A "Creation" Without a Creator

A Letter to Giordano Bruno

A regular and alluring argument used to support the idea of a god-made Universe is the idea that every "creation" must have a creator. The argument goes that the Universe is such a marvelous and complex creation that something must have created it. Nothing, not even the Universe, can exist without a creator.

Logically speaking, the expression “Every creation must have a creator” must be correct. Once you define something as a “creation” you have already presupposed it to have a creator, so you can’t be wrong, just like calling something a “product” pre-supposes production. However, this just assumes the issue away. The real question is, is the Universe a “creation” or “production” in terms of it being the result of a conscious act of a superior being?

A beautiful painting, a wristwatch or a classic cathedral are clearly “creations” in this sense. They are the conscious work product of thinking (human) beings. No explanation could reasonably be proffered for their obvious design and purpose other than the conscious effort of thinking individuals. To claim that Notre Dame was carved by the erosive forces of wind coming off the Seine would be absurd in the extreme.

Other complex things are not creations in this sense. The Grand Canyon is larger, more complex and arguably more beautiful than any cathedral, however, it is the result of millions of years of blind, directionless erosion by the Colorado River. No conscious sculpting or coloring was involved. The same can be said for Croatia’s magnificent Plitvička jezera and Iguazu falls in the Argentina-Brazil-Paraguay boarder region.

In each case, these geological phenomena came into being due to the blind interactions of the rocks and water peculiar to their respective regions. No conscious hand played a part. Countless other examples can be easily cherry picked from around the globe to demonstrate that creations can and do exist without an evident creator (the glaciers and fjords of Norway, the Yosemite Valley, the Alps, etc.). They are all complex and beautiful, but required no intervention by any result-orientated living organism in order to exist.

So, to turn to the assertion that the Universe is like the painting or cathedral and not like the mountains or fjords. When one claims that a being (god) created the entire Universe, one must understand the sheer enormity of that assertion. It is, by definition, the greatest power one can possibly attribute to a single being.

The Earth is big. It is 25,000 miles around at the Equator. It is also old, about 4.6 billion years. We believe that anywhere from 5 million to 100 million species inhabit the planet, of which science has identified about 2 million. The reason for the gaping shortfall is the large number of insects, microbes and deep-sea dwellers we believe we have not yet catalogued. Finding a new large mammal today is possible, but unlikely (despite the “intriguing” hair, footprints and/or feces that Bigfoot and Yeti hunters always have and always will find).

Over the course of the Earth’s four billion year history, billions of other species have evolved into existence and been rendered extinct by competitors or natural disasters, well before the current cast of characters appeared. To say that a being exists that is capable of creating all this and orchestrating its 4.6 billion year pageant of life and death is ascribing incredible age, powers and abilities to such a being. An entire planet, teeming with life for billions of years! It is truly an enormous assertion to credit it all to the actions of one being. One is justified to ask, “What is your evidence for this incredible super-being?”

Our sun is huge. Stupidly huge. One million Earths would fit inside it. It is so big that, due simply to shining, it losses 4,000,000 tons of mass every second. In a day, it loses 345 billion tons of mass. It has been shedding weight at this prodigious rate for almost five thousand million years. Yet, it is so huge that this is hardly noticeable. In fact, it would take 160 billion years for it to lose 1% of its mass. To say a being exists that is capable of creating the sun is ascribing even more incredible powers and ability to such being. The putative being’s creative abilities have just increased a million fold!

Eight planets and their moons circle the Sun, along with Pluto, innumerable asteroids, comets and miscellaneous dust and space debris. Four of the planets are enormous, thousands of times bigger than the Earth. Pluto is so far away it takes 245 years to circle the Sun. Jupiter and Saturn are so big as to be circled by their own families of moons, some of which rival the other planets in size. All the planets and their moons (some of which have their own mini-moons) have volcanoes, mountains, impact craters and bizarre formations of different chemicals. This makes up the Solar System, a huge and complex system of circles within circles.

