From Raven:
The other question some YECs hate is, “Do you believe Noah had a boatload of dinosaurs?”
The YECs that are trying to look intelligent and educated will waffle around and refuse to answer it. They know it makes them look silly.
Be sure to ask it often and don’t let them evade the question.
It is a central story of their religion. God ineptly creates humans in his own image so they are also inept. Then he genocides all but 8 in an attempt to improve them. That didn’t work so he sent his kid down to be nailed to a tree. So how did that work? The next step in god’s improvement program to fix his original design flaws is another genocide.
For an all powerful being, he certainly seems to have trouble getting things to work. Someone tell me again, why the fundie god is worth worshipping?
Indeed, why? We've all been so immersed in this lunacy, many of us have lost the ability to step back and see just how loony it is.
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17 comments:
"For an all powerful being, he certainly seems to have trouble getting things to work."
This comment, more than any other on your blog, shows your incredible ignorance of theology. I'd delete your post if I were you. Any atheist -- forget believer -- who has gone to one week's worth of Theology 101 would suggest the same, so as to help you not look so ignorant.
For such comments to qualify as more than mere bluster, they'd have to be followed by actual examples of said ignorance, and of course any substantiation of the notion of theology as an academic subjectwould be nice as well. I've been through far more than mere Theology 101, as have most of the nonbelievers you'll meet and hear similar things from, so such claims simply don't merit much credibility. It's just another case of wishing the world were so.
If you were to say "For an all powerful being, he certainly seems to have trouble getting things to work" to your Theology 101 teacher, he would've responded, "it's about time you stop sleeping in class." Listen, it doesn't matter whether what they're teaching (about suffering, or design that looks bad) is poor theology or not. The fact is that your question totally *ignores* what they teach. It is in *this* sense that I felt your question was ignorant. Maybe I should've been more polite and described as "not well thought out" instead.
Perhaps we simply find what they teach to be nothing more than made-up, unverifiable bafflegab at best (the trinity), and demonstrably false nonsense (a 6,000 year old earth produced by infinite benevolence), and as such, deserves no better. It's simply not a worthy academic pursuit.
OK. (I spoke too harshly above, apologies.) But if it's not a worthy academic pursuit, you've got to ask yourself, "why do I spend so much time speaking out against it" The religious won't listen to you (well, they'll occupy your time with incessant attempted pushbacks) and the non-religious already believe what you're saying. Have you found any fence-sitters you've swayed? Good for you if you have.
Of course I have, all the time. The world is not the binary one so many wish it were. Many have given theology far too much credit on the basis of casual observation of how it is treated in public discourse. Many respond positively to being shown it has not earned the respect it claims.
Your frankly lame question makes that point. "If this is so bad, or nonexistent, why do you speak out against it so much" is so absurd one would never ponder it for a second in any other area. Asking "If AIDS is so bad, why do you speak out against it?" or "If the benefits of homeopathy are nonexistent, why do you argue against that which does not exist?", would get you laughter at best, and intellectual dismissal at worst. It's just one more way religion gets a free pass, and what I and many others are working to change.
Good enough. Your answer was better than my question.
I'm just afraid that my original point got lost in my rhetoric.
It seems to me that your challenge, "For an all powerful being, he certainly seems to have trouble getting things to work" would be asked during the /first/ day in a Theology 101 class. Lets pretend you stated that challenge the first day of class. The answer you receive from the teacher shows that within your challenge you misunderstood their theology, relying on a faulty premise. However, the entire theology seems to be ridiculous to you (lets say even *I* agree with you), so it hardly matters whether you misunderstood it or not.
But now it's the end of the semester, and you're still making the same challenge?
I'm afraid your point is still lost in your rhetoric and presuppositions, at least to me. The point of the question is that we've heard all the answers, and in light of actual facts of the world, we find them wanting, to put it mildly.
Perhaps you should simply make your point directly, rather than in the form of let's-pretend hypotheticals. The lesson in theology class that would clear all this up is X for reasons W, Y, and Z and supported by facts Q, R, and T.
SA,
Check out this piece of twisted logic.
http://www.answersingenesis.org/articles/am/v2/n4/other-religious-writings
You will be hard pressed to not do a spit take with their logic here.
Did my comment get lost in moderation...or (/me looks scared) did I get lost in moderation?
It didn't get lost, it got flushed, along with all the other Bible-babble assertionfests I receive. People can always go to links like the one Pradeep provides if that is where their interest lies.
