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@kylecousin

We don't need to read the stories in greek mythology to know that the stories are fiction and bulls**t. In the same way we don't need to read the bible/koran/etc. to know that it's bulls**t.

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Did you read ALL of the stories of EVERY god that has ever been written about? Did you read about faeries? Did you read about leprechauns? Did you read about the flying spaghetti monster? Did you read about purple unicorns?

Hang on, let me make up something...

There is a being called Jagalafrockstermon that has exactly 85% of the abilities of Yahweh. Make sure you read up on him too before you tell me it's false.

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"nobody believes in the Jagalafrockstermon,"

So? How does that have anything to do with the Jagalafrockstermon's reality? Perhaps those billions of people have been living their lives blindfolded.

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@kylecousin

Debating a religious person is like a geologist debating a flat earther.

I will agree that it can sometimes be helpful when debating them to understand some of what they are saying. But I'm sure as hell not going to study their crazy ideas just to verify they are false, I already know they are false.

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No, its not blind non-belief. The crux of the argument is written in big letters on every temple door. What he's saying is why read all 13 books of the wheel of time when you know at the outset that its a FANTASY STORY.

God's reality would be carved into every person's mind if he were real. There would be no room for doubt unless God needed doubt, and God wouldn't need doubt or He wouldn't be God. There is no reason to explore the idea beyond that.

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@kylecousin

Don't misunderstand me. I'm quite knowledgeable about science and to a lesser degree philosophy. I am always reading about this type of stuff. But I see no reason to study biblical literature or any other religion/god. I may study the religious person's arguments, so I can find a better way to counter their arguments, but that's about it.

Thanks StaticThunder, you have a good way of elaborating further on what I'm trying to say lol Sometimes I'm not the best at explaining things.

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xkcd has a good cartoon about this

http://xkcd.com/154/

I am only troubled when these people try to impose their will upon me. I am not interested in debating or researching that which is obviously untrue.

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"At least inform yourself first. Jesus turned water into wine, not God, Mozes opened the sea, not Jesus or God"

Funny that you told him to inform himself.

"Jesus turned water into wine, not God"

uh, according to the story - JESUS IS GOD.

"Mozes opened the sea, not Jesus or God"

First of all, it's Moses, MoZes, secondly, Moses didn't do s**t. He raised his cane in the air, God parted the sea" Moses was powerless. Read the stories again (or for the first time) and speak when you know what you're talking about.

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Right, because believers ALL believe in God and never argue over who has it right?

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lol static. Good point, well made. It just reminded me of Dawkins comparing organising atheists as like trying to herd cats seeing a bunch of atheists (like me!) arguing over wether you have to read teh bible to say if its fiction or not.

I don't think it sucks to be me, but I guess I can't be sure till i've tried being someone else ; )

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Because there is no agenda among atheists. Just a shared lack of belief.

I'm a militant atheist. I have no interest in debating people on it and no patience anymore for people who think we have some duty to respect people who believe in bulls**t, and furthermore acquire a deep understanding of their PARTICULAR bulls**t, anymore than I have to respect and understand someones heartfelt belief that we didn't land on the moon or that we should all kill ourselves to catch a ride on the spaceship behind Halley's comet.

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@StaticThunder

That's what I'm talkin about!

Wish you could join me and my friends in Oklahoma. We're anti-theists and we seem to be the only 3 in the whole damn state. Ideally I'd love to get one more of us and sit around at a table and talk about religion for a couple of hours and record it, kinda of like the four horsemen (dawkins, hitchens, dennet, and harris) video on youtube if you've seen it. Awesome!

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"Ideally I'd love to get one more of us and sit around at a table and talk about religion for a couple of hours and record it"

First you say that you don't want to know anything about it, because it's too obviously all bulls**t, and then you want to discuss it with someone? You're trying to be like Dawkins? You know that Dawkins actually knows what he's talking about and has done more research than anyone else about the topic. You can't debate like the "four horsemen" - because you don't have the knowledge to start any decent discussion.
We're still on the same side, we both can't stand religion, but I don't think any serious debate about it can be done with you.

