Charles Darwin, English naturalist & creator of the theory of Natural Selection, 1809-1882
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“Although I did not think much about the existence of a personal God until a considerably later period of my life, I will here give the vague conclusions to which I have been driven. The old argument from design in Nature, as given by Paley, which formerly seemed to me so conclusive, fails, now that the law of natural selection has been discovered. We can no longer argue that, for instance, the beautiful hinge of a bivalve shell must have been made by an intelligent being, like the hinge of a door by man. There seems to be no more design in the variability of organic beings, and in the action of natural selection, than in the course which the wind blows...”

— Charles Darwin, Charles Darwin: His Life Told In An AutobiographicalChapter, And In A Selected Series Of His Published Letters, (ed. Francis Darwin, F.R.S), William Clowes And Sons, 1908 p59

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Richard Dawkins, PhD, British evolutionary biologist, 1941-
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“Natural selection works because it is a cumulative one-way street to improvement. It needs some luck to get started, and the ‘billions of planets’ anthropic principle grants it that luck. Maybe a few later gaps in the evolutionary story also need major infusions of luck, with anthropic justification. But whatever else we may say, design certainly does not work as an explanation for life, because design is ultimately not cumulative and it therefore raises bigger questions than it answers – it takes us straight back along the Ultimate 747 infinite regress.”

— Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion, Mariner Books, 2008 p169


“The argument from design is the only one still in regular use today [of the arguments Dawkins lists], and it still sounds to many like the ultimate knockdown argument. The young Darwin was impressed by it when, as a Cambridge undergraduate, he read it in William Paley’s Natural Theology. Unfortunately for Paley, the mature Darwin blew it out of the water. There has probably never been a more devastating rout of popular belief by clever reasoning than Charles Darwin’s destruction of the argument from design. It was so unexpected. Thanks to Darwin, it is no longer true to say that nothing that we know looks designed unless it is designed. Evolution by natural selection produces an excellent simulacrum of design, mounting prodigious heights of complexity and elegance. And among these eminences of pseudo-design are nervous systems which – among their more modest accomplishments – manifest goal-seeking behaviour that, even in a tiny insect, resembles a sophisticated heat-seeking missile more than a simple arrow on a target...”

— Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion, Mariner Books, 2008 p103


“The argument from improbability states that complex things could not have come about by chance. But many people define ‘come about by chance’ as a synonym for ‘come about in the absence of deliberate design.’ Not surprisingly, therefore, they think improbability is evidence of design. Darwinian natural selection shows how wrong this is with respect to biological improbability. And although Darwinism may not be directly relevant to the inanimate world – cosmology, for example – it raises our consciousness in areas outside its original territory of biology.

“A deep understanding of Darwinism teaches us to be wary of the easy assumption that design is the only alternative to chance, and teaches us to seek out graded ramps of slowly increasing complexity. Before Darwin, philosophers such as Hume understood that the improbability of life did not mean it had to be designed, but they couldn’t imagine the alternative. After Darwin, we all should feel, deep in our bones, suspicious of the very idea of design. The illusion of design is a trap that has caught us before, and Darwin should have immunized us by raising our consciousness. Would that he had succeeded with all of us.”

— Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion, Mariner Books, 2008 p139

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“Living things are not designed, but Darwinian natural selection licenses a version of the design stance for them. We get a short cut to understanding the heart if we assume that it is ‘designed’ to pump blood. Karl von Frisch was led to investigate the colour vision in bees (in the face of orthodox opinion that they were colour-blind) because he assumed that the bright colours of flowers were ‘designed’ to attract them. The quotation marks are designed to scare off mendacious creationists who might otherwise claim the great Austrian zoologist as one of their own. Needless to say, he was perfectly capable of translating the design stance into proper Darwinian terms.”

— Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion, Mariner Books, 2008 p212

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Kai Nielsen, American Professor of Philosophy, 1926-2021
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“We still have problems with the design argument. What does it mean to say, ’The universe as a whole was designed’? There are difficulties, deep conceptual difficulties, in speaking of the universe as a whole. There are difficulties in discovering the design of the universe. Even the use of the word ’design’ cheats in a way. I don’t mean deliberately cheats, but unwittingly cheats. You may only be studying order or regularity. From order and regularity you don’t automatically get design. These are all old arguments; they are at least as old as Hume.”

— Kai Nielsen, Does God Exist?, Prometheus Books, 1988 p70
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Richard Dawkins, PhD, British evolutionary biologist, 1941-
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“[Philosopher Daniel] Dennett has offered a helpful three-way classification of the ‘stances’ that we adopt in trying to understand and hence predict the behaviour of entities such as animals, machines or each other. They are the physical stance, the design stance and the intentional stance. The physical stance always works in principle, because everything ultimately obeys the laws of physics. But working things out using the physical stance can be very slow. By the time we have say down to calculate all the interactions of a complicated object’s moving parts, our prediction of its behaviour will probably be too late. For an object that really is designed, like a washing machine or a crossbow, the design stance is an economical short cut. We can guess how the object will behave by going over the head of physics and appealing directly to design...

