Neat Video Explaining the Evidence of Our Relationship To the Other Great Apes

[Muslim-UK]

How Red Wine Helps the Heart

You atheists make me laugh

How does that balance the $6 Billion annual cost to the NHS here in the UK from alcohol related issues?

"patients who knew they were being prayed for had a higher rate of post-operative complications like abnormal heart rhythms" Long-Awaited Medical Study Questions the Power of Prayer

This is the original study if you care to examine its set-up and the numerical results.

Who were they praying to is my question? Was it Lord Dawkins and his little helper the Apostle Harris by any chance?

We don't need commandments to know that, nor to be charitable. Wouldn't you be charitable without them?

I've already shown Muslims give more charity, (here in the UK at least) than ANY other group of people.

 

[Muslim-UK]

There is no atheist religion.

"I always flinch in embarrassment for the believer who trots out, 'Atheism is just another kind of faith,' because it's a tacit admission that taking claims on faith is a silly thing to do. When you've succumbed to arguing that the opposition is just as misguided as you are, it's time to take a step back and rethink your attitudes." - Amanda Marcotte

Please don't try to dodge. It is a way of life based on a closed mindset, faith based on following Scientists who change their minds. Anyway my question remains, please read what Lord Dawkins says about the purpose of life and let me know.

 

[Bob the Unbeliever]

The positive impact it has on believers is what pleases God.

You said that there was nothing people could do, to influence your god.

Then you contradict yourself, with this. You are not being consistent, here.

Which is it?

 

[SkepticThinker]

Please don't try to dodge. It is a way of life based on a closed mindset, faith based on following Scientists who change their minds. Anyway my question remains, please read what Lord Dawkins says about the purpose of life and let me know.

Atheism is not a way of life. It's a position on a single claim. No faith required. Does your position on the existence of unicorns dictate your mindset and way of life and/or require faith?

 

[Bob the Unbeliever]

I don't know about where you live, but here in the UK alcohol abuse costs the health service £3.5 Billion a year ($5 Billion) the advice on moderate drinking changes and the amounts acceptable do too. Most people are not good at sticking to strict limits either.

But you would ban it entirely? I see that History isn't something you have studied....

 

[Bob the Unbeliever]

Only the data shows Muslims give more in charity than any other group of people Muslims ‘are Britain’s top charity givers’ so here we have a direct link of commandment from God benefiting humans.

So? People get an emotional kick out of giving. It happens all over the world.

It does not prove anything, except that people are herd animals...

 

[Bob the Unbeliever]

What is the purpose of life according the atheist religion?

Once more: ATHEISM IS NOT A RELIGION. ATHEISM IS NOT A PHILOSOPHY. THERE IS NOTHING IN ATHIESM APART FROM "there is no evidence for god(s) so we do not behave like an idiot and believe in one anyway"

 

[Bob the Unbeliever]

Get a good dictionary and see if you understand insulting and denigration.

There it is AGAIN. This person cannot help himself: He is so full of hate, he cannot help but speak down to people in a grossly insulting manner.

So very like the example of Jesus... right? right? All those examples of Jesus talking down to people in insulting terms, right?


Wait...

 

[It Aint Necessarily So]

Atheists Scientist have no concrete evidence, just a number of theories.

Scientific theories are all derived from evidence, and confirmed by making predictions that are then confirmed with additional evidence. The most powerful evidence that a scientific theory is correct is the evidence that it works.

Mind blowing complexity shows a power behind the design and creation, a intelligent conscious entity with unlimited wisdom and knowledge, much as God describes Himself in the Qur'an.

Complexity does not require intelligence. Irreducible complexity would, as would specified complexity such as writing, but natural systems are routinely extremely complex, where complexity corresponds to how many instructions or parameters are necessary to specify all of the detail in the system.How many data points do you imagine it would take to specify all of the features of a mountain? You would need to specify its contour at all scales, its mineral content at every location, the strata if any in it including the thickness, shape, and composition of each layer and the location and type of each of its constituent atoms, which pieces are broken off and rest on the mountain as soil or loose rocks, the temperature at every location, and on and on.

