“Deism, historically, produces atheism; first you make God a landlord, then he becomes an absentee landlord, then he becomes simply an absentee.”
N.T. Wright, History and Eschatology: Jesus and the Promise of Natural Theology (2019)
We begin, as any serious discussion of a Creator should, with evolution.
The genomes of living organisms are prone to random variations, or mutations. If a mutation happens to confer a survival advantage (e.g. thicker fur) or reproductive advantage (e.g. more elaborate plumage), then the organism carrying that mutation is more likely to pass it on to the next generation. When a population of a species becomes separated by a geographical barrier (e.g. the formation of a mountain range), the isolated populations accumulate different mutations and are subjected to different selective pressures, causing them to diverge over time. Eventually, they may become incapable of interbreeding and producing fertile offspring. At that point, they are considered separate species.
Evolution is thus a cumulative term for the ongoing processes of mutation, natural selection, sexual selection and speciation. Over the space of ~4.5 billion years, these processes have given rise to a tremendous diversity of life on Earth. Evolution is substantiated by many powerful lines of evidence, from the steering power of artificial selection and the existence of intermediate fossils to analogous anatomical structures and the geographical distribution of life. Especially powerful is the tree of cousinship which emerges from comparing the genomes of closely-related and distantly-related species. In a short video filmed at the University of Nebraska State Museum, Richard Dawkins offers a concise explanation of comparative genomics:
Evolution has obvious implications for supernatural belief systems, which typically posit the existence of a Creator God. Indeed, we are now aware that the approximately 8.7 million known species of life on Earth were not created individually by some external agent, but rather share a common ancestor with all other species; humans, for example, share 85 percent of their DNA with mice and 61 percent with fruit flies. Evolution thus makes God/Allah/Yahweh redundant and destroys the notion of human exceptionalism, the beating heart of Abrahamic monotheism. In The Autobiography of Charles Darwin, the great naturalist describes how his Christian faith faded away as he began to realise that his theory was correct:
Beautiful as is the morality of the New Testament, it can be hardly denied that its perfection depends in part on the interpretation which we now put on metaphors and allegories. But I was very unwilling to give up my belief… Thus disbelief crept over me at a very slow rate, but was at last complete. The rate was so slow that I felt no distress, and have never since doubted even for a single second that my conclusion was correct.
Given the enormity of evolution, to be a person of faith requires one to either ignore the facts of biology, to deny them, or to find a way to accommodate them. Quite often, those who take the latter route adopt the belief that God set the universe in motion and guided the evolutionary process (see The Language of God by Francis Collins). However, while this is certainly an improvement over creationism, introducing a supernatural agent into evolution does nothing to help us understand it better; there are no puzzles in biology which are more easily solved by invoking a deity. As the evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne has put it, “If the history of science shows us anything, it is that we get nowhere by labelling our ignorance ‘God’.”
In removing God from nature, we are left with a deity who got things going with the Big Bang, and that’s about it. We are thus no longer dealing with a personal god, but a remote entity whose existence, even if it could be proven, would concede absolutely nothing to the miraculous claims of religion. Indeed, positing the existence of a Prime Mover or First Cause is not an argument for Moses parting the Red Sea with his staff, Jesus rising from the grave, or Muhammad flying from Mecca to Jerusalem on the Buraq; rather, the believer still has to show how we get from an impersonal god to one who intervenes in human affairs. In a debate with Christian apologist Frank Turek, the late Christopher Hitchens makes this point effortlessly:
The desire to believe in a higher power is perfectly understandable; indeed, it can be comforting to believe that someone is watching over you. However, insofar as we value the truth, we must admit that the god of deism is not the mighty personality of Abrahamic monotheism, but rather a distant spectre – “an insubstantial shadow”, as Sigmund Freud put it in The Future of an Illusion. Alas, this admission is made difficult by the efforts of liberal theologians, who are shameless enough to employ deistic arguments as evidence for a personal god. In this article, we will thus spend a little time examining two of the most common arguments for deism. With any luck, it will enable believers on the fence to complete their journey to atheism.
