This is here to record a conversation between a creationist troll and 24 other YouTubers (the troll spammed us all).
Sent November 21, 2009 by Eye2EyeIIIV:
Think about it...
WHERE DO CARING AND MERCY COME FROM?
While many evolutionists cry out that a loving God is inconsistent with this world of cruelty we inhabit, they conveniently overlook other things. For example, how does evolution explain charity, and caring? If evolution is true, the driving force of nature is "survival of the fittest". Those less able to compete are destined to die. Any attempt to rescue these "less competitive" people would be to work AGAINST the most fundamental force of nature. The existence of doctors, hospitals, charitable organizations, and even police force is contrary to raw evolutionary forces.
The evolutionist has no basis for moral judgments. If man is just the result of millions of years of evolution, our behavior is based on random chemical reactions. There is no ultimate moral code. All morality is relative. So if a person needs money, why is it wrong to rob someone or a bank? According to evolution, the stronger person should succeed. Might makes right. So in the evolutionary view, such violence is a natural, and necessary, part of the world.
Those who have a worldview based on the Bible have a consistent basis for acts of kindness, charity, or caring. We are commanded in Scripture to love our neighbors as ourselves, to perform acts of mercy, and to care for the widows and orphans. If we take evolution to its logical conclusion, we will conclude that these widows and orphans should die because they are a drain on the resources of nature.
Only true Christians ultimately offer the world a basis to make moral judgments. Those who reject the Bible have no basis for morality.
When I'm confronted by theists over why I'm an atheist, this is usually my response:
"When I look at the universe around me, with all of its wonders and spectacles, I fail to find any phenomenon that cannot be explained scientifically or that definitively require the invocation of a supernatural entity. Furthermore, even if some phenomenon were observed that required said invokation, I fail to find any reason for why said supernatural entity should take any one form over any other."
Rephrase the last sentence to fit the theists' belief, e.g. if they are Fundamentalist Christians, I would say that there's no reason for why said entity should be as described in the Bible.
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Sometimes, however, I do question myself (I'm paranoid), and I wonder if God (as we've defined him over the millennia) really exists.
When that happens, I watch a few videos on YouTube. I have them now on my iPod, so I can watch them on the go. I recommend that everyone wtach these videos, as they are probably the most spiritual scientific videos you will ever watch.
Setting: Near a subway, I'm walking down the street. Plot: A member of the Church of Jesus Christ and the Latter-Day Saints is trying to convert the masses selling holiday cards.
Her: Hello! Would you like to learn a little bit about Jesus Christ, Our Lord and Savior? Me: No thanks, I'm an atheist. Her: *extremely puzzled, stutters* Her: Well, um, well, I 've always been curious: why si it that you're an atheist. Me: I'm an atheist because I look at the universe around me and I do not see the need to invoke the existence of a supernatural deity in order to explain the universe's existence or its phenomena. Furthermore, even if a deity were requried, I see no reason why it should be one deity over any other. Her: Well, that's, uh, interesting. If you ever want to learn more about Jesus-- Me: I'll stop by. Got it. Thank you. Her: Er, no problem.
The following is my response to a theist's answers to a list of questions posed to theists.
Why does the universe need a reason to have been made?
This question presupposes that one of my arguments for the existence of God is that the universe needed a reason to be made. The fact that a reason exists (God’s will) does not in any way indicate that a reason was needed. Saying that presence indicates necessity is ludicrous.
Presence indicating necessity is indeed ridiculous. However, you have misunderstood the question. Science gives us a few ideas on how the universe formed. If you believe that God made the universe, then you are rejecting those ideas. How do you propose God made the universe? Is the previous question really scientific?
What sanctioned your god making the universe? Who says that God needs to be sanctioned? By whose authority do you propose He was bound? The idea that a sanction was required presupposes the existence of a higher authority. One of the fundamental properties of the very IDEA of God, is that there is none.
Again, you misunderstand the question. The question is: "Why did your particular god (over any other hypothetical entities) make the universe, and why did he make the universe in the first place?"
Can you prove that your god exists? Nope. Can you prove He doesn’t? Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Science.
Can you prove that there isn't an invisible unicorn in your bathroom which stays perfectly silent and moves out of the way when you walk in?
And actually, I can prove that the Semitic god (Yahweh/Allah) does not exist under the criteria supplied by theists. There are many proofs that omnipotentence, omniscience, free will, omnibenevolence, omnipresence, etc. are impossible. If you say that they are possible outside of out logic, then you have left the field of evidence and have moved into pure faith, where you can't trust anything.
Why do we use the original 10 commandments rather than the replacements that God gave to Moses after Moses broke the tables containing them? Because it makes no functional difference? The only differences are ones of slight rephrasing. The order and meanings remain the same, so what difference does it make? Do you really care that much that we use the version that says “You shall not kill. You shall not commit adultery. You shall not steal.” Instead of the one that says “You shall not kill. Neither shall you commit adultery. Neither shall you steal?”
