David Pakman: 'Is Atheism Irrational?' NYTimes Article is Irrational

[WhoIsNumberNone]

[SamKnause]

1. Of course Atheism is irrational.

All rational people know that Zeus is the one and only true "God".

If you do not worship Zeus you are going to burn in the eternal hell fire.

[Moostache]

2. Heretic!!! Thor and Odin are the true gods of this universe!!!

On another note....The "agnostic" argument that we do not have enough evidence is a cop out.

There is PLENTY of evidence that the "god" of the bible (or the Torah or the Koran or the other holey books) is 100% fabricated start to finish. We may not be able to rule out "something", but we sure as hell can rule out the pathetic constructs of man's earliest attempts to understand the universe.

When we did not understand electricity, it was perfectly sane to believe that the gods controlled that which was beyond our reason...to keep on believing it now though is indicative of brain damage or cowardice.

[SamKnause]

3. One another note,

I agree.

[robersl]

4. Intelligence behind the Universe

David,

You want evidence for a diety? Walk over to the mirror - talk to yourself.

You cannot explain to me how you walk or how you talk, where your thoughts come from, or where the amazing form you behold in the mirror came from unless you postulate a deity.

You are a sentient being able to contemplate your own existence, living in a universe fine-tuned for life. This is a miracle within a miracle within a miracle.

Yet we are expected to believe that by some "fluke" this all just came into existence by chance? This is what is known as Magical Thinking. You don't need to point to a cause for the evidence before your eyes, it "just happened" on its own.

No. The mental gymnastics necessary to deny the existence of a creator are nonsensical. If human inquiry is to be about gathering evidence and reaching conclusions from it, there can be no escaping the conclusion that an Intelligence designed the world we live in.

[Bernardo de La Paz]

7. The "fluke" argument does not wash.

People who make it tend to have little conception of the enormous numbers involved. People making it tend to make few calculations.

When you have millions of molecules in a droplet of water, and millions of interactions per second, and millions of droplets in a gallon and millions of gallons in a small lake and millions of small lakes, and millions of seconds in a year and thousand million years in a billion years, ... it is no surprise that certain combinations occur again and again.

The particular combinations that build up to self-replication are not insanely rare, just rare. Given the huge numbers of times they occur it is no wonder that after a billion years or so life formed.

[robersl]

9. The Fluke

You're getting close here.

Now when you try to explain to me the mechanism behind that magical "combination" that caused life to start and realize you can't explain it, you will have bumped up against the conundrum which requires you to reconsider a deity.

It doesn't matter how many big numbers you dazzle your brain with, you can't explain how it happened. To use the "infinite monkeys" argument is just sloppy. (Sorry, I don't mean to get personal here but I just can't think of another word for it.)

[Bernardo de La Paz]

10. Not "infinite". Finite. I can explain it but I don't have time to go into so much biology.

I can explain it but I don't have time to go into a first year university level biology education in this thread to go through the chemistry of amino acids and how simple they are (some have been found in interstellar space) and sugars and how RNA came before DNA and how membranes form and so on.

We are not making an "infinite monkeys" argument. We are discussing finite numbers of molecules, but extremely large numbers of molecules and extremely large numbers of interactions and extremely large amounts of time for those interactions to occur.

PS: Calling an argument "sloppy" is not personal, it's ok and proper in context. Calling a person "sloppy" is an attack, which you did not do. I always try to attack the thinking and the logic and the factualness but not the person. However, some people are unable to separate themselves from one line of arguments they make and consider an attack on it as an attack on themselves, as if they can never make a mistake.

[robersl]

11. First Year Biology Education

Am I to understand that, given sufficient time to explain, you could tell me how life arose from inert matter?

That sounds like you have the formula for creating life.

[Bernardo de La Paz]

12. "Formula" is indicative of where the "Faithful" go off the rails.

There is no "formula" to create life. The universe is not that simple, but nor is it as complex as many think it is.

People of faith are, sad to say, looking for simple answers. When there are no simple answers, or the answers are more complex than they comprehend, they tend to retreat to their faith which provides simple answers that usually devolve to the simplest answer of all: "god did it".

The use of the word "formula" is indicative. "God did it" is a formula.

But yes, given sufficient time, I could explain to you how life arose from inert matter. That does not mean I have all the answers or that scientists have all the answers, but the chain is well enough established that it can be understood in all the level of detail that one can master short of being a research scientist. Yes, there are points here and there that can be nitpicked, because in fact scientists do nitpick them: that is the way the science gets stronger.

