Gary, the dangerous infidel says:

That explains it, qb. I may have let it slip that I had a bowl of Post Nipple Nuts cereal for breakfast, and your comment just overloaded and crashed the filter, so now we’re free to talk 😉

BubbaRay says:

# 65 Traaxx said,

“An atheist believes there is no God, they also believe it’s dumb to believe in a God which in my opinion is dumb. They can’t prove it, they have no evidence to prove God doesn’t exist…

Umm, you can’t prove a negative. Take some logic lessons.

Misanthropic Scott says:

#91 – John,

Sorry I don’t buy the primordial soup theory. If you study biology you’ll soon realize that things are a little too perfect to have happened by accident. Even the environment is evidence of this (we inhale oxygen and exhale CO2, plants “inhale” CO2 and “exhale” oxygen).

Let’s talk a little about perfection. Ever since we knucklewalkers stood up, we’ve had to deal with back problems due to the curvature of our spines. We also have knee problems from a joint that really wasn’t intended to deal with the total weight of our bodies.

However, these things are not so obvious. So, let’s go inside our eyeballs. Our eyes are conveniently one of the things that wacko creationists think are too perfect to have evolved and would be useless if they were not perfect, never mind that many who need glasses survive just fine, even on days when they leave their glasses at home or take them off to look more attractive.

Now, let’s look at inside. We have rods and cones that face the back of the retina and receive a reflected image. Our brains must then correct for the fact that the image is backwards.

More important, since the rods and cones are all backwards, the nerves from each cell are in the middle of the eye and must somehow make a connection through to the brain for our eyes to have any use. So, there is a bundle of nerves in your eyes making a blind spot in each eye. Your brain must again fill in the details of the blind spot using the image from the other eye which has a blind spot in another spot.

So, the brain fills in the details missing from each eye. Nice kluge, but hardly something we can call designed.

Now, babies are able to eat and breath at the same time. Otherwise, we would likely choke to death at a very young age. However, in order to be able to speak, we must combine the tubes so that the air goes through the vocal chords during speech.

Because of this, we often choke on our food and drink as we forget momentarily and attempt to eat or drink while breathing. Most of us experience this every so often. It has to do with the same tube being used for two purposes. Again, it works well enough, but is hardly a perfect design.

Things that work well enough, but are actually just effective kluges are a major theme in nature. It need not be perfect, just good enough.

The panda’s “thumb” is another good one, made famous by Steven Jay Gould. Pandas need a thumb to strip the leaves from the bamboo they eat. They have a perfectly good thumb, but it happens to be fused to the other fingers, as with all bears, and similar animals. So, instead of unfusing the thumb, as a designer would, they evolved an enlarged wrist bone, the radial sessamoid, to perform the task of a thumb. Again, not perfect, but good enough.

So, too perfect to not have been designed? Or, too imperfect to have been designed? What do you think?

Gary, the dangerous infidel says:

#91 John wrote “If you study biology you’ll soon realize that things are a little too perfect to have happened by accident. Even the environment is evidence of this (we inhale oxygen and exhale CO2, plants ‘inhale’ CO2 and ‘exhale’ oxygen).”

When the photosynthetic process evolved on earth several billion years ago, I assure you that there were many anaerobic organisms that would have vehemently disagreed with your idea of perfection. Many of them even found the free oxygen that was produced to be the kiss of death — an agent of mass destruction. They cried their tiny little bacterial eyes out, and referred to this evolutionary development as “the Oxygen Catastrophe”…
http://tinyurl.com/2ejnlz

In memoriam for them, let’s have a moment of silence and let’s not be so fast and loose with our use of the word “perfect.”
.
.
(if this works, thanks to M.Scott for advice on the “Thou shalt not use ‘href’ links” commandment that resulted in my earlier comment going to spam hell)

Nimby says:

# 87 Misanthropic Scott said, “Just give me a single shred of credible evidence…”

Of course, you say this with full faith that Alfie can’t do it. He is bound by the restraints of his own religion. I used to have a friend who was not only a PhD psychologist but a Catholic priest. His proofs for a creator tended toward the beauty of the world and the complexity of life. My counter was that if there were truly a god that was all powerful and wanted us to believe in him and follow his rules, he could achieve that goal pretty quickly by just appearing in the sky all over the world and saying, : “I am the Lord, thy God and Jeremiah Wright is my Living Prophet on Earth! If you don’t do what I say, then I will do this to everyone…” and Australia disappears. I guarantee we’d all be on our knees praying before the clouds reformed.