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@kylecousin

Don't try to tell me what we can and can't do lol We are not stupid.

We don't have to have the knowledge of Dawkins to debate religion, among other topics. We have plenty I assure you.

You may be an atheist, but you sure are not an anti-theist.

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"Dawkins knows every single small detail about the Bible and the Quran, he has solid arguments very every ridiculous story in the book. You can't have those arguments, because you don't know what those books are about."

So you still think you can argue someone into not believing?

More's the pity.

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Furthermore, I don't WANT to be like Richard Dawkins and neither should you. I have a life, a career and a family that are far more important than converting the masses to atheism. I'm not interested in being a demagogue begrudgingly respected by atheists on digg - as if thats a good tihng.

You actually WANT to argue Biblical and Quranical minutia? What's WRONG WITH YOU?

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ALL HAIL ZOMBIE CHRIST!

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You may not be a fanatic Balurdo, but if you believe in a god, you are delusional. There is no evidence supporting any such claim, and acting on such beliefs without proof is not only foolhardy but demonstrably dangerous.

How can anyone believe in a god while faced w/science? If you are staring at this computer screen, you know that magic is not real. Anything under the sun can have a rational logical explanation that does not involve the supernatural. If you drive a car, own a cellphone, and wear clothes made in China, you know the world is round, Newton's laws work, and this planet is not the center of the universe. You know prayer doesn't put gas in your tank. You have to put it in there yourself. The reason this charlatan gets away with this blatant con that suckers millions every year is because people insist on still believing crap that science has repeatedly disregarded as asinine. You worship a god AFTER it proves itself to you. Not on the promise that someday you'll see the proof, if only you have enough faith.

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Aside from the believing thing I was with you till:

"Evolution? Sure, why not! We don't know! Creationism? Maybe, more likely not! Relativity? Sure!"

Evolution has a massive amount of supporting evidence, so yes we do "know" as far as we know anything. Creatonism has zero supporting evidence. Zero. There is no maybe, its made up. Glad you gave relativity a free pass - probably the most debatable theory of the three (due its contradictiosn to quantum mechanics).

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"How can anyone believe life came from non-life when faced with science? H"

Pretty easily, actually. There is nothing magical about chemistry.

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Okay, apparently you do think biochemistry is magic and means you should believe in a the judgmental and jealous God of Abraham.

Fine by me. Let me know how that works out for you .

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"How can anyone believe life came from non-life when faced with science?"
Well, we're getting there in leaps and bounds. Here's a copy/paste of another post I've made to a creationist:
We have sufficiently demonstrated how nucleotides (particularly ribonucleotides) are synthesized under prebiotic conditions. [1][2][3]

The formation of fatty acids has similarly been sufficiently demonstrated to be plausible under prebiotic conditions. [4] We can then further demonstrate that these fatty acids can become lipid bilayer vesicles. [5][6][7]

Formation of oligomers in areas of in areas with a high concentration of nucleotides has also sufficiently been established. [8][9][10][11]

Bilayer vesicle absorbing nucleotides and growing has been demonstrated. [12][13][14]

What we're yet to sufficiently establish (as I've alluded to), is the formation of increasingly complex polymers within an encapsulated vesicle (or nucleotides). The next step after that would be the ability for them to develop into self-replicators, and then tie it all up with a bow on it in a plausible theory under prebiotic conditions.

"How can anyone believe the conditions for life on this planet being so perfect as to defy all probability and yet we are here?"
So the conditions are perfect, yet the probability is slim? I don't believe I follow, but I think you're trying to eat your cake and then have it, too.

"How is it someone can look at DNA code and say it was happenstance but they look at computer code and know it wasn't accidental?"
See above w/ abiogenesis. We've been able to make polymers in some sort of "primordial soup" for about 200 years now, dating back to Strecker's work that predates Darwin.


