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Is "god did it" an explanation?

Character Assassin

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Hi, this is my first thread on this forum hopefully it won't be the last :D.

Some religious people are contented with "god did it" as an explanation for just about anything that science hasn't explained yet or that they think that science hasn't explained (the apparent design of living things).

How can anyone be satisfied with "god did it" as an explanation? It doesn't explain how he did it. In other words they don't seem to be bothered that they don't have a mechanism for their explanation. It's no better than "it just happened".

What good is an explanation if it doesn't tell you how something happened? Unless its an explanation of who did it or what kind of thing it was, it doesn't help you if you want to know how something happened.

Thoughts?
 
Welcome to the forums.

You're right, it's a lousy response. Saying "Goddidit" allows people to turn off their brains. Thinking takes effort, and some people are content taking the easy way out.

Steve S
 
Character Assassin said:
Hi, this is my first thread on this forum hopefully it won't be the last :D.

Some religious people are contented with "god did it" as an explanation for just about anything that science hasn't explained yet or that they think that science hasn't explained (the apparent design of living things).

How can anyone be satisfied with "god did it" as an explanation? It doesn't explain how he did it. In other words they don't seem to be bothered that they don't have a mechanism for their explanation. It's no better than "it just happened".

What good is an explanation if it doesn't tell you how something happened? Unless its an explanation of who did it or what kind of thing it was, it doesn't help you if you want to know how something happened.

Thoughts?
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Hi and welcome. Theists don‘t just use “God did it“ merely for that which science can‘t explain. They also often use it for that which science can explain. Creation as opposed to evolution for instance. It’s not just “We don’t know therefore God did it”, it’s also “God did it therefore God exists”. It’s a ludicrous circular “proof” that their God exists. The “how” is covered by magic and miracles.
 
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Hi. I think you got it spot on. Once upon a time "Goddidit" was the answer for everything; Earthquakes, floods, famines, droughts, plagues, wars, meteorites, comets, losing things, finding things, stubbed toes and jock itch... For the last few centuries the list of things that God did has been shrinking.

Now we have people who claim that God only did the Big Bang, but why should anyone accept that as an answer? If all God did was say the magic words and leave the rest to physics, he's not the God of the Bible. He's not the God of Abraham, Isaac and Joeseph, He's just some kind of Cosmic Catalyst and praying to such a thing seems absurd to me.

Welcome to JREF.
 
I can't see "god did it" as an explanation because there's no evidence of a god. And even before that, there's no reasonable definition for a god that you could find evidence for.
 
Character Assassin said:
How can anyone be satisfied with "god did it" as an explanation?
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Quite easily. If the question being dealt with isn't all that interesting to them or they have more directly pressing matters to deal with, it's not really a surprise that a non-answer can be found acceptable. Confirmation bias is a powerful thing, either way. As is, to a lesser extent, the human tendency to seek agency everywhere.

As for what good is such an explanation? It's just fine, if one starts with the assumption that the question's answer is outside of what they can likely understand, anyways.
 
Aridas said:
Quite easily. If the question being dealt with isn't all that interesting to them or they have more directly pressing matters to deal with, it's not really a surprise that a non-answer can be found acceptable. Confirmation bias is a powerful thing, either way. As is, to a lesser extent, the human tendency to seek agency everywhere.

As for what good is such an explanation? It's just fine, if one starts with the assumption that the question's answer is outside of what they can likely understand, anyways.
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Often it’s more a matter of what they don’t want to accept rather than their ability to understand or not. Evolution for example.
 
ynot said:
Often it’s more a matter of what they don’t want to accept rather than their ability to understand or not. Evolution for example.
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In the case of evolution their faith is built upon a literal cherry-picking of the bible.

If they'd accept evolution, then Genesis goes out the window, and there's no telling what would follow.

Rejecting evolution is their last ditch effort to stick to their current iteration of their faith.

It's not for nothing that they often say "If you accept evolution, everything goes". To them it's not a hyperbole.
 
Bram Kaandorp said:
In the case of evolution their faith is built upon a literal cherry-picking of the bible.

If they'd accept evolution, then Genesis goes out the window, and there's no telling what would follow.

Rejecting evolution is their last ditch effort to stick to their current iteration of their faith.

It's not for nothing that they often say "If you accept evolution, everything goes". To them it's not a hyperbole.
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Don’t some theists claim that evolution is all part of God’s perfect design and that God lit the wick of the Big Bang?
 
“God did it” isn’t an explanation, it’s a pathetic positive affirmation to support a silly belief.
 
ynot said:
Don’t some theists claim that evolution is all part of God’s perfect design and that God lit the wick of the Big Bang?
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Yes, but that's why I qualified the kind of Christian who would reject evolution.

Specifically, the type who is smitten with literal reading of certain pieces of the bible. If they have to stop taking them literally, they will have to reconsider other parts as well, for instance the ones about homosexuality and the like.

Maybe that's why fundamentalists who loose their faith become much more liberal, but I digress.
 
Character Assassin said:
What good is an explanation if it doesn't tell you how something happened? Unless its an explanation of who did it or what kind of thing it was, it doesn't help you if you want to know how something happened.
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I think this is pretty much on the money. Religion tends to skirt around "how" questions, which I find is the most natural type of question to ask, and instead focuses on "who", "what" and "why" questions. I'm not sure if that's deliberate, although it has the convenient effect of pushing difficult questions to one side. It's more that people who always want to know how something works are less likely to find much sense in religion than people whose natural instinct is to look for some sort of deeper meaning and higher purpose.

I'm not satisfied by "Goddidit", and neither are you, because we're interested in how something happened. My reaction when I was taught about the feeding of the five thousand as a young child was to ask how it worked, and whether it just grew back every time a piece was broken off. But religion relies on people being more interested in those other questions. Investigation of "how" is stymied by beliefs that (to be frank) don't make sense, called mysteries, which gradually nudges believers into the habit of concentrating more on the significance of an event, rather than how it happened.
 
Abdul Alhazred said:
If there were a God, it would be an explanation.
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I heard a story from a guy who never got a satisfying answer about what causes fires when he was a child. He asked all of his teachers, and they all told him it was caused by 'combustion,' but he had no clue what that was and said the explanation didn't help him any more than if they told him fire was caused by "Fred."

Of course "God did it" it is an explanation if God, in fact, did it, but it would be meeting only the barest minimum requirements for a thing to be accurately described as an explanation.
 
Of course "God did it" it is an explanation if God, in fact, did it, but it would be meeting only the barest minimum requirements for a thing to be accurately described as an explanation.
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If the question is something like ...

"Who gave the Philistines hemorrhoids as a punishment for stealing the Ark of the Covenant?"​

... then "God did it" really is a complete explanation.

I Samuel chapters 5 and 6, BTW.

I love the Bible. :cool:
 
Most people like a short answer, and that's not just Christians, either. "Evolution did it" is very similar to "God did it". It's the shorthand answer when you really don't know. Asking a question like "How did eyes develop" requires a lot of work to answer. Evolutionary biologists have done the hard work for you, but it requires an effort on your part to understand the explanation (and evolution actually did do it). People as a rule are quite lazy, intellectually speaking, whether theist or not.
 
For some to be an "explanation" in any reasonable sense of the term it has to lead to greater understanding of what it's supposed to be explaining. God does not fit that bill in my opinion since God and his methods are so poorly defined.

Why does X happen? Well God does X. Okay how does that lead to a greater understanding of X and how it occurs?

God is, was, and always will be nothing more then a theatric, grandiose, self important way of saying "I don't know and have no real interest in finding out."
 
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