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A little victory against a squatter rationalresponders.blogspot

Sapient's blog - Mon, 2014-01-20 00:36








Sapient's blog - Sun, 2014-01-19 20:37





In the 24 months since we've owned the server, it has done some work for us and been online, it hosts some things, sometimes.  We have practice sites, but it's daddy's are very busy with real life work.  From Feb-Sept I have about 8 hours a week I can spend on RRS, I work multiple jobs and still make less than 30k/yr.  My earning potential is lower now as a result of my life as an atheist activist.  I'm also a single dad of a young man about to head to college.  Right now he needs me quite a bit.  He has me in the gym with him for about 12 hours a week. I'm worried about how I'm going to afford his college.  He'll have over a 4.0 GPA but I'll still have to cover big costs over the next few years.  For example he doesn't have a car.  It's a decent life, very fulfilling, just not very financially rewarding.  

Right now things are tight.  I feel like we can go in two general directions from here...

DOWN: The site continues on a trend where I have to come out of pocket to keep it going.  It feels more cost effective to reduce or scale back in some way then to keep it thriving.  This might allow me to put the last remaining batch of my focus on a real life job.

UP: We actually have enough money to get the help we need to make our site have the cutting edge community site technology and speed we need to compete in the domain of ideas.  We become dominant again.  Everyone who has ever posted here has their views amplified in the domain of internet ideas.

I don't mean to startle you, I am fairly certain we're not going anywhere.  Freudien slip... we probably are just going to be stagnant, no up, no down.  

There are certainly tons of awesome people that care and that contribute.  Thanks to anyone that has ever donated, it's because of you that is still here.  But I've had these thoughts for a while, and thought some of you might want to know what kind of financial state RRS/I'm in.  

This site and it's donors are responsible for supporting and Atheism United.  

We could use your help. If you would like to help point us towards "UP" please consider a one time donation.  Go big, it's a one time donation.  

You can also make a $3, $10, $25 monthly donation.

If you do decide to donate, allow me to say thanks right now.  I really appreciate it. 

If you're wealthy and you're asking yourself, "how much would it take to fix all of this and revolutionize these sites?"  The answer is $25,000 will do it.


Rational Response Text Input box working again for all browsers!

Rational Squad Alerts - Sat, 2014-01-18 09:45

For the last few months we were dealing with an error in which people were having a hard time posting on in browsers other than Firefox.




In Rationality,

Brian Sapient

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Help me, I've been defeated by superior logic

Ask the Atheist - Tue, 2009-07-14 00:47







- SmartLX

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Are you too easy on yourself?

Ask the Atheist - Mon, 2009-06-29 21:07
Question:You've written some of the questions yourself. Are you throwing yourself softballs?Atheist Answer





- SmartLX


Need help for Houston radio show

Ask the Atheist - Tue, 2009-06-23 18:30






- SmartLX


First Cause Argument

Ask the Atheist - Fri, 2009-06-19 22:38


The argument from design I've answered here for a start.

- SmartLX


The Jesus dvd and rationality?

Ask the Atheist - Sun, 2009-06-14 20:33











- SmartLX


The Improved Hotpocket Argument

Ask the Atheist - Fri, 2009-06-12 02:23
Question:Premise 1: The hotpocket has been designed by man Premise 2: The hotpocket will burn you if you are not careful. Premise 3: God is like a hotpocket Therefore: Man created a wrathful God that sends people to Hell if they are not careful. Or would this argument be better... Premise 1: A hotpocket is intelligently designed Premise 2: A hotpocket is intrinsically perfect, but may be introduced to flaw by manipulation from a third party without the guidance of its creator. Therefore: Satan caused the fall of mankind PS: Thanks for your timeAtheist Answer

You know you can carry on from your initial question using comments, right?

It's still silly, but let's make some sense out of it all. By substituting just a few words in these arguments you get some of the real religious arguments from design, and approaches to theodicy. The issue with the above, like the real ones, is the dearth of support for the premises themselves. Take Premise 3 in the first argument for an example; even if there were scriptural support for God's similarity to a hotpocket, which I don't think there is, how is scripture itself supported?

I'm trying to go along with your intent, Pritchard, but come clean for us. What are you getting at?

- SmartLX


Breaking to family...

