7/18/09

Atheists: “No God, No Reason, Just Whining”

FYI: this post has been moved here.
Share |

TwitThis

Posted by Ken
Labels: , , , , , , , , , , ,

18 comments:

  1. AnonymousJuly 18, 2009 at 11:04 AM

    The reason that I, as an atheist, am not interested seriously debating a believer is because I will, always and forever, lose. Not because my position is necessarily wrong, but because a believer's arguments can't technically be false. I can make as reasoned an argument as I please, and it will be shot down in a second when the believer says something like, "But can you actually PROVE there is no god?" To which I must say no. You can't prove a negative. The only way to PROVE god doesn't exist is to spend an infinite amound of looking for him/her/it. Of course, none of this matters, I've already lost the so-called "serious debate." I'm sure you can appreciate how futile this all seems from my end.

    Also, I think it is true, that an atheist cannot (currently) be elected to public office, just because believers don't trust non-believers. After all, if I don't get my morality from the bible, then surely I can't have any morals at all.

    ReplyDelete
  2. AnonymousJuly 18, 2009 at 11:09 AM

    Furthermore, Michael Newdow sued to get "so help me god" removed from the official oath of office, not to ban anyone from saying it. Obama would have been free to still say "so help me god," but it wouldn't have been required. Wouldn't that be so much more meaningful?

    ReplyDelete
  3. jdhueyJuly 18, 2009 at 11:13 AM

    PZ Myers does a nice job of eviscerating this diatribe here:

    http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2009/05/charlotte_allen_really_is_angr.php

    ReplyDelete
  4. mmcelhaneyJuly 18, 2009 at 11:27 AM

    I love the tired response from atheist when ask "Bur you can't prove that God doesn't exist, can you?" As the commenter pointed out, common answer is "No. But you can't prove a negative." That is so silly. If you want to prove the God does not exist all you have to do is find something in the Bible illogical or incorrect in a fact it asserts. It's been 2000 years (longer for the Old Testament) and no one has been able to do that! No one will. So the reason why many atheists refuse "serious" discussion/debate is because deep down they know there is no possible way they can win. Those that try inevitably or left one of two recourses open to them: repent and believe or reject God. Pretending that God does not exist does not change the fact that everyone will make this choice.

    ReplyDelete
  5. AnonymousJuly 18, 2009 at 12:11 PM

    Yes...find something in the Bible that is illogical or an incorrect fact. Well I think it's all illogical, have I proven that God doesn't exist yet?

    As far as incorrect facts...exactly what "facts"
    are you referring to? That 2000 years ago there was a man named Jesus who was crucified and then resurrected? That a benevolent god once firebombed a whole city because of some queers? That a man named Moses once liberated a bunch of hebrew slaves from egypt? How am I supposed to prove that any of that did or did not happen? There is no record or evidence that there were ever any hebrew slaves in egypt...but again, lack of evidence is no proof, that is why I will always lose.

    ReplyDelete
  6. FreePlayJuly 18, 2009 at 5:41 PM

    "If you want to prove the God does not exist all you have to do is find something in the Bible illogical or incorrect in a fact it asserts. It's been 2000 years (longer for the Old Testament) and no one has been able to do that! No one will."

    ... It says that bats are birds and that the moon is a light in the sky. Checkmate.

    ReplyDelete
  7. PhysicistDaveJuly 18, 2009 at 7:00 PM

    Well, Mariano, here is Ms. Allen’s own self-evaluation of here own mental abilities:

    >I can't help it, but reading about such episodes of screaming, gushing and swooning makes me wonder whether women -- I should say, "we women," of course -- aren't the weaker sex after all. Or even the stupid sex, our brains permanently occluded by random emotions, psychosomatic flailings and distraction by the superficial.
    [snip]
    >I am perfectly willing to admit that I myself am a classic case of female mental deficiencies.

    ( http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/02/29/AR2008022902992_pf.html )

    “A classic case of female mental deficiencies.”

    I would not have put it so bluntly. But since she herself admits it… well, who can seriously deny the truth about Ms. Allen?