“The intentional stance is another short cut, and it goes one better than the design stance. An entity is assumed not merely to be designed for a purpose but to be, or contain, an agent with intentions that guide its actions. When you see a tiger, you had better not delay your prediction of its probable behaviour. Never mind the physics of its molecules, and never mind the design of its limbs, claws and teeth. That cat intends to eat you, and it will deploy its limbs, claws and teeth in flexible and resourceful ways to carry out its intention. The quickest way to second-guess its behaviour is to forget physics and physiology and cut to the intentional chase. Note that, just as the design stance works even for things that were not actually designed as well as things that were, so the intentional stance works for things that don’t have deliberate conscious intentions as well as things that do.
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“It seems to me entirely plausible that the intentional stance has survival value as a brain mechanism that speeds up decision-making in dangerous circumstances, and in crucial social situations...

“In its lower orders at least, the intentional stance, like the design stance, saves time that might be vital to survival. Consequently, natural selection shaped brains to deploy the intentional stance as a short cut. We are biologically programmed to impute intentions to entities whose behaviour matters to us...
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“The design stance and the intentional stance are useful brain mechanisms, important for speeding up the second-guessing of entities that really matter for survival, such as predators or potential mates. But, like other brain mechanisms, these stances can misfire. Children, and primitive peoples, impute intentions to the weather, to waves and currents, to falling rocks. All of us are prone to do the same thing with machines, especially when they let us down...

“...Justin Barrett coined the acronym HADD, for hyperactive agent detection device. We hyperactively detect agents where there are none, and this makes us suspect malice or benignity where, in fact, nature is only indifferent. I catch myself momentarily harbouring savage resentment against some blameless inanimate such as my bicycle chain...”
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— Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion, Mariner Books, 2008 p211-214

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Kai Nielsen, American Professor of Philosophy, 1926-2021
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“[J.P. Moreland] made an appeal to arguments for design. As far as I can see, they only point at best to design in the world. They don’t point to design of the world, nor do they show that a personal infinite creator created it. There could have been a number of creators, some of them long gone. The same thing is true about actual infinities. The most, the very most it could give him would be some factually necessary beings or being. It wouldn’t give him an infinite eternal God. It wouldn’t be able to link up with the Jesus of Nazareth who supposedly is the one true God or at least the son of the one true God.”

— Kai Nielsen, Does God Exist?, Prometheus Books, 1988 p66
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Robert Ingersoll, American lawyer & orator, 1833-1899
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“The next great difficulty is the act of creation. My mind is so that I cannot conceive of something being created out of nothing. Neither can I conceive of anything being created without a cause. Let me go one step further. It is just as difficult to imagine something being created with, as without, a cause. To postulate a cause does not in the least lessen the difficult. In spite of all, this lever remains without a fulcrum.”

— Robert Green Ingersoll, Why Am I an Agnostic, 1900 (Anodos Books edition, 2019, p5)


“It seems to me that the man who knows the limitations of the mind, who gives the proper value to human testimony, is necessarily an Agnostic. He gives up the hope of ascertaining first or final causes, of comprehending the supernatural, or of conceiving of an infinite personality. From out the words Creator, Preserver, and Providence, all meaning falls.“The mind of man pursues the path of least resistance, and the conclusions arrived at by the individual depend upon the nature and structure of his mind, on his experience, on hereditary drifts and tendencies, and on the countless things that constitute the difference in minds. One man, finding himself in the midst of mysterious phenomena, comes to the conclusion that all is the result of design; that back of all things is an infinite personality–that is to say, an infinite man; and he accounts for all that is by simply saying that the universe was created and set in motion by this infinite personality, and that it is miraculously and supernaturally governed and preserved. This man sees with perfect clearness that matter could not create itself, and therefore he imagines a creator of matter. He is perfectly satisfied that there is design in the world, and that consequently there must have been a designer. It does not occur to him that it is necessary to account for the existence of an infinite personality. He is perfectly certain that there can be no design without a designer, and he is equally certain that there can be a designer who was not designed. The absurdity becomes so great that it takes the place of a demonstration. He takes it for granted that matter was created and that its creator was not. He assumes that a creator existed from eternity, without cause, and created what is called matter out of nothing; or, whereas there was nothing, this creator made the something that we call substance.“Is it possible for the human mind to conceive of an infinite personality? Can it imagine a beginningless being, infinitely powerful and intelligent? If such a being existed, then there must have been an eternity during which nothing did exist except this being; because, if the Universe was created, there must have been a time when it was not, and back of that there must have been an eternity during which nothing but an infinite personality existed. Is it possible to imagine an infinite intelligence dwelling for an eternity in infinite nothing? How could such a being be intelligent? What was there to be intelligent about? There was but one thing to know, namely, that there was nothing except this being. How could such a being be powerful? There was nothing to exercise force upon. There was nothing in the universe to suggest an idea. Relations could not exist–except the relation between infinite intelligence and infinite nothing.”

