How do you know the house you live in had a builder?

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Why can't it just have put itself together like apparently the Earth did so without the need of a God? If a planet can be put together without a creator, why can't a house? Why can't a car form without a creator? Why can't a watch form without a watchmaker?

I can go to the offices of the Local Government (we call them city councils here) and inspect documents which show the application for the building permit, the granting of one, any special conditions, the construction materials used, the names of the building inspectors who signed it off the compliance certicates, the name of the developer and so on.

I don't think that someone stepped out of a Harry Potter story and waved their wand around so that the building sprang up from magic.

it depends on what you call a house – a cave could be created without a builder, and it can be considered a primitive house, which fulfills our basic needs for a dwelling.

what?

because they're not alive?

i see people (PEOPLE) building houses all the time.

it's easier to assume that my house was created in the same way, than to think that my house somehow magically, divinely sprouted from the earth one day and all the other one are artificial.

I suppose we can have houses that flower, get to know each other intimately, and have baby houses when we can figure ot the genetic profile for houses.

Obviously in that case you better keep it well fed - otherwise house pets and children could start disappearing!

what do houses eat i wonder?

i'd assume a house whose structure is wood based would have a different diet than a brick house...would they tolerate pate?

come to think of it, i am sure there are many houses that do sustain themselves on children and their toys, gorging themselves one a year on halloween and boasting very aggressive feeding and hunting patterns.

this leads one to believe that the film Monster House was not just a children's horror film...but a documentary.

Suffice to say that entropy is everywhere. Living organisms seem to fend it off by constant small deaths and rebirths and births at the cellular level or having immune systems that fight off the agents of decay. Non-living structures don't have that self-patching activity. There have been some neat ideas for putting limestone-creating bacteria in cement so that the cement is self-repairing when it cracks but that's another example of biology being harnessed for self-repairing structures.

I am suspicious of every miniscule speck or sprawling mass I encounter, I don't believe the sun ever went away when it rises and I fail to be impressed by the ever changing cratered countenance of the mistreated moon, each curb you dare cross is a potential frigid ocean to be tipped into and each sneeze could trigger the rancid reincarnation clause that may be hidden in our life contracts! Where does the food actually come from, how do lightbulbs know when to fritter out of existence, are they attuned to the careful chaos of diseased stars? Do the birds get unfurled on invisible and invasive little strings? Are the cars that you can't see actually drawn on the chalkboard by the kid next door who you presume is really a ghostly projection from a malfunctioning projector buried in the basement of an attic masquerading as a semi detached house directly across from your window? Are you looking out from a glass of baubles by the way? Who papers over the tarmac cracks when you weren't there to observe them, who empties the bins down the forgotten alleyways, who sails down the stinking sewer network picking out the discarded For Sale signs, used condoms, broken antennaes and too curious cat carcasses?? If I didn't see it, it's not authentic!

Well for one, there's usually records of the builder. You can go down to city hall, find the lot number of the structure, the owner, the lot information, the zoning information, the blue prints, the name of the company that built it and the dates.

But if you are asking why a house can't self assemble and a planet can...

The universe has particles called fermions (electrons, protons, and neutrons, etc) and these are particles with mass. You and I, for example, are made of fermions. Why fermions have mass, and why mass is associated with gravity, no one knows. It's thought that, when the universe as we know it was very young, it was hot and small, but as it expanded and cooled, electrons, neutrons, and protons started to clump together under electrostatic forces and form hydrogen. These hydrogen particles, due to gravity, started to clump together, and eventually formed dense balls which became so dense that the hydrogen particles started to fuse together into helium particles. This process is called thermonuclear fusion and when it occurs, let's of energy in the form of heat and light. In other words, these balls of hydrogen became stars. The more massive of these stars exploded as supernovas when they died, and this violent process smashed atoms of helium together in such a way as to form the heavier elements. These heavier elements, began to clump under electrostatic and gravitational forces and some of this matter was pulled into rocky planets like Earth.

Unfortunately, there is nothing about gravity or electrostatic forces that would cause matter to spontaneously form into a four bedroom, two bathroom mediterranean style tract house.

Electrostatic forces, however, can drive the formation of rather intricate crystals in some situations.

You're following up your evolution question in the other thread, I see.

The question you're asking here is the set-up for developing what's called "the argument from design" -- that is, the argument for the existence of God, based on the apparent design (or adaptation) of living things. It's an argument that's been around for centuries -- John Ray's famous allegory of "the watch on the moors" is one classic example from around 1700.

The weakness of the argument from design is that it forces only two choices on you: are the complex structures and adaptations of living things the product of random chance, or design? If you're given only those two choices, then design is by far the better choice.

And this shows what Charles Darwin (and Alfred Russel Wallace) accomplished: they came up with a third alternative, natural selection, to explain the adaptation of organisms to their environment. Natural selection generates the *appearance* of design through variation and selection over many generations -- with the details of the process worked out by evolutionary biologists over the last 150 or so years.

Why can a god exist without a godmaker?

I have not observed houses fornicating with other houses to produce baby houses.

Nor do they find millions of years of fossilized houses in the geological record.

Actually they DO find fossilized "houses": transitional fossils of various kinds of huts in previous ages that are (in a sense) "ancestral" to the fully evolved house I live in today. But these ancestrial houses were man made.

So houses are not really analogous to what you're talking about.

Conservatives make a similar mistake to the OP's when they equate government debt with personal debt. They prefer simple solutions to realistic, complicated solutions.

At the same time though, on that issue, they're no worse than people who think Keynesianism means run deficits in both good and bad times.

I don't think they understood Keynes, or even tried. He wanted deficit spending to get undone once the animal spirits turned positive. However, the more I understand about how economists really think, the more I realize how often politicians deliberately distort what economists say.

Because someone had to take the basic materials manufacture them into building materials and then put said materials together to build a house. A planet is not a solid artificial structure...