Section 1: Purposeful Creation or Cosmic Accident?

Moderator: We begin with the most fundamental question: the universe itself. Is it the product of an intelligent mind, or the outcome of blind, unguided physical laws? We turn first to Professor Dawkins.

Richard Dawkins: Thank you. Let us be clear from the outset. The notion of a divine creator, a "God," is a failed and profoundly unparsimonious hypothesis. It has been rendered obsolete by the relentless and beautiful progress of science. For centuries, humanity looked at the complexity of the living world—the intricate design of the eye, the aerodynamic perfection of a bird’s wing—and concluded it must have a designer. This was a reasonable, if primitive, inference. We now know better.

Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection is the single most powerful idea ever conceived by the human mind. It provides a complete, mechanistic, and stunningly elegant explanation for the illusion of design. There is no top-down designer. Instead, from the bottom up, through the simple, blind processes of random mutation and non-random natural selection, the astonishing diversity and complexity of life emerged over billions of years. Life pulls itself up by its own bootstraps. Biology has absolutely no need for a creator; in fact, the existence of one would only complicate matters.

Likewise, in cosmology, the "God hypothesis" is a placeholder for ignorance. Physicists are steadily pushing back the frontiers of our understanding of the universe's origins. The Big Bang theory describes the universe expanding from an incredibly hot, dense state. Quantum mechanics provides a framework for understanding how something might emerge from what appears to be nothing, through random quantum fluctuations. While we don’t have all the answers, to insert "God" into the gaps of our knowledge is intellectually lazy and historically foolish. Every gap where God was once thought to reside—from the movement of the planets to the origin of species—has been filled by scientific discovery. Science offers a worldview based on evidence, reason, and methodological naturalism. It is a humble worldview, admitting what it does not yet know, but it is also a powerful one. It has no need for a supernatural creator, an entity who would himself be inexplicably complex and for whom there is not a shred of empirical evidence. Occam’s razor slices God away. The universe is here, it is governed by physical laws, and that is all the explanation we need.

Ibn Sīnā: I must commend Professor Dawkins for his eloquent summary of the empirical sciences. His descriptions of the physical processes of biology and cosmology are admirable, and we, as philosophers, do not dispute the workings of the natural world as discovered by observation. However, he has made a fundamental category error. He is attempting to use the tools of physics, which measure the contingent, to answer the questions of metaphysics, which concern the necessary. Your science brilliantly describes how one state of the universe leads to another. It explains the chain of cause and effect within existence. But it cannot, even in principle, answer the ultimate question: Why is there existence at all? Why is there something rather than nothing?

This is not a gap in scientific knowledge that will be filled by a new equation. It is a question that lies beneath science, a question about the very ground of reality upon which science stands. To address this, we must use pure reason. Consider anything in this universe: a rock, a planet, a living organism. Its existence is contingent (mumkin al-wujūd). It exists, but it did not have to. It depends on causes and conditions outside of itself. The question reason demands we ask is this: Can this chain of contingency go back forever? An infinite regress of causes is a logical impossibility. If every single thing in the chain depends on a prior thing for its existence, then the entire chain itself would require an external cause to bring it out of non-existence into existence.

Therefore, logic necessitates that this entire series of contingent things must terminate in a reality that is not contingent. There must exist a being whose existence is self-sufficient and necessary (Wājib al-Wujūd). Its very essence is to exist. It is uncaused, non-contingent, and upon it, the existence of the entire contingent universe depends. This is not a "God of the gaps." This is the God of the whole show. Your science studies the intricate grammar of the book of the universe. We are asking who authored the book and why there is a book at all. The Necessary Existent is the only logical answer.