— Robert Green Ingersoll, Why Am I an Agnostic, 1900 (Anodos Books edition, 2019, p3-5)

Bertrand Russell, British philosopher & polymath, 1872-1970
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“The philosophers and the men of science have got going on a cause, and it has not anything like the vitality it used to have; but, apart from that, you can see that the argument that there must be a First Cause is one that cannot have any validity. I may say that when I was a young man and was debating these questions very seriously in my mind, I for a long time accepted the argument of the First Cause, until one day, at the age of eighteen, I read John Stuart Mill’s Autobiography, and I there found this sentence: ‘My father taught me that the question “Who made me?” cannot be answered, since it immediately suggests the further question “Who made God?”’ That very simple sentence showed me, as I still think, the fallacy in the argument of the First Cause. If everything must have a cause, then God must have a cause. If there can be anything without a cause, it might just as well be the world as God, so that there cannot be any validity in that argument. It is exactly of the same nature as the Hindu’s view, that the world rested upon an elephant and the elephant rested upon a tortoise; and when they said, ‘How about the tortoise?’ the Indian said, ‘Suppose we change the subject.’ The argument is really no better than that. There is no reason why the world could not have come into being without a cause; nor on the other hand, is there any reason why it should not have always existed. There is no reason to suppose that the world had a beginning at all. The idea that things must have a beginning is really due to the poverty of our imagination. Therefore, perhaps, I need not waste any more time upon the argument about the First Cause.”

— Bertrand Russell, “Why I Am Not a Christian,” (1927) Why I Am Not a Christian and Other Essays on Religion and Related Subjects, Touchstone Books, 1957, p7 

Richard Dawkins, PhD, British evolutionary biologist, 1941-
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“All three of these arguments rely upon the idea of a regress and invoke God to terminate it. They make the entirely unwarranted assumption that God himself is immune to the regress. Even if we allow the dubious luxury of arbitrarily conjuring up a terminator to an infinite regress and giving it a name, simply because we need one, there is absolutely no reason to endow that terminator with any of the properties normally ascribed to God: omnipotence, omniscience, goodness, creativity of design, to say nothing of such human attributes as listening to prayers, forgiving sins and reading innermost thoughts...“To return to the infinite regress and the futility of invoking God to terminate it, it is more parsimonious to conjure up, say, a ‘big bang singularity,’ or some other physical concept as yet unknown. Calling it God is at best unhelpful and at worst perniciously misleading...”

— Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion, Mariner Books, 2008 p101-102

Paul Davies, PhD, English physicist & professor, 1946-

‍“So far in this chapter I have been tracing the consequences of the cosmological argument for the existence of God. This argument does not attempt to establish that God’s existence is a logical necessity. One can certainly imagine that neither God for the universe existed, or that the universe existed without God. On the face of it there does not seem to be any logical contradiction in either state of affairs. So, even if a case can be made that the concept of a necessary being makes sense, it does not follow that such a being exists, still less has to exist.”
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— Paul Davies, The Mind of God, Touchstone, 1992 p185


“...It has been argued by some that everything in the universe can be explained in terms of something else, and that in terms of something else again and so on, in an infinite chain... However, it is quite wrong to suppose that an infinite chain of explanation is satisfactory on the basis that every member of that chain is explained by the next member. One is still left with the mystery of why that particular chain is the one that exists, or why any chain exists at all. Leibniz made this point eloquently by inviting us to consider an infinite collection of books, each one copied from a previous one. To say that the content of the book is thereby explained is absurd. We are still justified in asking who the author was.
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“It seems to me that, if one perseveres with the principle of sufficient reason and demands a rational explanation for nature, then we have no choice but to seek that explanation in something beyond or outside the physical world – in something metaphysical – because, as we have seen, a contingent physical universe cannot contain within itself an explanation for itself. What sort of metaphysical agency might be able to create a universe? It is important to guard against the naïve image of a Creator producing a universe at some instant in time by supernatural means, like a conjurer pulling a rabbit out of a hat. As I have explained at length, creation cannot consist of merely causing the big bang. We are searching instead for a more subtle, timeless notion of creation which, to use Hawking’s phrase, breathes fire into the equations, and thus promotes the merely possible to the actually existing. This agency is creative in the sense of being somehow responsible for the laws of physics, which govern, among other things, how space-time evolves.
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“Naturally the theologians argue that the creative agency that provides an explanation for the universe is God. But what sort of agency would such a being be? If God were a mind (or Mind), we might fairly describe him as a person. But not all theists accept the need for this. Some prefer to think of God as Being-Itself or as a Creative Force, rather than as a Mind. Indeed, it may be that minds and forces are not the only agencies that have creative potency...”

— Paul Davies, The Mind of God, Touchstone, 1992 p170-171


“We usually think of causes as preceding their effects. It is therefore natural to try and explain the universe by appealing to the situation at earlier cosmic epochs. But even if we could explain the present state of the universe in terms of its state a billion years ago, would we really have achieved anything, except moving the mystery back a billion years? For we would surely want to explain the state a billion years ago in terms of some still earlier state, and so on. Would this chain of cause and effect ever end? The feeling that ‘something must have started it all off’ is deeply ingrained in Western culture. And there is a widespread assumption that this ‘something’ cannot lie within the scope of scientific inquiry; it must be in some sense supernatural. Scientists, so the argument goes, might be very clever at explaining this and that. They might even be able to explain everything within the physical universe. But at some stage in the chain of explanation they will reach an impasse, a point beyond which science cannot penetrate. This point is the creation of the universe as a whole, the ultimate origin of the physical world.