1. Alkaline fluid circulation in ultramafic rocks and formation of nucleotide constituents: a hypothesis.
Nils G Holm, Marion Dumont, Magnus Ivarsson and Cécile Konn.
2. http://www.springerlink.com/content/t44rn5h873262431/
3. http://www.springerlink.com/content/u65g2628j3011467/
4. Initial indications of abiotic formation of hydrocarbons in the Rainbow ultramafic hydrothermal system, Mid-Atlantic Ridge, Nils G. Holma, , and Jean Luc Charloub.
5.Extreme accumulation of nucleotides in simulated hydrothermal pore systems.
Philipp Baaske, Franz M. Weinert, Stefan Duhr, Kono H. Lemke, Michael J. Russell, and Dieter Braun
6. Formation of Protocell-like Vesicles in a Thermal Diffusion Column Itay Budin, Raphael J. Bruckner, and Jack W. Szostak
7. Mineral Surface Directed Membrane Assembly
Martin M. Hanczyc & Sheref S. Mansy & Jack W. Szostak
8. Extreme accumulation of nucleotides in simulated hydrothermal pore systems.
Philipp Baaske, Franz M. Weinert, Stefan Duhr, Kono H. Lemke, Michael J. Russell, and Dieter Braun
9. Montmorillonite Catalysis Of RNA Oligomer Formation In Aqueous Solution: A Model For The Prebiotic Formation Of RNA by James P. Ferris and Gözen Ertem, Journal of the American Chemical Society, 115: 12270-12275 (1993)
10. Synthesis Of 35-40 Mers Of RNA Oligomers From Unblocked Monomers. A Simple Approach To The RNA World by Wenhua Huang and James P. Ferris, Chemical Communications of the Royal Society of Chemistry, 1458-1459 (2003)
11. Synthesis Of Long Prebiotic Oligomers On Mineral Surfaces by James P. Ferris, Aubrey R. Hill Jr, Rihe Liu and Leslie E. Orgel, Nature, 381: 59-61 (2nd May 1996)
12. Semipermeable lipid bilayers exhibit diastereoselectivity favoring ribose. M. G. Sacerdote and J. W. Szostak
13. Experimental Models of Primitive Cellular Compartments: Encapsulation, Growth, and Division
Martin M. Hanczyc, Shelly M. Fujikawa, Jack W. Szostak
14. Coupled Growth and Division of Model Protocell Membranes. Ting F. Zhu and Jack W. Szostak
15. Strecker, A. Ann. 1850, 75, 27. Strecker, A. (1854) Ann. 91, 349.

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Why can't you accept that you don't know all the answers?

Science is totally fine with not knowing stuff. Are you so arrogant that you need to have a set opinion on the origins of the universe while you take a runny Taco Bell s**t at 7 am?

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Flip, but you're asking us to believe that it's absolutely impossible for life to have arisen without supernatural influence simply because we don't have all of the answers yet. Demonstrating possibilities, even if you can't prove that's how things actually happened, chips away at your argument through incredulity.

Note: the difference between a really small probability and zero probability can be significant.

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Really small probability, long time, and lots of places where it could have happened.

Not really far fetched at all. Every so often somebody gets a Royal Flush.

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It didn't sound like you were hedging your bets here:

"How can anyone believe life came from non-life when faced with science? How can anyone believe the conditions for life on this planet being so perfect as to defy all probability and yet we are here? How is it someone can look at DNA code and say it was happenstance but they look at computer code and know it wasn't accidental?"

You're basing your conclusion that it's unlikely that life arrived here on a natural basis on the fact that we don't understand everything there is to understand about the world, and on your misunderstanding of probability. The system has to exist in one state. You can't say "Gee, it's unlikely that the system would exist in exactly this state, so it's hard to believe it's even possible."

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"And that was done where? Oh yeah, in a lab where scientists manipulated conditions in a controlled environment to reach the desired result. ."
Actually, they started off with what we conclude to be prebiotic conditions based upon independent lines of inquiry into the prebiotic earth's atmospheric composition.

"No evidence has ever been found for the "primordial soup""
What are you even asserting here? The "primordial soup" is merely a series of chemical reactions within prebiotic earth. Yes, we don't have a big picture model for it yet -- I did say that in my other post, didn't I?

