darkendless
Guardian of Asgaard
Dig a hole in the ground and you'll be suprised what you find. Fossils are everywhere. The other day i found some funny looking things in a bassalt deposit over 200 million years old.
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Reasons for the belief in no God
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Dig a hole in the ground and you'll be suprised what you find. Fossils are everywhere. The other day i found some funny looking things in a bassalt deposit over 200 million years old.
Are you referring to post 76?
The problem I see with this is its strangeness. There is a direct correlation between placing your hand on a hot burner and withdrawing in pain: it's completely understandable why this would happen.
However, why does eating the fruit of a magic tree cause cancer, birth defects, old age, and so on? Aside from the fact that it seems a little extreme of a punishment -- and aside from the fact that the story reeks of entrapment -- how is that correlated to suffering all these maladies?
Humans aren't directly responsible for these natural bits of suffering: humans have no power to create tornadoes, cancer, disease and parasites. They had to come from somewhere, and believing in a creator god implies that they came from the god.
Let me give one of my favorite examples. Plasmodium falciparum is the protozoan that causes the disease malaria. I understand the argument that "the Fall" caused disease and parasitism and so forth, but Plasmodium (among other parasites) raise an interesting question because they're (assuming creation) designed solely to be torture devices.
First, consider P. falciparum's life cycle. An infected mosquito carries the parasite and inadvertently injects them into a human host. The parasite proceeds to burrow into eurythrocytes (red blood cells) -- why? Because hiding inside one of the body's own cells confuses the immune system, which has "feeler" cells that examine microscopic bodies. An infected eurythrocyte looks just like a normal red blood cell to the body, so the immune system leaves it alone. (By the way, this is how the life cycle continues: another mosquito comes along to imbibe some blood and picks up some infected blood cells).
However, eurythrocytes are destroyed on a regular basis when they cycle to the spleen. If this were the end of the story, Plasmodium infections would be wiped out simply because red blood cells get destroyed. This doesn't happen, however, because Plasmodium will emerge a hook-like structure through the membrane of the red blood cell which latches onto the walls of the vessels the eurythrocyte is traveling through (like a ninja hook). This defense is specialized specifically for human hosts.
There becomes another catch: the immune system can eventually identify these hook-like structures, destroy them, and send the infected cell on its way to the spleen for destruction. Plasmodium has another trick up its sleeve: every few generations, the shape of the hook will change; effectively changing faster than the immune system can keep up with it.
Furthermore, the changes in the hook structures isn't random. You can separate two populations of Plasmodium from the same host and they will go through the same sequence of hook shapes: essentially, they're drawing in sequential, non-random order from a genetic database of hook shapes with which to evade the human immune system! (Incidentally, it would be possible to cure malaria if scientists could decode this hook database and innoculate patients ahead of time with the sequence! Alas, not a lot of money is forthcoming to such projects...)
So, here we have an organism with no apparent purpose other than to specifically evade the human immune system and cause nothing but misery to humans. Why?
Again, putting a hand on a burner and retracting it in pain is understandable. But how does eating a magic fruit cause such complex specificity in a biological torture device like Plasmodium falciparum?
The conclusion is fairly obvious to me: either God deliberately creates torture devices (if creationism is true); or as the evidence suggests, Plasmodium evolved.
Edit: There's also the interesting question of what Plasmodium would have been like before "the Fall." If everything was benign before "the Fall," how did Plasmodium become so complex and specific to human immune systems? It certainly wasn't through blind chance!
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You have assumed there is a God for this conversation, thus my job is done and I don't need to go any further. This topic is not about the design of God, but the existence or non existence of God, not the design but the designer.
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If someone brings up the concept of fairies, I'll assume the existence of fairies in order to explain why fairies are nonsensical, unverified, etc. In order to explain why something doesn't make sense, one assumes temporarily the existence of such a thing to showcase its errors.
When debating religious people, I routinely assume the existence of Allah, Yahweh, Jesus, various pagan deities, Krishna, Buddha, and others in order to debate the various metaphysical claims associated with those religions. In other words, one if person claims X and I disagree with it and find the claim to be nonsensical, I'll say, "Well if X is true, then here A, B, C, and D, which are conclusions drawn from such a belief that show its invalidity."
It's a pretty basic aspect of debate and discussion, and I find that fundamentalists, on average, tend to have a difficult time conceptualizing other arguments and seeing things from other viewpoints. I wager that this plays a part in why they hold the religious views that they do.
Thank you. You have admitted to the existence of God.
"It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain an idea without accepting it." - Aristotle
"It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain an idea without accepting it." - Aristotle
Exactly. You don't need to admit the existence of God to argue for the non-existence of God. Otherwise if you do, your intellectually dishonest... Get it?
If you think that Penumbra or Meow Mix have admitted to the existence of God, then you don't get it.
In this context, "assume" means "entertain for the purposes of the discussion", roughly.
It means he assumes the existence of God. And thus, my job is done.
Yes, for the temporary sake of discussion. Otherwise the discussion could go nowhere.
The discussion would go like:
Theist: I assert X claim about Y deity.
Atheist: None of it exists so it doesn't matter.
If the atheist is going to actually demonstrate the errors of the theist claim, then she must move past the fact that they're wrong and demonstrate why they are wrong.
So it goes like:
Theist: I assert X claim about Y deity.
Atheist: Well here's the problem with that. If X is true, then here are a collection of conclusions that would necessarily be the case, but they're not and therefore claim X is incorrect.
It's pretty trivial stuff.
Actually this conversation would go somewhere, if you atheists could produce a reasonable argument for the non-existence of God. Instead you have to assume His existence, you are supposed to reason with me why I should assume the NON-EXISTENCE of God.
I wouldn't call it a job to transparently misrepresent the positions of others. "Hobby", maybe. "Job", no. It's not exactly a marketable skill.
I wouldn't call it a job to transparently misrepresent the positions of others. "Hobby", maybe. "Job", no. It's not exactly a marketable skill.
Just produce an argument that reasonably logically concludes the non-existence of a transcendent being such as God.
outhouse
Atheistically
No problem
There is no god, only a mans inagination of what he would want if one did exist.
Im sure there were gods and spirits on this planet before homosapiens ever evolved. Im sure homo erectus had fire spirits and smoke spirits ect ect
Imagination is tied into our instincts and it is always used to answer questions we do not know.
imagination is not real, therefore god is not real in my opinion
I've already put forth a set of reasons against gods in post 76, but they have all gone completely unchallenged, except for the one about evolution which you needed to deny basic science in order to avoid.
And furthermore, in order to justify something, you have to prove that it exists rather than wait for others to prove that they don't exist. There are countless claimed deities: Allah, Jesus, Yahweh, Zeus, Krishna, Brahman, Shiva, Zeus, Odin, etc. It's not a matter of whether "god" exists, but whether any of the claims about the existence of gods have any justification whatsoever. "God" is a poorly defined term that can be applied to all manner of various metaphysical claims, and unless any of them can be justified, there is no reason to believe them.
I already did that four pages ago in a post that, so far, you've ignored:
http://www.religiousforums.com/forum/2284364-post117.html