“This so-called cosmological argument has in one form or another often been used as evidence for the existence of God. Over the centuries it has been refined and debated by many theologians and philosophers, sometimes with great subtlety. The enigma of the cosmic origin is probably the one area where the atheistic scientist will feel uncomfortable, hard to fault until just a few years ago, at which point a serious attempt was made to explain the origin of the universe within the framework of physics. I should say right at the outset that this particular explanation may be quite wrong. However, I don’t think that matters. What is at issue is whether or not some sort of supernatural act is necessary to start the universe off. If a plausible scientific theory can be constructed that will explain the origin of the entire physical universe, then at least we know a scientific explanation is possible, whether or not the current theory is right.”

— Paul Davies, The Mind of God, Touchstone, 1992 p39-40

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“A key feature of the Judeo-Christian creation doctrine is that the Creator is entirely separate from and independent of his creation; that is, God’s existence does not automatically ensure the existence of the universe, as in some pagan schemes where the physical world emanates from the Creator as an automatic extension of his being. Rather, the universe came into existence at a definite instant in time as an act of deliberate supernatural creation by an already existing being.

“Straightforward though this concept of creation may seem, it caused intense doctrinal dispute over the centuries, partly because the old texts are somewhat vague on the matter. The biblical description of Genesis, for example, which drew heavily on earlier creation myths from the Middle East, is long on poetry and short on factual details. No clear indication is given of whether God merely brings order to a primordial chaos, or creates matter and light in a pre-existing void, or does something even more profound. Uncomfortable questions abound. What was God doing before he created the universe? Why did he create it at that moment in time rather than some other? If he had been content to endure for eternity without a universe, what caused him to ‘make up his mind’ and create one?

“The bible leaves plenty of room for debate on these issues. And debate there certainly has been. In fact, much Christian doctrine concerning the creation was developed long after Genesis was written, and was influenced as much by Greek as by Judaic thought...”

— Paul Davies, The Mind of God, Touchstone, 1992 p41-42


“Can these recent scientific developments square with the Christian doctrine of creation ex nihilo? As I have repeatedly emphasized, the idea of God bringing the universe into existence from nothing cannot be regarded as a temporal act, because it involves the creation of time. In the modern Christian viewpoint, creation ex nihilo means sustaining the universe in existence at all times. In modern scientific cosmology, one should no longer think of space-time as ‘coming into existence’ anyway. Rather, one says that space-time (or the universe) simply is. ‘This scheme does not have an initial event with a special status,’ remarks the philosopher Wim Drees. ‘Hence, all moments have a similar relation to the Creator. Either they are all ‘always there,’ as a brute fact, or they are all equally created. It is a nice feature of this quantum cosmology that that part of the content of creation ex nihilo which was supposed to be the most decoupled from science, namely the ‘sustaining,’ can be seen as the more natural part in the context of the theory.’ The image of God conjured up by this theory, however, is rather far removed from the twentieth-century Christian God. Drees perceives a close resemblance to the pantheistic picture of God adopted by the seventeenth-century philosopher Spinoza, where the physical universe, itself takes on aspects of God’s existence, such as being ‘eternal’ and ‘necessary.’”

— Paul Davies, The Mind of God, Touchstone, 1992 p68-69

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“...It appears as if creation ex nihilo resolves the paradox of how a changing, contingent world can be explained by a timeless necessary being. Unfortunately, in spite of the attention of generations of philosophers and theologians to develop this idea into a coherent scheme, major obstacles remain. The chief one is to understand why God chose to create this particular world rather than some other. When human beings choose freely, their choice is colored by their nature. So what can be said about God’s nature? Presumably that is fixed by his necessity. We don’t want to contend with the possibility that there could be many different types of God, for then we would have gained nothing by invoking God in the first place. We would be left with the problem of explaining why that particular God existed rather than some other. The whole idea of invoking God as a necessary being is to ensure that he is unique: his nature could not have been otherwise. But if God’s nature is fixed by his necessity, could he have chosen to create a different universe? Only if his choice was not rational at all, but whimsical, the theistic equivalent of tossing a coin. But in that case existence is arbitrary, and we might as well be content with an arbitrary universe and leave it at that.”

— Paul Davies, The Mind of God, Touchstone, 1992 p179-180


“All debate about the origin of the universe presupposes that the universe had an origin. Most ancient cultures inclined to a view of time in which the world has no beginning, but instead experiences endlessly repeating cycles. It is interesting to trace the provenance of these ideas. Primitive tribes always lived closely attuned to nature, depending for their survival on the rhythm of the seasons and other natural periods. Many generations would pass with little alteration in circumstances, as the idea of unidirectional change or historical progress did not occur to them. Questions about the beginning or the fate of the world lay outside their conception of reality. They were preoccupied instead with myths concerning the rhythmic patterns, and the need to propitiate the gods associated with each cycle to ensure continuing fertility and stability.

