Dear Friends,

You probably already know where I am going with this, but please hear me out. Especially if you like prime numbers!  🙂

Today’s outline

• Wait, what?
• My super short primer on primes
• OK, so how many are there?
• The reductio ad absurdum argument for God
• This isn’t a big leap, my dear friends…
• Here’s where I beg you to honestly confront a serious question

Wait, what?

You probably never guessed that prime numbers would crop up in a discussion about God and atheism. Stay with me.

Today, I’m not going to directly comment on the kind of heart issues that can bias us toward atheism. I already talked about some of those here (1).

I want to comment today on how pedestrian, how simple, how straightforward a sound argument in favor of God can be. My claim is that atheism, despite its billing, does not actually resonate with our logical minds. So, atheism must resonate with a different part of our being.

My super short primer on primes

A prime number is a number greater than 1, that is divisible only by itself and 1.

The first three prime numbers are 2, 3 and 5.

For example, 3 is divisible only by itself and 1. So, it’s prime.

As an opposite example, 4 is divisible by itself, and by 1, and by 2. So it’s not prime.

OK, so how many are there?  

It’s natural to wonder…as we look at larger and larger numbers, is it possible we could run out of primes, since a really huge number has got to have at least one divisor besides itself and 1?

This is where some relatively simple reasoning leads to a fascinating truth.

Let’s just assume we run out of prime numbers at some point. So, there is some huge prime number that happens to be the biggest one. After that, there are no more prime numbers.

.

So, as a result of the math above, there has to be some number that is equal to 1 and greater than 1 at the same time. But this is impossible! Literally impossible. So…our initial assumption cannot be true. There is no largest prime number. Oddly enough, they go on forever!

To prove the infinite, we assumed that there was only the finite, and arrived at an absurdity. This is a reductio ad absurdum argument, AKA a proof by contradiction.

The reductio ad absurdum argument for God 

Theists have been offering a very similar argument for a long time.

Assume there is no God, and you have to believe that everything self-existed and self-assembled! But that is absurd. So, there must be an uncreated, uncaused, intelligent God. A God who did not come from anywhere and has no beginning.

Mind you, I don’t offer this as a proof of Christianity. It’s just a very simple argument that there has to be some kind of transcendent, intelligent Being or Beings, that exist outside of time and created the universe.

This isn’t a big leap, my dear friends…

Atheists may call that God argument absurd (without actually showing what’s wrong with it), but let’s you and I consider the parallels between this argument and the very well-established argument about prime numbers:

• We want to know:
  • If an Infinite being exists
  • If the prime numbers go on infinitely
• So we assume:
  • There is no infinite being
  • There is no infinite quantity of prime numbers
• This leads to the conclusion that:
  • The universe self-assembled itself, over a very long period of time, into the human brain
  • There is a number that is greater than 1 and also equals 1 at the same time
• Which is a problem because:
  • The brain-from-the-ocean idea:
    • Has never been demonstrated by any science experiment with an appreciable level of representativeness
    • Contradicts our (all of us, experts and lay people alike) observations about what happens when a bunch of random stuff gets randomly mixed together
  • It’s impossible for any number to be greater than 1 and equal 1 at the same time
• So, we logically reject the initial assumption and conclude:
  • That there is an Infinite Being or Beings, regardless of whether or not we can directly observe such a Being
  • An infinite number of numbers qualify as prime numbers, even though it is by definition impossible to directly observe all of them

Here’s where I beg you to honestly confront a serious question 

The prime number argument I presented is very, very old news. I first encountered it in my college textbook called “Elementary Number Theory”, by David Burton (1998, The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.).

This argument is well-established, and is very similar to the theistic reductio ad absurdum argument. So, if atheists are not frustrated by the prime number argument, why do atheists get so frustrated/repulsed (they seem frustrated/repulsed, anyway) by the theistic argument?

They’ll say over and over that it’s because they’re evidence-driven, or because they have an a priori objection to miracles, etc.

I want to be respectful to all atheists reading this. But, I hope I can be respectful and also ask a hard question: Are you sure that this isn’t a heart/will/emotional issue?

Respectfully,

TFOTF

Links:

1: Biases toward atheism