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The Fine-Tuning Argument
In essence, the Fine-Tuning Argument states that both the fundamental constants governing the laws of physics and the initial conditions of the universe appear to fall within ranges compatible with the emergence of complex chemistry, stars, planets, and ultimately life. Such constants include the strength of gravity, the forces governing electromagnetism and nuclear interactions, the masses of elementary particles, and the cosmological constant governing the expansion of the universe. The initial conditions, by contrast, concern the particular state in which the universe began, including its extraordinarily low entropy, the tiny density fluctuations that seeded the formation of galaxies, and the excess of matter over antimatter.
Proponents argue that this apparent fine-tuning is best explained by an Intelligent Designer who deliberately calibrated the universe for life. There are, however, several significant philosophical and scientific problems with this argument.
1: The Probability Problem
The force of the Fine-Tuning Argument depends heavily upon the claim that a life-permitting universe is extraordinarily improbable. Yet establishing such a probability is far from straightforward. We have observed only one universe, and we do not know whether the fundamental constants could actually have taken different values, what range of values would be physically possible, or what probability should be assigned to each possible value. We also have only one example of life – carbon-based life that developed on Earth – and cannot therefore confidently determine the full range of physical conditions under which life, or even complex self-organising systems, might arise. The mere fact that a constant can be varied mathematically does not establish that those alternative values were physically possible or equally probable.
Moreover, if a multiverse exists in which different universes possess different physical parameters, a life-permitting universe may not be particularly surprising: observers could exist only in universes compatible with their existence. The multiverse itself remains speculative and raises difficult questions about how probabilities should be assigned across such an ensemble, but its possibility illustrates why the apparent improbability of our universe cannot simply be assumed. Consequently, claims that the universe is “improbably” fine-tuned can give an impression of mathematical precision that the evidence does not necessarily warrant.
2: Anthropic Selection Effects
We can only observe a universe compatible with our own existence. Any observer capable of asking why the universe permits life must necessarily find themselves in a universe that permits observers to exist. This creates an important selection effect: the fact that we observe a life-permitting universe is not, by itself, surprising, because we could not have observed a universe in which the conditions for observers were absent. Our observation of a life-permitting universe therefore cannot straightforwardly be treated as though we had an equal opportunity to observe a universe that did not permit observers. This does not disprove the existence of an Intelligent Designer, but it does weaken the assumption that our observation of a life-permitting universe is, in itself, strong evidence for one.
3: The Universe Is Not Obviously Optimised for Life
If the universe were deliberately designed with life as its objective, its apparent hostility to life is worth considering. The overwhelming majority of the universe is composed of regions in which life, as we know it, cannot exist: most of space is an almost perfect vacuum, stars are separated by enormous distances, and most environments are lethal to terrestrial organisms. Even within our own galaxy, habitable conditions occupy a miniscule fraction of the available volume. Moreover, life appeared only after billions of years of cosmic history and, as far as we know, remains confined to a tiny fraction of the universe. The universe therefore does not obviously resemble a system whose primary purpose is to produce life; it is vast and hostile to living organisms, with life emerging only under a narrow set of conditions in a small corner of it.
This does not disprove fine-tuning, since a Designer need only make life possible rather than maximise its abundance. Nevertheless, it challenges the intuitive claim that the universe’s observed properties are straightforwardly what we would expect from a universe deliberately designed for life. The fact that the universe permits life is therefore not the same as demonstrating that the universe was designed for life. Our existence may be remarkable without there being any purpose behind it. Indeed, the absence of design need not diminish the wonder of our existence. Richard Dawkins captures this sense of wonder beautifully in Unweaving the Rainbow, reflecting on the extraordinary fact that, after billions of years of cosmic history, we have briefly awakened to experience and contemplate the universe:
After sleeping through a hundred million centuries we have finally opened our eyes on a sumptuous planet, sparkling with colour, bountiful with life. Within decades we must close our eyes again. Isn’t it a noble, an enlightened way of spending our brief time in the sun, to work at understanding the universe and how we have come to wake up in it? This is how I answer when I am asked – as I am surprisingly often – why I bother to get up in the mornings. To put it the other way round, isn’t it sad to go to your grave without ever wondering why you were born? Who, with such a thought, would not spring from bed, eager to resume discovering the world and rejoicing to be a part of it?