Ask the Atheist - Thu, 2009-06-11 20:25
Question:How can I break to my family and friends that I'm an atheist? I live in the Southern Baptist state of North Carolina where there's atleast 3 churches within a mile radius of your house. I'm only 12, so I don't think they'll accept it. Any suggestions at all would be nice. Thanks!Atheist Answer

I hate to say it, but I wouldn't start off with the word "atheist". Losing your faith and not being religious is one thing, but atheism currently has a special stigma among Christian zealots of all kinds.

If it's important enough to you to be fully honest with people, I would simply say to selected people that you don't believe in God (anymore, if you ever did). Don't deny atheism if you're accused of it, but don't bring it up yourself.

Once it's out there, you'll have to explain yourself. Not just yourself, but all atheists - you'll find all kinds of misconceptions about them: that they hate God, that they worship Satan, that they want to force people to give up religion or remove kids from religious parents and so on.

Besides that you'll get all the really obvious, kneejerk arguments for God, like the beauty of a flower and "where did it all come from". Your family may send you to a preacher or even a Bible camp if they don't trust their own ability to proselytise. This site and the rest of the Web provides answers to pretty much all of it. Bone up. Start by searching for my "Great Big Arguments" series.

Once you've established that you've thought this through and you can't be reconverted with simple platitudes, if your community is as religious as you say it is then you will lose friends. Sorry, but some people don't like to be around atheists, who question their lifelong assumptions by just existing.

You may also find that you become better friends with others; those who are also quietly questioning their faith. When Richard Dawkins did a lecture tour through the Bible Belt, he found big, enthusiastic audiences everyplace. The irreligious are everywhere, as paranoid Christians often warn. Hopefully you'll find some more of them.

Let us know how you go, if you go ahead with it. Good luck.

- SmartLX


Evidence for God -- the hotpocket argument

Ask the Atheist - Thu, 2009-06-11 06:19
Question:This is my contribution to philosophy. Premise 1: A hotpocket is intelligently designed Premise 2: A hotpocket will burn the roof of your mouth Premise 3: A hotpocket is intelligently designed but flawed Therefore: humans were intelligently designed by the Old Testament God 6000 years ago.Atheist Answer

Well now you're just being silly. Some of the sincere arguments appear to make about as much sense though.

- SmartLX


Is Atheism the answer?

Ask the Atheist - Sat, 2009-06-06 22:41
Question:"The seismic shock of out-and-out atheism sent tidal waves across Europe and beyond, accounting directly for the annhilation and butchering of more than one hundred million people this past century alone. Humanity has paid a steep gruesome price for the awful experiments in deliberate antitheism carried out by Lenin, Stalin, Mao Tse-tung and others – each of whom was profoundly influenced by the apostles of atheism... After watching atheism proliferate... it's clearer than ever that... without God, we're lost." (Luis Palau, "God is Relevant". New York: Doubleday, 1997) "During my lifetime, America has been constantly waging war against much of humanity: impoverished people mostly, in stricken places." (John Pilger) I will pre-emptively highlight the five major blots on Christian history – the Crusades, the Inquisition, the Salem witch trials, exploitation by missionaries, and anti-Semitism. These blots reflect not Christianity but its misuse and exploitation by power-hungry men, who manifestly rejected the teachings of Jesus. We know they are wrong because they can be sized up against their own objective morality. However, were Lenin, Stalin, Mao Tse-tung and others wrong in an aetheistic world? According to Michael Ruse: “Morality is a biological adaption no less than are hands and feet and teeth… [morality is] just an aid to survival and reproduction… any deeper meaning is illusory.” (Michael Ruse, “Evolutionary Theory and Christian Ethics,” in The Darwinian Paradigm (London: Rouledge, 1989) What do we measure these men against? The teachings of Jesus Christ have never been more necessary. It’s time more Christians started behavng like christians, as a minority already so gloriously do. In aethesitic America and Western Europe, it’s obvious what the values are: power, wealth and materialistic pleasure. Totally antithetical to the teachings of the Bible. What is atheism's answer to today's problems? TomAtheist Answer

Atheism's answer isn't communism, for one thing.

Totalitarian communist regimes suppress religion because of one person: Karl Marx. You know the famous "opium of the masses" quote? Here's more of it:


In other words, according to Marx, oppressed people use religion to make their oppression bearable. If you remove their religion they will truly feel the suffering of their situation, and be spurred to rise up and revolt. Once socialism is in place and the people are no longer oppressed, they will no longer need religion.

