Posted on 10/17/2003 4:04:27 PM PDT by TXLibertarian
Excerpted from a longer op-ed. Author discusses the danger of legal proselytizing by a few firebrand secularists. Worth a read, IMHO.
What Atheists Want
By Chris Mooney
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Unfortunately, in my experience, the U.S. atheist and secularist communities contain a number of activists who are inclined to be combative and in some cases feel positively zestful about offending the religious. Madalyn Murray O'Hair, easily America's most famous atheist firebrand, wasn't dubbed "the most hated woman in America" for nothing. Despite her landmark 1963 Supreme Court victory in a case concerning the constitutionality of school prayer, O'Hair's pugilistic and insulting public persona hurt atheists a great deal in the long run. A head-on attack on the pledge seems to epitomize the confrontational O'Hair strategy.
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(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
That is a wondrous way of looking at things and I'm glad it gives you pleasure. But others don't take that step to think that there must be a cause for everything. Different people, different perceptions of the same reality.
Since any god of the Christian type is far beyond our knowing, we'll never really know the answer in this life, will we?
And of course there are plenty of examples of human rights NOT existing in the presence of God.
No ... this is straight observation; the odds against chance being responsible are too high to have ever happened in the observed lifetime of the universe.
I await your probability calculation for universe formation. Be sure to show your work.
I'm not trying to prove that the God of the Bible created the universe. SOMEONE did as the odds against natural formation are so laughable that you would have to win the lottery every day of your life to duplicate it.
Again, I await the details of your probability calculation. And if your calculated result is larger than 10-184000, then your above claim is wildly overexagerated. Don't make claims about probabilities and numbers unless you've actually produced some.
I'm not talking about belief or faith in deducing the existence of an intelligence guiding creation.
Sure you are.
30 physical constants in the universe are EXACTLY what's needed to provide life ot the universe. Move any of them by more than 2% higher or lower and life becomes IMPOSSIBLE.
Please name the 30 physical constants, and provide the calculated range of their "allowable" values, and by what criteria each range was calculated. Specify whether by "life" you mean "life of *our* particular type", or "life of any conceivable form, chemistry, or composition". Again, show your work.
Also please demonstrate that a) those constants *could* have had other values (for all you know, their current values may be the only values possible, making their probability 100%), b) there is only one universe (as opposed to a multitude (or infinitude) of varying universes, vastly increasing the odds of a "good" one appearing in the bunch, c) that all "30" physical constants are entirely independent of each other (if not, then there may be far fewer degrees of freedom, again raising the odds), and d) that you have accounted for every conceivable alternative form that life could take when calculating your calculation of what the constants would "have" to be to make some form of life possible.
Finally, address the Anthropic Principle (in its six primary forms) and explain how it impacts your thesis.
Use a #2 pencil and show your work. You have sixty minutes, at which time the proctor will collect your papers. Begin.
Biochemistry : abiogenisis cannot be duplicated.
If you mean it's impractical for us to set up a virgin planet and let it cook for several hundred million years as some sort of long-term experiment, you're right. On the other hand, I don't think you can duplicate the first book of Genesis, either.
But that doesn't mean we can't reconstruct what most probably happened by studying chemical properties and tracing clues from the physical configuration of the prebiotic Earth, and the internal structure of extant life. For example, The Path from the RNA World .
There's not even a model that allows for it.
Man, are *you* behind on the literature...
Here's a model for you: On the origins of cells:a hypothesis for the evolutionary transitions from abiotic geochemistry to chemoautotrophic prokaryotes,and from prokaryotes to nucleated cells. Here's another: The emergence of life from iron monosulphide bubbles at a submarine hydrothermal redox and pH front. For much more, follow the dozens of references contained in those papers.
Just evolutionary 'faith' that it had to happen.
No, evidence and painstaking reconstruction.
Look at a bee, mathematically it should not be able to fly, yet it does.
Because mathematically, it can. The silly old urban legend about bees (actually, the original statement was about bumblebees) not being able to fly according to mathematical analysis dates back to the 1930's, and was based only on the Reynolds number of bumblebee wings, which basically only shows that they couldn't *glide* if their wings were held out flat and rigid like an airplanes. But needless to say, that's not how bumblebees fly -- they flap their wings very rapidly, and even back in the 30's a more comprehensive analysis which included the flapping demonstrated that there's nothing "mathemagical" about their ability to fly. See McMasters (in the Amer. Sci. 77:164-169).
So... Why are you 70+ years behind on this? And doesn't your example actually show that overly simplistic calculations (like your "30 constants" case above) are likely to be missing some key factor and thus achieve a misleading result?