Of course, you would only have described the mountain as it is now. It was different yesterday and will be different again tomorrow.

You could come together with every Scientist on the planet, create a single cell from absolutely nothing and prove me wrong.

No evidence convinces a faith based thinker. They don't come to their positions using it, and can't be budged from it. We already know how the faithful will receive the news of the first cell created de novo in a laboratory. We'll be told that we can't prove that that actually happened, and that it is evidence that an intelligent designer was needed.

 

[Muslim-UK]

You said that there was nothing people could do, to influence your god.

Then you contradict yourself, with this. You are not being consistent, here.

Which is it?

Your struggling with simple facts:

1 God does not need us
2 No amount of worship from humans could ever repay the gift of sight etc
3 God gives us guidance in the form of Religious Scriptures
4 We follow that guidance and benefit both ourselves and man kind <<<< This pleases God and makes Him more inclined to forgive us when we return to Him.

Nothing I've said contradicts these 4 statements.

Once more: ATHEISM IS NOT A RELIGION. ATHEISM IS NOT A PHILOSOPHY. THERE IS NOTHING IN ATHIESM APART FROM "there is no evidence for god(s) so we do not behave like an idiot and believe in one anyway"

You people even have your own Churches to come together and discuss your faith. What happens at an atheist church? - BBC News

You as an individual may shun this Church and belong to another, I don't know. Perhaps you keep yourself to yourself at home whist gazing at the lord dawkins screensaver, again I don't know. But look, don't get touchy and shouty about it. Everyone is free to follow what ever belief rocks their boat. I respect your right to hold your beliefs

 

[Muslim-UK]

There it is AGAIN. This person cannot help himself: He is so full of hate, he cannot help but speak down to people in a grossly insulting manner.

So very like the example of Jesus... right? right? All those examples of Jesus talking down to people in insulting terms, right?

Wait...

I don't see hate from him, he just holds opposing views.

 

[Muslim-UK]

Scientific theories are all derived from evidence, and confirmed by making predictions that are then confirmed with additional evidence. The most powerful evidence that a scientific theory is correct is the evidence that it works.

All the theories are disputed amongst the Scientific Community.

Complexity does not require intelligence. Irreducible complexity would, as would specified complexity such as writing, but natural systems are routinely extremely complex, where complexity corresponds to how many instructions or parameters are necessary to specify all of the detail in the system.How many data points do you imagine it would take to specify all of the features of a mountain? You would need to specify its contour at all scales, its mineral content at every location, the strata if any in it including the thickness, shape, and composition of each layer and the location and type of each of its constituent atoms, which pieces are broken off and rest on the mountain as soil or loose rocks, the temperature at every location, and on and on.

Of course, you would only have described the mountain as it is now. It was different yesterday and will be different again tomorrow.

Please provide Scientific evidence demonstrating incredibly complexities can arise from nothing. Show me the date, show me a study done, show me something to support your comments.

No evidence convinces a faith based thinker. They don't come to their positions using it, and can't be budged from it. We already know how the faithful will receive the news of the first cell created de novo in a laboratory. We'll be told that we can't prove that that actually happened, and that it is evidence that an intelligent designer was needed.

They created the cell from chemicals and a electrical charge? Or did they use existing God given material?

Anyway you are not answering my question. What is the purpose of life according to Atheist beliefs?

 

[It Aint Necessarily So]

Well the book given to Muslims contains signs, many many signs showing it comes from a higher being.

Science tells us the most likely model for the start of the Universe is something termed the Big bang, following rapid expansion and cosmic gases. There are other theories, and we can argue to and fro on technical terms/different theories, leading to stalling of this discussion.

Using the model Science mentions, we read the following verses in the Qur'an:

The Big Bang

Do those who disbelieve not see that the heavens and the earth were sewn together and then We unstitched them and that We made from water every living thing? So will they not believe? (Qur'an, 21:30)

The word "ratq" translated as "sewn to" means "mixed in each, blended" in the Arabic vernacular. It is used to refer to two different substances that make up a whole. The phrase "we unstitched" is the verb "fataqa" in Arabic and implies that something comes into being by tearing apart or destroying the structure of things that are sewn to one another. The sprouting of a seed from the soil is one of the actions to which this verb is applied.


