From Chapter 22—The Fine Art of Self-Deception. © 2020 by Emory Lynn.
If you peel away all of the surrounding layers of the Abrahamic faiths’ concept of God, you uncover an astounding belief at the very core: God is eternal—he is and always has been. He was not created nor was he the effect of any cause. Thus, nothing was responsible for God’s existence. God created everything else that exists out of nothing. (The Genesis creation story implies but doesn’t specifically say that God created everything from nothing. Other scriptures do make it clear that the Genesis creation was from nothing. John 1:3: “All things were made by him; and without him was not anything made that was made.” See also Colossians 1:16 and Revelation 4:11.) Therefore, everything in the universe came into existence entirely as a consequence of two nothings!
This is just astounding when laid bare, yet this is the consensus belief of Christians, Jews and Muslims. The implausibility gets more transparent when you consider how apologists defend this core belief. They are fond of using the ex nihilo argument against nonbelievers: Out of nothing comes nothing. While asserting that it’s quite obvious that nothing can come from nothing, they then contradict themselves by claiming that as a logical necessity there must have been an uncaused first cause (assumed to be the God of their religion), else there would be an infinite regression of causes which is impossible. God is thus something that came from nothing because he was uncaused. God just is! Apologists try to stack the deck by fashioning the ex nihilo argument to exclude the possibility of something coming from nothing naturally while allowing for something to come from nothing supernaturally in the special case of God. This is a fallacious argument known as special pleading—an exception to a generally accepted rule with no justification for the exception.
Another pet argument, the argument from incredulity, is routinely used against the plausibility of natural causes. For example, the human genome is so complex and incredible, it couldn’t have possibly been created naturally; hummingbirds are such incredibly beautiful aerial acrobats, surely natural processes could not have designed them; the human eye is so irreducibly complex, there is no way it could have been created naturally; and on and on the disbelief goes. The only reasonable explanation for these incredible examples in the natural world is that God created them supernaturally. Indeed, God is without any limitation and can create anything. Never mind that this requires a God who must be even more complex, even more incredible, and even more implausible than his creations. Now, it isn’t necessarily so that a creator must be more complex and incredible than its creations. Evolution has created complex creatures from relatively simple processes of nature over extremely long periods of time. However, the God of the Abrahamic faiths created everything in the universe in six 24-hour days of special creation, which surely means that this God is more complex and incredible than his creations.
We now have the basic characterization of the God of Christianity, Judaism and Islam, with apologetic rationalization:
- God is eternal; he is and always has been.
- God isn’t the effect of any cause. Nothing is responsible for his existence.
- God created everything else that exists out of nothing.
- It is self-evident that out of nothing comes nothing. However, this does not apply to God.
- The universe is filled with things that are so incredible and complex as to defy a natural explanation for their existence.
- Therefore, everything that is and ever has been was created literally from nothing by a supernatural Creator who exists literally because of nothing, yet this Creator is even more complex and incredible than are his creations.
Can anything be less plausible than this? Could the ex nihilo argument and the argument from incredulity be more abused than this? If it were not rendered normal by cultural sanction, such a belief would be universally regarded as absurd, even insane.
For those interested in giving it a go, try to conceive of a way to make this most fundamental belief of the Abrahamic religions even more farfetched. No limitations, anything goes, even somehow adding the material consequence of a third nothing!
