DogOnPorch Posted April 2, 2011 Report Posted April 2, 2011 Since fossils are fake: What is coal, how was it made and how long ago? Quote Nothing cracks a turtle like Leon Uris.
betsy Posted April 2, 2011 Author Report Posted April 2, 2011 So if the right answer is agnosticism, why have you not moved to that camp yet? You are painting all atheists with the same brush here which eventually destroys your agruments, and it has several times in several threads now. Simply because of faith, my friend. I believe. No need for proof. Is all. Those who read and understand what they read will know that there is no wide-brush stroke. Quote
betsy Posted April 2, 2011 Author Report Posted April 2, 2011 Excerpts from the article. A very long read. Hart tackled Dawkins, Hitchens, Dennett and more.... Believe it or notDavid B. Hart May 2010 I think I am very close to concluding that this whole “New Atheism” movement is only a passing fad—not the cultural watershed its purveyors imagine it to be, but simply one of those occasional and inexplicable marketing vogues that inevitably go the way of pet rocks, disco, prime-time soaps, and The Bridges of Madison County. ….the recently published 50 Voices of Disbelief: Why We Are Atheists. Simple probability, surely, would seem to dictate that a collection of essays by fifty fairly intelligent and zealous atheists would contain at least one logically compelling, deeply informed, morally profound, or conceptually arresting argument for not believing in God. Certainly that was my hope in picking it up. Instead, I came away from the whole drab assemblage of preachments and preenings feeling rather as if I had just left a large banquet at which I had been made to dine entirely on crushed ice and water vapor. To be fair, the shallowness is not evenly distributed. Some of the writers exhibit a measure of wholesome tentativeness in making their cases, and as a rule the quality of the essays is inversely proportionate to the air of authority their authors affect. For this reason, the philosophers—who are no better than their fellow contributors at reasoning, but who have better training in giving even specious arguments some appearance of systematic form—tend to come off as the most insufferable contributors. Nicholas Everitt and Stephen Law recycle the old (and incorrigibly impressionistic) argument that claims of God’s omnipotence seem incompatible with claims of his goodness. The scientists fare almost as poorly. Among these, Victor Stenger is the most recklessly self-confident, but his inability to differentiate the physical distinction between something and nothing (in the sense of “not anything as such”) from the logical distinction between existence and nonexistence renders his argument empty. The whole project probably reaches its reductio ad absurdum when the science-fiction writer Sean Williams explains that he learned to reject supernaturalism in large part from having grown up watching Doctor Who. So it goes. In the end the book as a whole adds up to absolutely nothing—as, frankly, do all the books in this new genre—and I have to say I find this all somewhat depressing. For one thing, it seems obvious to me that the peculiar vapidity of New Atheist literature is simply a reflection of the more general vapidity of all public religious discourse these days, believing and unbelieving alike. The principal source of my melancholy, however, is my firm conviction that today’s most obstreperous infidels lack the courage, moral intelligence, and thoughtfulness of their forefathers in faithlessness. What I find chiefly offensive about them is not that they are skeptics or atheists; rather, it is that they are not skeptics at all and have purchased their atheism cheaply, with the sort of boorish arrogance that might make a man believe himself a great strategist because his tanks overwhelmed a town of unarmed peasants, or a great lover because he can afford the price of admission to a brothel. http://www.firstthings.com/article/2010/04/believe-it-or-not Quote
DogOnPorch Posted April 2, 2011 Report Posted April 2, 2011 I suppose a question about where the coal and oil we burn comes from is a wee bit too chalenging to the ol' faith-o-rama. If fossils are the Devil's work...why am I driving a car??? Quote Nothing cracks a turtle like Leon Uris.
