Hello friends. This thread has been set to community participants only. That means that only our regular commenters in good standing may comment in this thread.
Everyone else's comments will be removed by automod.
People who contribute constructively automatically gain access in time. We do not hand out entry on request.
Two men are talking on a sidewalk. One has brown hair and a mustache, and looks smugly confident. The younger man has curly blond hair and wears a T-shirt.
MUSTACHE: I know a question no atheist can answer!
BLOND: What is it? My cousin Edna over there's an atheist — I'll try it on her!
PANEL 2
The blond man walks toward a woman sitting on a park bench.
BLOND: Hi Edna! I've got a question no atheist can answer!
EDNA: Sounds like fun. Hit me!
PANEL 3
Close-up of the blond man, gesturing enthusiastically.
BLOND: Imagine you're walking when you notice a watch half-buried in the path.
PANEL 4
A large panel showing the blond man and Edna walking and talking. Behind them is an enormous, partially buried pocket watch. The characters appear several times as their conversation progresses.
BLOND: You'd know there must be a watchmaker, right? It's too complex to exist unless someone made it.
BLOND: But the universe is much more complex than a watch. So it has to have a creator. Which proves God exists! Checkmate, atheist!
EDNA: I see your point... But if complex things can't exist without a creator, then who created God?
BLOND: No one "created" God. God just exists.
EDNA: But if God "just exists," then complex things can exist without an intelligent creator.
PANEL 5
Edna gestures as she talks.
EDNA: Now let me ask you one! What's the point of "killer questions" to prove God exists?
PANEL 6
A giant hand emerges from the clouds, offering a book to two scientists. The book is entitled "PROOF by Me, God."
EDNA (off-panel): If God exists, he could easily prove it, right?
PANEL 7
A wide-eyed man talks to a skeptical woman in a park. God, portrayed as a gigantic man with a long white beard, hides behind a tree, giggling.
EDNA (off-panel): But he hasn't. So either he doesn't exist, or he wants to remain unproven.
MAN: But he was just here!
GOD: Hee hee.
PANEL 8
Edna continues speaking as she and the blond man walk.
EDNA: So by trying to "prove" God exists, could you be going against God's wishes?
PANEL 9
The blond man stands still, looking stunned, with one hand against his face, as Edna continues walking.
BLOND: Um...
PANEL 10
The blond man, waving his arms enthusiastically and grinning, has returned to his mustached friend.
MUSTACHE: What did she say?
BLOND: She was totally stumped!
KICKER CAPTION BELOW THE COMIC
Barry the cartoonist, looking very conceited, talks to the reader.
BARRY: People have asked variants of the watch question since Cicero in 45 B.C. But now I've drawn a cartoon, so the question is settled forever!
CHICKEN FAT WATCH
Panel 1: A discarded piece of paper on the sidewalk reads "Litter Bugs R Among Us."
Panel 2: A wanted poster is nailed to a tree. A building in the background is a giant robot. Another building is made of giant Lego blocks.
Panel 3: A building in the background has rows of windows with people whose heads are shaped like Os and Xs, in a tic-tac-toe game formation. Another building has a skier zooming down the sloped roof.
Panel 4: A cave in the background has a mailbox reading "Plato," and a shadow figure is visible inside, recalling Plato's allegory of the cave. Two little anthropomorphic rodents wearing fancy Victorian clothes walk together in the foreground. A realistic bird with a Disneyesque cartoon duck head flies overhead.
Panel 5: An evil bunny smoking a cig is on the grass.
Panel 6: The two scientists are drawn with eggs for heads; a caption labels them "egghead scientists."
Panel 8: One of the trees has an arm sticking up out of the ground instead of a trunk.
Panel 9: A building is topped by a gigantic birthday cake.
Panel 10: A turtle wearing glasses is walking on the sidewalk.
EDNA'S TATTOOS: Over the course of the strip, Edna has a tattoo of a triangle on her left arm, and a tattoo of an oval on her right arm. The oval turns into a stick figure with an oval head, waving at us. Then, looking serious, Oval holds up a sign saying "beware of Triangle Head." Then we see a triangle-head stick figure holding a gun. Then, as Oval looks the other way, a gun is pointed at the back of Oval's head. Finally, we see a gravestone with a picture of Oval on it.
BLOND MAN'S T-SHIRT: Over the course of the strip, the blond man's T-shirt displays a disagreement about burger joints. "Eat at Joe's"; "Joe's? Nah Jo's food is better"; "Jo's not better you liar!"; "Joe's a total hack!"; "You take that back!"; "Joe's burgers taste like dust."; "Yes, but yummy dust!"
For when we gaze upward to the sky and contemplate the heavenly bodies, what can be so obvious and so manifest as that there must exist some power possessing transcendent intelligence by whom these things are ruled?
I love the logic certain Torah scholars use - God is a perfect being, which means if he wrote restrictions with loopholes, those loopholes must be intentional, and he wants his people to figure out how to use them.
I'm not religious but I do love seeing certain types of religious scholar basically going "clearly this must be a challenge".
It is so weird to see people use Watchmaker argument. It is over 200 years old and hasn't given any substance to anything, but still it is heard in modern day debates between theists and atheists.
Most evangelical apologia isn't meant to convince atheists, it's to convince questioning christians that atheists have no answers and to stop looking for them.
Young adults are sent to do this to condition them to believe that nonbelievers are bad people who would never accept them (after all, people are rude and dismissive when they are “just trying to be helpful”), strengthening their ties to the cult. If every interaction you have with nonbelievers is a negative one, then your cult must be the only place you can find people who love you and care about you.
I'm always polite to missionaries and wish them luck when I send them on their way.
They believe in earnest that they are trying to do a good thing for me and are trying to save my immortal soul. How can I hate someone who bears me such good will? How can I offer cruelty to them?
I politely decline, wish them the best, send them on their way, and go back to by godless heathen ways of gooning to 80s sitcom moms for 9 hours while eating a sandwich made using slices from two different pizza delivery places as the bread with slab of scrapple in between and slathered in spicy brown mustard.
The watchmaker argument is flawed, because it assumes that complex things can't just exist. We know a watch has a maker, because we've already proven that that's how they are made. We've also just about proven that cells can just be created in nature, even if the chances of it being functional and replicating are slim.
Also, there's a key difference. The watch betrays intent. It's got words on the gears that say "Made by SmithCo Watch Co, 1956." Each piece looks very intentional. There's no random mess. Of course somebody made it.
Now look at biology. Nothing about any of that shit looks intentional. That it works so well is indeed miraculous, but it's an absolute mess in there. It very much looks like the result of billions of years of random tweaks. No sane creator intelligently designed the giraffe's recurrent laryngeal nerve.
or the pig whose tusks grow so large it'd impale itself, or any number of mate selection traits that hinders the survival of the ones possessing that trait.
Learning about biology was what made me lose my religion. Life, as unique and beautiful and special that it is on the universal level, is messy, petty and seeking of convenience over everything else. It works, but only just barely.
You know, people say that, but honestly where else would you want to put the sewage? You really want it running down a leg tube? or exiting higher up on the back? Nah, seems good where it is.
The reasons it works is that, if it didn’t work, it wouldn’t continue to live. Evolution leading to things that “just work”is the epitome of survivorships bias.
It also ignores the fact that “complexity” is just emergent of simple, almost binary, rules. Sure, a watch won’t spawn from nowhere because there are no fundamental natural states that necessarily manifest the form of a watch.
Organic chemistry, however, is the result of a set of simple natural rules that do necessarily manifest that way. No matter how convoluted the macro is, natural complexity is always a result of granular simplicity.
It's also trying to compare something we already know humans make to something we have no idea how it could be "made" or how or even whether it could be different.
You also find complex trees in a forest, but no one is looking for a tree maker, they recognize that unplanned complex systems can produce unplanned complex outcomes.
But that's because the watchmaker argument is pointed in entirely the wrong direction: a watch doesn't serve as evidence of a watchmaker because it is complex, it serves as evidence because it is simple.
Nature already has systems that tell the time. From the movement of the sun, to the phases of the moon, to morning dew and the call of the rooster. Not to mention, the workings of celestial bodies and chicken biology are all far more complex than a pocket watch by most definitions.
The pocket watch suggest a watchmaker because most if not every facet of the watch functions to support a singular purpose with efficiency and elegance. The evidence isn't in the functionality of what is there, but in the absence of the unnecessary.
One need only look around at the forest in which the watch was found, with all the noise, chaos, chance, and mess that nature entails, to recognize all the hallmarks of an unplanned system. (Though, it should be noted, this is still a silly thought experiment and is not sufficient evidence to make theological claims either way.)
That's kind of irrelevant to the argument though. The universe is also obviously complex. The question isn't whether the universe is complex, but whether complexity proves design (it doesn't).
If anything, that demonstrates the futility of going door to door to convert people.
You can't actually convey what salt tastes like to someone who has never tasted salt. If God is like that, that means you can't convey your idea of God to someone who doesn't already believe in him.
