Saturday, August 13, 2016

Don't the predictable laws of nature point to a god creating them?

From where I'm standing, I see no reason why an all-powerful deity, who created the whole universe, would need to be limited by everything working the same way every time. If a being was truly all-powerful, then "micro-managing the universe" (exerting his will directly over the movement of every single atom and particle) wouldn't be any sort of strain at all. So if such a god wanted to make a billiard ball move when it was struck one time, and not move another time, and absorb the other ball into itself a third time, that would be absolutely no problem for a god. But it would be a huge problem for naturalistic physical laws. From where I'm standing, physical laws that don't have a god behind them would have to be consistent and predictable, because there's no magical entity jumping in and changing them. Without a god, atoms are just doing what atoms do, so of course they would do the same thing every time. How could it not be regular and limited to a certain range of effects? 

Now, I'll even grant you that it wouldn't make sense for a loving god to be enacting an unpredictable universe, because it would make us be essentially living in a worldwide carnival funhouse. But if you're just talking about a generic "ordering intelligence," then I see no reason why that intelligence (if it cared more about itself than humans) wouldn't just have fun being disordering instead. In other words, I feel like the percentage of possible worlds without a god, where the laws of nature are unpredictable, would be 0. Whereas, the percentage of gods who might make the laws of nature unpredictable would be much greater than 0. Therefore, I think the existence of unpredictable laws of nature would actually make it more likely that a god exists, and the existence of predictable laws of nature do not.

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