Ask An Atheist Anything

Originally posted by mhorndisk
Well go ahead and pick your side then. Play the little game. Nothing poofed everything into existence, or a supernatural deity did. I believe both assertions are completey ridiculous and a scientific degree therefor would mean absolutetly nothing to me. It is a purposeless cause, which will provide a purposeless effect. It doesn't matter because no one will ever discover the answer to the beginning of the universe, ever. But God IS coming on the Earth. He's not going to be this supernatural deity, but a physical man just like you and me. That is what the all seeing eye represents. He will be able to see you whenever he wants to. He will be God.

Yes yes, science is all completely worthless.

I always enjoy reading that statement on the internet

No, I pointed it out. Perhaps not in the very post you extracted a quote from, but it's there. Reading a bit of the thread should prevent you from committing those mistakes in the future.

You say one thing, and then, however many posts or even pages later, you say another thing which contradicts the first, and I'm supposed to guess which one you really meant to say?

That's absurd. If you say it, then you will be asked about it.

And when you are, here's what you should say. Either you misspoke the first time, or else you misspoke the second time. All you have to do is say that.

Oh, and say which time it was, too, please. If you know.

Isn't it fascinating - how some (many) insist you must believe in something.

And then get angry when you don't.

Quote: Yes yes, science is all completely worthless.

I said its great for making your car run... but what worth you or I put into it is completely up to us as individuals.

Quote: Fair enough. Your subjective experiences, redefinitions of words and inventive concepts give you the room necessary to operate as a kind of theist - or shall I say, retain some form of superstitious belief system.

What's superstitious about my belief system? By that notion anything unexplainable would be followed by a superstition. You know you opened up the dictionary and you saw that God is someone valuable. God doesn't have to fit every single definition. If it defined God as a rock and an apple would that mean he needs to be both? Of course not.

There is a force that gives life to everything in the universe. Some call it God, some call it electromagnetic energy, I call it the force. What I call God is a man, who is living and breathing because of that force. You see I'm not reinventing anything here. You've just never been made aware of the other definitions of God because one has been repeated over and over and over again to you (brainwashing). You opened the dictionary, and if you want to say I am redefining stuff than I guess I wrote the dictionary.

One definition defines God as a supernatural force, the other does not, how can he be both? He can be either, you just choose which one you want to believe is true, and voila, you have a theistic belief system about what God IS, which is why you are A theist. That's what you believe God is, so I'm sorry if you don't believe what you believe God is.

Originally posted by mhorndisk
One definition defines God as a supernatural force, the other does not, how can he be both? He can be either, you just choose which one you want to believe is true, and voila, you have a theistic belief system about what God IS, which is why you are A theist. That's what you believe God is, so I'm sorry if you don't believe what you believe God is.

What? That makes no sense at all.

Something happened that caused a creation. That something can be anything. And that something does not require any kind of consciousness or intelligence.

Both consciousness and intelligence - - can be by products of evolution down the road.

Originally posted by traditionaldrummer

Originally posted by adjensen
Possible? Sure, why not? I do think it incredibly unlikely that this moment, me writing this and you reading it, comes to us courtesy of nothing but a nearly infinite number of random chances that just happened to wind up in our favour, but, sure, I think that is possible.

I don't believe random chances lead to humans in any way. Nor do I believe in "creators".

Huh? How is evolution not random? Natural selection says that some aspect randomly pops up and if it's an improvement, it sticks and is passed along, if it's not an improvement, it goes away. There is either design or there is randomness. What's the third option?

Yep. I already agreed to that. I think the idea that a magical fairy, or the idea that nothing, popped everything into existence are both equally ridiculous. I don't think we will ever know. But God is only a magical fairy according to atheists and christians. They believe God is a magical fairy, and that is what doesn't make sense because magical fairys don't exist!

And neither does nothing...

But a magical fairy is more likely to exist...

Originally posted by mhorndisk
Yep. I already agreed to that. I think the idea that a magical fairy, or the idea that nothing, popped everything into existence are both equally ridiculous. I don't think we will ever know. But God is only a magical fairy according to atheists and christians. They believe God is a magical fairy, and that is what doesn't make sense because magical fairys don't exist!

Your comment equating God with a "magical fairy" is both foolish and belittling (which I was criticizing you for earlier.) If you wish to be taken seriously, stop insulting people's beliefs with childish invectives, build a coherent theology, and defend it with sensible arguments.

As I've read through the pages and pages of back and forth between you and AD in this thread, you come across as a poorly written Turing Machine, built to take random facts, tie a few disparate ones together and claim spiritual significance for it.

If your beliefs lack any reasonable order, limit and theology, no one is ever going to take you seriously, because even if you make a modicum of sense on one point, five minutes later, you'll be citing World of Warcraft, the Pantheon and cottage cheese to make some sort of point.

reply to post by mhorndisk


First, noone definies deities as magic faries that I am aware of. Second, please stop putting up multiple replies to the same person about the same thing. Slow down, think, make your single reply, and edit afterward if you forgot something. Good grief.

