Why I Am Not a Christian

by Richard Carrier

  Think about it. If you found a pair of scissors and didn’t know what they were designed for, you could hypothesize they were designed as a screwdriver, because scissors can, after all, drive screws. In fact, there is no way to design a pair of scissors that would prevent them being used as a screwdriver. But as soon as someone showed you that these scissors were far better designed to cut paper, and in fact are not the best design for driving screws, would you stubbornly hang on to your theory that they were designed to drive screws? No. You would realize it was obvious they were designed to cut paper, and their ability to drive screws is just an inevitable byproduct of their actual design. This is exactly what we are facing when we look at the universe: it is not very well designed for life, though life is an inevitable byproduct of what the universe was more obviously designed for: black holes. So if the universe was intelligently designed, it clearly was not designed for us.

  But that is not the only explanation. If the universe was indeed perfectly designed to sustain and benefit life—if the whole cosmos was hospitable and beneficial—that would be evidence it was intelligently or supernaturally designed, since only an intelligent or supernatural being would ever have such a goal in mind. But this does not follow for black holes. Smolin explains why. Black holes possess all the same properties that our own Big Bang world possessed before expanding into the present cosmos, so it seems likely that every black hole might produce a universe inside it. Smolin then demonstrates that if every black hole produces a new universe slightly different than its parent, then our universe is the inevitable outcome of literally any possible universe that could arise at random. If any universe emerges randomly from a primordial chaos, no matter what arrangement of particles and physical constants that universe accidentally ends up with, it will always produce at least one black hole (even if only by collapsing in on itself), which in Smolin’s theory will reset the whole slate, producing an entirely new universe with a newly randomized set of properties. This new universe will in turn produce at least one more black hole, and therefore one more roll of the dice, and on and on, forever. There is nothing that could ever stop this from continuing on to infinity.

  Some of these early random universes will just by chance have properties that produce more black holes than other universes, and will thus produce far more baby universes than their cousins do. The more black holes a universe produces, the more likely it is that some of the new universes this causes will also be good at making black holes, or even better. And eventually this chain of cause and effect will generate perfect or near-perfect black hole producers, after an extended and inevitable process of trial and error. Therefore, if the whole multiverse began with any random universe from some primordial chaos—which would always either collapse or rip apart, either way generating at least one new black hole, if not many, and thus inevitably just creating new random universes over and over again—eventually a universe exactly like ours would be an inevitable and unstoppable outcome. Hence Smolin’s theory predicts exactly our universe, with all its finely tuned attributes, without any God or intelligent design at all.

  Now, Smolin’s theory has yet to be proven. It is at present just a hypothesis—but so is Christianity. Just like Christianity, there are elements to Smolin’s theory that are conjectural and not independently proven to exist. However, the most important element—the fact that unintelligent natural selection can produce incredibly precise fine tuning over time—has been proven, whereas any sort of divine activity has not. We have never observed a single proven case of a god causing anything, much less any fine-tuning of the properties of our universe. But we have found overwhelming evidence for a process that produces very amazing fine-tuning without any intelligence behind it, and that is evolution by natural selection. This is a known precedent—unlike bodiless minds or divine causation. And a theory based on known precedents is always less ad hoc than a theory based on completely novel and unobserved mechanisms. So Smolin’s theory already has an edge over creationism.

  Even so, there are still some ad hoc elements to Smolin’s theory, and therefore it is not yet a fact, just a hypothesis. But suppose for a moment that Smolin’s theory is the only possible way our universe could come to exist without a God. It is certainly one possible way. No Christian can yet refute Smolin’s theory or prove it is not the correct explanation. There are also other theories now that explain our exact universe without a God, like chaotic inflation theory. But let’s assume we ruled out all those alternatives, and all we had left was Smolin’s theory and the Christian’s theory. Then, if Christianity was false, Smolin’s theory would necessarily be true.

  Now observe the facts: the universe is exactly the way Smolin’s theory predicts it would be, right down to peculiar details—such as the existence and properties of obscure subatomic particles, and the fact that the universe is almost entirely devoted to producing and feeding black holes, is almost entirely inhospitable to life, and almost never produces life. Christianity predicts none of these things, and in fact many of these details are quite improbable if Christianity is true. In contrast, atheism would predict every single one of those details, exactly as we observe. Once again, Christianity predicts a different universe than the one we have—while atheism predicts exactly the universe we have. This even extends to the Big Bang theory itself. In no way does Christianity predict God would “create” a universe with a long deterministic process from a gigantic Big Bang. But if Smolin’s theory is the only possible explanation of our universe without God, then it necessarily follows that our universe must have begun with a Big Bang and evolved slowly over many eons. Yet again, atheism predicts a Big Bang universe. Christianity does not.