“The rise of the great early civilizations in China and the Middle East made little difference to this outlook. Stanley Jaki, a Hungarian-born Benedictine priest who holds doctorates in both physics and theology, has made a detailed study of ancient beliefs in cyclic cosmology. He points out that the Chinese dynastic system reflected a general indifference toward historical progression. ‘Their chronological datings restarted with each new dynasty, a circumstance which suggests that for them the flow of time was not linear, but cyclic. Indeed, all events, political and cultural, represented for the Chinese a periodic pattern, a small replica of the interplay of two basic forces in the cosmos, the Yin and the Yang... Success was to alternate with failure, as was progress with decay.’

“The Hindu system consisted of cycles within cycles, of immense duration. Four yugas made up a mahayuga of 4.32 million years; a thousand mahayugas formed a kalpa, two kalpas constituted a day of Brahma; the life cycle of Brahma was one hundred years of Brahma, or 311 trillion years! Jaki likens the Hindu cycles to an inescapable treadmill, the mesmerizing effect of which contributed greatly to what he describes as the despair and despondency of the Hindu culture. Cyclicity and the associated fatalism also permeated the Babylonian, Egyptian, and Mayan cosmologies...
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“Greek philosophy too was steeped in the concept of eternal cycles, but, in contrast to the pessimistic despair of the poor Mayas, the Greeks believed that their culture represented the top of the cycle – the very pinnacle of progress. The cyclic nature of time in the Greek system was inherited by the Arabs, who remained custodians of the Greek culture until it was transmitted to Christendom in medieval times. Much of the present world view of European cultures can be traced to the monumental clash which then occurred between Greek philosophy and the Judeo-Christian tradition. It is, of course, fundamental to Judaic and Christian doctrine that God created the universe at some specific moment in the past, and that subsequent events form an unfolding unidirectional sequence. Thus a sense of meaningful historical progression – the Fall, the Covenant, the Incarnation and Resurrection, the Second Coming – pervades these religions, and stands in stark contrast to the Greek notion of the eternal return. In their anxiety to adhere to linear, rather than cyclic, time, the early Church Fathers denounced the cyclic world view of the pagan Greek philosophers, notwithstanding their general admiration for all Greek thinking. Thus we find Thomas Aquinas acknowledging the power of Aristotle’s philosophical arguments that the universe must always have existed, but appealing for belief in a cosmic origin on biblical grounds.”

— Paul Davies, The Mind of God, Touchstone, 1992 p40-41


“The upshot of all this is that, according to Hartle and Hawking, there is no origin of the universe. Nevertheless, that does not mean that the universe is infinitely old. Time is limited in the past, but has no boundary as such. Thus centuries of philosophical anguish over the paradoxes of infinite versus finite time are nearly resolved. Hartle and Hawking ingeniously manage to pass between the horns of that particular dilemma. As Hawking expresses it: ‘The boundary condition of the universe is that it has no boundary.’

“The implications of the Hartle-Hawking universe for theology are profound, as Hawking himself remarks: ‘So long as the universe had a beginning, we could suppose it had a creator. But if the universe is completely self-contained, having no boundary or edge, it would have neither beginning nor end: it would simply be. What place, then, for a creator?’ The argument is therefore that, because the universe does not have a singular origin in time, there is no need to appeal to a supernatural act of creation at the beginning. The British physicist Chris Isham, himself an expert on quantum cosmology, has made a study of the theological implications of the Hartle-Hawing theory. ‘There is no doubt that, psychologically speaking, the existence of this initial singular point is prone to generate the idea of a Creator who sets the whole show rolling,’ he writes. But these new cosmological ideas remove the need, he believes, to invoke a God-of-the-gaps as the cause of the big bang: ‘The new theories would appear to plug this gap rather neatly.’

“Although Hawking’s proposal is for a universe without a definite origin in time, it is also true to say in this theory that the universe has not always existed. Is it therefore correct to say that the universe has ‘created itself’? The way I would rather express it is that the universe of space-time and matter is internally consistent and self-contained. Its existence does not require anything outside of it; specifically, no prime mover is needed. So does this mean that the existence of the universe can be ‘explained’ scientifically without the need for God? Can we regard the universe as forming a closed system, containing the reason for its existence entirely within itself? The answer depends on the meaning to be attached to the word ‘explanation.’ Given the laws of physics, the universe can, so to speak, take care of itself, including its own creation. But where do these laws come from? Must we, in turn, find an explanation for them?...”

— Paul Davies, The Mind of God, Touchstone, 1992 p67-68
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Paul Davies, PhD, English physicist & professor, 1946-
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“In his famous book A Brief History of Time Stephen Hawking begins by recounting a story about a woman who interrupts a lecture on the universe to proclaim that she knows better. The world, she declares, is a really flat plate resting on the back of a giant turtle. When asked by the lecturer what the turtle rests on, she replied, ‘It’s turtles all the way down!”