Dearest ScienceAvenger:
I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but my "flushed" post wasn't saying what you think it was saying. While it could be construed as a "Bible-babble assertionfests", it was intended to be amusingly satirical. I know that this was the intent, as I wrote it, and I've come to know myself quite well, and I am, myself, amusingly satirical. It makes it tough to find pants that fit, but that's tangental to the topic at hand. In my quiet moments alone with myself, I sometimes confide to me my own atheism. Then I make myself hot chocolate. Later, I spoon.
Hmm, so it is, my mistake. Satire is difficult to discern in the morning. Here is your Twainishness in it's entirety:
He has a plan, you see. As the Bible shows, Man, made by a perfect God, needed to realize that he wasn't good enough so that God, being perfect and intolerant of imperfection, could send Himself down to die, temporarily, in Man's place for the sins of Man, who a perfect God made perfectly but somehow ended up with a serious imperfection, that being free will, which, again, a perfect God invented for His perfect Man in His perfect Creation so that Man, which He made, could freely choose to completely obey Him in every way. He did this because He didn't want automatons who were programmed to obey and worship and praise, but because He wanted people that would willingly obey and worship and praise, even though the entire tale sounds kind of daft and wildly ahistorical if you haven't been touched by God. If you have, it makes perfect sense, even though you are clouded by the sin that a perfect God never made but that you inherited from perfect people that disobeyed the perfect God that made them perfectly. Oh, and their disobedience also corrupted the entire universe and, if you think that just because they never existed that they never existed, that's just because your mind is clouded by sin, which only God can take away, leaving you clean and white as the lamb and perfect until you sin again.
God is here to guide you, except when He's silent, and He can help you unless that would compromise your free will to freely believe that the lack of Him proves that He's there. He can't mess with your free will unless He does. That's a rule that He can't break, because He made the rules in the first place and, being perfect, could not make a mistake, which is why it's always your fault. Or Eve's, who was, again, made perfectly by a perfect God who is both incapable of and intollerant of imperfection.
You just have to reach out to Him in faith and He will reach back, unless He doesn't in which case you aren't reaching for Him, no matter how much it appears to you that you are. And if you ever thought He was with you, but you fell away from faith, He was never with you and you were fooling yourself the entire time. The solution to this is simply to reach out to Him.
He will guide and help you, leading you on the right path, as He is doing, and has done, with many others, many of whom, with His guidance, will come to radically different conclusions than His same guidance will with you.
Through the Bible and the inerrant guidance of the Holy Spirit you can learn of His divine will and come to understand Him and also He's ineffable and mysterious and you can't hope to now why He gave your child cancer, even though He didn't, because He only does the good things, and anything He does by definition is good, even when it involves giving (or not preventing) children cancer, which He didn't do and anywhay it's the child's fault for being a sinner. Or it's Adam's fault. Or He's teaching you a lesson in soul building by killing your child, which He's not doing, but if He was (which He isn't) it would be, by definition, good.
Modusoperandi,
ScienceAvenger does not print poster's URLs with which he disagrees, unless the person introduces it with scorn.
Alex once again demonstrates his tenuous grasp of reality. What I do not do is post links when they are given no context, or have no relation to what is being discussed. 99% of the time they are pure propoganda.
Personally, I'd love to get some posts which disagree with me, and which have links to back the arguments made. The other side just seems to have an awfully difficult time managing that, which ought to give them pause, instead of causing them to project their shortcomings on others.
Good afternoon,
Second-time reader, second-time commenter here.
I'm a Bible-believing Christian, non-Evolutionist, with YE sympathies, just to be upfront about the point-of-view that I'm coming from.
My question is about the purport and form of the argument that is sort of loosely articulated in your post here.
Should I understand it as the sort of argument that Gould gives? Something of the form:
1) Creature X is either a product of mutation and selective pressures or a product of an intelligent designer.
2) An intelligent designer would not give creature X poperty P, but evolution foreseeably might.
3) Creature X does have property P.
4) Therefore, Creature X is not a product of intelligent design, but rather of evolution.
Admittedly, I'm not committed to this exact formulation. I'm rather tired at the moment, and not too bright to begin with. But pending some glaring error that I'm making, is this the idea?
I suppose it would be silly to not add my follow-up question since my original is obviously a lead-in.
The follow up would be this: Are you aware of the sort of criticism that arguments of this sort of come in for by philosophers of science? If so, how do you respond?
Thanks, and I look forward to hearing.
best,
BT.
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