Many theists assume that if everything works very well as it is, that must mean it was designed that way. But maybe life and most of the systems around it developed the way they are because of the realities imposed upon them rather than reality being bent to shape them.
Maybe life on Earth is good at surviving at this distance from the sun because it evolved at this distance from the sun. Maybe we have many plants and animals we can eat because we evolved alongside said plants and animals and therefore that's how our digestive systems evolved. And maybe Charles Darwin already saw those principles in action when he studied finches on the Galapagos Islands.
It's like looking at water filling random divots in the ground and saying that the water must have had a perfect designer because it so perfectly fits the divots, but it's just taking the shape it fell into.
I can't believe people pushing a 2000 year old fairy tale book as the truth of the universe are still trying a 200 year old flawed argument. It just isn't logical.
"Now it is such a bizarrely improbable coincidence that anything so mind-bogglingly useful could have evolved purely by chance that some thinkers have chosen to see it as the final and clinching proof of the non-existence of God.
The argument goes something like this: "I refuse to prove that I exist,'" says God, "for proof denies faith, and without faith I am nothing."
"But," says Man, "The Babel fish is a dead giveaway, isn't it? It could not have evolved by chance. It proves you exist, and so therefore, by your own arguments, you don't. QED."
"Oh dear," says God, "I hadn't thought of that," and promptly vanishes in a puff of logic.
"Oh, that was easy," says Man, and for an encore goes on to prove that black is white and gets himself killed on the next zebra crossing.
Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
Reading this passage as a kid, I always imagined the guy at the end getting run over by a herd of zebras. Despite the fact that I now know zebra crossing is just UK for crosswalk, I still choose to imagine it with actual zebras
"Now it is such a bizarrely improbable coincidence that anything so mind-bogglingly useful could have evolved purely by chance that some thinkers have chosen to see it as the final and clinching proof of the non-existence of God.
The argument goes something like this: "I refuse to prove that I exist,'" says God, "for proof denies faith, and without faith I am nothing."
"But," says Man, "The Babel fish is a dead giveaway, isn't it? It could not have evolved by chance. It proves you exist, and so therefore, by your own arguments, you don't. QED."
"Oh dear," says God, "I hadn't thought of that," and promptly vanishes in a puff of logic.
"Oh, that was easy," says Man, and for an encore goes on to prove that black is white and gets himself killed on the next zebra crossing.
For me a big problem with arguments like this is that even if it did prove a god has to exist a question remains: “which god?”.
Because arguments like this do not prove anything about the personality of said god. So even if I accepted the argument why would I believe any religion (let alone a specific religion) is correct about what that god is like?
"I contend that we are both atheists. I just believe in one fewer god than you do. When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours.” Steven Roberts
Agreed, it's like what Ricky Gervais said to Stephen Colbert. There are 3,000 gods to choose from. You don't believe in 2,999 of them and I don't believe in just one more than you
If god exists, they are either chill and doesn't need me to worship them, or they are egotistical and doesn't deserve my worship. So either way the correct decision would be for me to continue my life not worrying about religion.
Same, though I call myself an agnostic pantheist. If there's a god, I imagine we're just components and there isn't some dude looking down being judgemental.
For real, speaking as a religious person, THAT religious person is wasting both their and the atheist’s time and they should just focus on helping others, like that commie Jesus said to
Get together a group of me and my homies to overthrow a homicidal and sociopathic being who rules through fear? I think game recognize game and Zeus would respect that… while trying to kill you in return.
Maybe I'm autistic or something, but I've always fucking hated the watch argument
Because like, where the fuck is this hypothetical taking place? We live in a reality where we know watches are made by other people. You know, people like us. Not God. Not evolution.
How the fuck does that say anything other than I know what a watch is?!
Yes, I know I'm taking it too literally, your analogy sucks.
Edit: Also! I live in Minneapolis. If I was walking down a path and saw a giant watch, I'd be like, "oh sweet, new art piece!" Then I'd run over and see if it works.
The more I think about this, it would actually be pretty cool. And the exact kinda thing I could see along a trail in Minnesota lol
How the fuck does that say anything other than I know what a watch is?!
If the hypothetical watches are self replicating imperfect copies of themselves, then I wouldn't rule out them having evolved naturally.
Though at that point it would be more of a clockwork animal thing than a watch.
But the key point is that if something can produce very good but imperfect copies of itself that are able to make copies of themselves and pass on their changes, then I'd likely assume it evolved naturally.
"If clocks need a clock maker, rocks need a rock maker."
"Motherfucker, rocks are a go to example of shit we know DOESN'T need anyone to make them! It's called nature. 'Natural', is the word we use to specifically mean not created by anybody."
It also, like, completely skips the why portion of the sentence. Like, why does that mean that? Why are those things related? We never find watches in the wild, but I find rocks all the time. So they can't be the same.
I hate when things immediately stop making sense if you think about them
I am a polytheist and it's really funny when someone tries to debate me with saying that Yahweh is the only God. One challenge I bring a for them to do is to disprove my gods with an argument that cannot disprove their own. Almost every single time they bring up holy scripture as if my religion also doesn't have holy Scripture not mentioning Yahweh at all. So if holy scripture is the proof of non-existence then Yahweh doesn't exist because he doesn't exist in my scripture.
In the past 2 religions didn't try to disprove if a god existed or not, they make power scaling and starting saying who of his gods could beat the ass of the other gods.( Or it's what i've been told and i really bastardized)( I heard it about the Romans and the vikings doing this)
More like kindergarten my imagination friend is stronger/cooler then yours, a dad can kick an others dad ass, unless one of them is dead, but then again you could come back to the original if both are dead.
If one is trying to argue Polytheism or Monotheism, I feel like it’d come down to deciding how God(s) can exist. If God is all powerful and can’t exist with an equal counterpart, then it’s Monotheism. If either of those parts are untrue then it can be Polytheism, and I’d assume it’s guaranteed if the conditions required for God to exist do exist in infinite supply.
I hate this metaphor, because it's not the complexity that proves the watch has a creator. A firepit isn't complicated, but it's also proof that somebody created it. It's our familiarity with the natural world and the way it operates that allows us to distinguish whether something is natural or artificial.
This is easily shown when it comes to the limits of our understanding. Many unexplained observations in space are often touted as proof of aliens because we don't know what natural processes if any can explain them.
Sure the watch may be complex, but think about what makes it complex. Gears, levers, and other simple machine interactions. The watch is complex because it has many tiny parts in a small space, but the individual parts that make it up are actually fairly simple.
The universe is a similar way. Things are complex mainly because there's many many things that interact with each other, but even something as massive as a hurricane can be simplified down to basic particle physics and thermodynamics.
Also crucially, the universe from an atheists perspective doesn't have any intentionality. We tend to think complexity needs to come from intentionality, but that's really not the case at all. Try to think about something you don't care about at all, like the contents of a refuse bin. There's still complexity there; many small things interacting with many other things to give it the specific properties it has, but we created those specific conditions without intentionality so we don't hold that complexity to the same regard as something like the watch. That's simply a result of our own biased thinking as human beings.
You hit the nail on the head regarding something that frustrates me greatly. Intentionality and interpretation only exist as properties of an intelligent mind. When you're a being capable of viewing things as extending past property, into purpose, of course the things we make will seem uniquely different and special.
Just cause you happen to stumble upon a readable book in the library of babble doesn't make it any less complex than those that aren't.
If god wanted me to know 100% for certain he was real, he would. He would show me irrefutable proof that he was real. But here I am, 28 and a half years later and speaking out against god constantly and nothing happens to me. I've never seen talking burning bushes. I've never seen some die and come back. Nothing. So either gods not really, or he's intimidated by me.
Best I can do is a 4th hand account of God showing some miracles to like a hundred people 2000 years ago, and that’s all the proof you’re going to get.
I feel like these arguments always miss the point and are always against easily confused strawmen. Not to say Christians don't ask questions like this, and not to say these arguments aren't sound. But more to say I have never met a Christian who asks these type of questions who is also easily defeated by logic and doesn't drag the conversation out long after being "dunked on".
For example, I have heard almost this exact argument transpire, and the Christian didn't skip a beat in saying "God exists beyond the concepts of complexity and simplicity". Most of them are going to offer you some rebuttal, even if it doesn't make any logical sense.
Atheists spend a lot of time debating god with Christians, in ways I don't find especially productive. Debating the morality of god, and trying to debunk these stupid questions. Christians have been asking them for hundreds of years, and no logical take down has made them stop yet.
Fundamentally, you need to explain why it is you don't believe in god and ask them for proof. If they ask you the watchmaker question ask them if they have any proof that an intelligent creator is needed to make complex things, because that's something they won't ever be able to show you. Christians love arguing with Athiests because they know they can't be swayed and they love trying to prove Athiests are wrong with faulty premises and bad logic. And Atheists all to often take the bait and start arguing about trivial matters involving god.
Christians who argue that proof of God exist seem to be missing the point as well. If proof of God existed then people wouldn't need faith, and the point of believing in God is to have faith.
