The Atheist Test
 

The Atheist Test

/troll

heh

interesting page.. reminds me of an analogy i heard one time: take apart a mechanical watch and throw all the parts in a dryer. would you ever expect a fully function watch with all parts to ever form?

It would almost be an appropriate analogy if watches reproduced.

Or if, you know, the very concept of infinity--mind-boggling as it is--didn't in fact say that yes, a fully-functioning watch would eventually form, regardless of what you as a short-sighted human might "expect."

A fully functioning watch would never form in such a small and simple system. Fortunately the universe ain't that simple.

A banana is not perforated.

Further, complete knowledge of China is not necessary to prove there is no gold in China. I may have complete knowledge of gold. Or I may know some consequence of the existence of gold in China which I can demonstrate has not happened. (since the statement is false, none comes to mind).

No one knows if there is a god, no one knows there isn't. Why do we have to know? What difference does it make? If you had irrefutable proof that there was NO god, would you live your life differently?

Do you only do good in hope of reward, or fear of punishment? I don't. I do good because it is good.

:love:

I'm trying to work out whether the argument would convince me if I didn't dislike bananas so much....

Perhaps I'll just have to accept them as the devil's fruit.

the creator is natural selection.

bananas don't have legs, so in order to travel, they need to be eaten, carried and deposited elsewhere. does this mean that bananas are intelligent? no. does it mean that GOD had to design them as a finished product? no. it means that bananas have, through natural selection, developed the traits that make them appealing to primates. they fill a niche.

like a puddle that seems to have been created to hold the exact amount of water that fills it up.

creationism is a cop out.

Creationism exists because the human ego holds that humans are *so* much more elevated above the rest of Life as we know it, that we *must* have been designed by someone even higher up the line that ourselves.

Fine. What if that someone was an alien? Would we still believe that it was God, or would the human ego just go, "Well, someone must have created the aliens, then!"?

It just strikes me as odd that the same people who scoff at the notion of a creator wholeheartedly accept the notion that the entire universe came into being from nothingness with no help whatsoever. That seems contradictory to the very heart of the theory of evolution.

For most people -- not all -- it simply boils down to "I don't like Christians, and anything they say should be stricken from the arena of ideas (or at the very least, ridiculed until they give up). God -- yeah right." They've heard enough science to be able to formulate some witty one-liners for forum threads, but by and large, they don't have a clue about either science or God.

The haters like to make all Christians sound like idiots, but we're not. There is no inherent contradiction between the concepts of evolution and a creating God. You can "HAHAHA JEEBUS SUXXORS!!!!!1" all you want.

And don't start this whole "But government can't mandate religion" bullshit. If there ever was a zealous extremist movement, it's that of secular humanism. It's not a matter of protecting people from government-organized religion; for them, it's about shoving it all under the rug so that their voice is the only one heard.

and I meant to put this in the intelligent design thread. There's a joke in there somewhere...

First, evolution says absolutely nothing about where the universe came from.

But anyway, there are four possibilities:

1) An entity came into being from nothingness with no help whatsoever, then created the universe.
2) An entity always existed, and created the universe.

3) The universe came into being from nothingness with no help whatsoever.
4) The universe always existed.

If it is possible for something to always exist or to appear from nothingness, then the simpler explanation is that the universe did it. Adding an extra entity just adds the additional question of where that came from.

So, if the universe just popped into existence, how did that happen? The official scientific answer? Unknown. Science says nothing about it. Could it be God? Sure, maybe. It could be all sorts of things. But that's not science. And it doesn't belong in a science class. Which brings us to:

That's only true if you consider the government to be the only part of life that isn't under the rug. Because that is the common thread to all of the secular movements.

*sighs*
All those traits would aid the spread and success of the banana and thus fit perfectly with evolutionary theory.

And whoever it was wasn't a very bloody intelligent designer, omnipotent my ass - I've got a funny bone, a useless organ that can kill me, my short term memory goes to crap after 5-7 objects and at 1 foot my high-quality vision area is about the size of a thumbnail. Looks like lowest-bidder work to me.