betsy Posted April 2, 2011 Author Report Posted April 2, 2011 (edited) If fossils are the devil's work.....why am I driving a car??? ha-ha-ha For a while I thought you've got something up your sleeves. And I was about ready to ask you to spit it out.... ha ha ha Edited April 2, 2011 by betsy Quote
WIP Posted April 3, 2011 Report Posted April 3, 2011 Since they've actually waged war, I like to know these men. It's only sensible to know the enemy. I assume Dawkins is much more high-profiled - being the atheist poster boy - compared to the other 4 (two of whom where not included in the interview) who started the movement. Dawkins was easy to "read" from just watching that debate with Wendy Wright. I think he'd make an interesting subject for psychologists. Anyway... What the hell are you talking about -- "waging war"? Re: your last sentence, I'm wondering if you're the one who would make an interesting subject for a psychologist! The using of violent terminology and imagery, tells me that your way of thinking has no room for different opinions. Anyone who doesn't believe like you, and writes books condemning religion, is equivalent to waging war. I could say pushing your version of religion and condemning everyone who pushes back, is waging war against freethought. Lawyer rebutts Dawkinshttp://www.victorzammit.com/articles/dawkins.html So, now you believe in telepathy, psychic healing, telekenesis, paranormal, mediums talking to the dead etc.....since this rebuttal is not about God, but a critical essay Dawkins wrote about psi and paranormal mumbo jumbo five years ago. And his rebuttals are all rhetoric and no substance. For example, he repeats a statement several times that there are hundreds of studies providing empirical evidence for the psychic phenomena, and provides no links or references to any of them. A secondary point is that he doesn't seem to have much of any idea who Richard Dawkins is, aside from reading the article that he took offense to, since he identifies Dawkins as a zoologist, rather than an evolutionary biologist. It's not much of rebuttal. I'm wondering if you're googling search terms like "Dawkins" and "refute" or "rebuttal" and just posting the links! Quote Anybody who believers exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist. -- Kenneth Boulding, 1973
Oleg Bach Posted April 3, 2011 Report Posted April 3, 2011 Apparently... Clearly that 1% makes quite a big difference. Then Dawkin says... He should've been Agnostic. The probability is still there. And yet he is "confident" that God does not exists. I guess it's more lucrative to be an atheist! One can not have two masters. You can not serve Mammon ( the god of riches ) and God at the same time - You will grow to hate one master and love the other - atheists probably do prosper in the short term..but not eternally. Quote
WIP Posted April 3, 2011 Report Posted April 3, 2011 Excerpts from the article. A very long read. Hart tackled Dawkins, Hitchens, Dennett and more.... http://www.firstthings.com/article/2010/04/believe-it-or-not I haven't read the book he's supposed to be reviewing, but I've read stuff from many of the names listed; and you can't summarize what all 50 of the believe, so the author just glosses over many of the names, before going on to condemn the celebrities on the list. It's totally false and disingenuous to label all 50 as "zealous" new atheists. Just like many of your other links, you've picked another one that creates straw men to knock down under the banner of waging war against atheism. Rather than any fact-based criticisms of new atheism, all he offers his opinions, conjectures and invectives. But, I'm more interested to see what this writer believes, and what sort of case for belief he makes...since he has so much bile for those who remain unconvinced. So what is his evidence? Near the end, he presents a murky reading of the standard Cosmological Proof for the existence of God: These claims start, rather, from the fairly elementary observation that nothing contingent, composite, finite, temporal, complex, and mutable can account for its own existence, and that even an infinite series of such things can never be the source or ground of its own being, but must depend on some source of actuality beyond itself. Thus, abstracting from the universal conditions of contingency, one very well may (and perhaps must) conclude that all things are sustained in being by an absolute plenitude of actuality, whose very essence is being as such: not a “supreme being,” not another thing within or alongside the universe, but the infinite act of being itself, the one eternal and transcendent source of all existence and knowledge, in which all finite being participates. Well, if nothing in this universe can account for its own existence, or be uncaused, then he needs to answer the question that David Hume asked a couple of centuries ago, and he refers to earlier in the article: 'what caused God?' What makes God "eternal" and "transcendent"? And what proof is there that such a being created the Universe? How does he know that there is such a creator, and that he has these qualities that provide an existence that violates the rule that everything must