  Since Smolin’s theory makes all this evidence far more likely than Christianity does (indeed Christianity doesn’t make any of that evidence even likely at all), if Smolin’s theory were shown to be less likely than some other godless theory (like chaotic inflation theory, or anything else), then Christianity would be even more refuted. Because if Christianity is less likely than Smolin’s theory, then Christianity will be even less likely than any theory more likely than Smolin’s. So the evidence of cosmic and fundamental physics completely refutes Christianity. If Christianity were true, we would have observed a completely different cosmic and physical structure in the world. Instead we see exactly the cosmic and physical structure that must exist if there is no God. That can hardly be a coincidence.

  Even aside from physics, the nature of the world is clearly dispassionate and blind, exhibiting no value-laden behavior or message of any kind. And everything we find turns out to be the inevitable product of mindless physics. The natural world is like an autistic idiot savant, a marvelous machine wholly uncomprehending of itself or others. This is exactly what we should expect if it was not created and governed by a benevolent deity. Yet it is hardly explicable on the theory that there is such a being. Since there is no observable divine hand in nature as a causal process, it is reasonable to conclude there is no divine hand. Conversely, all the causes whose existence we have confirmed are unintelligent, immutable forces and objects. Never once have we confirmed the existence of any other kind of cause. And that is strange if there is a God, but not at all strange if there isn’t one. Nowhere do we find in the design of the universe itself any sort of intention or goal we can only expect from a conscious being like us, as opposed to the sort of goals exhibited by, say, a flat worm, a computer game, or an ant colony, or an intricate machine like the solar system, which simply follows inevitably from natural forces that are fixed and blind.

  Given the lack of any clear evidence for God, and the fact that (apart from what humans do) everything we’ve seen has been caused by immutable natural elements and forces, we should sooner infer that immutable natural elements and forces are behind it all. Likewise, the only things we have ever proven to exist are matter, energy, space, and time, and countless different arrangements and behaviors of these. Therefore, the natural inference is that these are the only
things there are. After all, the universe exhibits no values in its own operation or design. It operates exactly the same for everyone, the good and bad alike. It rewards and craps on both with total disregard. It behaves just like a cold and indifferent machine, not the creation of a loving engineer. Christianity does not predict this. Atheism does. Christianity is therefore refuted.

  The Original Christian Cosmos

  A Christian might still balk and ask, “Well, what other universe could God have made?” The answer is easy: the very universe early Christians like the Apostle Paul actually believed they lived in. In other words, a universe with no evidence of such a vast age or of natural evolution, a universe that contained instead abundant evidence that it was created all at once just thousands of years ago. A universe that wasn’t so enormous, and that had no other star systems or galaxies, but was instead a single cosmos of seven planetary bodies and a single sphere of starlights, that all revolve around a single Earth at the center of God’s creation—obviously, because that Earth is the center of God’s love and attention. A complete cosmos whose marvelously intricate motions had no other explanation than God’s will, rather than a solar system whose intricate motions are entirely the inevitable outcome of fixed and blind forces. A universe comprised of five basic elements, not over ninety elements, each in turn constructed from a dizzying array of subatomic particles (we’ve discovered several dozen different varieties). A universe governed by God’s law, not a thoroughly amoral physics. A universe inhabited by animals and spirits whose activity could be confirmed everywhere, and who lived in and descended from outer space—which was not a vacuum, but literally the ethereal heavens, the hospitable home of countless of God’s most marvelous creatures (both above and below the Moon)—a place Paul believed human beings could live, and had actually visited without harm (without need of space suits or fear of solar or cosmic radiation, or meteoroids or lethal cold).

  That is, indeed, exactly the universe we would expect if Christianity were true—which is why Christianity was contrived as it was, when it was. The first Christians truly believed the universe was exactly as Christian theism predicted it to be, and took that as confirmation of their theory. Lo and behold, they were wrong—about almost every single detail! Paul truly believed that the perfect order of the heavens, the apparent design of human and animal bodies, and the perfect march of the seasons had no other explanation than intelligent design, and in fact he believed in God largely because of this, and condemned unbelievers precisely because they rejected this evidence (Romans 1:18-22).† But it turns out none of this evidence really existed. Christians have long abandoned their belief that the perfect order of the heavens (the movement and placement of the stars and planets) can only be explained by God, since they now know it is entirely explained by physics and requires no intelligent meddling or design. And a great many Christians have abandoned their belief that the apparent design of human and animal bodies can only be explained by God, since they now know it is entirely explicable by natural evolution.

  All the evidence we now have only compounds Paul’s error. For what we know today is exactly the opposite of what Paul would have expected. It is exactly the opposite of what his Christian theory predicted. Paul certainly would have told you that God would never use billions of years of meandering and disastrously catastrophic trial and error to figure out how to make a human. God would just make humans. And Paul certainly believed that is exactly what God did, and surely expected the evidence would prove it. But the evidence has not. It has, in fact, proved exactly the opposite. Likewise, Paul naturally believed God simply spoke a word, and Earth existed. One more word, and the stars existed. That’s exactly what the Christian theory predicts. But that isn’t what happened.

