The Four Dirty Secrets Against Darwin Evolution

[Polymath257]

Good question. Not for a long time, no. But it was the cognitive dissonance from trying to make sense of the universe without God that finally helped to open my eyes; our Universe had a Creator.

Funny, I have found no such cognitive dissonance. If anything, the more I learn, the less sense the hypothesis of a deity makes.

 

[Regiomontanus]

Funny, I have found no such cognitive dissonance. If anything, the more I learn, the less sense the hypothesis of a deity makes.

Brother, I do not doubt your sincerity for even a second. I was an atheist for most of my life and so have been where you are. God bless.



"They are darkened in their understanding, alienated from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them, due to their hardness of heart."

 

[Esteban X]

Where was this Creator before the universe existed?

By what technique did the Creator bring the universe into existence?

Why?

Why does this Creator care about the followers of one of earth's many many religions on one of many many planets around literally septillions or more of stars in the universe, and not bother with the rest?

If the Creator, God for want of a better term, was perfect and entire unto himself, what was his motivation to create the universe? He lacked nothing and had no need to fulfill, so creation was unnecessary. So, as you say, the fundamental question (of Life, the Universe and Everything) is : Why?

 

[TagliatelliMonster]

What an absurd statement!

"According to the poll, just over half of scientists (51%) believe in some form of deity or higher power; specifically, 33% of scientists say they believe in God, while 18% believe in a universal spirit or higher power. By contrast, 95% of Americans believe in some form of deity or higher power, according to a survey of the general public conducted by the Pew Research Center in July 2006."

Ok, not a particulatly recent poll, but I doubt the numbers are significantly different today.

Scientists and Belief

When President Barack Obama announced on July 8, 2009, that he would nominate renowned geneticist Francis Collins to be the new director of the National

www.pewresearch.org

The point is that none of them give god a thought when they are doing their research.

When medical scientists are running their experiments or doing their research, they are not considering the possibility that a god is intervening and fiddling about with the cancer cells to make the cancer go into remission.

When physicists make protons collide in the LHC, they aren't considering the possibility that god is intervening and fiddling about with the particles that result from that collision.

When paleontologists dig up fossils, they aren't considering the possibility that god burried them there to try and trick / test us.

When abiogenesis researchers are running an experiment to see under which conditions amino acids form, they aren't considering the possibility that a god is making them form.

In summary: when they are doing their science, they assume that their results are valid and the result of reality and natural forces. They do not assume supernatural forces are at play in any way. When doing science, they basically think like atheists: gods and the supernatural are non-issues. They are not present. They play no role.

 

[TagliatelliMonster]

Good question. Not for a long time, no. But it was the cognitive dissonance from trying to make sense of the universe without God that finally helped to open my eyes; our Universe had a Creator.

This sounds an awful lot like "This is way to hard for me to figure out. Let's just say god-dun-it and be done with it..."
Intellectual lazyness is what that's called.

 

[It Aint Necessarily So]

Brother, I do not doubt your sincerity for even a second. I was an atheist for most of my life and so have been where you are. God bless.

"They are darkened in their understanding, alienated from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them, due to their hardness of heart."

Whose heart has been hardened? I'll bet that you didn't say such offensive things to believers when you were an atheist. But now you feel free to say them to atheists.

What effect should that have on how atheists view such a religion or the people embracing it? Is that a good, positive, constructive message deserving respect, or self-serving bigotry?

This is one of the things I like least about religions like yours. They depict skeptics as intellectually and morally defective. The Christian Bible has many examples of atheophobic bigotry. the religion promotes itself by scapegoating unbelievers, which has marginalized and demonized atheists for millennia and made their lives more difficult and more dangerous.

And yes, I was a Christian for years, have been where you are now, and am well pleased to have become a humanist instead. I find it preferable to be able to live comfortably outside of religions.

Thanks for the scripture. I've added it to my list of biblical bigotry (number [6]):

Here are the others I had already found:

[1] "The fool says in his heart, 'There is no God.' They are corrupt, their deeds are vile; there is no one who does good" - Psalm 14:1​

​

[2] "But the fearful, and unbelieving, and the abominable, and murderers, and whoremongers, and sorcerers, and idolaters, all liars, shall have their part in the lake which burneth with fire and brimstone." - Revelation 21:8​

​

[3]"Do not be yoked together with unbelievers. For what do righteousness and wickedness have in common? Or what fellowship can light have with darkness?"- 2 Corinthians 6:14​

​

[4] Who is the liar? It is the man who denies that Jesus is the Christ." - 1 John 2:22​

​

[5] "Whoever is not with me is against me" - Luke 11:23​

​

[6] "They are darkened in their understanding, alienated from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them, due to their hardness of heart. They have become callous and have given themselves up to sensuality, greedy to practice every kind of impurity." - Ephesians 4:18-24​

Altogether, these six passages from your holy book depict unbelievers as corrupt, vile, wicked, abominable, godless vessels of darkness in the service of evil, not one of which does any good, greedy to practice every kind of impurity, to be shunned, fit to be burned alive forever as enemies of a good god, and the moral equivalent of murderers and whoremongers.