Communist dictatorships have of course done little to alleviate the suffering of the people living in them. They see the persistence of religion as an outward sign of this, and thus pretending that the populace is happily irreligious by forcibly ousting religion becomes an ongoing requirement for international PR.

Marx may or may not be right about religion, but he could have told the Communists that forcing people to change, hide or cease their religious activities has little effect on their actual beliefs. (Incidentally, compare the terrible coercion by Communists to the peaceful activism which is now frivolously labeled "militant atheism". Compare that to "militant Islam" while you're at it.)

Communism's self-declared incompatibility with religion does not imply that atheism is responsible for the atrocities committed in the name of communism, even less than anti-Semitic atrocities can be laid at the feet of Christianity. This is because there are no atheistic commandments, no creed, no dogma, no central authority and certainly no "apostles". Nowhere does it say, "There are no gods, therefore do this and this." Communism declares that there are no gods while separately giving its followers commands, but does not link the two.

Atheism is a simple position on the existence of gods, a single conclusion and nothing more. It does not presume to contain answers to today's or any other era's problems. By precluding absolute trust in religious doctrine, however, it leaves one open to secular philosophies and moral systems, which provide earthly, tangible, verifiable rationales for their guidance. Those only interested in "power, wealth and materialistic pleasure" are not following these philosophies any more than they're following Christian morality.

On another topic, to Ruse's list of five "blots" on Christianity I would add three more:
- The continuing attacks on science and scientists in the interest of preserving the plausibility of Christian dogma, from Galileo to Darwin.
- The Thirty Years' War of the 17th century, fought between Christians with the singular goal of spreading people's own idea of God's Word.
- The continuing death of thousands in the Third and First Worlds as a result of intrinsically ineffective abstinence-only education and the defamation of condom use.

- SmartLX


Friend who fears living forever

Ask the Atheist - Sun, 2009-05-31 23:17
Question:My boyfriend has always had a difficult time with the thought of living forever. He labels himself an atheist, however continues to have many panics about the "what if I am wrong?" I myself am a very strong atheist and I cannot seem to get a good enough persuasion for him to relax a little. How do you help someone who has extreme fears over living forever? What should a helpful explanation for him?Atheist Answer

Infinity/eternity is frightening to anyone who really thinks about it. It can be especially troubling to the recently ex-religious, because they've lost their particular assurances of perfect eternal happiness. Compared to that superficial idea, the prospect of simple unending persistence is much harder to shake, because we all have a tough time imagining ourselves not existing.

Your boyfriend's on the right track intellectually, because he accepts that there probably won't be a him after he dies. We just need to address that small probability that there will, and settle his emotions a bit.

Right then, what if he IS wrong? Anything is possible. The odds of any particular afterlife story being the real deal, including whichever version he may have grown up with, is almost zero. That's because there are an infinite number of possible afterlifes: the thousands imagined by humans in the last few thousand years, plus the countless ones we haven't thought of yet.

You haven't said what he specifically fears about living forever. Maybe he hasn't really told you. He might fear torture in hell, or a post-life sentence as a ghost watching everything he knows crumble away, or imprisonment in his own disembodied mind deprived of all senses, going mad in darkness and silence. That last one sure gives me the willies.

If anything is possible, all of the above are. Is any one of them at all likely? No, because they're swimming in an endless sea of alternatives. Put simply, whatever he's afraid his ultimate fate will be if he doesn't end at death, he's almost certainly wrong.

The only death scenario for which there is any solid physical support is oblivion. The mind, the ego, the identity, the memory and everything else that comprises "you" is contained and operated in a physical, bio-electrical brain. After death, that brain first shuts down and then disintegrates. It's a materialist view, I know, but arguments against it centre on things the physical brain supposedly can't do, and without exhaustive analysis are arguments from ignorance.

So take your boyfriend's most troubling scenario and work out the chances: the probability of an identity outliving the human brain outside of all detection, multiplied by the probability of that scenario being the one real one out of infinity. It's like the chances of finding a particular blade of grass if you don't know which country it's in.

That's the thrust of my recommended reassurance. To sum up, if there's an afterlife, you can be confident that it's different from and therefore less scary than his idea of it.

- SmartLX


Could our "energy" recycle itself?