have a cause? He could just be invoking the existence of a supernatural creator that exists outside of our universe (and outside of the rules of existence claimed here) to solve a problem. We don't get an explanation of why or how God is self-caused; so it's a matter of using a mystery to solve a mystery. Another problem is that these cosmological proofs that are based on the premise that all events in the Universe have a cause, are undone by the discoveries in quantum mechanics - of how things work at the sub-atomic level. For example, scientists have found that particles of energy may come into existence, completely uncaused (Virtual Particles), in empty space. Also, atomic decay, such as the decay of carbon 14 atoms, varies with identical carbon 14 atoms decaying at different rates for no other reason that that their decay rates are spontaneous (and therefore uncaused). If this is the best David Hart has got to prove God to me or anyone else, maybe his lack of a clear and consistent proof for what he believes everyone else should believe in, is the reason why he is so full of hostility to all who question the existence of God. Quote Anybody who believers exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist. -- Kenneth Boulding, 1973
WIP Posted April 3, 2011 Report Posted April 3, 2011 Knock down and challenge a popular theory? Skeptics don't argue that evolution is a theory. They argue it is the best theory based upon the facts but they wish to present it as the only, don't think of anything else, fact. This doesn't exactly make sense, so I'm going to have to do a little guessing to figure out what you're driving at here. There are differences of opinion on how evolution occurs -- a Dutch biologist Gert Korthof has dozens of book reviews on evolution and proposed alternative theories - check out the subheading Extensions & alternative evolutionary theories . There is a reason why proposed theories outside of the framework of evolutionary theory cannot be taken seriously by biologists and other life scientists -- non-evolutionary theories do not have means to explain the fossil record or the phylogenetic tree of life. The essential question is, does life create the environment or does the environment create life?Which makes most sense? Now I'm really wondering if you were into the non-liquid refreshments when you wrote this! First, evolution doesn't deal with origins of life, and what is this 'life creates environment' 'environment creates life' anyway? Quote Anybody who believers exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist. -- Kenneth Boulding, 1973
Bonam Posted April 3, 2011 Report Posted April 3, 2011 Now I'm really wondering if you were into the non-liquid refreshments when you wrote this! First, evolution doesn't deal with origins of life, and what is this 'life creates environment' 'environment creates life' anyway? Well, many lifeforms do modify their environment to better suit themselves. Obviously the most prevalent example of this is humans, but there are many others as well. Not that that has much relevance to this thread. Quote
dre Posted April 3, 2011 Report Posted April 3, 2011 I think that the article shows that the mainstream is more tolerant of non-Atheistic faith than of Atheistic faith. It's understandable really, because one should expect these New Atheists seem to be smarter than falling into the trap of faith. I think that the article shows that the mainstream is more tolerant of non-Atheistic faith than of Atheistic faith There is no atheistic faith. Youre parroting an entirely fallacious slogan, that I dont think you really believe. Quote I question things because I am human. And call no one my father who's no closer than a stranger
dre Posted April 3, 2011 Report Posted April 3, 2011 Simply because of faith, my friend. I believe. No need for proof. Is all. Your faith in humans that made up the particular set of mythologies you believe in? Why are ancient Romans more worthy of your faith than modern scientists? Quote I question things because I am human. And call no one my father who's no closer than a stranger
Oleg Bach Posted April 3, 2011 Report Posted April 3, 2011 Your faith in humans that made up the particular set of mythologies you believe in? Why are ancient Romans more worthy of your faith than modern scientists? Science is art - or artifical...or in some circles artifice..There is nothing wrong with humans having a hobby as long as they do not get fixated on it..and waste a life time dealing in curiousity. CREATION AND EVOLUTION - are the same thing. It is a case of time..and how human beings percieve time. Ten million years is but a blink of an eye - for GOD - the universal intelligence - So as scripture dictates... creation was instant...Let there be light - and the re-generation of intelligence which is within man kind and nature - was also instant. Fundamentalist who think the world is only 6000 years old are dumb...and science that believes that humanity is something new are also dumb. Human beings in there present form have never really evoloved - If we have evolved there would be proof of it...and our behavour does not stand up well as proof of progress. Quote