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Ultimately, the Argument from Fine-Tuning rests upon a number of assumptions that are far less secure than its proponents sometimes suggest. We do not possess a well-established probability distribution over possible universes; we necessarily observe a universe compatible with our existence; and the universe itself is not obviously optimised for life. The argument may therefore provide grounds for philosophical speculation, but it does not constitute compelling evidence for an Intelligent Designer behind the universe.
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The Cosmological Argument
The Cosmological Argument is a family of arguments that attempt to infer the existence of God from the existence of the universe. One influential version, known as the Kalam Cosmological Argument, can be summarised as follows:
1. Everything that begins to exist has a cause.
2. The universe began to exist.
3. Therefore, the universe has a cause.
Other versions begin instead from the apparent contingency of the universe and argue that everything contingent requires an explanation, ultimately necessitating a first or necessary cause. In either case, the argument attempts to move from the existence of the universe to the existence of God. There are, however, significant problems with each stage of this reasoning.
1: Did the Universe Actually Begin to Exist?
The claim that the universe began to exist is not necessarily established by the Big Bang theory. The Big Bang describes the evolution of our observable universe from an extremely hot and dense early state, but it does not by itself establish that physical reality came into existence at a definite moment in time. The Hartle-Hawking no-boundary proposal offers a particularly striking challenge to the assumption that the universe had a conventional temporal beginning. According to the proposal, as one approaches the earliest state of the universe, time behaves increasingly like a spatial dimension, such that the distinction between space and time eventually disappears. There is therefore no temporal boundary at which the universe suddenly comes into existence, nor necessarily a preceding moment at which a cause could operate.
The analogy often used is the surface of the Earth. Although the Earth has a southernmost point, it would be meaningless to ask what lies south of the South Pole: the concept of “south” simply ceases to apply beyond that point. Similarly, if time itself loses its conventional meaning at the earliest state of the universe, asking what happened before the universe existed may be a category error. More importantly for the Kalam Cosmological Argument, causation ordinarily presupposes a temporal relationship between cause and effect. If there was no prior time in which a cause could exist, the demand for a First Cause may therefore have no coherent application.
The Hartle-Hawking proposal remains speculative rather than an established description of the origin of the universe. Its significance, however, is not that it proves the universe had no beginning, but that it demonstrates why the concept of a cosmic “beginning” cannot simply be assumed to have the same meaning as the beginning of an event within time. If time itself is part of what emerges with the universe, then asking “What caused the universe to begin?” presupposes precisely the temporal framework that the proposed beginning brings into existence.
2: Does Everything Require a Cause or Explanation?
The argument relies upon a principle that is far from self-evident: that everything which begins to exist must have a cause, or, in broader formulations, that every contingent fact must have a sufficient explanation. Our experience of causation concerns events and entities within the universe. It does not necessarily follow that the same principles can be applied to the universe in its entirety, particularly if time, space and physical causality themselves originated with the universe. The argument therefore requires justification for extending a principle observed within reality to reality as a whole.
Nor is the classical conception of causation obviously applicable at the deepest levels of physics. Quantum theory describes fundamentally probabilistic processes such as radioactive decay and spontaneous emission in which the precise result is not determined by any identifiable prior event in the classical sense. This does not demonstrate that the universe can literally arise from nothing, but it does undermine the assumption that every physical event must have a determinate cause of the kind presupposed by classical intuition.
3: Why Must the Ultimate Cause Be God?
Even if we grant that the universe has an ultimate or first cause, nothing about this conclusion by itself establishes that the cause is conscious, intelligent or personal. It could be an impersonal necessary reality, a fundamental physical state, or something else beyond our present understanding. Additional arguments are therefore required to establish that the ultimate cause possesses the attributes traditionally associated with God, such as consciousness, intelligence, omniscience and omnipotence.
This also raises the question of why the ultimate cause should be exempt from the explanatory principle applied to the universe. If the universe is so extraordinarily ordered as to require a Designer, why should the Designer be exempt from this same demand, who must possess an even greater order of their own? In his classic philosophical treatise A Refutation of Deism, Percy Bysshe Shelley takes up this point with characteristic wit and eloquence:
Thus have we arrived at the substance of your assertion. “That whatever exists, producing certain effects, stands in need of a Creator, and the more conspicuous is its fitness for the production of these effects, the more certain will be our conclusion that it would not have existed from eternity, but must have derived its origin from an intelligent creator.”