Expanding Universe:

And it is We Who have constructed the heaven with might, and verily, it is We Who are steadily expanding it. (Qur'an, 51:47)

The word "heaven," as stated in the verse above, is used in various places in the Qur'an. It is referring to space and the wider universe. Here again, the word is used with this meaning, stating that the universe "expands." The Arabic word "moosiaaoona" in the term "inna lamoosiaaoona," translated into English as "it is We Who are steadily expanding it", comes from the verb "evsea," meaning "to expand." The prefix "la" emphasises the following name or title and adds a sense of "to a great extent." This expression therefore means "We expand the sky or the universe to a great extent." This is the very conclusion that science has reached today.


Cosmic Gas:

Scientists today are able to observe the formation of stars from a hot gas cloud. Formation from a warm mass of gas also applies to the creation of the universe. The creation of the universe as described in the Qur'an confirms this scientific discovery in the following verse:

He placed firmly embedded mountains on it, towering over it, and blessed it and measured out its nourishment in it, laid out for those who seek it-all in four days. Then He turned to heaven when it was smoke and said to it and to the earth, "Come willingly or unwillingly." They both said, "We come willingly." (Qur'an, 41:10-11)

The Arabic word for "smoke" in the above verse is "dukhanun," which describes the hot, cosmic smoke in question. This word in the Qur'an, in pinpoint fashion, describes this smoke very accurately for it is a warm body of gas containing mobile particles connected to solid substances. Here, the Qur'an has employed the most appropriate word from the Arabic language for describing the appearance of this phase of the universe.

Below is a site that uses over 50 translations of the meaning of the original Arabic text, so you can check the verses for yourself:

There are many other signs I could mention, but this is sufficient for now. These are not to sell you Islam, but are given so you can see why some people are convinced the 7th Century Arabs could not possibly have known these things, and accept this is revelation from a Spiritual source beyond our understanding.


al-Fatihah 1:1

I don't see evidence of a "higher being" there. We find things like this in the Christian Bible as well. I would bet that we could find equally tenuous correlations with modern knowledge in the Odyssey and Beowulf.

Notice that you implicitly acknowledge that science, not scripture, is the arbiter of truth in these matters. Apologists scour the scriptures looking for passages that they can claim correctly anticipated subsequent scientific discovery however vague, poetic, and unhelpful the passage, while ignoring those that are clearly incorrect, or redefining the words in them to try to make them correct. When you do that, you are treating science as the gold standard.

Christian apologists do the same thing. Their Bible is studded, for example, with scriptures saying that the earth has edges, is flat, is immobile, and rests on pillars. But one passage in Job (26:7) refers to earth, depending on the translation, being hung or suspended upon nothing.

This is touted as evidence of divine knowledge. But it is actually a nod to science over scripture again. If the scripture were considered authoritative, we would hear that the scientific understanding of the earth was incorrect because it fails to include the pillars. Instead, it is claimed that those claims aren't to betaken literally, scriptures that they won't even mention if not asked about them.

None of this convinces a rational skeptic of anything except that the apologist is grasping at straws to defend beliefs that he has accepted by faith from the revelations of science that reveal them to be incorrect.

 

[It Aint Necessarily So]

The evidence is too strong for them to reject faith.

That is self-contradictory. Faith (in the religious sense*) is unjustified belief. Belief based on evidence is the opposite - justified belief - as long as the belief is no stronger than the quality and quantity of supporting evidence. Those two epistemological methods, sometimes called fideism and empiricism, are antithetical.

Evidence not only doesn't modify faith, maintaining faith in an incorrect idea requires ignoring contradictory evidence.

This is another area in which the faith based thinker is tacitly showing deference to the reason and evidence based thinker. Most believers here continually refer to evidential support for their beliefs such as the complexity and beauty in the world, or falsely imply an interest in evidence by repeatedly soliciting it then rejecting it out of hand, or tell us that the evidence for the ideas that contradict the idols of their faith are insufficient.