Oleg Bach Posted April 3, 2011 Report Posted April 3, 2011 In fact humans are the only life forms that have not evolved...we have adapted to the point of destoying the very nature that created us.. That is not something to be proud of...the common coakroach will be around long after we are gone...they are turely evoluded creatures - they do not bite the hand that feeds them. They lick the hand and allow it to exist. Quote
betsy Posted April 3, 2011 Author Report Posted April 3, 2011 (edited) What the hell are you talking about -- "waging war"? Re: your last sentence, I'm wondering if you're the one who would make an interesting subject for a psychologist! The using of violent terminology and imagery, tells me that your way of thinking has no room for different opinions. Anyone who doesn't believe like you, and writes books condemning religion, is equivalent to waging war. I could say pushing your version of religion and condemning everyone who pushes back, is waging war against freethought. It is you who automatically thinks of violence. You think "war" is only waged through violence. What's with you members of the flock? Your emminence Dawkins and company refuse to think and look outside the box with anything about origin....remaining close-minded. You parrot the same. And now, see? It becomes a way of thinking it seems to you. To remain enclosed in a teeny-weeny box. YOu only think of war in a very narrow terms of violence! So, now you believe in telepathy, psychic healing, telekenesis, paranormal, mediums talking to the dead etc.....since this rebuttal is not about God, but a critical essay Dawkins wrote about psi and paranormal mumbo jumbo five years ago. And his rebuttals are all rhetoric and no substance. For example, he repeats a statement several times that there are hundreds of studies providing empirical evidence for the psychic phenomena, and provides no links or references to any of them. Why, should I only not agree with him when it's about God? Anyway, in the Bible it's been acknowledged that there are mediums or those who deal in the occult. Christians are supposed to stay away from those. There are quacks. And there are quacks. But who's to say there's not a real one? Besides we've not fully understood the capacity of the the human brain. To dismiss everything is irresponsible to say the least. Dawkins is blinded by his faith in no-God. He's so afraid to come face to face with the possibility of anything supernatural. He's crippled or paralyzed by this fear. He's no longer credible as a scientist. Mumbo-jumbo, Dawkins also has a knack for that. From scientist to quack (?). Either he's become a mad scientist....or it's just more lucrative to be an atheist! A secondary point is that he doesn't seem to have much of any idea who Richard Dawkins is, aside from reading the article that he took offense to, since he identifies Dawkins as a zoologist, rather than an evolutionary biologist. Whether he accurately identified Dawkin as a zoologist or not doesn't matter. You're grasping at anything it seems to muddy the waters. His point is still there! It's not much of rebuttal. I'm wondering if you're googling search terms like "Dawkins" and "refute" or "rebuttal" and just posting the links! It's not much of a rebuttal to you perhaps. But that's not surprising you'd say that...since yours is not much of a rebuttal either. You've lost your whole argument with that term, "war." And Dre's just babbling and sputtering away. No actually these articles all stemmed from googling "New Atheism." Like I said that opened many doors for me. Edited April 3, 2011 by betsy Quote
Oleg Bach Posted April 3, 2011 Report Posted April 3, 2011 The New Atheism is great! It consists of those that dispise religion and value God and goodness...they are actually true believers. They will pretend to put God in the same box as relgion - but in their hearts they know different. Most atheists (the non-aggressive kind) are good people - I just don't like fanatics...religious or atheistic. Quote
Michael Hardner Posted April 3, 2011 Report Posted April 3, 2011 He should've been Agnostic. The probability is still there. And yet he is "confident" that God does not exists. I guess it's more lucrative to be an atheist! Um... if he says there's a possibility of a god, then he IS an agnostic. Quote Click to learn why Climate Change is caused by HUMANS Michael Hardner
Oleg Bach Posted April 3, 2011 Report Posted April 3, 2011 Um... if he says there's a possibility of a god, then he IS an agnostic. Looking at the sun this morning standing in the park...I thought of what a fragile little star it was. That of the k-trillions of stars..this little weak blimp of energy sustains us. That in the black void of darkness our sky looking up is a delightful blue. Our very existance is an astounding miracle. Quote
DogOnPorch Posted April 3, 2011 Report Posted April 3, 2011 Our star is far from weak. It is a fine example of a Type G star which is energetic, stable and very long-lived. Any other type of star (other than an F, perhaps) and it would result in zero life on Earth. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G-type_main_sequence_star Quote Nothing cracks a turtle like Leon Uris.
