About that: no April 5, 2010
Posted by Evil Bender in Atheism, Religion.trackback
Dr Jensen told the congregation that atheism is as much of a religion as Christianity.
“It’s about our determination as human beings to have our own way, to make our own rules, to live our own lives, unfettered by the rule of God and the right of God to rule over us,” he said.
Actually, no. Atheists argue that current evidence does not support the hypothesis that god(s) exist. Complaining that we don’t want an Angry Man in the Sky telling us what to do is just as silly as arguing that we don’t believe in unicorns because we don’t want them on our lawn.
But yes, atheists in general do find it silly that anyone thinks the best way to live their life is to do what an ancient book tells you to because it was supposedly written by an all-powerful being (who wasn’t able to best iron chariots).
Not that I’m surprised that an Archbishop would want to argue that decent people should follow his god: that’s job security for him, after all.
I’ve yet to find an atheist with compelling evidence. I observe that DNA devolves instead of evolves, but you know that. And yet we postulate Lennons world with all the $ocial implications. One might argue that your world is all the more secured sequestered in these ivory towers, embracing the contradiction you’ve outlined so well. It’s only appropriate that your dissent was politely cancelled.
Cheers
Wow. Way late to this idiot, but minddrunk: We’re not the ones with the burden of proof. It’s not up to us to prove the nonexistence of something.
Your camp has yet to even define what evidence would support your assertions. You’re the ones claiming gods exist, and yet you can’t tell us what, if anything, that would mean.
As for evolution, what the hell do you mean “devolves”? DNA does all sorts of clever tricks.
Of course, I don’t expect anything from you to enlighten us. Creationists, after all, are the sorts who look at evidence of the orderly nested hierarchy of the sort evolution predicts and then argue “It’s random chance! It’s random chance that our random god who randomly spawned from a random nothing storm just randomly chose to do things in an exacting order! It’s just random coincidence that he chose to do things entirely consistent with its nonexistence!”
Hi BD,
I guess since you took a couple of months to respond, I don’t feel bad either. That’s really funny. Well, first of all, yes you are correct in saying that I look at the evidence. I like that sort of thing. But no, I’ve not seen random chance produce anything but chaos, and I can challenge you to produce this evidence because I know it does not exist. This is simple philosophy. You carry your belief that there cannot possibly be a creator, so your philosophy and view of things must support this view. When it does not, you resort to insults and childish name calling. That makes it unpleasant for others to dialogue with you, and when they leave, you are there to claim a victory.
You didn’t read a thing I typed, did you?
Liar. You’re making that challenge because you know I’m not making that claim. In fact, anyone bothering to read what I wrote would see that I was accusing you of being the one who believes in sheer random chance.
I certainly haven’t seen any Creationist make any coherent stance to the contrary: God just popped in and has all X attributes for no reason whatsoever, and by sheer coincidence they happened to lead him to create this specific universe. It compounds the imaginary fine tuning “problem” instead of reducing it.
I don’t know exactly how much random chance there really is in stuff like the Big Bang, but for evolution, well, evolution is NOT pure random chance. It’s my position that “random chance” is an illusion of language. Mutations happen, and it’s easier to simulate randomness than to calculate the wave function of every bit of ionizing radiation. Given the digital/discrete nature of DNA, there are exact changes that can happen in finite places.
The “random chance” given large populations over long periods of time will inherently give you a lot of variations. How do you think genetic algorithms produce useful engineering solutions?
Here’s one example of genetic algorithms (NOT random chance alone!) producing a useful function.
I’ll take evolution over a random, baseless, arbitrary Creationist god.