In what respect then do these arguments apply to the Universe, and not apply to God? From the fitness of the Universe to its end you infer the necessity of an intelligent Creator. But if the fitness of the Universe, to produce certain effects, be thus conspicuous and evident, how much more exquisite fitness to his end must exist in the Author of this Universe? If we find great difficulty from its admirable arrangement, in conceiving that the Universe has existed from all eternity, and to resolve this difficulty suppose a Creator, how much more clearly must we perceive the necessity of this very Creator’s creation whose perfections comprehend an arrangement far more accurate and just.
The belief of an infinity of creative and created Gods, each more eminently requiring an intelligent author of his being than the foregoing, is a direct consequence of the premises which you have stated. The assumption that the Universe is a design, leads to a conclusion that there are infinity of creative and created Gods, which is absurd. It is impossible indeed to prescribe limits to learned error, when Philosophy relinquishes experience and feeling for speculation.
Shelley’s point is not simply that God must have a cause. The more fundamental issue is that if the existence of the universe requires an explanation, then the argument must explain why an uncaused or necessary God is a satisfactory stopping point while the universe itself – or some more fundamental, impersonal reality – is not. Without a principled justification for this exemption, the same explanatory demand can be applied to God, potentially leading to an infinite regress of creators.
The theist may respond that God is a metaphysically simple being, and therefore does not require the kind of explanation demanded of a contingent universe. Richard Dawkins, however, raises a further objection: a being capable of creating and governing a universe, answering prayers, and possessing attributes such as omniscience and omnipotence would itself be an extraordinarily complex entity – at least as complex as the universe it is invoked to explain. Simply declaring such a being to be simple does not establish that it is explanatorily simpler than the universe itself. If complexity is what makes the universe demand an explanation, invoking an immensely sophisticated intelligence as its source merely replaces one mystery with an even greater one.
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Ultimately, the Cosmological Argument raises legitimate questions about why the universe exists and whether reality requires an ultimate explanation. But moving from those questions to the existence of a personal God requires several additional assumptions: that the universe had an absolute beginning or is contingent, that everything requiring an explanation must have one external to itself, and that this cause must possess the characteristics of a deity. None of these steps is self-evident, and the existence of the universe alone does not establish the existence of God. With this, our examination of the core arguments for deism comes to a close.
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Conclusion
When the arguments for theism and deism fall away, what remains is atheism. Depending on the individual, the loss or absence of belief in a higher power can have profoundly different effects. For some, atheism can result in a booming appetite for science and the wonders of our cosmos; for others, it can lead to intermittent or prolonged bouts of depression and existential angst. That is the risk we take in choosing to live without illusions, in charting our own courses – that sometimes, we end up crashing on the rocks.
For the well-being of our species, it is surely better that some of us struggle with the consequences of critical thinking, rather than everyone suffering from its absence. That is the lesson of history, from the 20th-century totalitarianisms to the likes of ISIS – that we should take the risk of thinking for ourselves, rather than delegating thought to others; to base our beliefs on reason and evidence, rather than authority or tradition. To finish with a quote from Bertrand Russell, who boldly sets out his stall in What I Believe:
I believe that when I die I shall rot, and nothing of my ego will survive. I am not young and I love life. But I should scorn to shiver with terror at the thought of annihilation. Happiness is nonetheless true happiness because it must come to an end, nor do thought and love lose their value because they are not everlasting. Many a man has borne himself proudly on the scaffold; surely the same pride should teach us to think truly about man’s place in the world. Even if the open windows of science at first make us shiver after the cosy indoor warmth of traditional humanising myths, in the end the fresh air brings vigour, and the great spaces have a splendour of their own.
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References: The Argument from Fine-Tuning
Anthropic Principle:
Barrow, John D. and Tipler, Frank J. The Anthropic Cosmological Principle. Oxford University Press, 1986. This book introduces the Anthropic Principle, discussing how the conditions of the universe are compatible with life because we, as observers, exist in a universe where those conditions happen to allow for our existence.
