As some of my colleagues has hinted at, you’re using the term 'life’ in a strange way. Do you mean all life? As in chickens and bacteria? Do you mean human life? Or do you mean your own personal life, and the lives of millions of others who live a content, happy existence?

To answer in order.

1. Biological life is rather incredible, when examined scientifically. For example, my favourite display of biological life is studying E.Coli bacteria. I recommend Carl Zimmer’s book on the subject. Here we have bacteria that creates little cities, work together to achieve a goal and all sorts of wondrous activities we wouldn’t expect from “mere” bacteria.

2. I find nothing special about human life and human beings in general. To think we are somehow special is anthropocentric, which can have unfortunate consequences. For example, the idea that other animals and the environment are merely our property; that we can do as we wish since we’re “better” than dogs or chickens. I find certain humans special, but not in some cosmic sense of the word. But I find humans and non-human animals special, so it is not restrictive.

To think we are special on a cosmic scale is to make unjustified or unverifiable claims. How do you know we are special? How is it that human life is extraordinary? Against what are you measuring? There are numerous and greater things than us that exist which are also extraordinary, like suns and galaxies; but we do not need to infer that god created them since we have beautiful reasons for explaining their emergence. So if we have scientific explanations for wondrous things from eyes to solar flares, then you must wonder why we infer from “life” that there must be a creator.

Also, let us not forget that life is not by definition roses and sunshine. This leads to my third point of contention.

3. Not everyone lives a life that even they would claim is wonderful or extraordinary. Many people living in the poorest settlements in Africa face unimaginable hardships everyday: there are people who don’t know what hot water against the skin is, people who don’t know what satisfying hunger feels like, people who have watched all their children die because they are raped or shot to death. This is life on this level: what some philosophers might term the narrative-account of life, as each individual person tells it.

On that level, we would have to assess individually. Yet, consider: Even if one person lived a perfectly happy, wonderful, rainbow and unicorn existence does that somehow prove a loving, kind deity made him? What about all those others who live a life of suffering and hardships? If you claim this is evidence for god, what type of god?

There is nothing extraordinary on this level, save the occassional extraordinary person who manags to ameloriate or get out of such situations.

I’m not impressed by claims that make life on the person narrative level into an all-encompassing one of rainbows, sunshines and loveliness. This is myopic and solipsistic. It ignores the plight and suffering of others. If you want to infer gods from this, do so at your own behest. But don’t be surprised when others are revolted by deities that let children die from such brutality or, worse, life in blood-soaked lands overflowing with petty, horrible strife.

Posted: March 13th 2011

See all questions answered by Tauriq Moosa

This is pure sophistry. Sure life is “extraordinary”, but does that make it evidence for anything? The word “extraordinary” may be applied in one way to describe life on earth and in another way to describe evidence, but that doesn’t mean these two contexts have anything do with one another. This is mere wordplay on your part — it’s no kind of argument at all.

The fact that life is “extraordinary” is a problem demanding an explanation. By itself, this fact (if it be a fact) doesn’t favor one explanation over another. You can’t just point out the existence of a problem and then say goddidit. Not if you want to make a coherent argument, anyway.

Posted: March 10th 2011

See all questions answered by George Locke

In order for a statement to be logically valid, all of its components must be valid. Your argument is based on two premises; a) that life is extraordinary, and b) that it is evidence for the existence of a god. If either one fails, the whole arguments vanishes, as Douglas Adams put it, “in a puff of logic”.

The first premise, that life is extraordinary, is far from proven. While it’s unlikely that we will ever have enough evidence to say for certain, many experiments suggest that the conditions that give rise to life are actually fairly common in this universe. Even if that were false, however, consider this: We live in a universe with hundreds of billions of galaxies, each filled with hundreds of billions of stars. If only one billionth of one billionth of those stars could produce the right conditions for life, it would still exist in tens of thousands of places in the universe. So, while it might be true that life originating in any one place is ludicrously unlikely, the chance that it originate somewhere is almost a certainty.

Even assuming that your first premise were true, I see no reason whatsoever to assume that the existence of life is evidence of a god. That’s a wholly unproven, and potentially unprovable, assumption on your part. You could just as easily say that the existence of life is proof that unicorns, faeries, or invisible flying turtles exist. Without at least a logical reason to suspect that the two things are in some way causally related, saying they are is just idle speculation.

So if the premise “life is extraordinary” is probably untrue, and the premise “life is evidence for the existence of a god” is completely unproven speculation, the argument that “the existence of life is extraordinary evidence for the existence of a god” seems pretty likely to be a failed intellectual endeavor.

Posted: March 8th 2011

See all questions answered by Blaise

Evidence is detailed—subtle. The many, varied intricacies of life are hundreds of millions of little, tiny pieces of evidence for where they came from. Your coccyx, the bones that comprise what most people know as their tailbone, is evidence that your ancestors had tails; your appendix, now a seemingly-useless infection-prone sack of poison, and your wisdom teeth, now painful and dangerous “extra” teeth requiring removal, are evidence that our ancestors were at some point herbivores. Whales have underdeveloped bones buried in their bodies where their ancestors had equine legs. Sightless cave fish still have non-functioning eyes because their ancestors could see. Boas and pythons still have remnants of a pelvis on their skeleton from where their ancestors had legs.

That is what evidence is: Evidence is a whole preponderance of detail which supports the same idea: In this case, the idea that all life evolved from a common

To simplify the vast, ever-growing collective of evidence gathered over the generations by scientists into something as simple as:

(A) Life is extra-ordinary (emphasis on the roots of the word implies the involvement of the supernatural), therefore, (B) My God exists.

I can see why you would feel wonderful believing that you can make the entire universe feel simple and crafted to your comfort by believing such things, however the facts simply do not care what makes you comfortable. None of what you believe about the origins of life, the universe, and everything is correct. You’re wrong, and arguing about it won’t make you right.

Posted: March 7th 2011

See all questions answered by Reed Braden

“What about this life can anyone find that is anything but extraordinary? The very fact that there is life is extraordinary.”

Yes, it is – but that’s not evidence, it’s an observation. The fact that we can make this observation is also extraordinary – but we wouldn’t be making it if we weren’t here, so we can’t say we’re playing on a level field here: we are enormously privileged.

However, there are two problems to your argument. The first is the gap in your logic between “life is extraordinary” and “a creator”. This is an elementary mistake, and if you imagine that we haven’t thought through that, you clearly haven’t done your homework. It’s called the “argument from design” or Teleological argument. Richard Dawkins was blasting holes in it back in the 1980s with books like The Blind Watchmaker, and he was hardly the first. I can recommend that and his The God Delusion for answers to that proposition.

The second problem is the “problem of evil”: if you want to give a creator credit for all the good things, he/she/it needs to take the blame for all the bad things that happen too. All the pain and suffering experienced by all living things, of which we only see a tiny fraction. Every evolutionary dead end, every failed mutation, every creature that dies of starvation due to overpopulation and predation. Would an “intelligent designer” design a system in which some animals exist only to feed other animals? We only see the successful “experiments”, not the failures, so we’re not exactly objective – which is why it’s important to make the effort to see past our evolved biases.

Posted: March 7th 2011

See all questions answered by brian thomson