[edit on 22-7-2010 by C09JayLT]

reply to post by mhorndisk


You cannot take a word out of context, find an alternate meaning and apply that meaning to the origional context. For example: "He is a rock god" -> god ~ deity -> "He is a rock deity". This would be an invalid chain of reasoning. In short, men can be called gods, but that doesn't mean men can become deities. And be extra careful about this mistake with religious texts; most started in a different language and have been translated many times, leading to confusion over meaning of various words.

Originally posted by mhorndisk
Quote: Fair enough. Your subjective experiences, redefinitions of words and inventive concepts give you the room necessary to operate as a kind of theist - or shall I say, retain some form of superstitious belief system.

What's superstitious about my belief system? By that notion anything unexplainable would be followed by a superstition. You know you opened up the dictionary and you saw that God is someone valuable. God doesn't have to fit every single definition. If it defined God as a rock and an apple would that mean he needs to be both? Of course not.

Definition of "superstition":

2 : a notion maintained despite evidence to the contrary

Since there is empirical evidence that humans are not gods and you insist otherwise, you maintain a superstitious belief system.

Originally posted by adjensen
Huh? How is evolution not random? Natural selection says that some aspect randomly pops up and if it's an improvement, it sticks and is passed along, if it's not an improvement, it goes away. There is either design or there is randomness. What's the third option?

The process you just described is not random. Nature keeping what works and discard the rest is not randomness in any sense. It's also not "design".

Originally posted by mhorndisk
because magical fairys don't exist!

Says the man who's never been to a gay bar.

Seriously, that statement sounds very atheistic to me.

The process you just described is not random.

Sure, it is. The process adj described is trivially isomorphic to a first-order Markov stochastic process. That is, roughly, or for example, a "random walk" among possible distributions of alleles in living organisms.

The distribution of allelles among living oganisms a moment from now is dependent on the current distribution, and not otherwise dependent on the distribution a moment ago (first-order Markov).

There is more than one distribution that could possibly obtain a moment from now, and which one will actually obtain cannot be determined with certainty knowing the current distribution (stochastic, or random). This gives rise in the obvious way to the signature "probability transition matrix" of first-order Markov process models.

Of course, any fielded model of the process adj described will have an even larger substantive role for probability distributions. For one thing, an "improvement" is typically defined probabilistically (an increase in the probability of begetting offspring, for instance). That is to say, improvement is a change in the value of what is usually and regularly called a random variable.

The prevalence of "evoultion by natural selction is not a random process" in attested instances probably arises from the phrase's frequent use in debates about intelligent design or creation. The context is usually that the 'anti-evolutionist" advocate has stated that "evolution is random," by which the speaker means something with "independent and identically distributed trials," often with a uniform distribution over possible states.

In particular, the anti-evolutionist will often deny the so-called "cumulative" character of evolution (for example, by "calculating the probability" that some protein would "come together at random"). The cumulative character of the actual, scientifically interesting, model is, mathematically, the Markov dependence property.

Since the anti-evolutionist's usage actually is among the accepted informal natural language notions of random, it is perfectly reasonable to deny that evolution by natural selection is random in that sense.

But there wouldn't be any general validity to saying that the operating principles of evolution by natural selection are

not randomness in any sense.

A random walk is indeed random in some sense.

Since you do not dispute that adj accurately described the process, then its random character, and the role that randomness plays in fielded models of the process, may be verified simply and easily.



[edit on 23-7-2010 by eight bits]

Originally posted by traditionaldrummer

Originally posted by adjensen
Huh? How is evolution not random? Natural selection says that some aspect randomly pops up and if it's an improvement, it sticks and is passed along, if it's not an improvement, it goes away. There is either design or there is randomness. What's the third option?

The process you just described is not random. Nature keeping what works and discard the rest is not randomness in any sense. It's also not "design".

Bearing in mind that I support the theory of evolution, I'm not a huge proponent of randomness (though if it is purely random, that works into my faith, as well,) but as I see it, there must be random variations, or nothing would ever move forward. One can't take the single celled entity that life evolved out of, check the DNA, and be able to, say, discern that a dog, whale and elephant would eventually exist.

My understanding (and, again, forgive me if my knowledge is wrong) is that differentials come from random mutations, and natural selection is the process by which the best options move forward and the less good ones fall away. Even beyond that, though, if you had an early human that was immune to cancer, but was eaten by a cougar or had a tree fall on it (both random events) before it passed on the gene, you've randomness inserted into your orderly, non-random, process.

One of the biggest problems that you seem to have when talking to myself or eight bits is that we say something ("some aspect randomly pops up") and you either ignore it or arbitrarily dismiss it ("the process you just described is not random") without justifying your dismissal. If I say that something is random, and your response is to say that I didn't say it was random, how are we supposed to understand what your belief is?