There is evidence of an intelligent design across the universe.
Back to unsupported assertions so soon?
It take more faith to deny the existence of a God than it does to merely acknowledge it's presence.
So who created God? It seems that by postulated some unspecified "god" to explain what you consider to be an unlikely combination of "settings" for our universe, you're creating an even bigger problem for yourself by now leaving unanswered the issue of how to explain the infinitely more unlikely existence of an ultrapowerful being whose substance must surely be vastly more "fine tuned" than just 30 or so physical constants. You've "solved" one question by swapping it for a vastly bigger one.
Conversely, if you're going to wave your hands and just say, "god didn't need to be created by anything to end up existing", then why can't that same notion be applied to the much simpler universe itself, thus undercutting your claim of a "need" for god in the first place as an originator of the universe?
Well, nothing is forbidden (except apparently violating the laws of physics). Does that mean that there is no God? (Or is the physical world His only manifestation?)
So is Frodo Baggins.
So do theists.
There are 6 billion people in this world. Only a fraction of them are Christians. Somehow the great majority of the world manages to live a life that's moral and not anarchic without looking to God for their strictures.
Only if you consider as bigger questions such things as existence without time, or an infinite past, extracorporeal consciousness, extracorporeal sense perception, omniscience, omnipotence, not to mention the age-old Christian quandary of the suffering of the righteous and the innocent as witnessed by a loving omnipotent entity.
So, people who agree with you are healthy. Those who disagree are diseased and dying. Don't you think that's a little smug and haughty?
let me assure you, you will not like living in what remains. You will not like living under a totalitarian government, or the manevolent compassion of socialism, and that is where not only the world, but the USofA is heading now...
So, Christians are free to express their Constitutional freedoms, but if homosexuals or atheists do the same, you see it as a nihilistic slide into the apocalypse? Or perhaps you're just being melodramatic.
You have bought into the lie that with Christians in charge you will be jailed and persecuted
That's an enormously presumptive statement for someone who doesn't know me whatsoever.
when it is because Christians have been in charge that you have not
This is also presumptive and a baseless contention.
There were laws on the books in Texas regarding the act of sodomy, never inforced except when sodomy began to show up in public parks in the daytime with children playing.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but the Lawrence v. Texas decision did nothing make public sex in the parks legal, did it? If not, what's the relevance of your point here?
Christians in the USofA believe...that He has poured out riches, power, and freedom on this nation more than any other in the history of the world.
You're perfectly free to believe that, and you should if that helps to affirm your faith. But the atheist can just as easily contend that it was a secular nation free from religious medling, freedom from onerous regulation, and the ingenuity of free men that created the most prosperous nation in the world.
On another thread a poster protested my claim that all western nations have been historically ahead of the pack because of their respect for God, and the USofA's purity of worship has put us even ahead of them... there is no comparison between the mixture of voodoo/Christianity that has been the norm in S. America
Please tell me this is a bad joke. This just displays an unbelievable amount of cultural ignorance I'm nearly speechless. Most of South America is staunchly Catholic.
So do theists.
Perhaps, but one good argument is readily accessible to both. It was advanced by Hinton Helper in 1857 in his analysis of the southern economy based on slavery and the results of decades of census data. Notably, it took the south an additional 100 years to wake up to the message after the Civil War.
I'm curious if you think the snake-handling and strychnine-drinking churches in the Appalachian hills are practicing "pure" Christianity. They are part of the USofA.
If you contend that these are merely cultish aberrations, why would you think that the "voodoo" Christianity in South America isn't also a similar aberration?
It’s a fraud because it’s a clumsy and misleading definition, not appropriate as a basis for a philosophical discussion. My Webster’s just defines an Atheist as “One who denies the existence of God”. The first online source that I went to defines Athiesm as Disbelief in or denial of the existence of God or gods . Neither requires the acknowledgment of the existence of something in order to disbelieve in its existence. That’s silly.
Come to think of it, if you have to so misrepresent atheism to feel confident in your religion, it looks like your faith is dependent on my ideology, not the other way around.
That’s a misconception of Objectivism that’s common in people who have only the briefest exposure to some of it. Believing that something is in one’s self interest does not make it so. Otherwise, Objectivism would be “subjectivism”. That’s why Objectivists are usually careful to say “rational self interest”. It’s up to us to discover what is in our rational self interest, first through guidance and education but then through observation and reasoning. Opinions vary, but recognizing the most fundamental social values that we should share (beyond the “self-engrossiveness” that I think you are referring to) is not rocket science.
By the way, theists are just as prone to differences of opinions and conflict, perhaps more so.
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