Assuming there is nothing particularly special about our solar system (and we are increasingly learning that this is so) there are likely about one hundred billion solar systems in our galaxy. That number slips off the tongue easily, but concentrate on it for a second. If each solar system were the size of a grain of sand of one cubic millimeter, they would fill 100 000 one liter coke bottles. Standing beside each other, these bottles would stretch for over six miles – each full to the brim with sand, each grain a solar system (probably) on average as big and complex as ours, resplendent with planets, moons, asteroids and, in some cases, perhaps life. Stop and picture this for a moment. Imagine scooping out a handful of sand from the first bottle and looking down the six mile line as the grains of sand trickle through your fingers. Each grain a solar system. The numbers and size are beyond the ability of the human mind to properly comprehend.

To give an idea of the distances involved in our galaxy, let me change analogies for a second. If each star were a basketball, they would be separated by about 3,000 miles. Imagine each of the 100,000,000,000 former grains of sand now a basketball, separated by 3,000 miles. The scaled down model itself starts to take on cosmic proportions!

How’s that whole “one being did it” theory going?

There are 200,000,000,000 known galaxies in the observable Universe. That is to say, multiply the above incomprehensible size by 200,000,000,000 and separate each galaxy by even greater distances. Put another way, for every grain of sand in the six miles of full-to-the-brim coke bottles, there are two galaxies, each made up solar systems that would themselves fill six miles of coke bottles. The numbers we cannot comprehend have just been squared – then doubled. The distances have exponentially increased.

All of the above only makes up about 5% of the Universe. The rest is dark matter or dark energy we cannot see. There are many strange and weird objects out there – black holes where space-time folds in on itself, neutron stars (a cubic inch of which weighs more than Mount Everest) and exploding suns. Space warps and time contracts. Atoms spring in and out of existence, gravity waves pulse out from violent star collapses, while antimatter spews out around the event horizon of black holes.

Six days and a talking snake starting to look a little silly? About as silly as the wind off the Seine creating Notre Dame? About as silly as Hoyle's storm blowing through a junkyard and creating a Boeing-747?

Believe it or not however, the god theory has to go even further. We not only assume/hope/wish into existence this most improbable of beings, we then unilaterally decide that it made the whole thing for us. The moon and stars were made “to light the night sky” for man as Genesis proclaims. The infinitely old super-being did all this, waited 10 billion years, created the Earth, then waited another 4.6 billion years, causing life to slowly evolve into humans and then sent its “son” to Earth to talk about sheep and goats in the Middle East.

Somehow, “oh come on” just doesn't quite capture it.

One can imagine, if and when we are eventually visited by an alien civilization, one of the creatures staring incredulously at the Vatican and asking its human hosts, “so, you really thought it was all about you?”

When one actually turns one’s mind to the sheer absurdity of all this, the god theory collapses in a heap. For once actually think about it. Spend five minutes trying to actually conceive of such a being. The powers it would need, the size it would have to be, the complexity it must have, how could it have always existed, and what is its motivation? Would it really care about my sex life or what I did on a Sunday?

If we accept that everything must have a creator, what created god? “God was always there, right?” In which case the validity of the very assumption you used to deduce god is nonsense. "We have no alternative explanation, therefore god did it!". Again, no. "We don't know" DOES NOT equal god. It equals "We don't know." And, by the way, we actually do have some very compelling theories on the origins of the Universe. Frankly, would any believer, absent having been taught it from when they were too young to question it, possibly conclude a creator-god as a thinking adult?

In fairness to the authors of our various “sacred” texts who created the gods, none of them had any idea how big and old the Universe was when they wrote. The Christian/Jewish/Muslim “universe,” for example, stretched from Egypt to North Syria and over the Arabian Peninsula. That of the Hindus, Jains and Buddhists covered a similar area in North India-Southern China. Their histories all stretched back a few generations, a few “begats”. Concepts, distances and times like those above were totally beyond them. In this sense, the authors of these tomes can be forgiven for getting it so completely and spectacularly wrong.

After all, they were only human.