    Dave

    ReplyDelete
  8. PhysicistDaveJuly 18, 2009 at 7:14 PM

    Marcus wrote:
    >If you want to prove the God does not exist all you have to do is find something in the Bible illogical or incorrect in a fact it asserts. It's been 2000 years (longer for the Old Testament) and no one has been able to do that! No one will.

    Oh, c’mon, Marcus! Do you really know that little about the Bible, or are you just “lying for Jesus”?

    Matthew’s and Luke’s genealogies of Jesus differ. Wildly. At least one is all screwed up.

    Badly.

    The Synoptic Gospels have Jesus crucified in the daylight after the Passover meal was eaten. John has the Crucifixion during the day immediately prior the the Passover meal – i.e., a whole day earlier.

    Numerous books and websites (see, e.g., Ehrman’s recent “Jesus Interrupted”) have long lists of fallacies and falsehoods in the Bible.

    There are so many that no single individual can memorize them all.

    Oh, and, by the way, there is the itty-bitty little problem of Genesis: the universe is not six thousand years old, and human are descended from fish, not made directly out of mud.

    But, even if you are a moronic YECchie, the internal contradictions where the Bible disagrees with itself are enough.

    Surely, you have run into at least one of the thousands of discussions across the Web pointing out such things!

    This is the key reason why so many of us atheists reject Christianity: you guys do not tell the truth.

    No one who knows and admits the well-established truth about the Bible can be a traditional Christian.

    Dave Miller in Sacramento

    ReplyDelete
  9. jdhueyJuly 18, 2009 at 10:57 PM

    "This is the key reason why so many of us atheists reject Christianity: you guys do not tell the truth."

    I disagree. I think the majority of us atheists reject Christianity for the simple reason that the Christian god simply does not exist. Of course, as far as we know, all the other gods people have believed also don't exist, so that's fair. I will make a prediction: IF, at some point in the future, a 'god' is actually proved to exist then that
    'god' will not be anything like what people think a god should be like.

    ReplyDelete
  10. PhysicistDaveJuly 19, 2009 at 5:13 AM

    jdhuey wrote to me:
    >>[Dave]"This is the key reason why so many of us atheists reject Christianity: you guys do not tell the truth."
    >[JDH]I disagree. I think the majority of us atheists reject Christianity for the simple reason that the Christian god simply does not exist.

    Yeah, I take your point.

    Maybe I should have said that the reason that it is hard to take seriously Christian claims about their god is that in making those claims they repeatedly choose not to tell the truth.

    When the evidence presented for a god is so obviously a pack of lies, well, that is substantial evidence that it is all a fraud.

    Conversely, I am not at all certain that no sort of deistic god exists: the claims deists make for their god seem to me unsubstantiated, and therefore a bit unlikely, but not obvious falsehoods.

    You also wrote:
    > I will make a prediction: IF, at some point in the future, a 'god' is actually proved to exist then that 'god' will not be anything like what people think a god should be like.

    Indeed. I am a theoretical physicist, and I still have trouble believing quantum mechanics is true (and maybe it’s not – that is, not in the form that we currently have).

    One of the things that annoys me about most Christians, deists, New Agers, dogmatic materialists, etc. is that they are so willing to claim positive knowledge about God, the ultimate nature of reality, etc., when the one sure truth in this area is that we do not yet have the Final Answer and that the main answers we do have so far consists of proof that the Final Answers proposed thus far are not true.

    Amazing how many people get angry simply when one points out the limits of current human knowledge!

    Dave

    ReplyDelete
  11. AnonymousJuly 19, 2009 at 7:24 AM

    Yes it is isnt it and that goes for everyone (Well who is actually interested) so this on going bickering looks to be perpetual as Atheists, Scientists, Theists, Everyone simply dont fucking know and remain the same as they did in the schoolyard

    ReplyDelete
  12. jdhueyJuly 19, 2009 at 11:51 AM

    @PhysicistDave,

    I'm pretty much in agreement with your assessment of Deism. In fact, it is the basis for my prediction.