It is important to note that scientists do not seek to prove theories. They seek to disprove theories. Theories that survive every attempt to disprove them are the theories we keep.

On the other hand, faith accepts no proof or disproof. It is impervious to facts and evidence and reason. At its core is the statement "I believe what I believe".

When humans run into something that is hard to understand, such as the cause of disease, faith provides no guidance and no predictive ability. Faith did not predict bacteria, viruses, or prions; nor did it provide any guidance on how to find them or how to resolve the paradoxes they explain.

What is your mix of faith and science? Are you a Young Earth Creationist? Do you believe in Old Earth creationism, Gap creationism, Day-age creationism, Progressive creationism, Intelligent design, Genesis creation narrative, Genesis as an allegory, Omphalos hypothesis, Creation science, Baraminology? Where do you stand on evolution?

[robersl]

13. Formula

I guess Deist is a good word to describe me.

I don't care much for faith, and I have no issues with evolution or science.

What I have an issue with is when science-minded people jump conclusions. As in "Well, we've proved conclusively that the world is not 5,000 years old, I'm sure its just a matter of time before we get the whole Life/Mind/Origin of the Universe thing figured out too."

I realize that there are a lot of religious people in this world who believe a lot of very questionable things (may the Deity deliver us from Fundamentalists.)

However, there is, equally, no basis for Science to expect that it will ever explain Everything. The basic premise of modern science is "We will only consider the empirical and leave the theological to the churchmen." Yet, increasingly, science has begun to believe it can kill God, it's just a matter of time.

I would point to the failure of science to be explain how life began, how intelligence works, what set off the Big Bang,, etc. as areas where it will never replace theological examination of the universe.

I would say that many scientists have Faith - faith that science will one day conquer all. It's just a faith of a different sort, and it can be just as blind.

[Dark n Stormy Knight]

16. And I would say that the failure of religion to explain who made god

and how an entity as omnipotent as this so-called god supposedly is could have simply sprung from nothing proves the theological explanation impotent.

[robersl]

19. Reply

I would rather be stuck with the theological challenge of explaining where god came from then to be in the position of defending a physics which does not even attempt to explain what caused inert matter to organize itself into amino acids, then combine those into simple life forms, which somehow "knew" to go on to organize themselves into more advanced life forms, imbuing themselves with consciousness as they went, and, as an aside, tweaking their environment to the finely balanced equilibrium that supports life.

How does all that happen without a guiding intelligence? And don't come back with "there were billions of years to allow this to happen by chance".

What exactly was the impetus behind all this organization and development?

[Neoma]

23. What made God? Bigger God? Super God? Godzilla?

You know, at first Christians didn't believe that evolution could happen because they didn't believe in extinction. How would God allow his perfect creations be destroyed? Then I guess the dodo happened and they had to come up with a caricature of what evolution is in order to deny it, because they knew otherwise it'd debunk a few things. But science and religion used to fit together as a cohesive unit before all that. Why would you want to learn about the world they said? To understand God better. But once evolution took hold in debates, there's been a lot of anti-science dogma floating around.

If you'd rather ponder God and ignore discovery, that's your choice. But I consider that a very simple way to think. It's not exactly an exchange of ideas except it's all about the same book repeatedly, over and over.

What I've found fascinating though, is the things Christians believed then denied since Christianity's existence. There's this idea that was challenged by monks in order to disprove paganism, and it is now believed by some Christians. That we're all made in God's image. Christians used to challenge that God used to look like us in order to disprove anthropomorphism. To disprove that the Gods are just like us walking around on earth except that they're immortal. Full circle. Jesus is a come'n!

[Dark n Stormy Knight]

24. You totally missed the point. As expected.

Again--you ask, "What exactly was the impetus behind all this organization and development?" And I my response is to ask, "Whatever that impetus was, what exactly was the impetus behind that impetus?"

And you have no answer, yet you pretend your question is somehow proof of god. But, of course, it isn't.

[starroute]

5. "The tide goes in, the tide goes out, you can't explain that!"

Invoking the anthropic principle as a justification for belief in a creator-god is simply a more advanced form of Bill O'Reilly's "you can't explain that" argument.

