. Can you explain to me existence? What is existence? At some point you reach an impasse. Transcendence is beyond the point of your reason. You should know this from your days of studying ‘Aqeedah. Any point beyond the line of transcendence must be understood to be not analogous to the creation. The sun does this, but it is in a way inexplicable in human rational terms. I ask that you reflect upon this.
I have read your article here, and your tacit assumption is evidently plain. You assume that the purpose of existence is the prolonging of life and the absence of discomfort. This permeates your entire article. Why would you think that our intellect is equipped to know the deeper wisdom behind apparent phenomena? We see in the actions of humans for example, endurance of pain for a greater good. The athlete willingly endures pain for the purpose of bettering his game and chiseling his physique. Some even find enjoyment in pain. The bifurcation of pleasure and pain is itself highly nebulous. According to the Indian Philosopher Krishnamurti, sexual intercourse is in itself a sensation of pain, however the body takes pleasure from that. Evil, pain, pleasure, etc. are all a posteriori constructs of human perception and consciousness. The observations of your article in no way disprove the existence of God or dispense with his necessity. The teleological arguments stand. Pain may be a part of this grand watch, the wisdom of which is held in a higher mind, and may be made evident to us later (or even now upon sufficient contemplation.) Evolution also does not disprove the existence of God in the least. While evolution is against Islamic doctrine for scriptural reasons, one could still easily admit the existence of the Islamic God while maintaining belief in evolution. Why does it present a problem for you? The development of homo sapiens is just pushed back further in the evolutionary scale. What is the “force” which pushes evolution towards it’s development. Whence originated the first conditions necessary to bring about the primordial cell? The circumlocution of Darwinism does nothing to solve the problem. Either there is a God, or there is regressus ad infinitum in causes. You cannot refute the cosmological argument, which is ironclad. It always buries it’s undertakers. I hope we will dialogue about this inshaAllah. Salaamun ‘alaa man tabi’a al huda.
See, if a brown guy named Abdullah just says what Atheists have been saying for 2 centuries, maybe he can get famous doing it?
Quit with the lame ad-hominem attacks, buddy
Bro Abdulrahman has done an exceedingly excellent simple philosophically rationally sound argument here O Abdullah Sameer.To err is human and to admit one’s error and return to the path rectitude is the way of the intellectually honest.Sameer,would you please be kind to own yourself sincerely and retrace your steps to back to Islam while you are still alive.You have no consistently rational objective basis for this apostasy.I have tried working with you directly via e-mails to engage you intellectually too but you literally ran away as you know.You have nothing to gain from this obduracy in kufr but everything to lose.
All your intellectually pretexts for apostasy have been refuted in details by many even on this your blog why not come back to the truth.That is more honorable,you would agree.To insist on this error is simply colossal ignorance flagrant arrogance and odious dishonesty.Mind you,your stubborn rejection of the obvious facts we have shared with you may though hurt some uninformed folks,ultimately it will hurt you most as you will bear the guilt of those less informed people who may fall prey to your intellectual pretensions which are nothing short blind and arrogant parroting others’ lies about Islam.What a tragedy,O Sameer.
Before I forget,thank you for being so fort right as to allow our damaging refutations of your assertions even in your blog.You may wish to resume conversation and dialogue with me or anyone else that may require help with dealing Sameer’s shallow objections to Islam by contacting me via:
[email protected]