Thursday, February 24, 2005

Argument From Personal Incredulity

Those who are unpersuaded by the Darwinian creation myth that blind, purposeless forces could randomly produce a strand of DNA and the biochemical machinery that attend it in the trillions of cellular factories that make up a living organism are often derided for their lack of imagination and for their childish capitulation to the argument from personal incredulity.

The argument from personal incredulity is a syllogism which concludes from one's inability to imagine that impersonal nature could accomplish such astonishing wonders as the machinery which carries out protein synthesis, for example, that therefore these machines and processes must have been the work of an intelligent Creator. The argument occasions much merry-making among the sophisticates in the Darwinian establishment at the expense of the incredulous, simple-minded folk who hold to it.

Ironically enough, however, the sophisticates often resort to the same argument from personal incredulity themselves when it comes to belief in God. They argue that they can't imagine a Being possessing the capacities of omnipotence and omniscience, that they can't imagine a genuine miracle such as the revivification of a dead man actually happening, and therefore they don't believe such a Being or such phenomena exist.

Lest the reader think we exaggerate by suggesting that there are otherwise intelligent people who think this way consider this passage from Albert Einstein which recently crossed our desk:

"I cannot conceive of a God who rewards and punishes his creatures, or has a will of the kind that we experience in ourselves. Neither can I nor would I want to conceive of an individual that survives his physical death; let feeble souls, from fear or absurd egoism, cherish such thoughts."

Set aside the question of whether the characteristics which Einstein associated with God are accurate, there is something very peculiar about the mind which thought up the near-incomprehensible implications of the theory of general relativity admitting that it cannot imagine individuals surviving physical death or conceive of a deity which possesses certain traits similar to those which humans possess. These are conceptions, after all, which mere mortals of average intelligence have been conceptualizing for thousands of years with little difficulty.

What, exactly, was Einstein's problem? It's not as if a personal God endowing the creation with some of the characteristics of His own Being is somehow logically contradictory, like the idea of a square circle. Nor, for that matter, is it like being asked to believe something akin to the claim that given enough time and resources the laws of physics, unaided by any intelligent input, could produce a computer with a Windows operating system.

We admit that we have a lot easier time imagining what Einstein could not than imagining what modern Darwinists apparently find so easy to conceive and believe. But then we're just simple-minded guys who find incredible things to be, well, incredible.