If evidence were part of their method for deciding, they would decide the way that people who rely exclusively on evidence and reason decide rather than things that can only be believed by faith.

If evidence led to believing a particular holy book, for example, or the ideology derived from it, it wouldn't be necessary to approach children with it, nor would it be convincing to those that haven't developed critical thinking skills yet.

Yet they still give lip service to using evidence to make the decisions that are clearly faith based.

Isn't this the thread where presently, one faith based thinker is taunting what he calls evos to bring him evidence that he can't be bothered to click on a link to examine, and that has already told us that he will reject if accommodated?

 

[It Aint Necessarily So]

Atheists still believe in Abiogenesis; all life started from proteins formed from a primordial soup 3.5 - 3.9 Billion years ago. This process formed the first self replicating living cell. What do we know about the structure of a cell today?

Why should anybody disbelieve that life arose naturalisitically, undesigned and uncreated? Why do you? Because life seems too complex to have organized itself? That's not a sufficient reason to consider abiogenesis ruled out.

There appear to be only two logical possibilities for the first life in the universe - it arose spontaneously, or it was created by an intelligent designer. Neither of those possibilities can be ruled in or out at this time, although they can be ranked. Occam tells us that the one that can account for all of the observed phenomena is the preferred answer. Sure, a god could have been involved, but as I noted early, such an assumption moves the argument from complexity back one step, and requires an even more complex, undesigned and uncreated entity to exist, one for which there is no evidence.

If you don't mind throwing in unnecessary complexity, lets add that this intelligent designer created life on another planet, it evolved there into a superhuman alien race capable of creating planets and life, came to our star or built it, built the earth and created the life on it last Thursday in a deceptive manner that caused us to believe that we evolved, and then implanted false memories in our heads to cause us to believe that we have existed more than a week.

It's possible, right? So why aren't we discussing it more?

Because it is unnecessarily complex in the extreme. It involves features that don't appear to be necessary to account for the world we find ourselves living in. You probably agree. The atheist just goes step further, removes the god, and presents a naturalistic hypothesis. That is not to say that he can justify removing gods from his list of candidate hypotheses, just that he can rank all suchideas below the ones that don't require a god, and according to Occam, should.

Have you ruled naturalistic abiogenesis out? If you have, you have done it without justification. There is no way to rule it out at this time, and probably never will be a way.

The more correct way to state what you did is that the rational skeptic, who is probably also an atheist, believes that abiogenesis is possible, and if so, more likely occurred than not.

 

[It Aint Necessarily So]

Ultimately if I die and disbelievers are right, we just turn to dust and nothingness, I lose nothing.

Some unbelievers will tell you that you are going to hell for not worshiping Jesus. What if they're right?

I would tell them, man worship is a Pagan concept. The Romans simply replaced Mithras with Jesus pbuh and secondly, no original texts survive, so we have no real clue about what Jesus pbuh actually taught. Everyone is welcome to use what is found in the NT to support their assertions, this is the reason why Christianity is so diverse on core issues.

You didn't answer the question asked. What if they're right?

You don't need answer. It's a rhetorical question meant to make a point rather than solicit information.

The answer is self-evident. If they're right, you're going to hell and you lost your wager, the one where you thought that you were risking nothing by being wrong.

 

[Muslim-UK]

I don't see evidence of a "higher being" there. We find things like this in the Christian Bible as well. I would bet that we could find equally tenuous correlations with modern knowledge in the Odyssey and Beowulf.

And that's fine if you don't see. I'm posting the verses to show why WE Muslims accept. In fact Arabs of the 7th Century didn't have equipment or tools to check these verses, they accepted the message based on 2 things; the truthfulness of the Prophet Muhammad pbuh and the superior Arabic of the Qur'an, which was enough to baffle the best poets of the time.