Oleg Bach Posted April 3, 2011 Report Posted April 3, 2011 Our star is far from weak. It is a fine example of a Type G star which is energetic, stable and very long-lived. Any other type of star (other than an F, perhaps) and it would result in zero life on Earth. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G-type_main_sequence_star That was not the point my friend - and thanks for the technical advice regarding our sun. When you think of our solar system - a big clock...and the fact that Jupiter is with it's great gravitational pull - is our protector from objects that would fall on our heads...It really is an amazing and intelligent set up...I as a human being am totally stunned by the majesty of this great supposed fluke that generates intelligent life. What I meant by the sun being weak - is that it will eventually go out. Perhaps in the next second. I do not take life for granted...I am thankful to what ever force created this miracle - that I a mere mortal can partake in. Quote
DogOnPorch Posted April 3, 2011 Report Posted April 3, 2011 (edited) Fluke, eh? Only if you have one shot at making Earth. In our galaxy alone there's an estimated 500 million potential Earths alone...with more stars being formed in various star nurseries as we converse. That's in our galaxy...there's hundreds of billions of those. This diagram is the result of Kepler's survey of a tiny patch of space over the past while. Look at all those planets... http://www.space.com/11279-nasa-alien-planets-image-1235-exoplanets.html http://kepler.nasa.gov/ Edited April 3, 2011 by DogOnPorch Quote Nothing cracks a turtle like Leon Uris.
Oleg Bach Posted April 3, 2011 Report Posted April 3, 2011 Come on - why do you want to drag us down and not allow humaity to be special? Here is the other alternative and it IS a possiblity - that there are other earths out there and are inhabited...BUT there is also the chance we are the only one..yes that is possbile even though not probable. If we were to find out that we were totally alone - that might make us appreciate who we are...and even make the existance of God - more of a neccesity. Quote
DogOnPorch Posted April 3, 2011 Report Posted April 3, 2011 Give my regards to Zeus. Quote Nothing cracks a turtle like Leon Uris.
Oleg Bach Posted April 3, 2011 Report Posted April 3, 2011 Give my regards to Zeus. Odd that Zeus sounds like E-zeus...and J-seus...............yah thanks - my regards to you also. Quote
GostHacked Posted April 3, 2011 Report Posted April 3, 2011 (edited) Simply because of faith, my friend. I believe. No need for proof. Is all. Those who read and understand what they read will know that there is no wide-brush stroke. Those who read have to deal with the contradictions that are in the bible. Only faith would allow one to allow contradictions, because when you think about it, the contradictions have torn the bible apart which destroys faith. I can't have faith in lies and deceit. You would have no problem kicking friends to the curb when they contradict themselves and lie to you. If you had faith in those friends, that would allow you to ignore all the bullshit. Same goes with the bible. And you do like to paint all atheists the same. You are only contradicting and lying to yourself to claim otherwise. Edited April 3, 2011 by GostHacked Quote
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