ggazoo said:
It looks like atheists outweigh the Christians on this board by quite a bit.
Well, it
is sciforums.
ggazoo said:
So, at the risk of getting flamed, I just wanted to pose a few general questions for the non-believers, and would love to get your opinions/answers on them:
1. How do you explain the high degree of design and order in the universe?
I'm afraid I see no design at all, and no order in excess of that mandated by the underlying general law of the Universe, which is "stuff sticks together". If you look at the Universe alone, there isn't anything you can see directly that isn't solely caused by the four forces of nature, electromagnetism, weak nuclear, strong nuclear and gravity. Understanding of the structure of the mathematical laws has allowed us to deduce a) there is a lot more to the Universe than we can see, and b) there are possibly other forces. But those forces (or just one more single force) are just direct action forces that operate on all matter, like gravity does, not some mystical "force" with an intent. As it is, the distribution of stars and galaxies is random, chaotic and "clumpy", with no design, just the beautiful patterns that mathematical forces create.
If you look at Earth, we can see that solid matter clumps together in a chaotic way. Rocks are higgledy-piggledy, the shape of coastlines is totally chaotic and recursive (ie self-similar at all scales). What shapes we see are down to gravity and friction, and the properties of the materials themselves, with no hint of anything over and above (except for those things specifically designed by humans).
Then there is Life. The vast majority of Life goes about its business in ways that defy all logic and sense in terms of efficiency. Life is symbiotic, but goes too far round the houses to realistically distinguish a "design" in the sense implied by ID-ers. I've just watched a series on BBC called
Life in the Undergrowth, which is beautifully filmed story of the inverterbrates, which includes the insects and arachnids, slugs and snails, and crustaceans. These creatures are truly alien. And very many of them continue a way of life that very quickly disposes of an idea of a compassionate all-loving God. About half the insects in covered by the programme propagate by injecting eggs into the larva of some other insect, so that it is eaten alive from the inside. It's repulsive, and it's beautiful. See the termite mounds, all aligned precisely to the rising and setting sun, for temperature control, and be struck with awe at the power of an evolutionary process that takes millions of years to perfect. "If they're so precisely aligned, doesn't that mean they were Designed?" But why just this one species of termite? Why would you design something that goes to all the trouble of building vast skyscrapers when the vast majority of similar creatures make do by living underground, or in water? It's the very pointlessness of the diversity which is the hallmark of evolution. A moth was shown which has enormous energy requirements to keep hovering near flowers, which it has to do in order to suck lots of nectar, which it has to do to continue flying. This kind of redundancy is the hallmark of a gradual evolutionary process, not efficient Design.
ggazoo said:
2. How do you account for the vast archaeological documentation of Biblical stories, places, and people?
I suppose there's this assumption that all atheists believe that every word in the bible is a lie. If the Biblical stories had
no basis in the real world in which it was written, that would be the surprise. However, the surprise may well be coming for
you. The archaeological evidence for Biblical stories, places and people is the opposite of vast - in fact the vast majority of archaeological evidence
contradicts the Bible. Archaeologists, no matter how hard they look, have failed, for example, to find any evidence for the great Davidic Kingdom of Israel under David and Solomon for the period (about 1000-900 BCE) which the Bible describes it existing. The vast documentation of thousands of years of Egyptian history fails to record a vast army of Hebrew slaves, any period of plagues consistent with the Bible, nor is there the remotest physical evidence for an Exodus as described in the Bible.
I, for one, however, do not subscribe to the views of ultra-Liberal "minimalists" such as the Copenhagen school of Thomas L. Thompson, who appear to believe, contrary to logic, that absence of evidence
is evidence of absence. Which leads Thompson to devote a section of his book
The Bible in History to dismissing the really impressive Mesha stele (aka the Moabite Stone) in totally irrational terms. The Mesha stele is written in precisely the same terms as many stories in the book of Kings - but with Chemosh (the Moabite local God) in place of Yahveh - another example of how similarly-placed people have a similar outlook, in this case "Turn away from your god and you will lose".
ggazoo said:
3. From whence comes humanity's universal moral sense?
Like everything else - from humanity itself. So, despite our brutal tendencies to hurt and torture each other, subjugate each other, go to war with each other, and display the greatest cruelties in the living world, some of the words that describe the
opposite of those characteristics are "humanity" and "humane".
ggazoo said:
4. If man is nothing but the random arrangement of molecules, what motivates you to care and to live honorably in the world?
I personally have a general desire to cause others around me the minimum of pain. I do this for
their sake, for the sake of all other people. Not because I'm scared of burning in Hell forever, or through some desire to please an invisible father figure. I live honorably in the world (or try to) so that others will live honorably with me. A direct and readily appreciable cause-and-effect.
ggazoo said:
5. Please explain how personality could have ever evolved from the impersonal, or how order could have ever resulted from chaos.
The fundamentals of the scientific view point disallow all answers of the form "x is the result of the actions of a supernatural being". Your own question is illogical, because the religious answer (which you have in place of science's total lack of an answer) is "God created our personality". But where did God get
his personality? "God is eternal" - yes, but don't claim you understand
that answer more than the rest of us are supposed to. And this is the point. The point of the scientific endeavour is to provide answers that ordinary mortals
can understand. Your answer "God designed and created the Universe, He designed and created Life, He designed and created Man and he designed and created Consciousness" is not an answer, because you yourself do not understand the mechanism by which God did these things. Theologians and philosophers can argue back and forth without coming to any real solution - since there is no evidence on which to base any conclusion - and meanwhile the scientists carry on investigating Nature and coming up with answers. And
so far they have not found the answer to your question. Which says nothing, I'm afraid, about humanity's ability to eventually succeed in answering the question. There is an infinity of stuff we do not know ... yet!
ggazoo said:
6. How do you account for the origin of life considering the irreducible complexity of its essential components?
"Irreducible complexity" is the Intelligent Design system for throwing in the towel. The arguments for any particular structure that ID-ers have declared "irreducibly complex" are generally riddled with fallacies and exaggerations. Time after time they will declare something like the eye to be "irreducibly complex", on the basis that all the parts have to work together perfectly, or the whole eye is useless. Many of those people suffer from defective vision themselves (as do I) so are apparently unaware of how nonsensical it is. A perception of light and shade has
some value to an organism, in a world populated by the blind (as all early life was, of course). The basic eye shape, constituents and functionality have evolved independently about nine times. That is the power of convergent evolution.
