A Response to Atheism: We Don’t Need God

2. We don’t need to stinkin’ deities.

After his first reason, Rosch begins to delve a little deeper into more interesting problems concerning the existence of God. The idea that we do not need God represents the recent development (i.e. the last 60 or so years) of the sciences, particularly in the fields of biology and physics regarding the theories of evolution and the Big Bang.

Rosch states that since science has started explaining the mysteries of the formation of the universe and life on this planet, we therefore no longer need God. Rosch and others like him, however, reach this conclusion rather hastily if it is based solely on the fact that science can explain certain processes. It would be like a blind and deaf person who stumbled upon a well-manicured garden and upon close inspection discovered the orderly rows of plants, the tilled and weeded soil, and eventually the gardening tools placed along the edge of the field. Should that person develop an understanding, through study, of how all the tools worked in maintaining that garden and could even explain the reasoning behind the ordering of the plants, would we conclude that the person has grasped all that there is to know about the garden?

Science answers one question: how. It’s scope, though, cannot extend into realm of why. Many scientists understand what topics are within the realm of science – that scientific conclusions can be and are used in philosophical inquiry. To say that science is the final study which makes redundant all other intellectual endeavors seems a tad arrogant.

The analogy above creates the possibility that there is a gardener whom our blind, deaf wanderer can meet and know. As a Christian, yes, I believe that this implies the existence of God. That analogy, though my own personal rendition may be unique, is not a new one. I am not so disillusioned as to believe that this argument from analogy makes God necessary, and even if it did, it demonstrates nothing about the character or nature of God, which leads into Rosch’s next reason.