If you can't see the hatred and bigotry there, substitute Christian for unbeliever. Let's rewrite a few:

• The fool believes in a god. Such people are corrupt and vile. None of them are good people.
• Believers should be grouped with the abominable, murderers, whoremongers, and liars, and deserve to be tortured forever.
• Who is the liar? The Christian.

 

[Polymath257]

Brother, I do not doubt your sincerity for even a second. I was an atheist for most of my life and so have been where you are. God bless.



"They are darkened in their understanding, alienated from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them, due to their hardness of heart."

And there is a way for nonbelievers to test whether they just “don’t see” something that believers do. I take the example of Dalton, of atomic theory fame. He noticed that others claimed to make color distinctions he couldn’t see. He also found that they were consistent in details of which colors were which. So he realized he was “color blind” ( a condition called daltonism at first).

I would apply the exact same test to god belief: do those claiming to see things have consistent descriptions? And the answer is clearly not. And that suggests that they do NOT see something that nonbelievers don’t, but are actually just “seeing” their own biases.

And this is one characteristic of believers that I have noticed: they seem to be awash in confirmation bias. They simply don’t like their beliefs challenged or have them asked to be testable by others. Again, that is to be expected if they are only deluding themselves as opposed to seeing something real.

 

[metis]

I'm just saying, we need to be careful with our language and "intuition" here.
Yes, there is an explanation for the big bang.
Likely, it is nevertheless nonsensical to talk about "before" the universe.

No doubt space time is a factor to a great extent but I'm not willing to go so far and insist "before" didn't exist--just my normal skepticism, I guess.

I agree, off course, that the best answer we currently have is simply "we don't know".

I 101% agree.

 

[Subduction Zone]

And there is a way for nonbelievers to test whether they just “don’t see” something that believers do. I take the example of Dalton, of atomic theory fame. He noticed that others claimed to make color distinctions he couldn’t see. He also found that they were consistent in details of which colors were which. So he realized he was “color blind” ( a condition called daltonism at first).

I would apply the exact same test to god belief: do those claiming to see things have consistent descriptions? And the answer is clearly not. And that suggests that they do NOT see something that nonbelievers don’t, but are actually just “seeing” their own biases.

And this is one characteristic of believers that I have noticed: they seem to be awash in confirmation bias. They simply don’t like their beliefs challenged or have them asked to be testable by others. Again, that is to be expected if they are only deluding themselves as opposed to seeing something real.

Your suggestions are good. They have strong merit to them on how one could rationally learn if their beliefs were true or not. But I have found that believers do not want to know. They just want to believe. I have more than once tried to help believers in the supernatural in the same way. Whether it comes to making recordings where one could "hear ghosts". Or in the recent case of a supposed case of a person able to speak in another very obscure language that was supposedly confirmed. They have enough raw data, that was gathered under half decent conditions so that it can be the basis of a proper testable hypothesis. They never want to take that step to where they can honestly say "I believe this and here is the testable claim that I have that is supported by evidence where we took out confirmation bias and other flaws". They do not want that because they can see the odds that they are actually wrong are huge and they would rather have a belief supported by very flawed "evidence" rather than knowing that they have nothing. I am not saying that that s what they have but to be honest it probably is just white noise for "ghost recordings". For the sudden ability to speak in a language that one does not understand, and the not understanding does not include just the language, but what one is saying as well, that is probably just some sort of babbling. One conveniently dead person confirmed the languages, but no one has bothered to see if that person was right.

 

[SkepticThinker]

Brother, I do not doubt your sincerity for even a second. I was an atheist for most of my life and so have been where you are. God bless.



"They are darkened in their understanding, alienated from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them, due to their hardness of heart."

Oh I just love when strangers tell me the reason I don't believe their unevidenced claims is because my heart is hardened because it says so in an old book.

 

[Polymath257]

Your suggestions are good. They have strong merit to them on how one could rationally learn if their beliefs were true or not. But I have found that believers do not want to know. They just want to believe. I have more than once tried to help believers in the supernatural in the same way. Whether it comes to making recordings where one could "hear ghosts". Or in the recent case of a supposed case of a person able to speak in another very obscure language that was supposedly confirmed. They have enough raw data, that was gathered under half decent conditions so that it can be the basis of a proper testable hypothesis. They never want to take that step to where they can honestly say "I believe this and here is the testable claim that I have that is supported by evidence where we took out confirmation bias and other flaws". They do not want that because they can see the odds that they are actually wrong are huge and they would rather have a belief supported by very flawed "evidence" rather than knowing that they have nothing. I am not saying that that s what they have but to be honest it probably is just white noise for "ghost recordings". For the sudden ability to speak in a language that one does not understand, and the not understanding does not include just the language, but what one is saying as well, that is probably just some sort of babbling. One conveniently dead person confirmed the languages, but no one has bothered to see if that person was right.

I am actually curious about this aspect of many people: why the desires to believe? Is it not better to search and discover the truth, testing it to be sure? Why stop at a pleasant hypothesis? Why not compare all the different hypotheses and see which actually fit the evidence and which so not?

