Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Heather Spoonheim on January 11, 2012 at 1:03am

I wouldn't say there is an unhealthy dose of 'science worship' amongst Atheists at all.  In my experience, more than 2/3rds of the time that science is brought up in apologetics, it is raised by the theist.  It is raised by theists because the only 'evidence' that they think supports the existence of invisible boogiemen is their ignorance of various scientific claims.

I almost never open with a scientific justification as to why I believe there are no gods -> but I almost always encounter a rebuttal based on ignorance of evolution, abiogenesis, or cosmology.  I've never had a theist answer my claim that there isn't a shred of evidence for gods.  I've also never gotten through a debate with a theist without them arguing that their scientific illiteracy is proof that their god(s) must exist.

Permalink Reply by Kir Komrik on January 11, 2012 at 1:24am

Hey Heather,

I wouldn't say there is an unhealthy dose of 'science worship' amongst Atheists at all. 

It may depend on how we define "unhealthy" and "worship" but I disagree. In fact, I hear this kind of affectionate tone on TA every day, not to suggest there is anything wrong with that, but that it is characterstic of most atheists.

In my experience, more than 2/3rds of the time that science is brought up in apologetics, it is raised by the theist.

My experience is quite different. I would say over 85% of conversations I hear between atheists (not trained in deconversion) and deists quickly ramps to a discussion in which the atheist immediately puts up the empirical standard for evidence; which is Science. I'm not saying they are wrong for doing that (because they are very much correct in doing so), only that that type of approach is not effective with adherents and that it is characterstic of most atheists.

I almost never open with a scientific justification as to why I believe there are no gods

That is one way, but not the only way, in which an atheist can make an appeal to Science. Challenging a deist's assertion by demanding an empirical standard be met does not sound like what you're describing, but is an appeal to Science nonetheless.

I would compliment you on your persuasion skills if this is the way you approach theists because I don't think that is very typical.

I've never had a theist answer my claim that there isn't a shred of evidence for gods.

I think we have probably all shared that experience and I feel your pain.

- kk

Permalink Reply by cameron penney on January 11, 2012 at 2:43am

Angelo, for the sake of argument let us say that everything and being has a creator. According to most religions that creator is God. Using this argument...who created God?

If everything has a creator then god must have been created. Who did it?

Permalink Reply by Angelo on January 11, 2012 at 7:09am

If everything has a creator then god must have been created. Who did it?

Maibe Santa Claus ? or Shrek ? 

or.....better.....nobody created God ?? he simply is, without beginning, and without a end.

Permalink Reply by archaeopteryx on January 11, 2012 at 10:47am

Michael/Angelo, RE: "or.....better.....nobody created God ?? he simply is, without beginning, and without a end."

Sorry M/A, you don't get to skate on this one - you said both, "everything has a creator," and "nothing can be created from nothing," so who created your god? (My own answer is, Man) And from what was he created? (My money's on imagination)

Try answering a question with an actual answer, you might find it a refreshing change of pace.

pax vobiscum,
archaeopteryx
in-His-own-image.com

Permalink Reply by Wintershade3001 on January 11, 2012 at 10:56am

or.....better.....nobody created God ?? he simply is, without beginning, and without a end.

This is definitely not better, because you have stated yourself that everything has a creator. If your "god" doesn't fit under the umbrella of "everything", then you have yet again proven that your "god" doesn't exist. Either that, or your statement that "everything has a creator" is false. And if you claim that your "god" is an exception, then you acknowledge that there are exceptions to the rule, where you are obliged to argue why the universe itself is not an exception.

Also, since you already mentioned the laws of thermodynamics, you should know that "without beginning, and without a end" is equivalent to "non-existent".

Bravo, sir. You have answered your own original question - twice in the same post, you have proven that your "god" indeed cannot and doesn't exist. I applaud you in the most sincere manner.

