The Extinction Argument: A Reply to a Subscriber
A subscriber objects to the extinction argument
According to the extinction argument against God’s existence, the fact that humans are likely to go extinct in the future is some evidence against God’s existence — though it could easily be there are stronger evidence for God’s existence. As I wrote to setup the argument:
This plausible assumption [of likely human extinction] looks like it conflicts with theism—the view that there exists an all-powerful, all-knowing, just and loving creator of the universe with the title ‘God’. The plausible assumption that humans are bound to go extinct, long before the heat death of the Sun, is in tension with theism: if God created humans in order to have relationships with those humans, God wouldn’t allow humans to go extinct—that would be antithetical to the aim of creation.
Upon posting the argument, a long-time Subscriber, Bernard, objected as follows:
[Two] of the dominant strains of monotheism hold (alternatively) that:
1. Humans won't go extinct, or at least not permanently. They'll be resurrected on judgement day and live forever thereafter.
2. Humans won't go extinct in the relevant sense. Their bodies might, but they will live on (and have a relationship with God) forever in a spiritual form.
I don't see how your argument gets going against the theist without begging a large part of the question against the central tenets of their religion.
I do not find this objection convincing, but I could see how someone could get there. The setup of the extinction argument could have been clearer. The fact that humans may live again in the afterlife, or some resurrected state, is neither here nor there where the extinction argument is concerned. The point of the argument is that God has a motive to create, or allow the creation, of human beings given that God wants a relationship with his human creations in their Earthly lives too—at least according to such religions. And so there is a good reason to expect that God wouldn’t allow human to go extinct.
Another way to put the argument: the fact of likely human extinction — should humans actually go extinct in the future — makes more sense on naturalism than on theism. On naturalism, the universe (or multiverse) and its inhabitants are causally isolated, and there is no God-like entity with the capacity to causally interact with the world, whereas on theism, there is an all-powerful, all-knowing, and perfectly just God who created the world and causally interacts with it. The extinction of humans would make more sense on naturalism since there is no reason on that view to expect humans to continue to exist. Whereas on theism, God would have a motivation — the desire for communion with his human creations in their lives on Earth — to preserve the human species. And this point is wholly compatible with the possibility of an afterlife with God, or being resurrected in the final judgment day.
As I said in the original post: the argument is some evidence — weak evidence, perhaps — against the claim that God exists.