This is a post from a different board. It pretty much ended the discussion because it went over everyone’s head, but I was hoping that maybe a theist or two here would be up to the challenge.
Quote:
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quote:Two years ago in Biology, we were going over DNA. My teacher made it a point to tell us that this is the one reason why he believes that there is a God of some sort, and it's because of DNA. When you go into it and look at all the detail that is in DNA, and think about how no one else will ever have that same exact highly detailed genetic code, unless you're an identical twin, that he believed that this much detail put into our genetic makeup could not be natural, but created by a higher knowledge, i.e. a God.
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God has less detail than DNA? Was that your teacher’s point? I really don’t mean to sound sarcastic at all. This is a very common argument that is made to point to God. The syllogism if you break it down usually goes something like this:
Something is great.
Great things can’t be natural.
Therefore those great things are designed by God.
There is a bit of a problem when you also have to accept the greatness of God. Is God also created by God? Is God natural? Is God something?
The way Christians usually try to avoid the contradiction is by saying God exists but He exists outside the universe. This concept really just destroys any legitimate meaning of the word universe rather than explain anything. If the universe is universal it includes all of existence including everything that exists. If God is a thing then He has to be included in a category of all things.
The trouble comes when people think of the universe as a place so they conceptualize God as in a different place. This destroys the definition of universe but allows theists to hold the contradiction in their head.
It becomes harder to hold that contradiction when you break it down to Ayn Rand’s fundamental axiom, Existence Exists. Not only can this statement not be contradicted without contradicting yourself, but it solves the location fallacy that facilitates the theistic contradiction. Existence is not a location. The term is universal to all existents including all beings that are both great and detailed as well as whatever Christians could conceive as being natural within their world view. Now you can’t break it down into existents that are evidence of creation and those that are eternal, without contradicting yourself or just making a random assertion.
Now is when it gets a bit complex. The few theists that are able to hold that line of thought consistently in their heads and still refuse to give up on the idea of God are the ones that said “God is infinite”. Many lay Christians take that to mean He is really really good and really really powerful, far beyond our ability to ever comprehend or compete with. That however is not what it means and it is not how they escape the dilemma of the existence of an uncreated great existent whose existence is “proven” by the need of great existents to be created. What they really mean by “God is infinite” is that he has no definition. That is not that we don’t know what His definition is or even that we could never possibly know what that definition is, but that He actually in reality exists without definition. They would then go on to assert that part of the definition of DNA may be that it is necessarily created, but God has no definition so it does not have the same limitation.
The problem with that is Rand’s second axiom, the law of identity. Existence is identity; A is A. To be is to be something. This axiom really is not a derivative of the first; it is just another way of stating it and looking at it. Existence does not have identity; existence is identity. Saying something does not have identity is just another way of saying it does not exist. Saying God is infinite is just an attempt to divorce existence from identity, but they are not two aspects of something that it shares but can be separated. It is the same thing; just two different ways of looking at it.
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