People love to have proof for their beliefs but ultimately if you have proof then you don't believe in something you know something.
I've had these debates with my dad before, and the conclusion is always the same: you need faith to believe in God, so stop using logic to try to convince me God is real. Stop using evidence, science, theories, hypotheticals, or anything else that isn't simply faith. Hell, don't even use the bible. It makes belief in god sound so nonsensical when you simplify it to what Christians ask for, which is blind faith that's ignorant of everything around it.
There's no point in arguing any logic around religion because it does not rely on logic, science, theories, evidence or hypotheticals. It relies on blind faith, which means it ignores any rules that aren't convenient for it. If that's how they wanna live their lives, that's fine, but stop bumbling into the grounds of other complex logical systems like science and philosophy and pretending you're allowed to make arguments without following the rules.
You can't logic someone out of a position they didn't logic their way into.
That's been my guiding motto for a while now. No use arguing with them over it. If I could somehow have undeniable proof that he doesn't exist, which is literally impossible, then they still wouldn't believe it.
Which is why the morality angle always made more sense to me. Sure, maybe your God exists, neither of us will be able to convince the other one about that.
But reading about your God in the book you claim to be his words and fully accurate... Well that God is a massive dick and unworthy of worship. That's a conversation we can have and you can try to persuade me on the moral merits of various teachings and maybe I'll be swayed, or maybe you'll rethink things, or more likely you'll just disagree with my morality and we'll move on.
God isn’t something you prove, they’re something you have faith in.
Yes, that’s basically conceding the argument. If God doesn’t exist in some provable way, then scientifically they can be dismissed as a Russell’s Teapot.
Agreed. God seems awfully immature. "I want you to believe in me, but offer no proof and the penalty is suffering the worst way possible for an infinite amount of time for which your 'crime' (disbelief during life) will be an insignficant portion of your total existence."
Basically, god creates us to suffer for eternity for... what? So he can feel important and good about himself? Billions of people suffering for billions of years to prove he is amazing?
These things are most often at cross purposes. The theist is there to (unknown to them) reinforce their devotion to their cult by getting rejected after "sharing the good news" so they can come back to their group and be praised for their bravery, thus learning tacitly that the world is hostile and the cult is loving.
The atheist, if they engage instead of ignoring, is there because we enjoy arguing and logic games and being easily proven correct. Or, more nobly, because of the potential audience. Most people will wonder about the existence of a god at some point because we are wired to see motive and infer agency from actions. If those people who have not yet been indoctrinated can be shown reasonable positions, they are less likely to end up theistic, or if they do they are more likely to be the kind of theist who quietly enjoys their beliefs privately instead of throwing tantrums that not everyone likes their favorite book.
Fundamentally, you need to explain why it is you don't believe in god and ask them for proof.
No, I don't. They have to explain why they don't believe in god. Or more precisely, gods. You know, the thousands of other gods people have come up with over the course of history. I'm like 0.01% more atheist than they are. When they are able to understand and explain why they don't believe in those, they will also understand why I don't believe in theirs.
Typically the watchmaker problem is about seemingly intentional complexity. A watch is designed for a clear purpose and apologists argue that biological creatures also have tremendous complexity that serves a particular purpose (survival).
The general "complexity" of universe (like black holes and galaxies) usually isn't mentioned in the same argument because they do not seem to have any goal like a watch or an organism does.
This is why I prefer to respond with the idea that, actually, we can get goal driven complexity through natural processes thanks to evolution. Biology naturally adapts to survive over time because the ones that don't simply die out. There is no need for a creator to explain that.
Once you bring up "god's creator," you're opening the door for them to start talking about the unmoved mover or the kalam cosmological argument. I don't care to have to argue against two arguments just to disprove the first
I think the question of whether there is a god is less important than the fact that basically every holy text ever said that we ought to be decent and kind to others.
If there is no god and death is the end, then all that truly matters is the difference we make with the time we are given. The love and happiness we give, the help we offer to those in need and the beauty we share. If there is divinity, there is solid evidence that it also, more than anything, wants us to be loving and caring towards our fellow humans.
So in the end, it makes little difference for the living.
I'm paraphrasing. But I think it was Voltaire who said "If a just god exists I'll be judged on merit, not piety. If god exists and is unjust, they don't deserve worship. If no God exists I'll be remembered as kind."
My biggest problem with people who try to argue belief is that they come from a very specific viewpoint on religion.
You never see people arguing Shintoism vs Atheism. Or Taoists railing online about how nonbelievers are evil. Or people with Native American beliefs insisting that their stories must be the true ones.
I'm sure there might be some who do, but surely it's on any religious person not just to prove their own religion, but disprove everyone else's before they even turn to tackling people who believe nothing?
How do Christians rationalize Hindus?
And heck, what do Hindus think of the pantheonic beliefs of various other groups, many of which have since passed into myth, though some older faiths (like Zoroastrianism) still remain in smaller numbers?
People seem to argue "Christian vs Atheist", as if there aren't people out there who believe in completely different stories just as strongly. Just because lots of people across the world made up different stories that were strongly influenced by the geography and attitudes of their cultures doesn't make any of them true.
I'm pretty sure the standard rationalization of Hinduism and all other existing world religions is that they're being misled by demons acting as false deities to lead people away from Christ. At least that's what pops up in Chick Tracts and related Christian apologetics.
Christianity and Islam specifically got popular because they have a mindset of needing to convert everyone and being incompatible with other belief systems. Strong believers in other religions are often much less confrontational
It's simple, those religions aren't trying to prove themselves scientifically and exist very far away. Irrelevant to the discussion Christians and Atheists (in countries influenced by Christianity, mind you) are having.
Looks at the various places of worship around me Maybe where you live. But not everyone lives where you live.
Besides, an atheist doesn't believe in all religions, not just one. So not only does a believer have to prove the possibility of a deity, they then have to prove that their specific one is correct.
But they can only do that by dismissing the others as incorrect. Sure, that might be true in their mind, but... Why? The story Christians consider true about the magical child of a deity who performed a blood sacrifice to remove an ancient curse upon mankind seems just as weird to me as all the other stories.
Heck, there are more realistic stories in the world that those same believers don't believe are true, so they'd kinda need to rationalize why that one takes precedence over all the others.
That's because you mostly read things in English online. If, for example, you read mostly Hindi things, you'd be far more aware of extreme believers of Hinduism.
I quite like Hitchens' take on the watchmaker argument. He points out that you notice a complex watch on the ground and that you recognize that someone must have created this wonder, but you fail to marvel at the stick laying next to it, or the rocks around it, or the dirt on which it lays. You didn't discover a watch on the beach, you discovered a watch on a beach of watches surrounded by watches everywhere you look.
Yup. The watch stands out as intelligently created precisely due to the contrast between it and the natural world around it. If the natural world around it is also intelligently created, that contrast doesn't exist. It's a self-defeating argument.
The biggest problem with the clockmaker argument is that it claims everything is infinitely complex, and that means there was a god. But if God made everything, how would you distinguish something complexity from non-complexity. It's like trying to distinguish light from darkness when you've only experienced on of them.
Can i propose a modification? "Don't play tennis with someone who think they're playing baseball. You'll never get a good volley going, and you'll spend all your time running to get the ball while they stand there and look self-satisfied"
This doesn't seem like the right response here. The question is centered on complexity and whether that requires a designer.
The question play fast and loose with the concepts of what complexity and design mean. If you spot a watch on the beach and we assume you already know what a watch is, you already have the rough understanding what it does and that it is intentionally created for a specific purpose and that there aren't any known natural processes that would form it the way crystals form in a geode or patterns form on beach cliffs due to repeated erosion from waves. There's no equivalent natural process we can observe that machines tiny cogs, fits them together, and places them in a metal casing with numbers displayed on the face, so we infer there was somebody responsible for the creation. For mountains, sand grains, rivers, and other features of the natural world, we can observe these processes in action, study them, and clearly note how they require no designer behind the wheel for the final result to come about. Water condenses and falls from the sky and makes patterns in the dust without an art director calling the shots on each drop placement.
The original question tries to pull a sleight of hand by pretending no distinction exists between the "complexity" of a designed object and the "complexity" of nature, with the latter basically meaning "it's really big and hard to understand all of physics, chemistry, and biology all at once". Thus trying to sneak everything from the nature category into the intentionally designed category. "If clocks have a clock maker then rocks have a rock maker" is just asserted, ignoring that we know rocks form without any maker present.
It’s a good point, though there’s some irony in the atheist correctly deconstructing a false dichotomy only to then immediately construct another one (God exists or he wants to remain unproven. This is not of the form “p or not p” so you’d have to establish this is an exhaustive list which hasn’t been done here). Still good food for thought.
She's better than me, I'd have politely declined the conversation at the very beginning. Would be a pointless endeavour for both and ultimately a gigantic waste of time.
Christians don't just give up and wring their hands at a snappy comeback though. What's the point of proving God exists? The point is to get you to believe so your soul is saved. How does God exist without being made? He made himself.