Permalink Reply by Angelo on January 11, 2012 at 6:52am

You are repeating once again a flat-out incorrect statement that has already been disproven in previous posts and which you have not addressed. If my proof is wrong, it is incumbent upon you to show how. For the record, you have not.

oh really, it has been disproven ? i have not seen, how ??

http://pt.scribd.com/doc/448517/Evolution-What-Are-the-Odds

Borel's law of probability states that if the odds of an event happening are worse than 1 in1*10^50, then that event will NEVER HAPPEN.Dr. Harold Morowitz, former professor of biophysics at Yale University, estimated thatthe probability of the chance formation of the smallest, simplest form of living organismknown is 1 out of 10^340,000,000. One out of ten to the 340 millionth power isunimaginable odds. This large figure is a "1" followed by 340,000,000 zeroes. As you cansee, Morowitz' odds against even the simplest life evolving were infinitely more than1*10^50, making them impossible.The very popular evolutionist, Dr. Carl Sagan of Cornell University, figured even steeper odds against the simplest life beginning naturally on a planet such as earth. According toSagan, the probability would be about 1 out of 10^2,000,000,000. Try to imagine ten tothe 2 billionth power. Pretty astounding odds. Interestingly, these impossible odds againstevolution came from one of the most prominent evolutionists of our time

Permalink Reply by archaeopteryx on January 11, 2012 at 10:39am

Your responses, Michael/Angelo, are becoming predictably formulaic - you first respond with a question, followed by quoting someone else's words. Do you have any original thoughts?

pax vobiscum,
archaeopteryx
in-His-own-image.com

Permalink Reply by Wintershade3001 on January 11, 2012 at 11:10am

And again, Angelo, you continue with your outward lies.

Actually, I apologise, you are not lying. You are quote mining, which is even worse than lying.

You are quoting the "most prominent evolutionists of our time" out of context, and since you know they said that, you must know in which context they did say that.

The statement about probability you made is true - however, the whole truth is that those very people all confirmed that the course of evolution or abiogenesis is not governed by probability, but by strict natural laws, which dictate that it must have happened this way.

This is exactly the same as putting a metal coin into a glass filled with sulphuric acid, and "calculating" the probabilities how one of hundreds of thousands of atoms of iron or zinc would react with one of millions of molecules of sulphuric acid, and then concluding that "it's too improbable to happen, so there must be an invisible boogeyman who does it when we're not looking". While, on the other hand, the strict natural laws in chemistry dictate that it must happen.

And the worst part is that you know this. If you actually read any of the authors you mentioned here, you would have known this. I assume that you have read them, which means that you are perfidiously ignoring the whole work, and cherry-picking the large numbers from it out of context.

According to your logic, the Bible itself says there is no god. Psalm 14, first strophe clearly says "There is no God". So once again, you prove with your own posts - your "god" does not exist.

Permalink Reply by archaeopteryx on January 11, 2012 at 2:13pm

Wintershade, re: "If you actually read any of the authors you mentioned here, you would have known this. I assume that you have read them...."

I'm beginning to get a new image of what's going on. Remember, in a previous post to you, I mentioned that Michael/Angelo's grasp of the English language appeared to fluctuate? I strongly suspect that the original Angleo has read nothing of the material he's quoting - quite possibly he is not alone - quite possibly there are a group of Fundies hunkering over a laptop somewhere in a college dorm room or his mother's basement, researching our responses on Fundie websites, then feeding the appropriate answers, when any there are, to Angie here.

Try reading his posts in that light and tell me what you think.

pax vobiscum,
archaeopteryx
in-His-own-image.com

Permalink Reply by Kir Komrik on January 11, 2012 at 12:58pm

Hey Angelo,

 

I am prepared to wait until hell freezes over for an answer.

oh really, it has been disproven ? i have not seen, how ??

As proven, your comment is flat-out false.

i have not seen, how ??

Then you are not reading your own thread. But really, I think you are just being disingenuous. What you are doing is impolite and disrespectful to everyone here, on all sides, who are trying to engage you honestly. This because you are forcing people to re-post arguments that you could have simply read by going back into the thread and responding.

I insist that you respond to this proof *directly* and stop prevaricating and employing blatantly dishonest methods to deceive readers.

This proof comes about as a result of the all too common tendency of human beings to confuse cause and effect when applying probability to causality. The best way to explain this is to start with a first order approximation in the form of a thought experiment. We will then formalize our conclusions into an Axiom.