Misanthropic Scott says:

#103 – Nimby,

I actually have no faith of any kind. In fact, so many people have had Faith that she’s all reamed out now. I’m surprised so many people still find her attractive.

Seriously though, I do not “have faith” that Alfie will not come back with evidence. I am merely confident that if such evidence had ever existed, we would hear about it by now.

So, were Alfie to truly come up with something real, I would indeed be shocked. However, I truly mean what I say in that I would become an agnostic. If the evidence were great enough, I would become a believer.

I would likely still not worship any creator, though I can’t be sure. I would like to hope that I would rather suffer for eternity than give obeisance to such a cruel deity.

But, who can say what I would really do if faced with evidence. Thus far though, none is forthcoming. So I can take comfort in the knowledge that my death will be just as my life was prior to my birth or even my conception. As I had no consciousness then, I expect to have no consciousness in death.

My life is a brief interlude in my oblivion for the age of the universe.

This does not bother me in the least. I expect there are many who fear non-existence too much to ever accept that it is their final reward. I do not fear death. Alfie likely does not fear death either since he likely does not believe in death. (I don’t want to speak with any great certainty about the mind of someone I never met. So, I say likely.)

Mr. Fusion says:

#103, Nimby

If you don’t do what I say, then I will do this to everyone…” and Australia disappears.

I would think (or like to see) something along the lines of :

“And all that genocide wasn’t really me. It was my identical twin brother. You know, the ugly one, that did all that stuff, and created cripples, and gimps, and retards, and rednecks, and blind folk, and herpes, and wimin that dye their roots black. Ya, ya, I know the dude is a dick, but hey, he is my brother and although mom always loved him best, yada yada, well, I’m back in charge now.

Now reading from my list of prayer questions, the first one is ‘why did I give men nipples.’ …”

BubbaRay says:

#79, Alex, there is no such thing as a “silica electron.” Electrons are electrons regardless of which atoms they are attached to, or when they are just hanging around by themseleves.

#9,Kayless, genetic systems tend to organization and not chaos. You are correct for systems in which life is not a factor.

Gary, the dangerous infidel says:

#110 Misanthropic Scott, I got a laugh from your perspective, but it’s entirely correct. It seems unorthodox to think of the type of bacterial extinctions that may have occurred as being “mass extinctions” because they’re such small critters, but the numerical scale of the disaster certainly justifies use of the term. However, I’m sure many types survived, living on protected oxygen-free bacterial preserves, for which proper funding was always a real fight 😉

Sometimes I feel like such an afterthought, too.

Johan says:

@65: Atheism is not the belief that god doesn’t exist. That’s called anti-theism. Atheism comes from the old greek prefix of “a”, as in “asexual”, which means “not”, or “without”. So an ahteist is simply someone who is not a theist. I do realize that a lot of people like to twist the term “atheist”, however, if you look at the etymology of the word, it’s right there.

A lot of thesauruses have accepted the notion that atheist and anti-theist is the same thing, but they are wrong.

All anti-theists are atheists, but not all atheists are anti-theists. I don’t believe in god, but I don’t completely rule it out. Some might call the agnostic, but agnosticism deal with knowledge and atheism with belief, so they aren’t the same.

Misanthropic Scott says:

#113 Johan, #114 Thomas

You’re right about atheist. And Thomas has given a very succinct explanation of the confusion.

However, antitheists, by my understanding actively oppose theism. Where an atheist does not believe in any gods, an antitheist opposes the belief in god.

As an antitheist myself, I take the view that religion and the belief in a deity have had a deleterious effect on humanity as a whole, as evidenced by the large number of deleted humans.

So, I am actively outspoken against religion and against theism. This, to me, is antitheism. I do not believe one can be an antitheist quietly.

Misanthropic Scott says:

#116 – Patrick,

Have you ever actually contributed to any of these discussions? Perhaps you should see if you can form an intelligent thought before typing.