If the Sun Didn’t Exist, Man Would Have Invented It

Voltaire famously said:

If God did not exist, it would have been necessary to invent him.

(This is often rendered a little more euphonically in English as “man would have invented him” or “man would have invented him anyway.”)

This is one of those statements which is often quoted as if it is profound, and not merely profoundly stupid. To show why, I will give a parallel”

If the Sun did not exist, it would have been necessary to invent it.

You see, if there was no sun, some explanation would be necessary for why there is light during the day, why you can get sunburned during the day but not the night, and as our understanding of astronomy increased, why the planets orbit around a central point as if there was some enormous mass there.

Of course, if the village atheist walked by he’d remark that if the Sun didn’t exist there wouldn’t be light during the day, you wouldn’t be able to get sunburned during the day rather than the night, the planets wouldn’t orbit around a central mass, and if he was especially clever, we wouldn’t even be here to “invent” the sun to explain these things that wouldn’t need an explanation because they wouldn’t happen.

And, if this hypothetical village atheist came by, he wouldn’t realize that he’s merely stated the point. Village atheists are strange people.

(He’s probably reply, “but I can see the Sun” and wouldn’t understand at all if you explained that this is why you chose that analogy, because in general they don’t understand analogies since analogies rely on the ability to apply logic. He will also completely misunderstand if you point out that he believes in the gravity of the Sun despite not being able to see (touch, taste, feel, etc) gravity. It would be utterly lost on him if you pointed out that you can’t actually see the Sun, you can only see the light coming from the Sun, and infer the Sun that produces this light.)


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6 thoughts on “If the Sun Didn’t Exist, Man Would Have Invented It

  1. “You see, if there was no sun, some explanation would be necessary for why there is light during the day […] why the planets orbit around a central point as if there was some enormous mass there.”

    Yeah, but no. Your analogy doesn’t work as there are no effects for which we need to attribute God as a cause. If you’re referring to anything in the natural world, the causes are natural all the way down. If you’re referring to supernatural claims in the Bible like the resurrection, the cause is that it was made up by deluded or mistaken people, the same as all religions. So, natural there as well.

    (Incidentally, the planets don’t orbit around the sun, the sun and planets combined orbit around their barycenter, or center of mass, which is just outside of the sun’s surface and has been pinpointed to within 100 meters.)

    “in general [atheists] don’t understand analogies since analogies rely on the ability to apply logic.”

    Not true, and analogies are logically fallacious, to be pedantic.

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    1. I’m referring to things like the necessary ground of our contingency or the actuality which enables change to happen (basically, how time actually moves). Another way to look at it is why there is anything natural at all, and why it has a nature.

      With regard to your attempted nitpicking, it’s only Jupiter’s barycenter with the Sun which might be just outside the sun’s surface, depending on the actual diameter of the Sun. (You don’t think that the diameter of the sun is known to under 100 meters, or is even constant over time, do you?) For all of the other planets, their barycenter is within the Sun (unless our estimates for its size are *way* off.) And bodies only orbit, in the sense that you’re using the term, about their barycenter in a 2-body system. With more than 2 bodies, the orbits are constantly perturbed. However, the normal definition of “orbit” refers to the thing originating the gravity, not to the point around which stuff moves, which isn’t a single point anyway because in the real world everything is actually changing over time. Absolutely none of which changes the point that if the sun weren’t there, you’d still have to explain why stuff was moving as if a body of the Sun’s mass was where the Sun is.

      “Not true, and analogies are logically fallacious, to be pedantic.”

      Analogies are not arguments, so they can be neither valid nor fallacious. What I was talking about was how analogies are used to illustrate relationships, i.e. to illustrate logical structure. Atheists of the sort I’m speaking of don’t seem to be able to grasp the idea of the logical structure of the relationships between real things, so they can’t understand things meant to illustrate what that structure is.

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      1. The question, “why is there anything natural at all?” presupposes that there is something supernatural. ‘Why is there something rather than nothing’ is a better question, but even that presupposes that there should be a reason for something to exist as opposed to a reason for nothing to exist. The answer is, ‘we don’t know’, but it may be (to speculate) because a state of nothing cannot exist (as existence is something), or because all states actually exist, including the nothing state. Or something else. Everything being created by the Christian God, with its very high specified complexity existing for no reason whatsoever, would appear to be the least likely answer (if it even is an answer), and no better than any other made-up creation myth.

        Of course, all of this nonsense is a million miles away from the Bible, with its slavery and parochial, contradictory stories. And not by accident either. Easier to defend an immaterial God which exists conveniently outside of space and time, than the biblical one for which no evidence exists.

        Regarding the solar system’s barycenter, its position is known to within 100 meters according to the paper “Modeling the Uncertainties of Solar System Ephemerides for Robust Gravitational-wave Searches with Pulsar-timing Arrays” (M. Vallisneri et al 2020 ApJ 893 112) I agree this barycenter stuff is irrelevant, but your arrogance demanded a response.

        An analogy in and of itself isn’t necessarily an argument, but your analogy (‘parallel’) was the title and main substance of your post. To be fair, your post was confused, just like your YT videos.

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        1. And, of course, we get to the typical atheist answer to why is there something rather than nothing: Stop thinking!

          I’m really curious what you read that cited that paper by M. Vallisneri et al, because I don’t believe for a second that you read this paper merely because you were interested in timing models for gravitational wave analysis and thought that a bayesian model for dealing with multiple sets of solar system ephemeris data might be a nifty approach, and in the course of reading it only happened to come across a line about the uncertainty of the Sun’s orbit about the solar-system-barycenter and misinterpreted that to be the uncertainty of the location of the barycenter as if the solar-system-barycenter was stationary (relative to an intertial frame of reference for the bodies) like it is (typically but not-unreasonably depicted) for the 2-body problem.

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          1. “And, of course, we get to the typical atheist answer to why is there something rather than nothing: Stop thinking!”

            And, of course, we get the typical internet Christian response to anything an atheist has said: misrepresent and lie. Giving several possible answers but admitting that we don’t necessarily know the real answer (assuming that there is one) isn’t “stopping thinking”. Claiming that the answer is “God dunnit” actually does stop all thinking.

            “I’m really curious what you read that cited that paper by M. Vallisneri et al,”

            Why didn’t you just search for it? It would have been a lot quicker than all that typing.

            https://www.inverse.com/science/solar-system-rethink
            https://www.space.com/solar-system-mass-center-gravitational-waves.html

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