Ask the Atheist - Thu, 2009-05-28 01:49
Question:After reading your response to a recent question regarding reincarnation I couldn't help but think, what if our bodies energy recycles itself? When I say energy I mean the electrical impulses or electricity that runs through our bodies that carry and direct our thoughts, memories and bodily functions. When we die does this electricity just cease to exist or is it conceivable that the energy may leaves our bodies but still continues on in another form, possibly finding a home in a newly conceived human life. Has science not suggested that energy never truly disappears? Atheist Answer

A certain amount of the energy that makes a human being function will certainly end up in other humans after he/she dies. A lot of it is recycled chemically in the soil that claims our bodies, for a start.

Does that count as reincarnation, though? Once that energy leaves your body, it has no memory of who or even what you were. It does not carry any part of what you would think of as your identity (you might suppose it does so invisibly, but then you're getting into the realms of fantasy).Those who come into contact with it will not be contacting "you".

It is a nice thought that our physical remains continue on as part of our larger legacy, and I've actually used that thought to comfort the bereaved. The energy we've used, while it is out there, will not produce any long-term echoes of us that anyone will ever identify. Our memories and identities are much better preserved in photo albums.

- SmartLX


Possible accounts of reincarnation.

Ask the Atheist - Mon, 2009-05-25 23:56
Question:Hello as im sure you know im new here and ive yet to see anything on the possible claims of reincarnation. such as young children claiming oddly accurate details of a past life. the one that i found interesting was of the WWII pilot who was shot down over Iwa Jima *sorry for spelling.* also im agnostic theist if not pagan in ways. i find that the Christianity version of a god is quite scary really, but anywho i was just woundering what you think of this. i have also read alot of your info on NDE too.Atheist Answer

Welcome WolfFable. Yeah, I ended up writing a mountain of stuff on NDEs when Maroun took it upon himself to defend them as evidence for God.

The boy you're referring to is James Leininger, who according to the story remembered details of the life of WW2 pilot James Huston, killed over Iwo Jima.

It seems to have become a flagship case for reincarnation, and in the case of the above link the religious are using it to support the existence of God. This is interesting, because reincarnation is not an accepted part of many mainstream religions. The impetus, I sadly suspect, is the New Age industry based around helping people "remember" their past lives.

Here is an excellent skeptical analysis of the case. Highlights:
- The first and only counsellor who saw the poor kid was a believer in reincarnation, who went about recovering the old memories on the immediate assumption that they were there.
- Most versions of the story fail to mention that the boy had been to the Kavanaugh Flight Museum in Dallas a few months before it all started.
- Little James talked about a Corsair, among the more distinctive planes featured at the museum. After investigation, it turned out James Huston was killed in a FM2 Wildcat.

There are other elements of the story which cannot be attacked so readily, but see how much less credible it is when just a few omitted facts are re-integrated into the story? Unfortunately parts of this story will probably get harder to pin down as time goes on, but there's enough so far to suggest that little James Leininger had plenty of earthly inspiration for his initial fixation.

Generally, reincarnation depends on the existence of souls, so you've got to establish those before you can talk about them moving between bodies. There are atheists out there who believe in ghosts, so a few atheists might well buy this concept too. I don't.

- SmartLX


Did Nietzsche think Jesus' Godhood was a lie

Ask the Atheist - Sun, 2009-05-24 18:27
Question:I just read an interesting article suggesting Nietzsche thought that the god-hood of Jesus was a lie. It's called "The Pious Fraud" and it's in the submissions section at Any thoughts?Atheist Answer

"Pious fraud" is a more general term for any act of deception by a religious person or group which uses the rationale that it increases belief in a supposedly real deity. A modern Christian-centric term for it is "lying for Jesus".

Nietzsche argued that the historical claims of Christianity had been debunked, for example briefly in his 1862 essay Fate and History. (It's only four pages, so check it out.)

Elsewhere he lumped Christianity in with other religions as being based on a lie. In The Antichrist (much longer), he is eventually direct, referring to the 'lie of the "risen" Jesus'. He directly accuses Paul of lying in the same passage. Your answer is yes, Nietzsche really did think what you think he thought.

If there was no actual resurrection, and disregarding for a moment the possibility of hallucinations, someone had to be guilty of fraud, pious or not. (The chroniclers themselves are included in the list of suspects.) Arguing against this based on the character and moral fibre of those well-known characters involved does no good, for it simply implies that they were not the perpetrators.