"and even if it did exist most scientists agree that it would have dissipated too quickly for life to form"
I guess that would depend upon which scientists you took to. If you talked to those qualified to make such a judgment, you'd be wrong - especially given the inroads made in the last 10 years or so. The prevailing theory is that life arose underwater, as the lack of ozone would've destroyed early polymers. If you talked to health scientists, they may not agree, but then I don't know why you'd be asking health scientists about abiogenesis.

"neither position gets to go all the way there based on evidence alone"
If you're submitting that "goddidit, just because" and, "here's the evidence for abiogenesis, evolution is an observable reality and here's the evidence for universal common ancestry" are even on remote wavelengths of "faith", then I think you're grasping at straws here.

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"But that's just it, the small probabilities are functionally zero."

So if you flip a coin 18 billion times and ask what the probability of a particular sequence of outcomes is, the answer is zero? You could never get all heads because that just strikes you as being too unlikely? If you watched someone flip that coin 18 billion times and get all heads, you'd say a deity must have been controlling the coin?


"Everyone takes a leap of faith of some kind."

I wouldn't say that choosing not to posit the existence of a deity based on the fact that you've calculated some really small numbers is taking a leap of faith. There's an option in between certainty on either side of the issue, and that's knowing that we don't know everything, and being okay with it.

Besides, you accused us of starting with the conclusion that no deity exists, whereas you're doing the opposite. You start with the conclusion that a deity exists, and you look for gaps in our understanding of the natural world that said deity can fill in. I see gaps and I see your small probabilities, and I say that imagining that the gaps are filled by a supernatural being whose existence *also* can't be explained doesn't fix the problem of small probabilities, but only makes the number even smaller.

What happens to your god of the gaps argument as gaps are filled? People once required deities to explain rain and lightning. We understand things now that seemed beyond explanation not all that long ago. Francis Collins tries to distinguish between really hard, solvable problems and unsolvable problems, because he seems to feel he needs the existence of the latter to justify his faith. To try to do that is the height of arrogance, as he's positing that he knows enough about all of these questions to know whether an answer exists. Was there not a time when the origins of lightning would have seemed just as unsolvable as any problem Collins can point to?

It strikes me as similarly arrogant to say we know enough about the world to conclude that there is absolutely no additional knowledge we could gain that would explain an observation that you currently attribute to the miraculous intervention of a deity. To say that we're so smart, so knowledgeable, and so omniscient that we can know whether we know all there is to know about something -- really?

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Forming your model purely on the basis of chance and trying to calculate a probability from it is intellectually dishonest, as a) your sample size of observable universes from which to form a model is exactly 1, and b) the population of states explored by the system is not governed by chance, but by chemistry. What you are doing is akin to asking what direction a ball travels when released, and it is trivial to show that the probability of travel in any direction is infinitely improbable, but the population of directions in which a ball travels is not governed by chance, but by gravity.

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"What you are doing is akin to asking what direction a ball travels when released.."

That's my line of thought with many of the supposed "statistics" that stem from duplicitous creationist sources. The odds of rolling the dice 10 times and specifically receiving the combination 4432163522 is 1/6^10 (1/60466176), but there obviously has to be an outcome, all of which are equally improbable before actually rolling the dice. Without being able to compare our dice rolling probability to other universes or the other ~60 earth-esque planets, it's utterly meaningless to work backwards with your probability.

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Yeah, I wasn't going to get into discussions of whether the probabilities really are as small as flip says they must be, because that's to some extent yet another argument from incredulity. It's hard to argue something we don't understand.

I mean, if you had some basic knowledge of chemistry, would you think that you'd get buckyballs if you zapped some dirt with electricity? Confirming that C60 existed and figuring out its structure (no easy task -- I heard a talk by Robert Curl about that whole process once) was worth a Nobel prize.

If you had no knowledge of quantum mechanics, wouldn't the results of the double slit experiment strike you as incredibly improbable? Miraculous, even?

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