A rebuttal of a common theistic stance.

One of the most common arguments you will hear from a theist goes something like, "The universe obeys natural laws. This implies a law giver/divine designer." It's a reasonable question to pose, but it's answer is nowhere to be found in religion.

Because what the theist doesn't consider when they pose this argument is that at the time that the monotheistic texts were being written (by men), people didn't know what the natural laws were, and they had no idea what they were actually observing when they looked up at the sky. They thought they lived on a flat earth and that the stars were hung in the sky so as to help them find their way around. There are verses in the Old Testament which refer to the earth as "sitting on its foundation," and not in a metaphorical sense, but such that it is clear that these people thought they were living on a flat earth which was resting on some sort of platform. Thus, answers to questions such as, "Why does the universe seem to obey certain natural laws?" could not possibly be answered by the bible, because when it was being written, these questions had not yet been posed. When you consider that the people who lived at that time and wrote the bible thought that storms and disease were judgments from god - and not results of their living on a cooling planet and microorganisms, respectfully - then nothing more needs to be said to prove this point. In other words, if you think that an outbreak of disease is a judgment from god, you couldn't possibly have any concept of the "laws of nature" and the "order of the universe," because things that have perfectly good natural explanations seem to you to be capricious.

Yes - brilliant scientists have discovered some unfailing natural laws that seem to govern the behavior of all matter in the universe and yes, if you believe in a god, you can use this as a reason to believe that he is the divine law-giver if you'd like. But what you can't do is say that the god of the bible fits that description. He doesn't. He can't. And not just because of the reason I stated above, but also because the bible insists that on many occasions, the unfailing natural laws of the universe were temporarily suspended if people prayed or made sacrifices. People don't rise from the dead; people don't walk on water; the sun doesn't stop in the sky for 3 hours (actually, Copernicus and Galileo showed us that in order for it to appear that the sun was standing still in the sky, it would be the earth that would have to stop moving, which would have sent Joshua and his army flying off the planet and hurdling through deep space); virgins don't conceive children. And if you believe that any of these things happen - even though you weren't there to witness any of them - then you are admitting that you would believe absolutely anything at all.