Say for example that someone unknown impersonated Jesus so well that his friends and very old (for the period) mother believed he had returned. To achieve this he didn't have to look or sound exactly as he did, as he'd supposedly been through a lot. He just had to make the point that he was back, and disappear again. This scenario exonerates Jesus, the apostles and anyone else named in the Bible of any deception, while still letting deception happen. If you don't like that idea, come up with your own clever scheme.

Personally, the idea of Jesus' teachings fading away seems frightening enough to his followers that they would be willing to manufacture a miracle to keep them going, thus breaking a Commandment and possibly sacrificing their own souls for the cause. Clever schemes don't appeal to me as much as the infinite capacity of the human mind for rationalisation.

- SmartLX


Is science creating gaps where there are no gaps?

Ask the Atheist - Tue, 2009-05-19 18:49
Question:It’s interesting to point out that the early founders of modern science were deeply committed Christians of the 16th and 17th Century, who were on a mission to understand more of God’s glorious works; indeed, the notion of natural laws is rooted in an understanding of moral laws. (Dennis Alexander – Director of the Faraday Institute in Science and Faith, Cambridge University) Ultimately, some saw science as a means to get closer to God, others saw it as a means to get further away. But “atheistic science” must now ask its “disciples” to believe it will not just explain the observable world around us, but that it will demonstrate how life creates itself, how a material universe came from nothing (an infinitely regressing universe is mathematically nonsensical, and the Big Bang theory points to a clear singularity), and how the human mind came to be. It also requires that objective morality is discarded and life’s purpose is as subjective as your choice of favourite ice cream. In addition, it must reject a man named Jesus Christ. The ability to observe the inner-workings of cells and understand (to some extent) how cells work is a wonderful achievement. But to suggest that we can some day prove that life evolves from non-life is quite an extrapolated assumption! Abiogenesis has been around for centuries – once rejected by science, now resurrected by science in light of Darwin’s Theory – it is just not getting any closer to providing an explanation. God can’t fit around science, God is science and Darwin’s theory of evolution (the foundation of atheism) cannot be true because an undirected, chance process is just not consistent with God as portrayed in the Bible – a God who claims to make Himself known through nature is more likely to leave finger-prints of design rather than the appearance of randomness and “non-design”. Faith in God doesn’t kill science, faith in science kills God. I believe science is now creating gaps where there really are none. Tom Atheist Answer

You dismiss a lot of what I wrote to your last question, without actually addressing most of my answers. I hope you realise that you can reply directly to my answers by commenting.

The founders of modern science were deeply committed Christians because almost the entire populations of their countries were. They approached everything from a premise of Christian faith, including science.

Their scientific endeavours, however, did not utilise the catch-all explanation that a god provides. Then as now, they searched for natural explanations for physical phenomena. THEN they credited God. They did not simply say, "God did it." They said, "God caused it to happen like this." If they couldn't work something out, they said, "We don't yet know how God does this." They still had gaps in their understanding, and filling them with God didn't stop them from wanting to close them.

Scientists today can be atheists, Christians or anything else. Modern science itself is not atheistic, it is rather agnostic. It is completely divorced from theology, and does not normally take any position on the existence of gods. It looks for natural explanations as always. Once those explanations exist, the religious are free to suppose that God is responsible. If you want to establish God's necessity however, you have to undermine the natural explanation and thus attack science.

Importantly, scientists of all religions HAVE found many explanations for phenomena for which there were none. The theory of gravity has explained not just the movements of planets but the means of their formation. Germ theory has explained diseases so well that we can now fight them directly.

This does not necessarily imply that all mysterious phenomena have natural explanations. It does mean that just because something doesn't have a natural explanation now doesn't mean that it never will. So scientists keep looking, not out of faith but from prior experience that the mysterious does not always remain so.

Scientists are under no illusions that they will understand the universe and everything in it in natural terms within a year, or even a century. The gaps, though shrinking, will probably always be there. If you want to say they're gaps in our understanding of God, go ahead. They're still gaps, and they always were.

Smaller points:

- Do not misrepresent an opposing position, I'm sure you know what a straw man argument is. Nothing in existence can have created itself, and no one thinks life did. It likely didn't evolve into existence either, because evolution requires self-replication which only life has achieved. It emerged as a result of the countless chemical reactions caused by the huge variety of elements being thrown together constantly on and beneath Earth's surface. As I said before, with recent developments abiogenesis research is getting MUCH closer to a full explanation.

