In my essay Why I Am Not A Christian, I outlined six types of arguments for God’s existence, cosmological, teleological, ontological, moral, historical and transcendental. In the “Does God Exist?” category on his website, Mr. Frank Turek uses two of them: the first and the last. At this point it would not, I am sorry to say, be beneath my dignity to make a little joke about Frank seeing himself as the Alpha and the Omega — but my ordering of the argument types is pretty much arbitrary, so it wouldn’t be a very good joke. Oh well, there are many others.[1]
In the cosmological category, Frank cited the “Law of Causality,” which is an authoritative-sounding title for the first premise of the Kalam Cosmological Argument: whatever begins to exist has a cause. But what sort of “law” is the “Law of Causality?” It cannot be a law of logic, for there is no logical contradiction entailed in something beginning to exist uncaused, so it must be a law of physics.
However, during the first ten to the minus forty three seconds of the universe — what cosmologists called the Planck Era — the universe was in a state of supersymmetry, wherein no physical laws obtained. They all “evolved” later in the universe’s development, when the symmetry broke. Therefore, even if the “Law of Causality” really did exist, it could not apply in the one place that Frank needs it to apply in order for the argument to work: the Big Bang!
As for the universe beginning to exist, Frank is a decade or two behind the times. Cosmologists now have evidence that the universe began existence as a “bubble” that formed out of a pre-existing substrate, one of an infinite number, most likely.[2] Frank’s cute little SURGE acronym refers to evidence that only applies to the VISIBLE universe — the universe we can observe, the one that came out of the Big Bang. We have no, or almost no, information about the Big Bang itself or what conditions were like beforehand, but we do know that there was SOMETHING beforehand. Frank may think otherwise, but his “doctorate” is not in any physical science, nor has he published any peer-reviewed work in the scientific literature, so his opinion on the matter cannot supercede those of actual scientists.
(Frank also cites the Kalam argument itself as evidence that the universe began to exist; I can only assume he’s referring to Craig’s attempts at proving that actual infinities cannot exist. These proofs all fail for the same reason: infinities do not obey the rules of finite mathematics.)
In the transcendental category, Frank shoots himself in the foot in a most amusing way: he states that any good worldview must be able to explain, among other things, the origin of the laws of logic themselves (and abstract objects which are derived from them, such as mathematics and objective morals). But what is Frank’s answer to this question? As he does NOT state in that post, but rather states in a discussion long after that post was written, his position is that the laws of logic are a part of God himself, and a necessary one — they did not come about as an act of God’s volition, but rather are part of his “unchanging nature.”
And what is the origin of God? He doesn’t have one, he doesn’t need one. Frank’s position, then, is tatamount to saying that logic itself neither has nor needs an origin — the same thing he accuses atheists of saying!
But for Frank, it gets even worse: his position does not allow for change. Unlike scientists, Frank cannot alter his theory based on new evidence; he is comitted, both dogmatically and metaphysically, to the position that logic comes from God — i.e. has no explanation. Even if that were true of atheism, we at least have the hope of altering our position in the future as new evidence becomes available; Frank, not being able to see the future, cannot say that no such evidence would ever appear. So the explanatory power of an atheistic worldview averages around good, and tends toward improvement. The explanatory power of Frank’s worldview, however, is zero and will always remain so.
It is obvious, then, that Frank has no evidence that is even marginally good, still less compelling, for the existence of God. However, it is possible that I have misconstrued his position, or missed a line of evidence he offered elsewhere on his site. If that is the case, I invite Frank to post on this site to set the record straight. (Unlike on his own site, Frank can be sure that the administrator of this site will not delete posts that happen to make good points.)
[1] You’ve probably noticed that in the very first paragraph of this scholarly-appearing essay, I insulted Frank twice: first when I called him Mister when he in fact possesses a doctorate in Christian Apologetics, second when I insinuated that many jokes could be made at his expense. The first is not intended as disrespect to Frank, but rather is intended to avoid disrespecting those who have earned doctorates in legitimate fields of study. The existence of “diploma mills” where anyone can get a piece of paper proclaiming them a doctor with minimal effort, or even a mere financial contribution, is a source of great chagrin to such people, and I have no intention of adding to their woes. For the second, however, I have no excuse. Neither does Frank, however, whose very first post in this category called atheism a fundamentalist religion — a linguistic impossibility, offered for the sole purpose of attempting to drag atheism down to Christianity’s level. Frank himself admits as much in this post.
[2] Cf. Michio Kaku, “Parallel Worlds” (2005). This also answers the teleological, or “design,” argument — given an infinity of universes arising from the quantum foam, we would need a very good explanation indeed if we DIDN’T find life in some of them!
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