Posts Tagged: the TED Radio Hour
“An Excessively Orderly Universe? God Can’t Win!”
I heard a snippet of “The TED Radio Hour” on Saturday, January 18, 2020. It’s a good show that Guy Raz hosts. However, sometimes it makes my really angry.
I just caught a little of the show on my way to work, so maybe my irritation is unfair, but here goes anyway. Consider this “venting,” and humor me.
A scientist (a physicist, I think) was being interviewed by Guy Raz, and bits of his TED talk were being aired. The guest was speaking of how orderly the universe is, and the host asked the scientist—with appropriate interviewerly tentativeness—if this order might suggest that there was some intelligent designer behind this order.
The scientist acknowledged that people had made precisely this suggestion. It was called “the teleological argument for the existence of God.” The teleological argument suggests that all this order proves that there was a God who had brought about the order.
However, then the scientist made a statement that was one of the greatest logical blunders that I’ve ever heard anyone make. He stated that there was a lot more order than was necessary. Therefore, the argument for the existence of God was probably not so convincing after all.
What!??? The universe is too orderly to suggest that there was a creator God!!! You’ve got to be kidding me!
Of course, there are many who note the chaos in the universe, on this planet, in their families, and in themselves, and take that to be evidence that there is no God. I get that. Sometimes, that is how I feel as well. But to believe that the universe is more orderly than is necessary, and to think that this suggests that there must be some better explanation for the order than the God-explanation . . . , well, that I just don’t get.
There is something terribly wrong when we take the abundance of order as being a sign that God is not involved in the order. The Bible speaks of a God of abundance. When I’m paying sufficient attention, my own life speaks of the same.
Apparently, God just can’t win.
DOWN TO EARTH BELIEVER
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