If God is all-loving, why does he order people to death for crimes they DID NOT EVEN COMMIT? That seems unfair to us, for sure, but again you are taking yourself outside the bounds of the argument. Your question assumes (in a very humanistic, atheistic way) that human moral ideals bind God. Who are you to say who God can and can’t kill? This is putting God beneath you, which is fundamentally against the spirit of Theism. God is transcendent of the rules of this universe. In fact, one could even argue that murder is only wrong because it is a sort of playing God. God can kill whoever he wants, but you can’t because you aren’t God.
So you are saying that our mortal definition of "moral" doesn't apply, because God might use a different definition.
Congrats: you have just killed religion. After all, if God can redefine words, what's to stop him from redefining everything in the fucking Bible? Maybe God is Satan, and Hell is Heaven and Heaven is Hell. All good Christians go to Hell. Interesting. Maybe by "no man shall sleep with another man" God really means "no man shall get to decide who can sleep with whom, because it's none of their fucking business in the first place."
Thank you.
Does God have the right to rule the universe? The question of God’s right to be in charge is a very atheistic one.
Well, duh, we're atheists. And "atheist" is the adjective as well, so no need to "atheistic."
It is also not logically defensible. Firstly, it is based on the purely atheistic assumption that the universe would continue to function without God.
Why shouldn't it? The laws of nature hold up perfectly fine, and last I checked, God isn't in Einstein, Newton, or Maxwell's equations.
The fact that this is not true to a theistic cosmology means that this argument is not valid.
In other words: My beliefs say that your question is wrong, therefore your question is wrong. In other words: I say you're wrong, so therefore you're wrong.
Until you prove the proposition that the universe would function without God, and he is simply choosing to rule, your question has no meaning.
*observes that the universe keeps working* *notes that no one's heard from your God in a few millennia* Q.E.D.
Secondly, the spirit of the question is a bit silly as well. Let me give an example. The Large Hadron Collider. There are very few people who can operate it, and they, logically, are the ones who operate it. Theoretically, I’m sure they could just start it up, and leave forever and let be what will be.
Completely wrong. The Large Hadron Collider cannot and should not be compared to the universe. The LHC requires constant fine-tuning and control. It is a simulator at best, an machine for conducting experiments. The universe is simply a bunch of matter and energy following a bunch of rules.
They don’t do this because they want to have someone to make sure that things don’t get totally out of hands and explode and destroy all that work (not to mention the lives at stake). Nobody questions their right to be the ones operating the LHC, because that would be silly.
Actually, you're completely wrong. Many scientific boards weigh in on the functioning of the LHC, not to mention the European Union and multiple anti-LHC groups. And again, you can leave the universe alone and it'll work. The LHC will stop working immediately.
Can you show that God is not a malevolent, omnipotent and all-deceiving being? Nope. Can you show that anyone is not a malevolent, omnipotent, and all-deceiving being? You just can’t operate under that assumption.
That's not an assumption, it's a question. How do you know that your God hasn't just lied to you all of the way through? He's told you a bunch of stuff that is completely untestable. That's part of religion: you have to take the Bible on faith. God could be completely bullshitting you, and you wouldn't know it. Heck, maybe God is gay, and he's really pissed off that you misread that part of the Bible. Prop 8 makes God cry rainbows. Ha ha.
On the other hand, science makes testable predictions. We know that Einstein isn't bullshitting us, because his work made many testable predictions, all of which were found to be true. It validated his work.
How can you prove that your scriptures (Bible, Koran, Torah, whatever) really represents the will of God, and not the humans, who wrote it? How can you prove that your Scientific Laws really represent the way the universe
works and not the ideas of the humans who wrote it? Don’t hold Religion to more rigorous standards than you hold Science.
That is stupid. I hold science to much, much higher standards than I do for religion, and science still passes much more often than religion does.
We know that the scientific laws represent the way the universe works because the universe follows those laws. We've shown this experimentally millions of times. Were we to find that there was a discrepancy, we would observe the available data and develop several testable ideas to replace the failed idea.
Can God create a rock so big that he cannot lift it? A big rock is only hard to move because it and you are affected by the laws governing the universe. God is not. Logically, God would never find a rock, no matter how big he made it, hard to move at all.
So you're saying that there's something that God cannot create.
That violates the definition of omnipotent. Logic is irrelevant: the definition of omnipotent trumps any natural logic.
And again, if you want to redefine omnipotent to be susceptible to logic, then I can redefine the Bible to promote atheism.
"The universe is a figment of its own imagination." -Douglas Adams
About Me
I am a gill-less, organic RNA/DNA protein-based, metabolic, metazoic, nucleic, diploid, bilaterally-symmetrical, endothermic, digestive, tryploblast, opisthokont, deuterostome coelemate with a spinal cord and 12 cranial nerves connecting to a limbic system in an enlarged cerebrial cortex with a reduced olfactory region inside a jawed-skull with specialized teeth including canines and premolars, forward-oriented fully-enclosed optical orbits, and a single temporal fenestra, attached to a vertebrate hind-leg dominant tetrapoidal skeleton with a sacral pelvis, clavical, and wrist & ankle bones; and having lungs, tear ducts, body-wide hair follicles, opposable thumbs, and keratinized dermis with chitinous nails on all five digits on all four extremities, in addition to an embryonic development in amniotic fluid, leading to a placental birth and highly social lifestyle.
I am also left-handed. [script for first part by AronRa.]
