More thoughts on why it is impossible that a God, much less the God of the bible, could have made everything.

2. The supernatural and immaterial cannot create the natural and material.

Let’s explore a little more of the nature of the God of the Christians. He is, they say, transcendent; ephemeral, intangible, invisible, ineffable, wholly spiritual. He is super-natural, existing on a plane outside the universe of matter, separate and removed from it and unlike any aspect of it. The bible implies as much and Christians have elaborated on these qualities throughout the millennia. The Christian God is everything, in fact, apart from physical matter (yes, those who claim to know all about this unknowable being assert he took on physical form as Jesus, but he’d yet to do that at the beginning of everything; 6000 years ago if you believe nutjobs like Ken Ham, 613.772 billion years if you accept the science.)

There is no incidence anywhere, no evidence that has ever existed ever, that demonstrates that something ephemeral, immaterial and super-natural is capable of creating the concrete, tangible and natural. To draw an analogy or two: music, which as heard is ephemeral and intangible, does not create the physical objects of the orchestra that play it. It does not look back as it vibrates through the air and conjure up the instruments from which it emanates.

Similarly, human thought, itself largely ephemeral and capable of imagining possibilities that don’t yet exist, does not of itself produce physical objects. However much you picture your ideal house in your mind, it will not produce the bricks and mortar without you taking action to realise them. This is always the case (and why prayer, spells and other wishful thinking are always ineffective); further action is required if what the human mind can imagine is to become a reality – some manipulation of the physical world. In all of our experience, in everything we know of reality, the transcendent cannot and does not produce anything material, ever. Music does not produce the orchestra. Thoughts do not construct the house; they must be translated into action, in the form of engagement with the physical world, for anything to materialise.

Two things follow: while the transcendent or spiritual cannot create anything in the real world without the corresponding physical activity, the reverse is not the case. Physical activity can and does produce the ephemeral. The instruments of the orchestra can produce music. The synapses of the brain can produce thought, love, empathy, desire. These do not exist, like other abstract concepts such as peace, hope and beauty, outside the physical human brain. In this reality, as opposed to that of the bible and the Creation Museum, the physical is always primary; it always comes first, the transcendent second. Never the other way round.

This, in fact, would appear to be a ‘law’ of the universe. As such, it is impossible a transcendent, supernatural being could have created the natural, material world. Applying this law, it can only be the case that the physical reality – or some aspect of it (guess what) – imagined the transcendent, without it having any real existence. No amount of physical activity has ever been able to produce it. If Christians therefore want to postulate a spiritual being as the first cause they need explain how the universal law that the physical always precedes the non-physical came to be overturned.

More to follow. Part one of this series is here.