But beyond that, there's another fundamental logical fallacy here -- which is to lump together everything we can't explain and assume it has a single cause. The existence of the physical universe is a mystery. The sense of fundamental interconnectness and purpose we may feel in looking at the world around us is a mystery. The awareness of a higher, guiding presence within our own minds that many people report is a mystery.

But is there any reason to believe they're all the same mystery? You can argue that they are, but it requires a leap of faith. And to further identify that hypothetical ultimate mystery with the story-book God of the Bible -- who hangs out on Earth back in the old days, smites people down for petty grievances or for not carrying out mass murders at his direction, and favors certain groups over others for no particular reason -- is the most extreme logical fallacy of all.

[robersl]

6. The Tide

Actually, the tide can be explained by the gravitational pull of the Moon.

I was not defending Jehovah or any fundamentalist distortions of the deity. I was merely pointing out that when confronted with an overwhelming abundance of form and order, observed by intelligent life, it becomes increasingly less likely that there was not a higher intelligence that set it all in motion.

You do not observe sandcastles arising spontaneously from inert sand - it requires an intelligence to organize it into a form.

[Bernardo de La Paz]

8. Time. And sand castles is a bogus diversion.

In a billion years, there is more than enough time to evolve the overwhelming abundance of form and order.

It is especially comprehensible for people who realize just how few basic forms there are in biology. By analogy there are many kinds of automobiles, but once the basic "car" was invented, it wasn't long before there were trucks and sports cars and buses and taxis and sedans and station wagons and SUVs and ....

The sandcastle argument is bogus because sandcastles are not self-replicating. That should be obvious, but bears pointing out.

[starroute]

14. Intelligence is over-rated

It's what we humans are good at, so being inclined to invent gods in our own image, we've invented one that's a super-duper form of intelligence.

The one thing you can say about the universe is that it appears to be self-organizing -- and that little by little, that results in greater complexity and a greater appearance of design.

But evidence for a plan-it-all-out-in-advance deity pulling the strings from somewhere on high? Not so much.

[robersl]

15. Intelligence

Help me out here:

If I say that everything exists within the mind of the deity, and that matter is really a form of concentrated spiritual energy, I am some sort of deluded religious nut, right?

But if a PhD in math says that, quite possibly, the universe is actually a computer simulation created by some human in the future, this gets discussed in all seriousness at professional journals, in the MSM (see this Sunday's NYT), etc., etc. as cutting edge science?

I can't see much difference between the two theories, other than mine is older, so help me out, what's the difference?

[Dark n Stormy Knight]

17. So what set that higher intelligence in motion?

Are we to believe that certain phenomena are too miraculous to not have a higher intelligence behind them, but that an intelligence capable of setting such phenomena in motion arose spontaneously?

[robersl]

21. Reply

If you are allowed to not explain how inert matter magically came alive, then I am allowed to not explain where god came from.

[Dark n Stormy Knight]

25. I'm not the one asking where anything came from. I'm just saying that you can't use the

"but where did it come from?" question as proof of god, because your argument is that something awesome had to have come from something even more awesome. By your own "logic" that question arises infinitely for every answer.

[Malteil]

18. You know what always got me?

How come for thousands and thousands of years there were pantheons of gods everywhere. And then all of a sudden there was one god and only one god and all of the other gods were false. Where was God for those previous thousands of years?

I got in a lot of trouble for asking that question in Sunday school. They told my parents on me.

[robersl]

20. Pantheons

Pantheons are no different than The Trinity.

Pantheonism is the misunderstanding of moderns. What appears to the modern mind to be a pantheon of many gods is really just representations of a multifaceted deity.

[Malteil]

22. So...

The Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost... which one is the god of thunder and which is the god of wine? Christ would be the wine guy right... blood and all.

I guess then your answer is that God was always there and he just never had anyone to write about him until the Hebrews came along.

Also...
"What appears to the modern mind to be a pantheon of many gods is really just representations of a multifaceted deity."

Would that make God a cross-dresser? Or just someone in touch with his feminine side.

All kidding aside, it all seems too easy to explain away difficult questions by saying "It's God, have faith."

[dsteve01]

26. I want to believe

I've been to Rosewell several times just for the museum. But I don't think the plot is as strong as The Lord of The Rings.

I can only believe in Frodo.

[DeSwiss]

27. ....

''Modern science is based upon the principle, ''Give us one free miracle and we'll explain all the rest.'' ~Terrence McKenna