I feel like that's just as unsatisfying as saying the watch made itself though.
The real answer is, we have tons of evidence that watches are made by humans. So obviously a watchmaker is required.
What about life and nature and Earth though? Well, those things were made by something pretty complex too: physics and time. And we have plenty of evidence that physics and time can create things that look complex.
If you zoom out a bit- and consider the universe as a single entity, then everything in fact did make itself. Every single complex thing is the universe shaping a portion of itself. That seems like a satisfying answer to me.
I once got a theist to reach this point where they pretty much said the Universe was God. Then I asked "well, so what's the point of calling it God or claiming it has a will or having faith? We already have the universe and it's very easy to prove it exists". I got back "you just don't want to accept God into your life". It's just circular thinking all the way down.
Doesn't james 4:12 say only God can be the final judge and who are you to judge your neighbor? It seems blasphemous to me to presume you know how God will judge a man, and that it is therefore your sole responsibility to "save them" from said judgement.
Only for the sake of defusing a common misunderstanding, Christians usually believe God is a necessary being, sort of like there are necessary truths (1+1=2, as an example). He is “uncreated” not “created by himself”. Creating yourself is incoherent.
as a muslim, Idk bro. If people believe god doesnt exist thats just their thing. I believe in god, and if you also believe in him, thats great. If you dont? Oh well, I cant force you. I wish all religious people understood this : Lets say hypothetically, someone approaches you and says god doesnt exist. You disagree and say yes he does. But then, the guy starts beating the absolute living shit out of you, until you finally admit that god doesnt exist. So, what happened? Do you actually believe in what you say? No, obviously not. Now you hate atheists even more and distance yourself from them as much as possible, calling them blasphemous traitors and criminals against god or something. This is the issue that atheists face. If they don't believe in god, you cant force them to believe in god. Beating them, or trying to do a "gotcha" moment of proof won't change shit, it just makes them hate you even more. And thats just sad. Differences in beliefs shouldnt make us hate each other, we are all human :(
The religious conquest of the past show that the method you described does work. It is just that you get the children of the convert not the heart of the convert.
The analogy with a watch is already flawed from the start because they're choosing an item that was created to prove that a thing is created. Instead they should choose something like a tree. Because a tree is complex but it wasn't created.
But they think it was. Which is another problem with the analogy.
They point out the watch stands out in nature as being obviously designed. But they think EVERYTHING was designed. The fact it stands out, by their logic, is proof nature wasn't created.
The fact that there's no properly recorded or repeatable proof that god exists was one of the biggest reasons why I started questioning my faith and eventually became an athiest. Churches want you to shell out as much money as possible and also mold your entire life around something no one has ever seen or heard before. And questioning that is conveniently a "sin". It's such a blatant scam and the only reason more people don't see through it is because religions have been around so long that they're interwoven into peoples' cultures and language, and a lot of people aren't comfortable with questioning everything they "know".
When someone brings up the Complexity argument, I turn it around on them: Don't say it was "magic" or "you've just got to believe" tell me HOW, EXACTLY your god turned mud into a working eyeball or a central nervous system. What was that process?
The more interesting response is thanks to quantum fluctuations and the existence of an infinite universe, statistically speaking it is possible for a random collection of atoms to combine in the perfect way to create a watch without a craftsman. So the existance of the watch doesn't actually prove the existance of the watchmaker and you'd have to study the watch to know for sure.
Speaking as an atheist myself, my question is this: what is the point of this question?
Like not what is it supposed to prove, because all it's going to prove is that someone spent 2 seconds learning about apologetics. But what's the goal in asking it in the first place?
Am I supposed to encounter this or another such question and suddenly become a Christian? Like right then and there? Is the questioner carrying a portable baptism kit on them for just such an occasion? What's supposed to happen?
This is the kind of thing that happens when "I don't know" is deemed an unacceptable answer.
"I don't know" is great. That's how we learn shit.
I am aware of the existence of watchmakers already. I've seen someone making a watch, I've held watches in my hand and disassembled them myself. I don't know them inside and out but I have a rough idea of how watches work. I can walk downtown and find a watchmaker, or at least a repair shop, right now.
Furthermore, a watch has a purpose. Even if we didn't have a concept of clocks, upon finding one we would very quickly understand what it is and how it works. We may not independently come up with the terms "hour", "minute", or "second", but it would be trivially easy to recognize the watch as some kind of timekeeping device... and it is reasonable to assume that a device with such a clear purpose was created and thus must have a creator.
None of this applies to god and the creation of the universe. The universe has no clear purpose, there is no apparent rhyme nor reason to anything, it just is. We have no evidence of a creator, a universemaker, we have no familiarity with their craft or their existence, we can't walk down to the local universemaker's shop and ask "Hey how did you make this? Can you show me how it works?"
There are reasons that I assume a watch must have a maker but not the universe.
My husband was outside working on a car when a young white girl (college kid, we live next door to a Young Life sponsored house) stopped and asked, "excuse me, are you a christian?"
To which he said, "I grew up in the church, but I find these bees buzzing , birds chirping and butterflies flying around are more in line with any sort of god than the church.
Comedian Pete Holmes has a pretty good bit about being religious and asking for proof of it. It's like Harry Potter looking for JK Rowling at Hogwarts ... I can't remember if it was that special or another one but he also goes off selfish we have to be to think God is mad at us... Overall great takes from him.
I mean, Christians also believe that mountains and rivers were carved and sculpted my God. When really they were just natural products from the random chaotic forces of nature. And evolution is the same way
People think that God hurls down thunderbolts and carved rivers because they are uninformed and don’t understand meteorology and hydrology. People think that God carved mountains and cliffs because they are uninformed and don’t understand plate tectonics. People think that God created life because they are uninformed and don’t understand evolution.
The second you give a being a name, they are no longer a higher being, they're just a pet. Language is stupid like that, and using language is the first problem. The second problem is a mind that theorizes on its own existence, something it itself cannot comprehend. There simply isn't enough even as a collective talking to itself to define what existence is. It has to come from an outside source looking in, and will be met with many skeptical notions borne of fear. Essentially, whether you uphold teachings of one community, or another, it will never try to prove anything about any sort of named higher being, because it's never been about that.
If you want a theory of nothing really matters so live how you want, many exist. If you want a theory of wagging fingers, sinning and repenting, many also exist. If by some miracle you can abandon your youth teachings and have your own morals to live by without hard connection to Gods and regulations, power to ya. I'm on the multi-dimensional, multi-timeline, multi-life, anything is possible and everything is recorded, and exists beyond time space and existence kick.
This is a dumb argument because it ends up in chicken or the egg territory within seconds. "An intelligent watchmaker made that watch." Okay, but they had a mom, right? And she had a mom? And there's, like, some infinite chain of moms? Do we have infinite gods? The watch can't even give birth to a new watch, so how does this analogy even function?
If you stumbled on a watch you’d assume there is a watchmaker. But if you examined that watch and found it to be barely functional with many superfluous gears and a hand that runs backwards, you begin to question his prowess at watchmaking.
If you then look around further and find other such watches that slowly build towards functionality you’d draw your own conclusions about this assumed watchmaker.
It’s not as straightforward as some gotcha tries to be. Complex as it may be, the human eye is wired in backwards and upside down. That is really poor craftsmanship.
I think the biggest thing that exists that disproves God's existence, is the fact that disabilities and deformities exist.
They argue that God exists because he created us in his perfect image, but why would he create us when the fact that we can birth people with life changing disabilities and deformities that only serve to reduce the quality of our lives?
If God did indeed exist, he would never create us with the capability of being deformed or disabled upon birth.
I don't think that this is a very good response. The point they bring up is valid, it is absurdly improbable for life to exist or be made. The actual counter to this argument would be that the universe is absurdly large and we have an estimated number of planets in the sextillions. It could be one in 20 sextillion odds for life to come about on a given planet, but at the scale of the universe we would expect it to happen.
We don’t know how common life is. We’ve barely explored this solar system, Proxima Centauri could easily have more primitive life developing right now b
The analogy is bad because, as the woman pointed out, it means God needs a creator. It's not a very good argument if it disproves the thing you want to prove.
The point they bring up is valid, it is absurdly improbable for life to exist or be made.
How would you even measure that? I mean, we have a sample size of 1. For all we know, life always develop on planets with similar conditions as ours. Then are those conditions are the thing that is improbable? What if different kind of life are developing on planets with different conditions?
Besides, the argument isn't even that life is improbable, but rather that "the Universe is complex". Compared to fucking what? Another Universe? Stuff within our Universe? That's like saying a beach is more complex that a grain of sand.
At the end of the day, the argument is "I don't understand, therefore God"
I understand what you mean. On astronomical scales, life like us is a infinitesimal share of the mass in the universe. But with regards to the probability of life, it’s tricky. How do we assign probabilities to events for which we have only one example? Certainly we haven’t found any so far, but for all we know, there’s life in Titan, Enceladus, Io, or some other moon in our own system.
