Reply To: Okay, Nerdy Keith, I'll bite: Why would someone be a deist?
Humans have an instinctive urge to make sense of the workings of the natural world. The Design Argument made sense when we were less well informed about our origins and the planet we live on. It made sense until only very recently to think the Universe was made up of what we can observe. Now we know Earth is only one of several hundred billion planets within our galaxy and that our galaxy is just one of several hundred billion galaxies within the Universe.
Darwin’s theory of evolution was the first real attempt at providing a more naturalistic explanation as an alternative to a deistic one. When we (humans) lack explanations for natural phenomena we are quick to fill in the blanks in anthropomorphic terms. Modern evolutionary theory proves beyond doubt that we are an evolved species. Evolution is unaware of us. It has removed the need for a god hypothesis. We are not designed. We are evolved from ugly fish…Lol.
The Universe too can be explained without it being designed. I suppose as a deist you could argue that if (a) god created the Universe then He would have created it for his own reasons but you cannot then argue that He created it for us. What would the point be of creating 500 billon stars in just our galaxy alone so He could endow just one of the millions of species “He created” to become self-aware?
To attribute what we do not yet understand or to say that if something is not explained by science it must therefore imply “god” is an argument from ignorance. Spinoza wrote of the “sanctuary of ignorance” where the “God did it” argument fails if we are content to allow answers to satisfy our imagination instead of our intellect.
Maybe the fish were beautiful and not in any way ugly. Either way the description is entirely subjective. When someone talks of the “order” they see in nature they are also being subjective. The moon may appear to circle the Earth in an orderly way but the moon way born from a violent collision with Earth and is moving away from us (3 inches every 10 years??). This also can appear orderly but it is the process of Entropy and at some point its gravitational effect on us will be so weak that our own planet will tilt and we will become extinct. The expansion of the Universe is accelerating – or at least the dark matter between massive objects is expanding – and at some point in the future (if we are still in existence) someone will look up at the night sky and see nothing. There will be no light out there. No stars and no concept of order or design. That is because it was not designed. Evolution does not know we exist. The Universe does not care that we do.