“The story symbolizes the essential problem that faces all who search for ultimate answers to the mystery of physical existence. We would like to explain the world in terms of something more fundamental, perhaps a set of causes, which in turn rest upon some laws or physical principles, but then we seek some explanation for this more fundamental level too, and so on. Where can such a chain of reasoning end? It is hard to be satisfied with an infinite regress. ‘No tower of turtles!’ proclaims John Wheeler. ‘No structure, no plan of organization, no framework of ideas underlaid by another structure or level of ideas, underlaid by yet another level, and yet another, ad infinitum, down to bottomless blackness.’

“What is the alternative? Is there a ‘superturtle’ that stands at the base of the tower, itself unsupported? Can this superturtle somehow ‘support itself’? Such a belief has a long history. We have seen how the philosopher Spinoza argued that the world could not have been otherwise, that God had no choice. Spinoza’s universe is supported by the superturtle of pure logical necessity. Even those who believe in the contingency of the world often appeal to the same reasoning, by arguing that the world is explained by God, and that god is logically necessary. In chapter 7 I reviewed the problems that accompany these attempts to explain contingency in terms of necessity. The problems are no less severe for those who would abolish God and argue for some Theory of Everything that will explain the universe and will also be unique on the grounds of logical necessity.

“It may seem as if the only alternatives are an infinite tower of turtles or the existence of an ultimate superturtle, the explanation for which lies within itself. But there is a third possibility: a closed loop. There is a delightful little book called Vicious Circles and Infinity which features a photograph of a ring of people (rather than turtles) each sitting on the lap of the person behind, and in turn supporting the one in front. This closed loop of mutual support symbolizes John Wheeler’s conception of the universe. ‘Physics gives rise to observer-participancy; observer-participancy gives rise to information; information gives rise to physics.’...”

— Paul Davies, The Mind of God, Touchstone, 1992 p223-224
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Hua-Ching Ni, Chinese Taoist author, teacher, and healer, 1925-
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“’Venerable teacher, is there a great creator of the universe, and did this creator bring forth all things and beings?’”

“’Kind prince, there is creation, but it itself is uncreated. There is transformation, but it itself is not transformed. The uncreated is able to create and recreate, and the untransformed is able to transform and retransform. That which is created cannot help producing of itself, and the transformed cannot help transforming of itself. By this is meant that there is no time and space without the production or transformation of things of themselves. This is the exhibition of yin and yang, metaphorically expressed as the swing of old Pan Kou’s ax. The untransformed goes to and fro. The range of what goes to and fro is unlimitable. The Universal Way [Tao] has neither beginning nor end and is inexhaustible...“’...Creation, transformation, form, appearance, wisdom, energy, decline and cessation all take place by themselves within the universal subtle law. It is incorrect to say that any of these must be achieved through external effort.’”

— Hua-Ching Ni (translator), “Hua Hu Ching,” (recorded from oral tradition), The Complete Works of Lao Tzu, Seven Star Communications (Ninth Printing), 1997 p148-149

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Steven Weinberg, American theoretical physicist, 1933-2021
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“Some people have views of God that are so broad and flexible that it is inevitable that they will find God wherever they look for him. One hears it said that ‘God is the ultimate’ or ‘God is our better nature’ or ‘God is the universe.’ Of course, like any other word, the word ‘God’ can be given any meaning we like. If you want to say that ‘God is energy,’ then you can find God in a lump of coal.”

— Steven Weinberg, Dreams of a Final Theory, Vintage, 1993 (quoted by Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion, Mariner Books, 2008 p33)

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Bertrand Russell, British philosopher & polymath, 1872-1970
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“In short, this whole argument about natural law no longer has anything like the strength that it used to have. I am traveling on in time in my review of the arguments. The arguments that are used for the existence of God change their character as time goes on. They were at first hard intellectual arguments embodying certain quite definite fallacies. As we come to modern times they become less respectable intellectually and more and more affected by a kind of moralizing vagueness.”

— Bertrand Russell, “Why I Am Not a Christian,” (1927) Why I Am Not a Christian and Other Essays on Religion and Related Subjects, Touchstone Books, 1957, p9

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Paul Heinrich Dietrich, French-German Enlightenment philosopher, 1723-1789
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“If a faithful account was rendered of Man’s ideas upon Divinity, he would be obliged to acknowledge, that for the most part the word ‘gods’ has been used to express the concealed, remote, unknown causes of the effects he witnessed; that he applies this term when the spring of the natural, the source of known causes, ceases to be visible: as soon as he loses the thread of these causes, or as soon as his mind can no longer follow the chain, he solves the difficulty, terminates his research, by ascribing it to his gods... When, therefore, he ascribes to his gods the production of some phenomenon... does he, in fact, do any thing more than substitute for the darkness of his own mind, a sound to which he has been accustomed to listen with reverential awe?” 