  Again, Christians can fabricate excuses for why God did things differently than we should expect (and the original Christians did expect)—but that’s all just ad hoc. Like Christianity, none of these excuses have been demonstrated to be true. It is even doubtful such excuses would be compatible with Christianity. As noted earlier, God can do essentially anything, so what he does is pretty much limited only by what he wants to do. Christianity says he wants us to be good and set things right, which entails that God wants us to know what is good and how to set things right. Christianity says God wants to do what is good, and his choices are guided by his love of love and his hatred of hatred—therefore anything he designed would be the good and admirable product of a loving being. There is no way to “define away” these conclusions. If any of these conclusions are false, Christianity is false. But these conclusions entail that certain things would be true about our universe that are not in fact true.

  The existence of a divine creator driven by a mission to save humankind, for example, entails that his creation would serve exactly that end, better than any other. And that means he would not design the universe to look exactly like it would have to look if God did not exist. Instead, if I wanted people to know which church was teaching the right way to salvation, I would lead the way for them by protecting all such churches with mysterious energy fields so they would be invulnerable to harm, and its preachers alone would be able to work miracles day after day, such as regenerating lost limbs, raising the dead, or calming storms. The bibles of this church would glow in the dark so they could always be read and would be indestructible—immune to any attempt to mark, burn, or tear them, or change what they said (and as God I could prevent people from abusing these properties—like making suits of armor out of bibles—in the very way ancient believers thought God did: by visiting humorous but annoying curses on such people until they behaved more reverently). Indeed, I would regard it as my moral obligation to do things like this, so my children would not be in the dark about who I was and what I was about, so they would be able to find out for sure what was truly good for them.

  So, too, the Christian God would design a universe with moral goals built in. For example, if I were to make a universe, and cared how the people in it felt—whether they suffered or were happy—I would make it a law of nature that the more good a person really was (not pretended at being), the more invulnerable they would be to harm or illness; and the more evil, the weaker and more ill. Nature would be governed by survival of the kindest, not survival of the fittest. Obviously, such a law would not be possible unless the universe “knew” what good and evil was, and cared about the one flourishing rather than the other. And unlike mere survival, which does its own choosing through the callous mechanism of death, if the very laws of the universe served a highly abstract good instead, that would be inconceivable without a higher mind capable of grasping and caring about all these deep abstract principles—as we know humans do, and the universe does not. So a physical law like this would indeed provide good evidence the universe was created by a loving God.

  But, lo and behold, that is not the universe we live in. Even if a God made this universe, it could not be the Christian God because no God who wanted us to know the truth would conceal it by making a universe that looked exactly like a universe with no God in it. The simple fact is that Christianity does not predict our universe, but a completely different one. Atheism, however, predicts exactly the kind of universe we find ourselves in. So the nature of the universe is another failed prediction, confirming our previous conclusion that Christianity is false. And like the three others, there isn’t any way to escape this conclusion.

  Conclusion

  As I’ve clearly shown, Christianity entails that God, like any other person, would say and do at least some things we would all observe, and we’d all agree on what they were. Any Christian God would make sure of that. Since we haven’t seen such things, none at all, the Christian theory of the world is falsified by the evidence—conclusively. Christianity also entails that God would have made the universe very differently than we observe it to be. It’s instead exactly as we’d expect it to appear if there is no god at all. So again Christianity is falsified by the evidence—conclusively.

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bsp; A failed prediction means a failed theory, especially when these failures apply to the very nature and design of the universe itself. There is also insufficient evidence for any of the essential propositions of Christianity. The evidence offered doesn’t even come remotely close to what common sense requires, and certainly nowhere near what you would accept as sufficient to convince you to adopt any other religion. So the Christian hypothesis flatly contradicts a ton of evidence, makes numerous failed predictions, is not the best explanation of the universe we find ourselves in, and fails to find anywhere near sufficient evidence in its own support. That’s more than enough reason to reach my conclusion. Christianity is simply false.

  But what do we do then? What do we believe? I answer that question in my book Sense and Goodness without God. You can read that for the whole of story, but I can brief it here. Since this world isn’t the way we’d want it to be, we have to make it the way we want it to be. This world isn’t protected by any supreme justice or caregiver, there is no infallible wise man to turn to, no divine hero to love us, and we aren’t going to live forever. So we have to create those things. We have to create justice, and care for each other and the world we live in. We have to find and give and receive love from each other. We have to be the hero. We have to give our lives meaning. We have to protect life, and invent technologies of immortality—metaphorically (in the way people’s words and actions live on in their consequences and memorials), and literally (through medicine, and the science of life extension and resurrection). And until we invent any real immortality, we have to accept the way things are and make the best of the short lives we have. We have to love life rather than fear death. We have to respect life rather than treat it as disposable.