Does naturalism predict the rarity of life better than theism? [closed]

Question

If there is no god, then that would imply the origin of life would have to be undesigned. If it is undesigned, it would have to occur through an improbable process (there are many more ways for chemicals to react in such a way to produce non life than life).

An extremely improbable process often requires many opportunities for it to occur and that is exactly what we find: an earth that is billions of years old, and a universe that is 13+ billions of years old, 99.999% of which is completely lethal to life.

On the other hand, on theism, what is the antecedent reason to expect an earth to be this old, or the universe to be lethal to life? Clearly, a god could have created a universe brimming with life, or an earth much younger, or even directly create human beings in such a way where they don’t even need to be evolved through a long, arduous process.

Thus, is the rarity of life more expected under atheism than theism?

Answer 1

It depends on the kind of theism being considered. For instance, Einstein was comfortable believing in the God of Spinoza in light of the evidence of nature, but this is a distinctly different conception of God compared to, say, the God of the Abrahamic religions.

In Christianity, for example, believers often appeal to concepts like the Fall of Man and the resulting curse on creation to explain away suffering and imperfections in the world. They also point to the influence of Satan as an antagonistic agent who willingly rebelled against God and exerts some degree of volitional influence over creation. Christians claim that, after the second coming of Christ, all of creation will be "upgraded" to a perfected state, resolving issues such as divine hiddenness and the problem of evil.

Other forms of theism likely have their own workarounds and ways of making sense of the data in different ways.

That said, under naturalism, the laws of nature are brute facts. As such, it is entirely conceivable within a naturalistic framework to imagine an alternate set of laws of nature, which are also brute facts, that would render the universe perfectly hospitable to life everywhere, contrary to what we see. On naturalism, there is no inherent expectation for the universe to be inhospitable, perfectly hospitable, or anything in between, as any scenario would equally arise from the brute facts of the laws of nature. Similarly, one could postulate different versions of theism as brute facts that also align perfectly with the observed data or under which we would expect something completely different to the data.

In the end, without an objective probability distribution over "brute facts," claims like "brute fact set X is more probable than brute fact set Y" are utterly unjustified mathematically, whether those brute facts are naturalistic or theistic or whatever you like.

Answer 2

No. Atheism is the claim that there is no god, not the claim that the entire universe was not just filled with lemmings two seconds ago.

That most atheists are not lemmingists is irrelevant: the claims of atheism are orthogonal to the claims of lemmingism. One can be an atheist lemmingist, a theist lemmingist, an atheist alemmingist, or a theist alemmingist, lemming-agnostic, or even something totally outside the theism-atheism-agnosticism paradigm.

Answer 3

Your question is not well thought thru. Asking a better question would give you a better answer, which I will try to provide for this poorly formed question.

IF one postulates that our universe were intentionally design for life by a deity (this is one of the two options I think you really meant to ask about)

THEN one would expect this universe to readily support life, and life to be present in it from the start, and also profligate and diverse from the start.

This predictions are not what we see in our universe, where life is a minor and late emergent event.

IF we alternately postulate that the universe and life formed only per natural processes,

THEN we can make no predictions about what our universe should look like, as natural phenomena are logically contingent, they could have been -- anything.

IF INSTEAD we postulate our current physics, chemistry, and biosciences are correct, and see what they predict for the likelihood of life, we get several conclusions:

• Our universe supporting life at all is radically improbable, due to its Apparent Fine Tuning for Life. The free variables of the Standard Model create a probability space with remarkably few universes able to support life.
• Within our universe, the efforts to figure out if and how life abiogenesised or not, have stalled after Urey Miller. If the later experiments had had the success or Urey-Miller, then life should be abundant in our universe. The 3/4 of a century failure in the field suggests that abiogenesis is itself remarkably rare, and is consistent with our not yet finding other intelligent life in the universe.
• BUT -- the quick appearance of life on Earth, and the hints that life may have formed on Mars, are contrary data. And if life formed twice in our solar system alone, then no, our current science does not explain our not finding alien intelligence yet.
• With data pointing in two opposite directions, this question is therefore still open.

IF instead we postulate a limited God who is not a Creator but does care about and want our universe to have life (note the number of possible God hypotheses is also large, and this one sort of fits our data) THEN a Godly intervention to overcome the abiogenesis bottleneck is a plausible divine miracle in our universe BUT such an intervention would presumably create life in many places, and this theist variant would not explain the lack of aliens we have met in our universe

None of these options is actually a particularly good fit to our universe.