There is no such thing as "irreducible complexity", there is only the limits of human knowledge. ID-ers would have us give up and cease investigating. If they had been around and influential in the 19th Century, we would never even have discovered Mendelian genetics, let alone the structure of DNA. ID is antithetical to the aims of Science, whilst providing a profoundly suspect view, theologically, of what God is and what He does.
ggazoo said:
7. Why does the Bible alone, of all of the world's 'holy' books, contain such detailed prophecies of future events? Many of which have already been fulfilled?
You'll need to justify this with actual quotes and citations of the things that came to pass. Let us take ("here he goes again", everybody says) Isaiah 7:14, the supposed prediction of the Virgin Birth of Christ. The original Hebrew does not say "virgin". If you read it in context, it is very obvious that Isaiah is actually trying to convince King Azaria of something that is going to happen very very soon - within the next year or two. It is entirely to do with the kingdom of Judah facing two powerful enemies and Isaiah's counsel - as advised by Yahweh - is to let the two enemies wear each other out. He illlustrates this by describing a child that is shortly to be born, and before it can speak (before it can say "mama" and "papa"), the enemies will be vanquished. He isn't telling him of some baby being born in seven centuries' time who is going to "save" the people from an oppressor (the Romans) who haven't even come out of their caves yet, and when the current enemy (Assyria, Babylon) will be little more than a memory. I don't call that much of a prophecy or much in the way of fulfillment.
ggazoo said:
8. Are you aware that every alleged Bible contradiction has been answered in an intelligible and credible manner?
Are you aware that every theological answer has also been refuted in an intelligible and credible manner? There are always credible answers and intelligent refutations.
ggazoo said:
9. How did 35-40 men, spanning 1500 years and living on three separate continents, ever manage to consistently author one unified message (i.e. The Bible)?
How unified is this message, exactly? The Jews are to keep themselves to themselves, and not to allow crossbreeding. (Ezra) Foreigners have their value and even David has foreign blood. (Ruth). Love your enemy as you love yourself (Jesus, various, also OT). On the other hand, slaughter all the enemies (most notably Joshua). It rained seven days and the Earth was flooded for 40 days and 40 nights (Genesis 7:4, 7:12, 7:17, 8:6)
or the waters below the earth and above the firmament came through the "windows of heaven" and "the fountains of the deep" (not the same as raining, I think you'll agree) and the Earth was flooded for 150 days (Genesis 7:24, 8:3). Jesus was descended from Solomon, son of David (Matthew) or Nathan, son of David (Luke).
Of course, these are simply contradictions, for which you can provide "intelligent and credible" answers. But the credibility of those answers rests upon the same level of credibility and rationality which rejects the view espoused in your question that the Bible's view is consistent to an almost miraculous extent. If it is possible to truly deduce one supreme Message from the Bible (and thousands of years of theology has pretty much failed), it is not surprising if all the thirty-five authors, all members of the same race and religion, having a broadly similar worldview, write works that have a broadly similar outlook.
I haven't even mentioned the fairly obvious fact that those works that do maintain the message are those which were selected for inclusion, and those which radically departed from it were excluded. For instance the books of the Maccabees, which were determined by rabbinical scholars to be insufficiently "inspired" (1 Mc doesn't mention God or any miracles), as well as telling the tale of a successful insurgency against despotic foreign rule by - sad to say - a non-Davidic family, were removed from Scriptures around 90 CE. Or the Gnostic gospels which were excluded from the NT by the Council of Nicaea in 325 CE, despite some telling textual evidence that Christ himself may have held Gnostic views. "How do you account for it?" sounds as if a
certain level of consistency is surprising. The level of consistency that we find is not
that surprising.
It's the high level of
inconsistency that is surprising, the editing together of two contradictory accounts of Creation and of two contradictory accounts of the Flood, and three different accounts of one of the patriarchs passing his wife off as his sister (twice to Abram (once when he was Abraham) and once to Isaac), and the acceptance of all these mishmashed accounts as the infallible Word of God. (Even the parts which the author clearly signalled as works of imaginative fiction are taken to be factual, which even the author never intended - viz the books of Job and of Jonah.)
That's the surprising thing. Something which the Qu'ran is less subject to. Perhaps the Qu'ran is the true Word of God, being on the whole a lot more consistent than the Bible?
ggazoo said:
10. Why subscribe to the incredible odds that the tilt and position of our planet relative to the sun are merely coincidental?
Ho ho, the anthropic fallacy. As has been pointed out, there are trillions of stars. Some have planets of sufficient mass to retain an atmosphere, some have planets in the temperate zone of orbit around the sun, some have a tilt allowing none-too-extreme seasonal variations. A small fraction of those will have a combination of all three. Life - as we know it, Captain - has arisen on one of those which are hospitable for life. But surely, this is only what anybody would expect? It's a tautology! On the other hand, if the axial tilt was too extreme, or the planet was too far away from the Sun and yet Life was still here -
that would be the proof of a benevolent God with a special purpose.