— Paul-Henri Thiry, Baron d'Holbach, Systeme de la Nature, 1770 

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Richard Dawkins, PhD, British evolutionary biologist, 1941-
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“Searching for particular examples of irreducible complexity is a fundamentally unscientific way to proceed: a special case of arguing from present ignorance. It appeals to the same faulty logic as ‘the God of the Gaps’ strategy condemned by the theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Creationists eagerly seek a gap in present-day knowledge or understanding. If an apparent gap is found, it is assumed that God, by default, must fill it. What worries thoughtful theologians such as Bonhoeffer is that gaps shrink as science advances, and God is threatened with eventually having nothing to do and nowhere to hide. What worries scientists is something else. It is an essential part of the ignorance as a challenge to future conquests. As my friend Matt Ridley has written, ‘Most scientists are bored by what they have already discovered. It is ignorance that drives them on.’ Mystics exult in mystery and want it to stay mysterious. Scientists exult in mystery for a different reason: it gives them something to do. More generally, as I shall repeat in Chapter 8, one of the truly bad effects of religion is that it teaches us that it is a virtue to be satisfied with not understanding.”
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— Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion, Mariner Books, 2008 p151-152

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Michael Ruse, Canadian philosopher of science, 1940-
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“To sort out this debate, let us agree (to what is surely the case) that if you are a methodological naturalist, today you are going to accept evolution and conversely to think that evolution supports your cause. Today, methodological naturalism and evolution are a package deal. Take one, and you take the other. Reject one, and you reject the other. Clearly then, if your theism is one which gets its knowledge of God’s actions and purposes from a literal reading of the Bible, you have got a conflict. You cannot accept Genesis literally and evolution. That is a fact. In other words, there can be no accommodation between Creationism and evolution. However, what if you think that theologically speaking there is much to be said for a nice shade of grey? What if you think that much of the Bible, although true, should be interpreted in a metaphorical manner? What if you think you can be an evolutionist, and yet take in the essential heart of the Bible? What price consistency and methodological naturalism then? The answer depends on what you take to be the ‘essential heart’ of the Bible. At a minimum we can say that, to the Christian, this heart speaks of our sinful nature, of God’s sacrifice, and of the prospect of ultimate salvation... And clearly at once we are plunged into the first of the big problems, namely that of miracles – those of Jesus himself (the turning of water into wine at the marriage at Cana), his return to life on the third day, and (especially if you are a Catholic) such ongoing miracles as transubstantiation and those associated, in response to prayer, with the intervention of saints.

“There are a number of options here for the would-be methodological naturalist. You might simply say that such miracles occurred, that they did involve violations of law, but that they are outside your science. They are simply exceptions to the rule. End of argument. A little abrupt, but not flatly inconsistent with calling yourself a theist. You say normally God works through law but, for our salvation, miracles outside law were necessary. Or you might say that miracles occur but that they are compatible with science, or at least not incompatible. Jesus was in a trance and the cure for cancer after the prayers to Saint Bernadette was according to rare, unknown, but genuine laws. This position is less abrupt, although you might worry whether this strategy is truly Christian, in letter or in spirit...

“The third option is simply to refuse to get into the battle at all. You argue that the law/miracle dichotomy is a false one. Miracles are just not the sorts of things which conflict with or confirm natural laws. Traditional Christians have always argued this in some respects. Take the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation. The turning of the bread and the wine into the body and blood of Christ is simply not something open to empirical check... 

“[Philip] Johnson’s Creationism and evolution/naturalism [from Darwin on Trial] are indeed in conflict...”

— Michael Ruse, “Creationism,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Sept 21, 2018

Bertrand Russell, British philosopher & polymath, 1872-1970
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“The real question is: Is there anything we can think of which, by the mere fact that we can think of it, is shown to exist outside out thought? Every philosopher would like to say yes, because a philosopher’s job is to find out things about the world by thinking rather than observing. If yes is the right answer, there is a bridge from pure thought to things. If not, not.”

— Bertrand Russell (quoted by Richard Dawkins), The God Delusion, Mariner Books, 2008 p106-107

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Richard Dawkins, PhD, British evolutionary biologist, 1941-
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“...Kant identified the trick card up Anselm’s sleeve as his slippery assumption that ‘existence’ is more ‘perfect’ than non-existence. The American philosopher Norman Malcolm put it like this: ‘The doctrine that existence is a perfection is remarkably queer. It makes sense and is true to say that my future house will be a better one if it is insulated than if it is not insulated; but what could it mean to say that it will be a better house if it exists than if it does not?’”

— Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion, Mariner Books, 2008 p107


“That’s an argument? You might as well say, people vary in smelliness but we can make the comparison only by reference to a perfect maximum of conceivable smelliness. Therefore there must exist a pre-eminently peerless stinker, and we call him God. Or substitute any dimension of comparison you like, and derive an equivalently fatuous conclusion.”
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— Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion, Mariner Books, 2008 p102


“My own feeling, to the contrary, would have been an automatic, deep suspicion of any line of reasoning that reached such a significant conclusion without feeding in a single piece of data from the real world.”

— Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion, Mariner Books, 2008 p107


“...The Australian philosopher Douglas Gasking devised an ironic parody of Anselm’s argument, which he did not record, but which has been reconstructed by William Grey of the University of Queensland as follows:

“1. The creation of the world is the most marvelous achievement imaginable.