    QM: I was taught by professors of the 'don't try to understand it, you can't, just do the math' school of thought. I, of course, did try to get an intuitive feel for QM and , of course, failed. But that damn double slit experiment just kept proving that nature didn't care that I didn't understand - QM works. Evidence trumps intuition.

    ReplyDelete
  13. AnonymousJuly 19, 2009 at 10:51 PM

    "One of the things that annoys me about most Christians, deists, New Agers, dogmatic materialists, etc. is that they are so willing to claim positive knowledge about God, the ultimate nature of reality, etc"

    Well until things like consciousness and self awareness can be explained naturally your going to be annoyed for a long time

    ReplyDelete
  14. PhysicistDaveJuly 19, 2009 at 11:12 PM

    Anonymous wrote to me:
    >Well until things like consciousness and self awareness can be explained naturally your going to be annoyed for a long time

    Well, perhaps.

    But I am happy to admit that I do not understand the origin or nature of consciousness or self-awareness. Indeed, as a physicist, I am doubtful that physics as we know it can explain consciousness or self-awareness, though perhaps the physics of the future will be able to. Who knows?

    Is it really a utopian dream to hope that most of the human race will eventually acquire the maturity to say, “Well. we don’t yet know” when they really do not yet know?

    Most of us admit that we don’t know who will win next year’s Superbowl or World Series! Why not be equally honest with ourselves about more difficult questions?

    Dave

    ReplyDelete
  15. PhysicistDaveJuly 19, 2009 at 11:27 PM

    jdhuey wrote to me:
    > QM: I was taught by professors of the 'don't try to understand it, you can't, just do the math' school of thought. I, of course, did try to get an intuitive feel for QM and , of course, failed. But that damn double slit experiment just kept proving that nature didn't care that I didn't understand - QM works. Evidence trumps intuition.

    Yeah, and as a Ph.D. in physics (I did my doctoral work at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center in elementary-particle physics), I can do the QM calculations with the best of ‘em.

    And, of course, in over eighty years, QM has *never* disagreed with experiment.

    On the other hand, there are several wildly different, mutually exclusive forms of QM: the standard textbook version, David Bohm’s deterministic QM, Ed Nelson’s stochastic (but realist) QM, etc.

    These are not merely different verbal “interpretations”: the math describing what is happening is quite different for the various alternative QMs, and the elementary do-hickeys follow very different paths in the different theories (in Bohm’s and Nelson’s theories the particles follow definite paths that differ between the two theories; in the textbook theory, one cannot talk about “definite paths”).

    And, yet, curiously, the standard textbook theory, Bohm’s theory, Nelson’s theory, etc. all predict the exact same experimental results.

    This is very, very weird. (Most textbooks, sadly, do not point out this anomaly, so even many physicists are unaware of the situation.)

    I don’t know better than anyone else what is going on. But I have a sneaking suspicion that we are in the position of astronomy prior to Copernicus. You know, “just shut up and calculate” actually worked for the Ptolemaic theory. As I understand it (from Owen Gingerich), the Ptolemaic theory actually agreed with observation as well as Copernicus’ theory (though not as well as Kepler’s version does).

    The human race – and science in particular – is very young. There is much we do not yet understand.

    Dave

    ReplyDelete
  16. jdhueyJuly 20, 2009 at 12:40 AM

    "I think perhaps the most important problem is that we are trying to understand the fundamental workings of the universe via a language devised for telling one another when the best fruit is."
    -- (Terry Pratchett, alt.fan.pratchett)

    ReplyDelete
  17. AnonymousJuly 20, 2009 at 1:22 PM

    I can't stand atheists -- but it's not because they don't believe in God. It's because they're crashing bores.

    But how can a group of people that know everything and are never wrong, be boring?

    ReplyDelete
  18. AnonymousJuly 21, 2009 at 5:52 AM

    "I can't stand atheists -- but it's not because they don't believe in God. It's because they're crashing bores."

    Thats like saying I don't like christians – but its not because the believe in god. It’s because they…..hmmmmm…..like chocolate - brilliant theological reasoning like most of the posts here

    ReplyDelete

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)