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Thank you so much for your reply and your interest!

Please state this argument. Although I, out of principle, do not volunteer my own personal beliefs in this arena, I have no problem with stating that atheism need not be a religion.

I welcome the opportunity! Thank you for asking!

The following are challenges to those who (a) claim to be atheist and (b) do not consider atheism to be a religion: What is religion?

Believers are not challenged to respond since they already, by definition, believe.

The challenge: I can personally accept that yours (an atheist's) is not a religious belief if you can provide plausible scientific or mathematical evidences for all of the following:

1. Prove that there was no beginning - i.e. prove a "steady state universe" which would disprove all modern (since 1960’s) cosmologies, big bang, ekpyrotic, multi-verse, multi-world, cyclic and imaginary time. In the 60’s the measure of cosmic microwave background radiation showed that the universe is expanding, hence space/time had a beginning (big bang). All of the cosmologies since which appeal to prior physical cause - whether prior universes or branes - likewise appeal to prior geometry and thus also have a beginning. IOW, past space/time is finite, there was a beginning, an uncaused cause, i.e. God!

2. Prove a natural source for information in the universe and then translate it to information in biological life. This does not mean the DNA, but the communications that occur in living creatures - reduction of uncertainty of a molecular machine in going from a before state to an after state. [Shannon] It is an action, not a message – i.e. a life force Possible but unexplored causes include harmonics, a universal vacuum field, geometry which gives rise to strings – all of which have a Scriptural root, i.e. God speaking it all into being, Creator outside space/time.

3. Prove a natural source for the will to live, the want to live or struggle to survive that characterizes life. IOW, self-replication is not enough. In an embryo, if the cells simply self-replicated the result would be a tumor. In life, the cells are organized into functional molecular machines which communicate together striving as one organism to live. Why does the organism have a will to live? Why should the component machinery (cardiovascular, neural, etc.) cooperate to that end?

4. Explain how the incredibly delicate physical constants, physical laws and asymmetry between matter and anti-matter came to be so perfectly balanced. A slight change one way or the other and there would be no life, or no universe at all. Appeals to the plentitude argument (anything that can happen, has) will only work in an infinite past, i.e. to make that argument one would have to first answer challenge #1.

5. Explain why out of all the possible spatial and temporal dimensions our vision and mind are tuned to a particular selection of four coordinates – why not three or five, etc.

6. Explain how biological semiosis arose through natural means. Semiosis refers to the language or symbols of communication in biological life - the encoding and decoding. This has two sides, the language itself (DNA, RNA) and the understanding of it. Where’d it come from?

7. Explain how functional complexity arose through natural means – why and how molecular machines organized around functions to the benefit of the greater organism. Of particular interest would be the functions which would not work if a key part were missing – i.e. cardiovascular without the lungs, nervous system without the brain, etc.

8. Explain how eyes developed concurrently across phyla – i.e. vertebrates and invertebrates – and why there have been virtually no new body plans since the Cambrian Explosion. Immutable regulatory control genes is all I can think of. But why would they in particular be immutable?

9. Explain the emergence of qualia through nature – likes and dislikes, pain and pleasure, love and hate, good and evil, etc. – consciousness and the mind.

Please note that appeals to the anthropic principle are statements of belief, e.g. that the physical laws must be the way they are for there to be physicists to observe them. IOW, shrugging does not constitute a scientific or mathematically plausible explanation.