- Infinity is not mathematically nonsensical. It is perfectly acceptable to suppose that matter and energy, which as far as we know cannot be destroyed, will last forever into the future. Matter having lasted forever into the past is no different.

- The Big Bang was indeed a singularity, but as the religious are fond of saying, where did that singularity come from? It may have been a transient phase of an ongoing cyclical universe, or the offspring of another. There are other theories which do suppose that it emerged from what one might reasonably call "nothing", but the important thing is that those theories explain exactly how.

- You've more or less ignored my basic explanation of the origin of mind. Perhaps if I point you to animals in which its precursors have appeared: self-awareness in birds, emotions in elephants, culture in dolphins, all of the above in chimpanzees...if it helps creatures survive and procreate, which it does, then it is strengthened with each new generation.

- You've also ignored my distinction between objective morality and absolute morality. The object on which a moral or ethic is based does not need to be a universal absolute (we cannot determine whether anything is) in order to be valid; it simply needs to be common to all those who apply that morality.

- Science is not concerned with Jesus because there is no scientific evidence for him or his supposed miracles. That's not to say he didn't exist, or even that they didn't happen. There is simply nothing in the subject for science to do right now.

- Darwinian evolution is not the foundation of atheism, because there were atheists thousands of years before Darwin. It's generally accepted by atheists today, because the only real reasons to reject it are religious. Your bottom line is that because evolution contradicts the Bible, it must not be true. That premise leads you to believe that ANY existing criticism of evolution is valid, so you use them all, even the long-refuted ones like irreducible complexity. Don't.

- SmartLX


Does an atheist need to explain the following?

Ask the Atheist - Mon, 2009-05-18 20:10
Question:As a Christian, I accept and respect the decision of an atheist to negate God; this is clearly their prerogative. However, I submit to you that there are multiple outstanding issues which might pose difficulties for an Atheist who wishes to remain content that Science actually speaks against God, rather than for Him. For instance: 1. How did something come from nothing (i.e. what caused the Big Bang)? 2. Irreducibly complex systems. 3. Non-living matter needing to arrange itself into living matter (mathematically refuted). 4. The Cambrian Explosion. "It's as though they were just planted there, without any evolutionary history" (Dawkins 1996) 5. An incomplete fossil record – “the trade secret of paleontology” (ATHEIST Gould, Stephen Jay; Professor of Zoology and Geology, Harvard University, USA) 6. The Anthropic Principle. 7. Origins of the mind. 8. Can a brain produced solely by a chance, undirected system be capable of determining ultimate truth? (A question posed by Darwin himself). 9. Are things “right” (i.e. moral/ethical) just because we say they are? (Without something transcendent to ourselves there is no objective morality). Clearly an atheist is not obliged to have definitive answers but could faithfully anticipate science filling in all these gaps. I’m just not sure I could live like that? I feel science happily points towards God. In Christ TomAtheist Answer

Atheists can deny gods, but we can't "negate" them. If there's a god here somewhere, it's there, and all the disbelief in the world won't destroy it. If there aren't any gods, however, all the belief in the world won't create one.

I've addressed a lot of your numbered points before if you want to have a look in Recent Posts, but I'll summarise for you.

1. The Big Bang wasn't necessarily something coming from nothing. It might have been, sure, but nothing prevents the existence of a natural precursor: say, another universe. In that case, the implication is an infinite series of universes, or a stable external universe producing unstable internal universes like this one.

Your solution to the same problem is that God created the universe, and he existed forever before that. If you can simply declare this, isn't it simpler to cut out the extra entity and suppose that the universe itself has always existed in some form? God explanations always look so clean and simple, until you then have to explain the god.

2. Name one actually irreducibly complex system. Those presented in public so far have been hypothetically reduced, and in most or all cases already had been when they were presented as irreducibly complex. If you have a favourite example, we can go through it here.

3. The mathematical refutations of abiogenesis (life from non-life) have themselves been refuted, starting with Hoyle's famous Boeing 747 argument. In brief, although the chances were small, the opportunities were many and the possible forms early life could have taken were almost infinite. Most impossible-looking probabilities suppose that only a particular protein or enzyme must be formed.

4. Quote-mining Dawkins, of all people, will get you nowhere. The Cambrian "explosion" was if anything a very slow explosion, occurring over several million of the 15 million years of the Cambrian period. It was indeed a period of great change and many new variations, but since it's around the period when animals themselves first appeared, one would expect this. Nobody said evolution had to proceed at the same rate throughout its 3.5 billion year history.

