Nearly Everything Is Evidence For Atheism

God fails as an explanation

Theism posits that the universe were created by a perfect being. If this were true, from the outset, there would be no feature of the universe that could be improved upon. Imagine if I claimed that my house was made by the greatest possible architect. For that claim to be true, one would expect there was nothing about the house that could be designed better. Similarly, if I claimed to be the greatest metaphysically possible chef, one would expect maximally great food—food that couldn’t be improved upon.

If God has the choice of making either

A) A mediocre thing

or

B) A perfect version of A.

God would obviously choose to create B. This obvious enough.

We now come to a fairly devastating argument for atheism, namely, that nearly everything could be designed better. If there is even one thing that can be improved upon, this would render theism false, so if everything seems like a possible candidate for being improvable, this is a devastating challenge to theism.

Let’s just survey the things in the room where I am currently to see this general notion. Right in front of me is the computer on which I type these words. Computers are great, but they could be easily improved. One of my computer broke recently, costing lots of money and causing immense inconvenience. Couldn’t god design the world such that computer were easier to use for complex purposes and more resilient? Couldn’t he make more resilient materials, making computers better?

In front of that is a whiteboard with handwriting. The handwriting is not particularly neat. That’s another thing that could be improved. If one was designing the human race from scratch, why not make them able to write more quickly and neatly? That would surely be a better world. If you had the ability to bring about a world in which people could write more quickly and neatly, surely you would do so? Well, god is in a position to do so (if he exists), and yet he does not.

Next to me is a water bottle containing a smoothie. That’s very easily improvable. For one, the smoothie could be made to be tastier and healthier. That seems like an incredibly obvious improvement to the world. If there was more food that tasted good and was very healthy, the world would be better.

Additionally, several people are wearing masks because of covid risks. That’s easily improvable: why make infectious disease heritable? If anything, the heritability of infectious disease undermines divine purposes. Presumably, meaningful interactions are good, yet those are clearly undermined by the threat of infectious disease.

It’s also rather chilly. Why create low and high temperature that are both often unpleasant to humans and cause immense harm, with lots of humans dying in heatwaves and many more starving to death. Wouldn’t a world in which we weren’t burdened by the temperature be a better world?

And don’t even get me started on the people. There are very obvious ways to improve the design of humans. Some people (myself included) have defective eyes, causing them to need glasses. Surely a world with perfect sight would be better. And the problem is far more dire for those who are blind, for example.

Humans are also designed to have their feeding tube right next to their breathing passage. That’s a terrible design that results in lots of people choking to death. Surely a world where people didn’t run the risk of choking to death would be better?

The human body needs a constant supply of vitamins, leading to most people being vitamin deficient. Surely a world in which most people weren’t vitamin deficient would be better? What’s the theodicy for why it’s good for lots of people to be deficient in vitamins, leading to a worse life.

The human body also slowly deteriorates over time, leading to humans becoming enfeebled when they’re old. Surely aging is bad. The slow, miserable end of life debilitation is such that a world without it would be better.

Humans also get a series of physical illnesses like cancer, malaria, and AIDS. Surely a world without those would be better. Unless one adopts the fairly reprehensible view that AIDS is designed to punish promiscuity and cancer is designed to punish having breasts or colons, it seems obvious that the world without those would be better.

And the human brain is even more deficient. For one, it has immense cognitive limitation, making it hard for people to understand complex topics. A world in which we had more processing power would clearly be better. Additionally, a world in which we could directly transmit mental information would avoid the impossibility of getting people to understand very complex concepts and would massively reduce transaction costs. Surely that would be better?

There’s also a hard problem of consciousness for the theist (though not the hard problem of consciousness). So many features of our consciousness could be improved easily. Many people are depressed often. Wouldn’t a world without depression be better. Additionally, a world in which people derived more joy from things would be better. As I listen to music, as much as I enjoy the music, if I enjoyed it 50 times more, that would clearly be better. The same is especially true of virtuous pleasures, like those that stem from interacting with others and learning. A world in which people got 100 times the enjoyment from those things would clearly be better.

It would be possible to rewire our consciousness to be an improvement both from the standpoint of our subjective enjoyment and from the standpoint of the worthwhileness of our pursuits. People derive lots of pleasure from things that theists say are not worthwhile, like masturbation. So why not just make that less pleasurable, but reading the bible more pleasurable? It’s a win win. More happiness and more bible study. Why make lots of very productive tasks also very boring?