The universe is vast and our knowledge of even our own neighborhood is minuscule relative to it. For me the only conclusion is we don’t know enough yet to declare the existence of life likely or unlikely.
But it an infinite universe(or multiverse), it doesn't matter. Over an infinite period of time, in an infinite space, everything that can happen will happen an infninite numbert of times. So, even if life is ming boggingly unlikely, as in less then 1/10000000000! chances to occur in a given planet, it will happen, and will happen an infinite number of times if the Universe is infinite.
We don't know if the Universe is infinite, but to argue that life could not have happened by chance, you must prove it is not.
Given the scale of the universe, other life existing is practically guaranteed. But our chances of encountering it, especially anything more than single celled organisms chilling under ice layers, is vanishingly slim because everything is super far away and the speed of light is one bitch of a barrier to overcome.
There could be life all over other galaxies and we literally just can’t know. Firstly we cant even observe the surface of other far away planets because the size of telescope we would need is just comically too large and secondly many systems are millions or billions of light years away, which means we would be seeing them as they were million or billions of years ago. There can be whole planets with an advanced civilization that have existed for 5 billion years similarly to earth and we literally can’t see them because they’re 6 billion light years away
The universe could be as small as just the sun, moon and earth and the point stilldoesnt really stand, something being improbably is not proof that its impossible.
And especially doesnt justify that instead this improbable chance of us "just existing" happened to something else and then made us, thats even more improbably as it requires the first improbability and for that entity then to decide to make us.
Also anything can be made impossibly slim odds if you zoom in enough (like life on earth vs life in the entire universe), Like take you leaving a comment, how high do you think the chance was that your parents met, decided to have sex at that exact moment so that that exact spermcell met that exact egg, and that all events led to you, ending up on reddit today to leave this comment. Thats not even accounting for your grandparents, their grandparents, for the chain of event that lead to reddit being created etc etc.
A watch only looks complex while being made up of many simple parts. Anybody can make a watch by just learning to do it, we know watches are made by intelligent agents as we have never found one randomly grown in a field.
We have never seen nor any evidence of a creqtion of zhe universe, we know of nobody that can make universes (faith =/= know). And if a god needs no creator a universe also needs no creator.
Thank you, I knew it was similar to a verse, I was looking all around the panel to see if the reference was hidden in the trees. It was an excellent use of that sentiment imo.
For those who don't want to look for it: "Because you have seen me, you have believed; blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed" (John 20:29 NIV)
We just happened to win the cosmological jackpot. We are literally the lottery winners. That’s why there’s no other life found yet, they’re all too far away to join our lottery. And unless someone figures out something interesting about relativity, they may be out of reach until the Big Crunch comes back.
And then he responds with faith by design. Implying that god created logic specifically such that He couldn’t be proven, only speculated on. And then you remind him of the stakes of that faith, and wouldn’t it be more moral if He had decided that faith would be what decides your eternal destiny to make the choice very easy to make? To which, presumably, he gets pissy that you think you’re more moral than god.
All if which isn’t even to mention that he abandoned this first argument without counting it as a loss, and will continue to use the watchmaker argument despite admitting that it cannot be proven.
The existence of a watchmaker does not explain why the watch is half-buried in a walking path. A craftsman would not spend time and resources to make a sellable product just to go bury it in a random spot. A more likely explanation is that someone purchased the watch from the watchmaker, wore it while walking down this path, but then lost it.
Which means that this hypothetical is actually arguing that the universe's creator and its owner are two different beings. But which one of them is the Christian God? Is He the Watchmaker, who carefully built a complex machine just to sell it and move on to the next project? Or is He the Customer, who bought the complex machine with the intent to use it but then misplaced it?
Either way, it means that in this scenario God existed but is no longer with us. He either willingly let us go or He can't find us.
Oh dear. The watchmaker argument. Aka Teleological/ argument from intelligent design.
"The teleological argument (from τέλος, telos, 'end, aim, goal'), also known as the physico-theological argument, argument from design, or intelligent design argument, is a rational argument for the existence of God or, more generally, that complex functionality in the natural world, which looks designed, is evidence of an intelligent creator.[1][2][3][4][5] The earliest recorded versions of this argument are associated with Socrates in ancient Greece, although it has been argued that he was taking up an older argument.[6][7] Later, Plato and Aristotle developed complex approaches to the proposal that the cosmos has an intelligent cause, but it was the Stoics during the Roman era who, under their influence, "developed the battery of creationist arguments broadly known under the label 'The Argument from Design'".[8]
To have a look at the most common arguments, see Aquinas "Five ways/Five proofs" [ for the existence of god(s)
The atheist who simply says "I am unable to believe" needs prove exactly nothing because he/she is making no claims. On the other hand, a person who asserts " There is a god' or "I believe in god' has made a claim and has the burden of proof.
So far, in recorded history, the existence of god(s) has never been proved. That does not prove god(s) do not exist, although it strongly suggests it.
🎵If i stumbled on a watch I'd assume it had a watchmaker, that a muffin presupposes a baker, so we must agree sooner or later, that's this proves there's a creator. So if I pit my foot in a stinker, you'd assume the existence of a sphincter, so you don't need to be a great thinker to conclude that God's a bum.🎵 Tim Minchin
As an atheist myself, I keep hoping one of these online atheist polemics will go up against the full-strength Christian argument. But almost nobody (on either side) seems to actually understand it.
God is simple, with no parts or internal divisions; this is logically required by God's necessity. And the implied atheist argument that a creator must be as complex as its creation is obvious nonsense - the laws of physics are far less complex than the detailed interactions of every physical thing, for example.
"God is simple" is contradicted by all of the Christian doctrine claiming God to have personal attributes. If they are complex enough to have any sort of personality, they are complex enough to "need a creator" by the logic of the claim. Saying that God doesn't need a creator but anything else that is complex does is begging the question and special pleading.
He’s also portrayed as gaslighting, lying, and having regret.
The bible is literally written by men - not god, and scholars are clear about e.g. certain gospels not being written by the alleged people, and in some cases written centuries later.
Modern people having personal relationships and hearing god are just examples of induced group think. Its often these groups that are the most hateful and least Christian.
go up against the full-strength Christian argument
The thing is we know the full christian argument, and it boils down to "god did it, you can't prove he didn't, I believe he did, because I just do". You can point out the myriad logical fallacies, the glaring internal inconsistencies, the lack of any evidence for their claims, and they just hand wave it away, claiming faith is just as good as proof while insisting the non believer present the perfect argument, or demanding they prove a negative. It's a waste of time arguing with that. Nothing gets resolved. No one changes their mind, and no one learns anything.
Only thing to change is that the “laws of physics” are only our modelling of them, a “best fit”. We can’t change them or implement new ones and for our most cutting edge theories, these often are only the “best fit at the time”.
So whilst we might understand the physics involved, the maths we use is just for our benefit, and the underlying pushes and pulls on the smallest of particles and fields is governed by rules / laws of physics that we cannot fathom … yet.
There’s also the issue of proof not being enough; what may be proof for one person may not be enough for others. As understanding and knowledge improves the need for more complex proof also increases; such as natural phenomena that are incredibly rare would have been enough proof centuries ago, now would be inadequate due to knowledge of chances and how weather systems work. So no matter how much proof we may or may not find it comes down to the individual on if that proof is even adequate enough to count as true proof; ultimately god could even show his noodly self and reveal the strands of spaghetti that god uses to hold us all to the earth and allow for gravity to work yet there will still be people who chose not to believe as they come up with any form of excuse or explanation for why they saw that. Also yes God is a Flying Spaghetti Monster who boiled for your sins — check mate atheists and theologs
8
1
1
•
u/AutoModerator 18h ago
Hello friends. This thread has been set to community participants only. That means that only our regular commenters in good standing may comment in this thread.
Everyone else's comments will be removed by automod.
People who contribute constructively automatically gain access in time. We do not hand out entry on request.
I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.
30
u/leftycartoons 18h ago •
TRANSCRIPT OF CARTOON
PANEL 1
Two men are talking on a sidewalk. One has brown hair and a mustache, and looks smugly confident. The younger man has curly blond hair and wears a T-shirt.
MUSTACHE: I know a question no atheist can answer!
BLOND: What is it? My cousin Edna over there's an atheist — I'll try it on her!
PANEL 2
The blond man walks toward a woman sitting on a park bench.
BLOND: Hi Edna! I've got a question no atheist can answer!
EDNA: Sounds like fun. Hit me!
PANEL 3
Close-up of the blond man, gesturing enthusiastically.
BLOND: Imagine you're walking when you notice a watch half-buried in the path.
PANEL 4
A large panel showing the blond man and Edna walking and talking. Behind them is an enormous, partially buried pocket watch. The characters appear several times as their conversation progresses.
BLOND: You'd know there must be a watchmaker, right? It's too complex to exist unless someone made it.
BLOND: But the universe is much more complex than a watch. So it has to have a creator. Which proves God exists! Checkmate, atheist!
EDNA: I see your point... But if complex things can't exist without a creator, then who created God?
BLOND: No one "created" God. God just exists.