Notice that you implicitly acknowledge that science, not scripture, is the arbiter of truth in these matters. Apologists scour the scriptures looking for passages that they can claim correctly anticipated subsequent scientific discovery however vague, poetic, and unhelpful the passage, while ignoring those that are clearly incorrect, or redefining the words in them to try to make them correct. When you do that, you are treating science as the gold standard.

I'm talking with an atheist so of course am going to try and speak in a language and terminology you understand and can perhaps even appreciate, though you've already dismissed the verses, which is your right.

Christian apologists do the same thing. Their Bible is studded, for example, with scriptures saying that the earth has edges, is flat, is immobile, and rests on pillars. But one passage in Job (26:7) refers to earth, depending on the translation, being hung or suspended upon nothing.

Well I can't comment on the Bible.

None of this convinces a rational skeptic of anything except that the apologist is grasping at straws to defend beliefs that he has accepted by faith from the revelations of science that reveal them to be incorrect.

Well you have your beliefs and we have ours.

That is self-contradictory. Faith (in the religious sense*) is unjustified belief. Belief based on evidence is the opposite - justified belief - as long as the belief is no stronger than the quality and quantity of supporting evidence. Those two epistemological methods, sometimes called fideism and empiricism, are antithetical.

This might apply to your faith, but in Islam we have evidences starting with the Prophet, the preservation of the Qur'an, the prophecies, the signs within the Qur'an and the examination of the natural World and Cosmos. More than half the battle is won, the rest which is unseen, Angels, Demons, Hell, Heaven and God are taken on faith using a balance of probability.

Evidence not only doesn't modify faith, maintaining faith in an incorrect idea requires ignoring contradictory evidence.

Nothing in the Qur'an contradicts confirmed Science.

This is another area in which the faith based thinker is tacitly showing deference to the reason and evidence based thinker. Most believers here continually refer to evidential support for their beliefs such as the complexity and beauty in the world, or falsely imply an interest in evidence by repeatedly soliciting it then rejecting it out of hand, or tell us that the evidence for the ideas that contradict the idols of their faith are insufficient.

You can't jump to that conclusion, without first having showing me the evidence I asked for.

If evidence were part of their method for deciding, they would decide the way that people who rely exclusively on evidence and reason decide rather than things that can only be believed by faith.

The Scientific evidence is ascertained through repeatedly tested and confirmed through observation and experimentation. I'll examine your evidence to see if it passes this test. Of course we both now the issue of how the Universe came into being and the origin of a single self replicating cell can not be tested using the Scientific method. Nor can anyone produce something complex out of nothing.

You don't even have the confidence to explain the purpose of life, so I'll have to see what the head of the Atheist Church has to say for myself.

 

[Skwim]

I'm not impressed. This proves nothing. I say, So what?

Whereas 6 people gave it a "Like," 4 people gave it an "Informative," and 1 person gave it a "Winner,' 11 thumbs-ups in all, it doesn't surprise me that it's gone right over your head.

.

 

[It Aint Necessarily So]

We are told that God can only do good. Is that what you mean by a soulless robot?

This robot argument comes up whenever we are discussing creating people that desire to do only what is good and right, and why alleged gods that are said to be so concerned with our behavior didn't create the kind of person it wanted. How is a person that only wants to do good an inferior person to the kind willing to do harm or living a less authentic life than such a person?

Those non believers who do good works in this life are rewarded, so I fail to see the problem. Likewise those believers who outwardly do good, whilst inwardly harbouring hate will be punished accordingly when they return to Allah swt.

That's a religious belief that you accept on faith, one which answers neither of my questions. Let's try again:

Is a God that only wants to do good a soulless robot?

The implication is obvious. If you answer no, then you have no reason to call a human being who only had pure and benevolent thoughts a soulless robot.

The other question that you declined to answer asked how a person that only wants to do good is less than one willing to do harm.

 

[Muslim-UK]

You didn't answer the question asked. What if they're right?

You don't need answer. It's a rhetorical question meant to make a point rather than solicit information.

The answer is self-evident. If they're right, you're going to hell and you lost your wager, the one where you thought that you were risking nothing by being wrong.

Yes IF they are right I lose.