“2. The merit of an achievement is the product of (a) its intrinsic quality, and (b) the ability of the creator.

“3. The greater the disability (or handicap) of the creator, the more impressive the achievement.

“4. The most formidable handicap for a creator would be non-existence.

“5. Therefore if we suppose that the universe is the product of an existent creator we can conceive a greater being – namely, one who created everything while not existing.

“6. An existing God therefore would not be a being greater than which a greater cannot be conceived because an even more formidable and incredible creator would be a God which did not exist.

“Ergo:

“7. God does not exist.”
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— Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion, Mariner Books, 2008 p107-108

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Paul Davies, PhD, English physicist & professor, 1946-
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“The fact that the ontological argument reeks of logical trickery belies its philosophical force. It has in fact been taken very seriously by many philosophers over the years, including briefly by the atheistic Bertrand Russell. Nevertheless, even theologians have not generally been prepared to defend it. One problem lies with the treatment of ‘existence’ as if it were a property of things, like mass or color. Thus the argument obliges one to compare the concepts of gods-that-really-exist and gods-that-don’t-really-exist. But existence is not the sort of attribute to be placed alongside normal physical properties. I can meaningfully talk about having five little coins and six big coins in my pocket, but what does it mean for me to say that I have five existing coins and six nonexistent coins?

“A further problem with the ontological argument is the requirement that God explain the world. It is not sufficient for there to exist a logically necessary being who is in no way related to the world. But it is hard to see how a being who exists in the realm of pure logic can explain the contingent properties of the world. The ontological argument relies on what philosophers all ‘analytic propositions.’ An analytic proposition is one whose truth (or otherwise) follows purely from the meanings of the words involved. This ‘All bachelors are men’ is an analytic proposition. Propositions that do not fall into this class are called ‘synthetic,’ because they make connections between things that are not related merely by definition. Now, physical theories always involve synthetic propositions, because they make statements about the facts of nature that can be tested. The success of mathematics in describing nature, especially the underlying laws, can give the impression (defended by some, as we have seen) that there is nothing more to the world than mathematics, and that this mathematics is in turn nothing more than definitions and tautologies – i.e., analytical propositions. I believe this line of thinking to be badly misconceived. However hard you try, you cannot derive a synthetic proposition from an analytic proposition.”

— Paul Davies, The Mind of God, Touchstone, 1992 p185-186


“Keith Ward argues that we could define a broader notion of logical necessity. For example, consider the statement: ‘Nothing can be red and green all over.’ Is this statement necessarily true? Suppose I assert it is false. My assertion is not obviously self-contradictory. Nevertheless, it may still be false in all possible worlds: that is not the same as saying it is logically self-contradictory in a formal sense. The assumption that the statement is true is, in Deutsch’s words, ‘something that we would make anyway.’ Perhaps, then, the statement ‘God does not exist’ falls into this category. The statement might not contradict the axioms of some formal scheme of propositional logic, yet it might be the case that the statement is false in all possible worlds.”

— Paul Davies, The Mind of God, Touchstone, 1992 p187

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Elmer Leon Towns, American professor of theology & pastor, 1932-
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‍“A final erroneous view of God is that of deism. ‘For deism God is present in creation only by His power, not in His very being and nature. He has endowed creation with invariable laws over which He exercises a mere general oversight; He has imparted to His creatures certain properties, placed them under His invariable laws, and left them to work out their destiny by their own powers. Deism denies a special revelation, miracles, and providence.’ This view is sometimes described as an ‘absentee landlord’ view of God. This erroneous view of God denies the basic attribute of God – love – which implies God involves Himself in the affairs of His creation.”

— Elmer L. Towns, Theology for Today, Wadsworth/Thomson Learning, 2002 p110


“God’s power holds the world together. The Bible teaches that God ‘upholdeth all things by the word of His power’ (Heb 1:3; cf. Col. 1:17). The power of God keeps the comets in their path and the planets in their orbit. The power of God keeps the atom from exploding into unlimited nuclear fission.

“The omnipotent God preserves the world as He created it in the beginning and is the greatest evidence of the Person of God.”

— Elmer L. Towns, Theology for Today, Wadsworth/Thomson Learning, 2002 p122

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Robin Le Poidevin, British professor of metaphysics, 1962-
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‍“As an explanation, this is not entirely satisfactory. If God has withdrawn, why did he do so? Presumably, because the human race went off the rails rather badly. But why did they do so? If the current parlous state of humanity is due to the absence of God’s guiding hand, why, when it was active, did that hand not prevent corruption before it took hold? And here is another concern. At what point did God withdraw? Not, surely, before the creation of the world itself. Yet the world appears to have been in the hands of blind forces from the beginning. If the purpose of existence was, ultimately, the creation of conscious life which would be capable of love, goodness, and understanding, why take this extraordinarily indirect and wasteful route to it? Why did it require so many false starts, so much destruction, such a long period of inanimacy? And why, when it did appear, was it concentrated in so small a part of a vast and largely empty universe?...”

— Robin Le Poidevin, Agnosticism: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford University Press, 2020 p74-75