It seems to me that in a discussion on GD, it’s almost inevitable that sooner or later a fundamentalist Christian will whip out Pascal’s wager. Moreover, they don’t say anything like, “What do you make of Pascal’s Wager?” or, “Pascal’s Wager seems like a sound argument to me- do you feel that there’s a flaw in it?” Instead they act like they and their friends are the only people on earth who have ever heard of it, and so they say, “Oh, yeah, Mr. Atheist? Well, get a load of this: if you believe and God doesn’t exist, it’s no big deal, right? But if you don’t believe and God DOES exist…” Every non-fundie groans inwardly at hearing this, because the argument can be refuted in a few sentences.
I’m toying with the idea of making a FAQ that would list a lot of these common arguments which every atheist has heard a thousand times, along with one-paragraph rebuttals. I’d like to keep this discussion away from C/E questions, since talk.origins already has one-stop FAQs for the most common creationist arguments.
For starters, I’d list:
Pascal’s Wager (It assumes the very God which it tries to prove.)
You can’t have morality without God. (Would you become a child molester if God told you tomorrow that you’d get to heaven no matter what?)
Atheism is a religion. (I could answer this in a paragraph, but I can’t summarize it into a sentence.)
Just because you’re blind doesn’t mean that other people can’t see.
The phrase “Separation of Church and State” doesn’t appear in the Constitution.
Einstein believed in God (this one could be answered with the short quote from Einstein.)
The Bible says that it’s the word of God. (Is it my imagination, or is this less popular than it was 10 years ago?)
One could also include things like, “The Founding Fathers were Christians,” and so on, although I’d like to focus on questions that could be answered with a short paragraph.
I may also include “Christianity must be true, or my whole life is a lie- so you need to become a Christian too!”
But everything on earth is so perfect it must have been made by someone else - It’s a near infinite universe by all accounts, it had to happen * somewhere*
I love their little pet “theories” about how the world really can be only 6000 years old.
And about how evolution is just a theory… and creationism is just a theory (which they “know” to be true)… so why should they both not be taught in schools?
Along with this, any reference to God in an official Government capacity. Our coins sporting, “In God We Trust”, which later became the nat’l motto. It was all plotted by fundies in positions of power (I believe the coin thing came when a fundie became head of the treasury, and was actually disapproved of by T. Roosevent, and then it became the motto in said mccarthy era)
Or there’s the argument that it’s only “perfect” because it’s the world we grew up in… that is to say, we have no reason to think our world is any better than anything else out there except that it contains the ingredient for “life” as WE know it
While Secretary of the Treasury Salmon P. Chase did indeed get the ball rolling on the whole “In God We Trust” slogan during the Civil War, it did not – and could not – appear on U.S. coins until both houses of Congress passed the Act of April 22, 1864.
President Teddy Roosevelt disapproved of having the motto “In God We Trust” appear on U.S. coinage – but not because of any convictions about the separation of church and state. He felt that having any reference to the Deity stamped on money was degrading to said Deity. (It was a Jesus-and-the-moneychangers-in-the-temple kind of a thing.) Although T. Roosevelt managed to get the 1907 Gold Double Eagle coins minted without the Motto on them, Congress quickly passed an Act that made the Motto mandatory on all coins that had previously carried the Motto.
“In God We Trust” made it onto paper money ($1 silver certificates) in 1957, the same year Congress voted it our National Motto.
I was searching for the site where I read about the phrase being put on coins… and I came across this odd little tidbit:
then I saw it repeated on the another site… what’s that about? Granted it takes me a little bit to get all the words to the national anthem… but I don’t remember that line
O thus be it ever when free-men shall stand
Between their lov’d home and the war’s desolation;
Blest with vict’ry and peace, may the heav’n-rescued land
Praise the Pow’r that hath made and preserv’d us a nation!
Then conquer we must, when our cause it is just,
And this be our motto: “In God is our trust!”
And the star-spangled banner in triumph shall wave
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave!
I’m not sure if that was Chase’s source or not. though.
“We need to post the Ten Commandments in schools to teach children proper morals.” What, you think a plaque with a quote from some old piece of literature is going to turn bullies into Boy Scouts? Ypu might see the Bible as the ultimate guide to life, but many kids don’t, and putting excerpts from it won’t have any effect on them, except to piss off people who like to have the government obey the First Amendment.
The assumption that we need redemption (another thread is running on that one now, but seems to me pretty soundly and easily refuted).
The assumption that it is possible to choose, actively, one’s real beliefs. Even if I lose every other debate with a believer, I still can’t suddenly decide to believe in a fairy tale. Couldn’t if I wanted to.
“The big bang theory must be wrong because scientists can’t explain what caused the big bang/ scientists can’t explain what happened before the big bang.”
of course in the tradition of providing arguments against theses… one obvious way to respond to this is to ask “What created God?” or “What was before God?”
I love it when Christians tell me that if I simply open myself to Jesus, take that one leap of faith, then he’ll love me, I’ll see the light, my breath will be fresher, birds will sing more sweetly, etc. When I retort that I was scarily close to a Fundie myself for four years, they can only retort that I wasn’t REALLY a Christian. So, on top of it being patronizing, simplistic, and insulting… it’s irrefutable!
<aside from the main question>
The assumption of the OP is that the only opposition to speak of is between atheists on the one hand and fundies on the other. This ignores the existence of liberal believers. From my POV, the fundies are a scourge toward those of us who think religion should be open-minded and gentle rather than narrow-minded and harsh. We are the people who suffer more from fundies because we have them in our face all the time. Atheists being on the outside can avoid them more easily.
</aside>
I can almost relate to a homosexual coming out of the closet, i am a recovering religionist and i’m trying to keep that fact away from my parents. Damn, at least if I was gay I would still go to church. Back to the OP (sort of), I’d just like a preacher to do a sermon on the Council of Nicea, or gnostics. It’s always fascinated me, the sheer arbitrariness (yes, that is so a word, even if I just made it up) of religion in general. I’ve been there, and I don’t think Jesus likes me any more. But speaking of fanatics, what bugs me as well are evolutionist fanatics. Now, i’m not gonna preach “creation science” here, i’m not into that shit. It just seems a tad bit of a leap of faith to accept evolution as fact. Come on. I’m not discounting it, and I’m not trying to start an arguement about it. I just thought I’d vent since we were talking fundies. BTW, I want to kill everyon who has ever appeared on TBN.
some of the arguments presented here are equally as useful to you and those like-minded… for example the seperation of church and state (both in the form of not being specifically mentioned in the const and in the motto/coin/10 commandments in school things) are an issue of contention among Christians.
I often try to argue from various perspectives, and sometimes it is from the perspective of a “liberal believer”, at least what i took that to mean which was a person who believed the Bible to be a manmade metaphorical guidebook with some usefulness but not ultimate accuracy/infallibility… I’m not saying that the term “liberal believer” is defined as such, but that such a person would be a believer who is liberal about those beliefs… anyway in such a position many of the points made here are valid for arguments