Why don't I believe in God? It's not complicated. I call it the argument from insignificance -- that the universe is so huge and so timeless, and the earth so insignificant and the human species even more insignificant, that it is the height of arrogance, and just a little bit stupid, to believe that it has been created for us.
Humanity has been around for a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a moment in the history of the planet, and an even tinier fraction of an unimaginably small moment in the history of the universe, and we will disappear just as quickly. It's such a brief moment we can't get our heads around it.
When the intelligent designers say that if the Big Bang that created it all had been a little bit hotter or cooler we would never have existed, and this proves God was in control of it, especially when you take account of the enormous odds of it working out the way it did, I reply that this is like a lottery winner thinking that the whole lottery has been designed just so that they could win it.
If things had been different, sure, something else would have happened and we wouldn’t be here. But that doesn't mean the whole thing unfolded the way it did just to get to us, especially if you go back to the point about insignificance, that we will be around for such a tiny moment that if any cosmic historian writes a history of the universe we won't even be included, not even as a footnote.
And if they say this can’t be all there is, I say what more do you want? Take a look around you. This planet and its inhabitants may be insignificant against the backdrop of the universe -- but it is, and can be, a glorious place.
It's not complicated.