Multiverse Hypothesis:
Tegmark, Max. Our Mathematical Universe: My Quest for the Ultimate Nature of Reality. Knopf, 2014. Tegmark posits that our universe is just one of many, each with different physical laws and constants. He suggests that if there are enough universes, it becomes statistically likely that some will have conditions suitable for life.
Assumptions about Life’s Requirements:
Davies, Paul. The Goldilocks Enigma: Why Is the Universe Just Right for Life? Penguin Press, 2006. Davies examines the Argument from Fine-Tuning, questioning that life must be carbon-based and require specific conditions. He discusses the possibility of alternative forms of life under different constants and conditions.
Low Abundance of Life-Critical Elements:
Stenger, Victor J. God: The Failed Hypothesis: How Science Shows That God Does Not Exist. Prometheus Books, 2007. Stenger discusses how the prevalence of inhospitable conditions and the scarcity of life-essential elements in the universe challenge the idea of one that is fine-tuned for life.
Questionable Probabilities:
Leslie, John. Universes. Routledge, 1989. Leslie discusses the difficulty of estimating the likelihood of life-permitting constants in a single universe. He argues that without a reference class of multiple universes, calculations of probability are speculative and lack a firm foundation, making fine-tuning claims uncertain.
Appeal to Ignorance Fallacy:
Swinburne, Richard. The Existence of God, 2nd ed., Oxford University Press, 2004. Swinburne, although a proponent of theism, acknowledges that fine-tuning arguments must avoid appealing to ignorance. His book offers a theistic perspective but also considers common counterarguments.
Self-Selection Bias and Observational Limits:
Bostrom, Nick. Anthropic Bias: Observation Selection Effects in Science and Philosophy. Routledge, 2002. Bostrom explores how self-selection effects may lead us to overestimate the significance of fine-tuning, given that we can only observe conditions compatible with our existence.
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References: The Argument from First Cause
Infinite Regress and Special Pleading:
Mackie, J.L. The Miracle of Theism: Arguments For and Against the Existence of God. Oxford University Press, 1982. Mackie provides a well-regarded critique of cosmological arguments, discussing the potential for infinite regress and the special pleading involved in positing an uncaused cause.
Modern Physics and Causality:
Hawking, S.W. and Hartle, J.B. ‘Wave Function of the Universe’. Physical Review D, vol. 28, no. 12, 1983. This paper advances the theory that near the universe’s origin, time transitions into a spatial dimension, eliminating the need for a temporal “beginning” and challenging traditional notions of causality.
Quantum Mechanics and Causality:
Krauss, Lawrence M. A Universe from Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather Than Nothing. Free Press, 2012. Krauss discusses how quantum mechanics might allow for a universe without a traditional “cause” in the classical sense, challenging the cosmological argument’s assumptions about causality.
Ambiguity About the Nature of the Cause:
Rowe, William L. ‘The Cosmological Argument’. The Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology, edited by William Lane Craig and J.P. Moreland, Wiley-Blackwell, 2009. Rowe examines whether the First Cause argument necessarily implies a personal God and considers the possibility of alternative, impersonal causes.
Alternative Explanations for the Universe’s Existence:
Penrose, R. Cycles of Time: An Extraordinary New View of the Universe. Knopf, 2011. Penrose argues that the universe undergoes infinite cycles of expansion and contraction. Each cycle ends in a state of low entropy that transitions seamlessly into the next, redefining time and eliminating the need for a specific beginning.
Occasionalism and Anti-Causation:
Al-Ghazali, Abu Hamid. The Incoherence of the Philosophers. Translated by Michael E. Marmura, Brigham Young University Press, 2000. Al-Ghazali’s critique of Aristotelian causality is central to Occasionalism, which denies the independent efficacy of causes and instead attributes every effect to God’s immediate will.
Conflict with Divine Attributes:
Padgett, Alan G. God, Eternity, and the Nature of Time. Wipf and Stock, 2000. Padgett critiques traditional views of divine timelessness, discussing the challenges of reconciling a timeless God with causal actions, like creating the universe, that seemingly require temporal sequence and change.
