If God did not create the universe, then:
(A) God does not exist
(B) God exists but operates independent of our creation
(C) God evolved along with the space dust and this leaves open the possibility for other gods to also have evolved.
The mechanism of that “creation of life” is not the key component to believing in ANY idea of creationism. It hinges on whether you believe God played a role or not.
So those who deride all notions of creationism should really state what ideology they hold that denying any possibility of “creationism” does not deny the existence of god (forcing the “no god” god of atheism on the “deniers”).
Atheism is not the absence of religion. It is a faith too. Agnostics are the ones who say “we cannot know these things”.
I don’t see the point to teaching any theory as fact. That’s how we get the junk science of Man Made Global Warming in the circulum.
Odd too that science is unwilling to declare WHEN life begins even though there are millions of prenancies to observe but they are quite sure of the latest theory of HOW life began.
I have no dog in this fight, but I'll bump this thread for that line alone. Well done, weegee.
I’m well aware of the differentiation between an athiest and an agnostic, seeing as I consider myself the latter.
The way I put my personal belief system is that I’m open to the existence of beings more powerful than us, but any god whose sole concern is the life on Earth can’t be a very important god. That being said, from your 3 choices, I’ll pick B or C, more likely C than B but I’m willing to consider both options.
I’ll go one further than you with respect to AGW though. CO2 makes up 380ppm of our atmosphere, to put that into perspective, it’s 0.03% of the dry atmosphere (it goes down to about 1/4 of that value if you include moisture, but atmospheric composition is relatively constant when moisture is normalized out.) How can a gas that makes up so little of the atmosphere have such a large effect? It’s not possible. Water vapour makes up more of the atmosphere on average and has a stronger “greenhouse” effect associated with it than CO2. Also, CO2 concentrations lag temperature changes.
“Atheism is not the absence of religion. It is a faith too.”
No quite. Atheism is by definition simply the absence of a belief in the divine. What ever atheistic belief system that one has instead of a religion arguably may have some degree of faith in it, if nothing more than faith that they can believe their eyes, but faith is not the defining feature of a religion. A belief in the supernatural is what makes someones ideology a religion.