I was watching a video about people trying to justify a god and it made me think a bit about natural processes.

The video is “The ‘Best’ Evidence for God | Belief It Or Not” by Belief It Or Not. It talks about the claim that we constantly see gods creations, so we have plenty of evidence for god. I think my issue with this is more so that the human process of human creation is a natural process, on a grand scale.

By this, I mean that we humans are natural creatures. We are a product of nature, we exist alongside everything natural and are ourselves natural.

I guess the best way to put this is that planets are natural as well, and when they have their tectonic shifts, the planets, or more specifically their tectonic plates and their mechanism of moving them, creates mountains and continents. This is the consequence of the planet’s natural processes. It’s a natural creation.

Beavers, through the natural process of their brains working the way they do, cut down trees and arrange them into damns. This natural process, the creation of the beaver, wildly changes the climate that they live in. Through a natural process, they create the floodplains that happen because of their damns.

Humans too through their own natural process are the creators of everything we have made. Clocks, buildings, cities, they are all creations of humans, results of the natural process of our brains working in the way they do, as with the beaver and their brains, as with the planets and their tectonic mechanisms. Human creation is a natural process, even if it is radical and fast-paced and unprecedented considering the scope of our multicellular ancestors.

When we denote something as “unnatural” what we often really mean is that humans purposefully made it. Things like specific chemicals are a result of humans working towards a better life. Humans work towards a better life because it is natural for us to desire so; it is the natural process of our brains.

To tie this back to the argument for a god, when we look at a watch and know that it has a creator, we do so because we know how watches are made. They are made by people, and we create things like watches.

But when we look at a mountain, a theist might see the create of God.

And through science, we can use observations about the present and the past to determine that mountains were created by tectonic activity. The tectonic activity is the creator of the mountain. But who created the tectonic activity?

The beauty of science is its insatiable curiosity - to ground the idea this too is an outcome of the human brain’s natural processes. It is not enough to know that the mountain was created by tectonic activity. It is not enough to figure that tectonic activity is caused by mantle convection. Why is mantle convection? Why are planets formed? What is the beginning of the universe?

For all of these questions, we have answers. We have formed our description of how these natural processes have caused in the forming of mountains by the tectonic plates. We have even determined the conditions that were present at the beginning of the universe, and have used observable evidence to infer that at one point the whole universe was condensed to one point.

But why that point? Human curiosity is unsatiated. We may never know, and most people are comfortable with this answer, and have fun theorising.

A theist may like to say that god created these start-conditions.

And these start conditions created matter, which created stars, which created planets, in which humans were born and live through natural processes and make the iPhone.

At these scales, there is no difference between human creation and so-called “natural” creation. They are all outcomes of the specific starting conditions of the universe, or how energy was distributed in the singularity before the big bang.

As a computer scientist, I’d call these “parameters” of a function, the function of the universe. But this is just me applying the language of my field to another field. We don’t live in a simulation.

We don’t know if the universe began at the singularity. Many theists might decide so, and that a God created the singularity.

This god doesn’t really matter, the outcome is the same. If you gave me two visibly and functionally identical watches and told me one is worth £300 because it was hand-crafted and another is worth £120 because it is factory made, I won’t care about the origin if the outcome was the same.

To continue to re-iterate anti-theist talking points, if a “god” created the singularity, it is definitely not the god of any of our major religions. They have all this historic baggage attached to them, and holy books or something.

To addendum, we made up watches. We put some matter together and called it a watch. We determined some abstract set of properties that can be satisfied for something to be watch-like. All that actually exists is matter.

Anyway, that’s my philosophy around “natural creation”.