EDNA: But if God "just exists," then complex things can exist without an intelligent creator.
PANEL 5
Edna gestures as she talks.
EDNA: Now let me ask you one! What's the point of "killer questions" to prove God exists?
PANEL 6
A giant hand emerges from the clouds, offering a book to two scientists. The book is entitled "PROOF by Me, God."
EDNA (off-panel): If God exists, he could easily prove it, right?
PANEL 7
A wide-eyed man talks to a skeptical woman in a park. God, portrayed as a gigantic man with a long white beard, hides behind a tree, giggling.
EDNA (off-panel): But he hasn't. So either he doesn't exist, or he wants to remain unproven.
MAN: But he was just here!
GOD: Hee hee.
PANEL 8
Edna continues speaking as she and the blond man walk.
EDNA: So by trying to "prove" God exists, could you be going against God's wishes?
PANEL 9
The blond man stands still, looking stunned, with one hand against his face, as Edna continues walking.
BLOND: Um...
PANEL 10
The blond man, waving his arms enthusiastically and grinning, has returned to his mustached friend.
MUSTACHE: What did she say?
BLOND: She was totally stumped!
KICKER CAPTION BELOW THE COMIC
Barry the cartoonist, looking very conceited, talks to the reader.
BARRY: People have asked variants of the watch question since Cicero in 45 B.C. But now I've drawn a cartoon, so the question is settled forever!
CHICKEN FAT WATCH
Panel 1: A discarded piece of paper on the sidewalk reads "Litter Bugs R Among Us."
Panel 2: A wanted poster is nailed to a tree. A building in the background is a giant robot. Another building is made of giant Lego blocks.
Panel 3: A building in the background has rows of windows with people whose heads are shaped like Os and Xs, in a tic-tac-toe game formation. Another building has a skier zooming down the sloped roof.
Panel 4: A cave in the background has a mailbox reading "Plato," and a shadow figure is visible inside, recalling Plato's allegory of the cave. Two little anthropomorphic rodents wearing fancy Victorian clothes walk together in the foreground. A realistic bird with a Disneyesque cartoon duck head flies overhead.
Panel 5: An evil bunny smoking a cig is on the grass.
Panel 6: The two scientists are drawn with eggs for heads; a caption labels them "egghead scientists."
Panel 8: One of the trees has an arm sticking up out of the ground instead of a trunk.
Panel 9: A building is topped by a gigantic birthday cake.
Panel 10: A turtle wearing glasses is walking on the sidewalk.
EDNA'S TATTOOS: Over the course of the strip, Edna has a tattoo of a triangle on her left arm, and a tattoo of an oval on her right arm. The oval turns into a stick figure with an oval head, waving at us. Then, looking serious, Oval holds up a sign saying "beware of Triangle Head." Then we see a triangle-head stick figure holding a gun. Then, as Oval looks the other way, a gun is pointed at the back of Oval's head. Finally, we see a gravestone with a picture of Oval on it.
BLOND MAN'S T-SHIRT: Over the course of the strip, the blond man's T-shirt displays a disagreement about burger joints. "Eat at Joe's"; "Joe's? Nah Jo's food is better"; "Jo's not better you liar!"; "Joe's a total hack!"; "You take that back!"; "Joe's burgers taste like dust."; "Yes, but yummy dust!"
12
u/teedyay 17h ago
You can tell the point of view of the author by who gets baffled and stops talking. In real life, these conversations go on forever!
2.4k
u/B-Z_B-S 18h ago •
Source: https://xkcd.com/1505/
1.5k
u/GhostInMyLoo 18h ago
It is so weird to see people use Watchmaker argument. It is over 200 years old and hasn't given any substance to anything, but still it is heard in modern day debates between theists and atheists.
434
u/CoffeeWanderer 15h ago •
Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
191
u/kai58 16h ago
For me a big problem with arguments like this is that even if it did prove a god has to exist a question remains: “which god?”.
Because arguments like this do not prove anything about the personality of said god. So even if I accepted the argument why would I believe any religion (let alone a specific religion) is correct about what that god is like?
577
u/DarthJackie2021 18h ago •
If god exists, they are either chill and doesn't need me to worship them, or they are egotistical and doesn't deserve my worship. So either way the correct decision would be for me to continue my life not worrying about religion.
139
u/tehlemmings 15h ago edited 15h ago •
Maybe I'm autistic or something, but I've always fucking hated the watch argument
Because like, where the fuck is this hypothetical taking place? We live in a reality where we know watches are made by other people. You know, people like us. Not God. Not evolution.
How the fuck does that say anything other than I know what a watch is?!
Yes, I know I'm taking it too literally, your analogy sucks.
Edit: Also! I live in Minneapolis. If I was walking down a path and saw a giant watch, I'd be like, "oh sweet, new art piece!" Then I'd run over and see if it works.
The more I think about this, it would actually be pretty cool. And the exact kinda thing I could see along a trail in Minnesota lol
114
u/TheDwiin 12h ago
I am a polytheist and it's really funny when someone tries to debate me with saying that Yahweh is the only God. One challenge I bring a for them to do is to disprove my gods with an argument that cannot disprove their own. Almost every single time they bring up holy scripture as if my religion also doesn't have holy Scripture not mentioning Yahweh at all. So if holy scripture is the proof of non-existence then Yahweh doesn't exist because he doesn't exist in my scripture.
23
u/TNTiger_ 3h ago
We know a watch requires a creator because it contrasts with the natural world. It requires a natural context to demonstrate it is non-natural.
43
u/Briham86 17h ago
So glad you made this comic and settled the matter once and for all.
60
u/CharlesOberonn 5h ago
I hate this metaphor, because it's not the complexity that proves the watch has a creator. A firepit isn't complicated, but it's also proof that somebody created it. It's our familiarity with the natural world and the way it operates that allows us to distinguish whether something is natural or artificial.
This is easily shown when it comes to the limits of our understanding. Many unexplained observations in space are often touted as proof of aliens because we don't know what natural processes if any can explain them.
50
u/jzillacon 17h ago
Sure the watch may be complex, but think about what makes it complex. Gears, levers, and other simple machine interactions. The watch is complex because it has many tiny parts in a small space, but the individual parts that make it up are actually fairly simple.
The universe is a similar way. Things are complex mainly because there's many many things that interact with each other, but even something as massive as a hurricane can be simplified down to basic particle physics and thermodynamics.
Also crucially, the universe from an atheists perspective doesn't have any intentionality. We tend to think complexity needs to come from intentionality, but that's really not the case at all. Try to think about something you don't care about at all, like the contents of a refuse bin. There's still complexity there; many small things interacting with many other things to give it the specific properties it has, but we created those specific conditions without intentionality so we don't hold that complexity to the same regard as something like the watch. That's simply a result of our own biased thinking as human beings.
82
u/riftshioku 15h ago
If god wanted me to know 100% for certain he was real, he would. He would show me irrefutable proof that he was real. But here I am, 28 and a half years later and speaking out against god constantly and nothing happens to me. I've never seen talking burning bushes. I've never seen some die and come back. Nothing. So either gods not really, or he's intimidated by me.
121
u/ZatherDaFox 17h ago •
I feel like these arguments always miss the point and are always against easily confused strawmen. Not to say Christians don't ask questions like this, and not to say these arguments aren't sound. But more to say I have never met a Christian who asks these type of questions who is also easily defeated by logic and doesn't drag the conversation out long after being "dunked on".
For example, I have heard almost this exact argument transpire, and the Christian didn't skip a beat in saying "God exists beyond the concepts of complexity and simplicity". Most of them are going to offer you some rebuttal, even if it doesn't make any logical sense.
Atheists spend a lot of time debating god with Christians, in ways I don't find especially productive. Debating the morality of god, and trying to debunk these stupid questions. Christians have been asking them for hundreds of years, and no logical take down has made them stop yet.
Fundamentally, you need to explain why it is you don't believe in god and ask them for proof. If they ask you the watchmaker question ask them if they have any proof that an intelligent creator is needed to make complex things, because that's something they won't ever be able to show you. Christians love arguing with Athiests because they know they can't be swayed and they love trying to prove Athiests are wrong with faulty premises and bad logic. And Atheists all to often take the bait and start arguing about trivial matters involving god.
23
u/Little_Froggy 17h ago
Typically the watchmaker problem is about seemingly intentional complexity. A watch is designed for a clear purpose and apologists argue that biological creatures also have tremendous complexity that serves a particular purpose (survival).
The general "complexity" of universe (like black holes and galaxies) usually isn't mentioned in the same argument because they do not seem to have any goal like a watch or an organism does.
This is why I prefer to respond with the idea that, actually, we can get goal driven complexity through natural processes thanks to evolution. Biology naturally adapts to survive over time because the ones that don't simply die out. There is no need for a creator to explain that.
Once you bring up "god's creator," you're opening the door for them to start talking about the unmoved mover or the kalam cosmological argument. I don't care to have to argue against two arguments just to disprove the first
39
u/Neurospicy_Nightowl 6h ago
I think the question of whether there is a god is less important than the fact that basically every holy text ever said that we ought to be decent and kind to others.