Why the reluctance to doubt?

 

[Subduction Zone]

I am actually curious about this aspect of many people: why the desires to believe? Is it not better to search and discover the truth, testing it to be sure? Why stop at a pleasant hypothesis? Why not compare all the different hypotheses and see which actually fit the evidence and which so not?

Why the reluctance to doubt?

I am not a professional at all when it comes to this, I can only go off of my personal observations. I can understand somewhat the reluctance to believe. One of the "strengths" of Christianity, and by my scare quotes you can see that I do not mean strength in a good way, is the concept of hell. Add to that unjustified shame and you can lock people in for a lifetime. Children in Christianity are taught at an early age that they are inherently evil and no matter what they cannot make up for their sin because God hates sin. Rational thought is opposed by the leadership because that leads to freedom. You will find quite a few of what I call defensive verses in the Bible designed to keep people from reasoning their way out.

Once those walls of fear and self degradation are set up any time one gets close to reasoning they come clanging down keeping that person from reasoning.

The few times that creationists have ever been honest enough to even discuss the concept of evidence with me they all ran away at the point that they could see that there was going to be clear evidence for evolution and none for creationism. They are not stupid, though their running away from reasoning often makes them look that way. They are merely afraid. Very, very afraid.

 

[TrueBeliever37]

Do you not believe that leprechauns exist or do you believe that leprechauns don't exist. Two very different propositions

I do not believe that leprechauns exist. And I believe that leprechauns don't exist. That is saying the same thing in two different ways.

 

[TrueBeliever37]

The leprechaun question is a good analogy.
People don't believe in leprechauns because there is no objective evidence they exist. Yet they believe biblical claims despite an equivalent lack of evidence.

For me there is much evidence that the Bible is the word of God in fulfilled prophecy. So that gives me confidence in the other things it says. I'm not saying that is sufficient proof for you. But that is one of the reasons I believe it.

 

[Valjean]

I do not believe that leprechauns exist. And I believe that leprechauns don't exist. That is saying the same thing in two different ways.

No. Not being convinced is not the same thing as a positive belief in absence.

For me there is much evidence that the Bible is the word of God in fulfilled prophecy. So that gives me confidence in the other things it says. I'm not saying that is sufficient proof for you. But that is one of the reasons I believe it.

I hear this a lot, and other religions make these claims, as well. Usually the 'prophecies' are ambiguous enough to admit alternate interpretations, or are downright non sequiturs.
So what prophecies are you referring to?

"...Confidence in other things it says?" What about the obvious falsehoods or fantastical claims? They don't give you pause?

 

[Esteban X]

I do not believe that leprechauns exist. And I believe that leprechauns don't exist. That is saying the same thing in two different ways.

Actually the first means that you do not accept the claim made by the believer and the burden of proof is on the believer. The second is making a claim and therefore carries the burden of proof. The same applies to a belief in god(s). Atheists simply do not accept the claim and the burden of proof falls to the theist.

 

[TrueBeliever37]

No. Not being convinced is not the same thing as a positive belief in absence.

I hear this a lot, and other religions make these claims, as well. Usually the 'prophecies' are ambiguous enough to admit alternate interpretations, or are downright non sequiturs.
So what prophecies are you referring to?

"...Confidence in other things it says?" What about the obvious falsehoods or fantastical claims? They don't give you pause?

Things like the 70 year Babylonian Captivity. There are many other things also.

 

[Evangelicalhumanist]

I do not believe that leprechauns exist. And I believe that leprechauns don't exist. That is saying the same thing in two different ways.

No, it is saying things in two subtley different ways. That is the beauty of language, that it allows us to provide some nuance in how we communicate. To say, "I do not believe that leprechauns exist" includes a whole lot of important stuff. First, it describes what you think about a certain proposition. It would seem that the second sentence does the same thing, but it shifts the confidence level, by shifting the focus of the belief. In the first case, you have made a statement about your belief that contains an inherent uncertainty: "I do not believe" is like saying, "it might be so, but I don't think so." The second assertaion, "I believe that leprechauns don't exist," is a more confident statement, and reduces the uncertainty to the point that, for you, seems to be negligable.

 

[Valjean]

Things like the 70 year Babylonian Captivity. There are many other things also.

I wasn't aware that this was a specific prophesy -- emphasis on 'specific'.

 

[Valjean]

No, it is saying things in two subtley different ways. That is the beauty of language, that it allows us to provide some nuance in how we communicate. To say, "I do not believe that leprechauns exist" includes a whole lot of important stuff. First, it describes what you think about a certain proposition. It would seem that the second sentence does the same thing, but it shifts the confidence level, by shifting the focus of the belief. In the first case, you have made a statement about your belief that contains an inherent uncertainty: "I do not believe" is like saying, "it might be so, but I don't think so." The second assertaion, "I believe that leprechauns don't exist," is a more confident statement, and reduces the uncertainty to the point that, for you, seems to be negligable.

I see this strawman used frequently by theists.