There are also problems relating to non moral factors affecting humans motivation. For example, some humans have a sexual attraction to children or to non human animals. Surely a world without that feature would be better.

There are also just practical problems with the human body. Why not make people able to teleport? That would result in dramatic improvements in the world, allowing people to converse with people on the other side of the world.

Humans also need to sleep, eliminating about half of their life. Couldn’t god make us able to achieve the benefits of sleep without needing to sleep. Humans also need to eat, resulting both in immense costs to people and in thousands of people starving to death every day. Surely a world where food was an optional extra would be better.

I could keep going. The ears which I use to listen to music could be improved, by making people not go deaf, and by being more discerning. The mouth which I use to sometimes speak could be made better by not causing immense pain when I bite my cheek by accident. My hands could be able to type more quickly, my brain able to generate things to type more quickly. Humans backs could be more resilient, avoiding paralysis and immense back pain.

We now have the argument in place. The theist holds that the world had a perfect designer. And yet the designs of a perfect designer couldn’t be made better. However, nearly everything in the world is imperfectly designed. This is exactly what we’d expect on atheism—a world that’s mostly uninhabitable and in which things are far from perfect. Yet on theism, we’d expect there to be no obvious improvements to the world. However, not only are there some obvious improvements, there are seemingly obvious improvements to every single thing in the world.

The point of this is not to complain about how rough my lot in life is. Overall, my life is very good, certainly far better than the lives of most people throughout history. Yet despite that, nearly everything in my life could be improved by a perfect being. Given that even history’s most fortunate can spot many obvious improvements to common features of their lives, the world was clearly not perfectly designed.

This general argument circumvents nearly all the theodicies. Maybe some evil is needed because of free will, but backpain, hunger, mental illness, inability to teleport, and pedophilic sexual urges certainly aren’t. Maybe some things build our souls, but human cognitive limitations, eating disorders, mental illness, addiction, and vitamin deficiency certainly don’t. Predictable natural laws can’t explain why the predictable natural laws that we have result in so many easily improvable things. One could have both predictable natural laws and no vitamin deficiency, aging, and depression.

The only response that comes even close to responding to this is the fall theodicy, which said that things were perfect until Adam and Eve dropped the ball (or the apple) in the garden of Eden. Reconsider the case of the supposedly perfect architect.

A dialogue

Inquisitor: “This house is a total mess. There are bookcases collapsing killing lots of children, chemicals that are hazardous to safety, and lead in the paint causing severe neurological deficiency. There’s a horrible racket making lots of people go deaf and literal dementia causing chemicals. Why the hell would a perfect designer create this? Surely this house would be better without the cancer causing chemicals.”

Architect: “Dear sir, blame Adam.”

Inquisitor: “Who is Adam.”

Architect: “Well, to make a long story short, the house was perfect (it only had two people, but who says that that hinders the value of a house. However, I put a tree in the center of the house and I told Adam and Eve not to eat from the tree. They did eat from the tree, so I screwed everything up in response. See, perfect design, it was just the fall.”

Inquisitor: “What? Why the heck did you put the tree there and make it so that the house would become so messed up if the tree was eaten from?”

Architect: “Ah…about that. Well, I wanted the people to have free will, so I had to put it there.”

Inquisitor: “But couldn’t they have had free will without eating from the tree causing lots of people to get cancer. Why is a chain of unforeseen, unpredictable, and undesirable consequences of eating from a tree necessary for free will? Why put the tree there in the first place?”

Architect: “Well, my ways are very mysterious.”

Inquisitor: “But then positing that you’re a perfect architect is a terrible explanation. If your account of why things are terrible is that you set up conditions that would make things terrible if people acted in a predictable way, then that just raises the deeper question of why you set things up that way. This is like saying the supervillain’s robot who was infinitely wise and all powerful was defeated because someone pressed the self destruct button. It just raises the deeper question of why the hell the infinitely wise person put a self destruct button on the robot, in the first place. You have no account of that. To the extent that you can’t adequately explain any of the things in the house and why they’re so messed up, you’re a truly terrible explanation.”

More analysis

This is a large part of why I find theism so implausible. When you look around the world at all of the world’s imperfections, it is very obvious that there is no perfect designer. Theists will often say that merely a glimpse at the beauty of nature is how they know god exists. Well, a glimpse at the imperfections of nature, along with everything else, are how I know that god does not exist.