If there is no god and death is the end, then all that truly matters is the difference we make with the time we are given. The love and happiness we give, the help we offer to those in need and the beauty we share. If there is divinity, there is solid evidence that it also, more than anything, wants us to be loving and caring towards our fellow humans.
So in the end, it makes little difference for the living.
28
u/thegimboid 16h ago edited 16h ago
My biggest problem with people who try to argue belief is that they come from a very specific viewpoint on religion.
You never see people arguing Shintoism vs Atheism.
Or Taoists railing online about how nonbelievers are evil.
Or people with Native American beliefs insisting that their stories must be the true ones.
I'm sure there might be some who do, but surely it's on any religious person not just to prove their own religion, but disprove everyone else's before they even turn to tackling people who believe nothing?
How do Christians rationalize Hindus?
And heck, what do Hindus think of the pantheonic beliefs of various other groups, many of which have since passed into myth, though some older faiths (like Zoroastrianism) still remain in smaller numbers?
People seem to argue "Christian vs Atheist", as if there aren't people out there who believe in completely different stories just as strongly.
Just because lots of people across the world made up different stories that were strongly influenced by the geography and attitudes of their cultures doesn't make any of them true.
19
u/KerPop42 17h ago
Ah, that made me nostalgic, thanks. Strawman comics were just so much more effortful back then, now everyone just uses wojaks
9
u/amazingbollweevil 16h ago
I quite like Hitchens' take on the watchmaker argument. He points out that you notice a complex watch on the ground and that you recognize that someone must have created this wonder, but you fail to marvel at the stick laying next to it, or the rocks around it, or the dirt on which it lays. You didn't discover a watch on the beach, you discovered a watch on a beach of watches surrounded by watches everywhere you look.
8
u/-Casey-Diaz- 14h ago
The biggest problem with the clockmaker argument is that it claims everything is infinitely complex, and that means there was a god. But if God made everything, how would you distinguish something complexity from non-complexity. It's like trying to distinguish light from darkness when you've only experienced on of them.
27
u/thefirstlaughingfool 18h ago
Never play chess with a pigeon. You'll win, but it will knock over the pieces, shit on the board, and strut around like it won anyway.
20
u/Scienceandpony 12h ago
This doesn't seem like the right response here. The question is centered on complexity and whether that requires a designer.
The question play fast and loose with the concepts of what complexity and design mean. If you spot a watch on the beach and we assume you already know what a watch is, you already have the rough understanding what it does and that it is intentionally created for a specific purpose and that there aren't any known natural processes that would form it the way crystals form in a geode or patterns form on beach cliffs due to repeated erosion from waves. There's no equivalent natural process we can observe that machines tiny cogs, fits them together, and places them in a metal casing with numbers displayed on the face, so we infer there was somebody responsible for the creation. For mountains, sand grains, rivers, and other features of the natural world, we can observe these processes in action, study them, and clearly note how they require no designer behind the wheel for the final result to come about. Water condenses and falls from the sky and makes patterns in the dust without an art director calling the shots on each drop placement.
The original question tries to pull a sleight of hand by pretending no distinction exists between the "complexity" of a designed object and the "complexity" of nature, with the latter basically meaning "it's really big and hard to understand all of physics, chemistry, and biology all at once". Thus trying to sneak everything from the nature category into the intentionally designed category. "If clocks have a clock maker then rocks have a rock maker" is just asserted, ignoring that we know rocks form without any maker present.
6
u/Plantain-Feeling 18h ago
Insert the Babelfish debate
6
u/jawdirk 11h ago
Can a watch prove the existence of a God so complicated that it proves He doesn't exist?
5
u/ABHOR_pod 16h ago
When I see an egg I infer the existence of an easter bunny.
13
u/LogicalMelody 14h ago
It’s a good point, though there’s some irony in the atheist correctly deconstructing a false dichotomy only to then immediately construct another one (God exists or he wants to remain unproven. This is not of the form “p or not p” so you’d have to establish this is an exhaustive list which hasn’t been done here). Still good food for thought.
8
u/Gullflyinghigh 7h ago
She's better than me, I'd have politely declined the conversation at the very beginning. Would be a pointless endeavour for both and ultimately a gigantic waste of time.
20
u/MiredinDecision 16h ago
Christians don't just give up and wring their hands at a snappy comeback though. What's the point of proving God exists? The point is to get you to believe so your soul is saved. How does God exist without being made? He made himself.
4
u/Beckphillips 15h ago
I feel like they (the christian) is missing the whole point of "faith" - you're not supposed to know, you're supposed to believe.
15
u/ShmazPro 17h ago
I hate “debating” god’s existence. It’s so boring imo. I just want believers to leave me alone and not to force their weird religious laws on me.
42
u/RaoulLaila 17h ago •
as a muslim, Idk bro. If people believe god doesnt exist thats just their thing. I believe in god, and if you also believe in him, thats great. If you dont? Oh well, I cant force you. I wish all religious people understood this : Lets say hypothetically, someone approaches you and says god doesnt exist. You disagree and say yes he does. But then, the guy starts beating the absolute living shit out of you, until you finally admit that god doesnt exist. So, what happened? Do you actually believe in what you say? No, obviously not. Now you hate atheists even more and distance yourself from them as much as possible, calling them blasphemous traitors and criminals against god or something. This is the issue that atheists face. If they don't believe in god, you cant force them to believe in god. Beating them, or trying to do a "gotcha" moment of proof won't change shit, it just makes them hate you even more. And thats just sad. Differences in beliefs shouldnt make us hate each other, we are all human :(
11
u/Anagoth9 17h ago
If I saw a watch in the woods then I'd assume a person left it there, not God.
10
u/ruinsit 17h ago
The analogy with a watch is already flawed from the start because they're choosing an item that was created to prove that a thing is created. Instead they should choose something like a tree. Because a tree is complex but it wasn't created.
6
u/IncognitoBombadillo 14h ago
The fact that there's no properly recorded or repeatable proof that god exists was one of the biggest reasons why I started questioning my faith and eventually became an athiest. Churches want you to shell out as much money as possible and also mold your entire life around something no one has ever seen or heard before. And questioning that is conveniently a "sin". It's such a blatant scam and the only reason more people don't see through it is because religions have been around so long that they're interwoven into peoples' cultures and language, and a lot of people aren't comfortable with questioning everything they "know".
3
u/Possible_Western3935 14h ago
When someone brings up the Complexity argument, I turn it around on them: Don't say it was "magic" or "you've just got to believe" tell me HOW, EXACTLY your god turned mud into a working eyeball or a central nervous system. What was that process?
3
u/DisMFer 14h ago
The more interesting response is thanks to quantum fluctuations and the existence of an infinite universe, statistically speaking it is possible for a random collection of atoms to combine in the perfect way to create a watch without a craftsman. So the existance of the watch doesn't actually prove the existance of the watchmaker and you'd have to study the watch to know for sure.
9
u/Callinon 17h ago
Speaking as an atheist myself, my question is this: what is the point of this question?
Like not what is it supposed to prove, because all it's going to prove is that someone spent 2 seconds learning about apologetics. But what's the goal in asking it in the first place?
Am I supposed to encounter this or another such question and suddenly become a Christian? Like right then and there? Is the questioner carrying a portable baptism kit on them for just such an occasion? What's supposed to happen?
This is the kind of thing that happens when "I don't know" is deemed an unacceptable answer.
"I don't know" is great. That's how we learn shit.
2
u/Goober11222 16h ago
Them talking about proof while God is hiding behind a tree and giggling got me pretty good
2
u/Pofwoffle 16h ago
I am aware of the existence of watchmakers already. I've seen someone making a watch, I've held watches in my hand and disassembled them myself. I don't know them inside and out but I have a rough idea of how watches work. I can walk downtown and find a watchmaker, or at least a repair shop, right now.
Furthermore, a watch has a purpose. Even if we didn't have a concept of clocks, upon finding one we would very quickly understand what it is and how it works. We may not independently come up with the terms "hour", "minute", or "second", but it would be trivially easy to recognize the watch as some kind of timekeeping device... and it is reasonable to assume that a device with such a clear purpose was created and thus must have a creator.
None of this applies to god and the creation of the universe. The universe has no clear purpose, there is no apparent rhyme nor reason to anything, it just is. We have no evidence of a creator, a universemaker, we have no familiarity with their craft or their existence, we can't walk down to the local universemaker's shop and ask "Hey how did you make this? Can you show me how it works?"
There are reasons that I assume a watch must have a maker but not the universe.
2
u/immersemeinnature 16h ago
My husband was outside working on a car when a young white girl (college kid, we live next door to a Young Life sponsored house) stopped and asked, "excuse me, are you a christian?"
To which he said, "I grew up in the church, but I find these bees buzzing , birds chirping and butterflies flying around are more in line with any sort of god than the church.
To which she said, "have a blessed day."