We imagine a bucket of marbles, say a few billion of them, and we paint each one with a unique number so that each can be uniquely identified. We choose integer multiples in the form of a count, beginning with 1 and going in order to the highest value we have. Now, suppose we take a number of marbles much smaller than that total, say 10. Now, let us randomly pick those 10 marbles and place them in another bucket, call it the bucket of Intelligent Designs. Most people can clearly see that the probability of those 10 marbles having values within an interval of, say, 100, is exceedingly slim. This is the Intelligent Design argument. It is nonsense. And the reason why is that we have no way of knowing how many marbles were placed in the Intelligent Designs bucket. So, if we placed every marble from the starting bucket into the Intelligent Designs bucket the probability would then be exactly 100%; that is 100% that human beings were created by natural events only.

Let us tighten this up.

Let us begin a causality train whose program will be to generate a set of dependent variables, effects, from a set of independent variables, the causes. To get the set of effects A and the set of causes B which caused the set A, A and B must contain members that are not strictly arbitrary. We can define a rank n order m metric tensor, ₵, of “causality” generators; each denoted ϕ¹₁, ϕ¹₁ , … , ϕⁿ_m. Then for each ϕⁱ_j we can define a domain and range for each; corresponding to the sets B and A respectively. Now, let it be observed empirically that there exists a set a and b such that a ∈ A and b ∈ B; and both a and b contain one or more elements, that is:

r ∈ a ∈ A, s∈ b ∈ B and we guarantee that an enumeration of elements exists such that:

u < v.

where u is the enumeration r_u ∈ a and v is the enumeration r_v ∈ A.

If the generators ϕⁿ_m meet the definition of a function, that is, a rule that assigns to each element b ∈ B exactly one element ϕⁿ_m(b) ∈ A, then it is likewise possible to find a set of generators which also meet the definition of a function, δⁿ_m(s) ∈ a.

Now, we let the generators ϕⁿ_m and δⁿ_m be functions that strictly assign each element of its corresponding domain randomly to exactly one element in its corresponding range.

Then the probability that there exists a generator δⁿ_m is ∝ u / (v - u). However, the probability that there exists a generator ϕⁿ_m = 1.

QED.

In other words, appeals to beauty, order and the appearance of an intelligent design, as just one example of this proof’s application, to suggest, imply or otherwise provide evidence for an intelligent actor as the cause thereof is nonsense. Let’s go back to the marbles to explain why and try to state this proof in English since we promised no advanced math here.

In the marble example the starting bucket represents all the possible independent variables of any nature or “universe”; that is, the environment variables in which, for example, something like Deoxyribonucleic Acid was first “created”. What Intelligent Design incorrectly assumes is that we are selecting only a subset of all possible independent variable values (physical properties of an environment) and placing them in Intelligent Design bucket (the thing so ordered and “intelligently designed”) for which we require the filling of a similarly narrow band of marble number values. This is not reality. The reality is that we must consider the full range of values of independent and dependent variables, which results in a 100% percent chance that intelligent design can generate something of any complexity. The probability of producing something that we subjectively call complex is proportional to the dependent variables associated with that complex object (to be exact, the dependent variables that are responsible for the complex character of the object) and all independent variables, which are essentially infinite, and thus also 100%. So, it is 100% probable that nature generated those complex structures.

 

Ignorance and superstition never quits.

 

- kk

Permalink Reply by archaeopteryx on January 11, 2012 at 2:37pm

Suggestion Kir - wait til Texas freezes over, it's just as likely, and at least it's real!

Why in the world would you expect him to agree to "advance the conversation," as you continue to request, when by simply answering all questions either with his own questions or with a patchwork quilt he's cut and pasted off of some Fundie websites, he can, even with his severely limited intellect, make us jump through hoops trying to pin him down? Compared to the rest of us, his effort is minimal, while ours is significantly greater, and we generate less benefit from it than he. I KNOW you're more than familiar with the law of diminishing returns - I'm thinking it applies here. He's enjoying both the attention and the control.

Oh, have you noticed, since Michael/Angelo was outted, Michael seems to have disappeared --

pax vobiscum,
archaeopteryx
in-His-own-image.com

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