5. The incomplete fossil record is hardly a secret. A given plant or animal has an incredibly small chance of becoming a fossil at all, and we'll never find most of them anyway, so it's inconceivable that the record will ever be "complete".

Those fossils we have found, however, paint a sparse but consistent impression of branching descent from a common ancestor. What would really throw evolutionary theory off is not missing fossils, but fossils in the wrong period. The famous hypothetical example is rabbits in the pre-Cambrian.

6. The anthropic principle is often very atheistic in nature. It counters the sense of privilege we might feel in having a planet which is perfect for our needs, by saying that we could only have emerged on such a planet, wherever it was.

What you really mean is the fine-tuning argument, which states that if the conditions of the universe were even slightly different, we could not exist. In the hypothetical context of a multiverse the above applies again; out of the many different universes we could only have emerged in one which suits our needs.

There are other objections which do not require this model, for example: perhaps to achieve a different but life-friendly universe, the conditions of the universe need to be wrenched rather than tweaked, and other equilibria exist far away from the current "settings". All possible arrangements have not been tested, only those near ours.

7. The mind can be easily explained, at least in broad strokes, by evolution. The mind is beneficial. Those animals including primates which developed rudimentary versions of the brain functions we think of as "mind" had a tremendous mental advantage over those which didn't. Later, any deadly contest of will or wits was won by whoever had the better mind. Natural selection favours the clever, all other things being equal.

8. Darwin was in no doubt that an undirected system had in fact produced the brain. It may not in fact be capable of determining ultimate truth, whatever that is, but it is perfectly capable of making reasoned decisions based on the evidence before it.

9. Perhaps nothing is intrinsically "right" or "wrong". We can never know. Therefore we adopt a heuristic approach to morality: that which is beneficial is usually right, and that which is harmful is usually wrong. If it works, we keep it. If it doesn't, we change it.

Without something transcendent to ourselves there is probably no absolute morality, but there is plenty of objective morality. The objects used can be simple and straightforward, like a comparison of relative benefit and harm, or they can be tried and tested, like the ancient ethic of reciprocity (the Golden Rule), or they can be complex and careful, like the law.

These objects can certainly be challenged, but in the absence of any infallible authority we actually know exists, we use the most solid things we have, such as logic, mathematics, group consensus and our common human empathy.

Tom, I notice something about your perspective, based on your nine issues. It is not science that points to God, it is rather the perceived failings of science. You point in every case to what science supposedly can't explain (though in most of these cases it's well on the way), instead of what it can. Yours seems to be a god of the gaps.

Those gaps are getting smaller. Just this year, for instance, scientists discovered a method by which RNA (a precursor to DNA) can form, and elsewhere they synthesised rudimentary self-replicators. There is now less we don't know about the natural emergence of life from non-life than there was a year ago. God is a necessary part of that process to fewer people. The nature of gods of the gaps, Tom, is that they shrink.

If you want to keep believing, you're better off embracing the world as it really is, rather than denying things like evolution for which the evidence is overwhelming. God can always fit around science if you want Him to. Just accept that things are as they are, and say God made them that way.

- SmartLX


Secular response to a sneeze.

Ask the Atheist - Sun, 2009-05-10 19:18
Question:I once replied 'Bless You' to my born-again, right-wing, guns-and-ammo-obsessed co-worker (he's a nice guy, though, just scary sometimes with his views) and his reply to me was that 'We have not been given the power by God to bless anyone. Only God can do that." Okaaaaaay... So other than ignoring their sneeze(s), is there a polite response that indicates our joy that their heart did not stop during the event. Somehow 'Nice sneeze' or "Good one" don't seem sincere enough. Or... do we really need to say anything at all? It's just that we (I) was brought up to acknowledge a sneeze with a 'God Bless You'. I feel awkward not saying anything.Atheist Answer

Your co-worker took what you said too literally. As you say, "bless you" in this context is actually short for "God bless you" which is a request for God to do the blessing rather than a blessing in and of itself. Perhaps if you reinserted "God" the next time someone sneezes around this guy...

The tradition of acknowledging a sneeze is spread worldwide, but not all of the international sayings are religious. The most famous secular response, and the one I use, is the German version "gesundheit". It literally wishes the sneezer "good health".

- SmartLX

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