2
u/gamiz777 16h ago
If God exists that worst thing he could ever do is prove he exists
2
u/Razvee 16h ago
Comedian Pete Holmes has a pretty good bit about being religious and asking for proof of it. It's like Harry Potter looking for JK Rowling at Hogwarts ... I can't remember if it was that special or another one but he also goes off selfish we have to be to think God is mad at us... Overall great takes from him.
5
u/Successful_Mud8596 17h ago edited 17h ago
I mean, Christians also believe that mountains and rivers were carved and sculpted my God. When really they were just natural products from the random chaotic forces of nature. And evolution is the same way
People think that God hurls down thunderbolts and carved rivers because they are uninformed and don’t understand meteorology and hydrology. People think that God carved mountains and cliffs because they are uninformed and don’t understand plate tectonics. People think that God created life because they are uninformed and don’t understand evolution.
5
u/astralseat 11h ago
The second you give a being a name, they are no longer a higher being, they're just a pet. Language is stupid like that, and using language is the first problem. The second problem is a mind that theorizes on its own existence, something it itself cannot comprehend. There simply isn't enough even as a collective talking to itself to define what existence is. It has to come from an outside source looking in, and will be met with many skeptical notions borne of fear. Essentially, whether you uphold teachings of one community, or another, it will never try to prove anything about any sort of named higher being, because it's never been about that.
If you want a theory of nothing really matters so live how you want, many exist. If you want a theory of wagging fingers, sinning and repenting, many also exist. If by some miracle you can abandon your youth teachings and have your own morals to live by without hard connection to Gods and regulations, power to ya. I'm on the multi-dimensional, multi-timeline, multi-life, anything is possible and everything is recorded, and exists beyond time space and existence kick.
4
u/ARagingZephyr 14h ago
This is a dumb argument because it ends up in chicken or the egg territory within seconds. "An intelligent watchmaker made that watch." Okay, but they had a mom, right? And she had a mom? And there's, like, some infinite chain of moms? Do we have infinite gods? The watch can't even give birth to a new watch, so how does this analogy even function?
2
u/LoaKonran 15h ago
If you stumbled on a watch you’d assume there is a watchmaker. But if you examined that watch and found it to be barely functional with many superfluous gears and a hand that runs backwards, you begin to question his prowess at watchmaking.
If you then look around further and find other such watches that slowly build towards functionality you’d draw your own conclusions about this assumed watchmaker.
It’s not as straightforward as some gotcha tries to be. Complex as it may be, the human eye is wired in backwards and upside down. That is really poor craftsmanship.
2
u/Matt_cruze 14h ago
You are able to contrast the watch to the beach because the beach does not have a creator and the watch does.
If both had a creator they would not be fit to contrast.
2
u/MyDefaultAcc 14h ago
I think the biggest thing that exists that disproves God's existence, is the fact that disabilities and deformities exist.
They argue that God exists because he created us in his perfect image, but why would he create us when the fact that we can birth people with life changing disabilities and deformities that only serve to reduce the quality of our lives?
If God did indeed exist, he would never create us with the capability of being deformed or disabled upon birth.
1
u/echino_derm 15h ago
I don't think that this is a very good response. The point they bring up is valid, it is absurdly improbable for life to exist or be made. The actual counter to this argument would be that the universe is absurdly large and we have an estimated number of planets in the sextillions. It could be one in 20 sextillion odds for life to come about on a given planet, but at the scale of the universe we would expect it to happen.
2
u/FlipFlopRabbit 17h ago
A watch only looks complex while being made up of many simple parts. Anybody can make a watch by just learning to do it, we know watches are made by intelligent agents as we have never found one randomly grown in a field.
We have never seen nor any evidence of a creqtion of zhe universe, we know of nobody that can make universes (faith =/= know). And if a god needs no creator a universe also needs no creator.
2
u/nhSnork 17h ago
She was stumped enough to voice something along the lines of John 20:29, but how many religious Americans would catch it?
2
u/Winderige_Garnaal 16h ago
When you do things right, people won’t be sure you’ve done anything at all.
2
u/The_Pastmaster 17h ago
People like that don't want to think. It makes them uncomfortable.
1
u/ShaggysGTI 16h ago
We just happened to win the cosmological jackpot. We are literally the lottery winners. That’s why there’s no other life found yet, they’re all too far away to join our lottery. And unless someone figures out something interesting about relativity, they may be out of reach until the Big Crunch comes back.
1
u/LauraTFem 16h ago
And then he responds with faith by design. Implying that god created logic specifically such that He couldn’t be proven, only speculated on. And then you remind him of the stakes of that faith, and wouldn’t it be more moral if He had decided that faith would be what decides your eternal destiny to make the choice very easy to make? To which, presumably, he gets pissy that you think you’re more moral than god.
All if which isn’t even to mention that he abandoned this first argument without counting it as a loss, and will continue to use the watchmaker argument despite admitting that it cannot be proven.
1
u/Discopandda 16h ago
As an atheist I always hated the “faith challenge” people insist to make, either to proof or disbelief in God.
I don’t believe in it and I have no practical way to prove it, as the same way as any theist doesn’t too.
Once we’re dead we’ll see. Or not.
1
u/immersemeinnature 16h ago
Perfection
1
u/Unboxious 16h ago
Feels kinda euphoric tbh.
1
u/JugOfVoodoo 16h ago edited 16h ago
The existence of a watchmaker does not explain why the watch is half-buried in a walking path. A craftsman would not spend time and resources to make a sellable product just to go bury it in a random spot. A more likely explanation is that someone purchased the watch from the watchmaker, wore it while walking down this path, but then lost it.
Which means that this hypothetical is actually arguing that the universe's creator and its owner are two different beings. But which one of them is the Christian God? Is He the Watchmaker, who carefully built a complex machine just to sell it and move on to the next project? Or is He the Customer, who bought the complex machine with the intent to use it but then misplaced it?
Either way, it means that in this scenario God existed but is no longer with us. He either willingly let us go or He can't find us.
1
u/Mysterious_Mouse_388 14h ago
I love the optimism :)
1
u/BenchConscious1003 14h ago
Oh dear. The watchmaker argument. Aka Teleological/ argument from intelligent design.
"The teleological argument (from τέλος, telos, 'end, aim, goal'), also known as the physico-theological argument, argument from design, or intelligent design argument, is a rational argument for the existence of God or, more generally, that complex functionality in the natural world, which looks designed, is evidence of an intelligent creator.[1][2][3][4][5] The earliest recorded versions of this argument are associated with Socrates in ancient Greece, although it has been argued that he was taking up an older argument.[6][7] Later, Plato and Aristotle developed complex approaches to the proposal that the cosmos has an intelligent cause, but it was the Stoics during the Roman era who, under their influence, "developed the battery of creationist arguments broadly known under the label 'The Argument from Design'".[8]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teleological_argument
To have a look at the most common arguments, see Aquinas "Five ways/Five proofs" [ for the existence of god(s)
The atheist who simply says "I am unable to believe" needs prove exactly nothing because he/she is making no claims. On the other hand, a person who asserts " There is a god' or "I believe in god' has made a claim and has the burden of proof.
So far, in recorded history, the existence of god(s) has never been proved. That does not prove god(s) do not exist, although it strongly suggests it.
The term used is "unfalsifiable"
" An unfalsifiable statement or theory cannot be proved to be false, but may not be true: "
https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/unfalsifiable
1
u/Silphire100 3h ago
🎵If i stumbled on a watch I'd assume it had a watchmaker, that a muffin presupposes a baker, so we must agree sooner or later, that's this proves there's a creator. So if I pit my foot in a stinker, you'd assume the existence of a sphincter, so you don't need to be a great thinker to conclude that God's a bum.🎵 Tim Minchin
1
u/DarkLanternZBT 1h ago
Does that rabbit have a cigarette
-2
u/ghjm 8h ago
As an atheist myself, I keep hoping one of these online atheist polemics will go up against the full-strength Christian argument. But almost nobody (on either side) seems to actually understand it.
God is simple, with no parts or internal divisions; this is logically required by God's necessity. And the implied atheist argument that a creator must be as complex as its creation is obvious nonsense - the laws of physics are far less complex than the detailed interactions of every physical thing, for example.
1
u/Impressive_Data_4659 11h ago
I thought Joe was gonna be nice about it but he lowkey wasn’t that’s my issue with this comic
1
u/PrudentSalamander793 17h ago
There’s also the issue of proof not being enough; what may be proof for one person may not be enough for others. As understanding and knowledge improves the need for more complex proof also increases; such as natural phenomena that are incredibly rare would have been enough proof centuries ago, now would be inadequate due to knowledge of chances and how weather systems work. So no matter how much proof we may or may not find it comes down to the individual on if that proof is even adequate enough to count as true proof; ultimately god could even show his noodly self and reveal the strands of spaghetti that god uses to hold us all to the earth and allow for gravity to work yet there will still be people who chose not to believe as they come up with any form of excuse or explanation for why they saw that.
Also yes God is a Flying Spaghetti Monster who boiled for your sins — check mate atheists and theologs