1> Re your evidence score card; you imply science and theism are in conflict. How so?
2> “Animals have morality. Humans are animals”. So what?
3> I’ve answered your question. There is an intelligent agent behind the existence of the universe. The universe exists. The universe did not always exist, therefore it had a cause. The ultimate cause of the universe must be uncaused, or it would not be the ultimate cause. The intelligent agent behind the existnece of the universe is uncaused.
When you say “There isn’t a Starbucks next to the library, I was just there yesterday.” you don’t *know *that elves didn’t build it overnight. But unless there is a good reason to think that, what you said isn’t a belief any more than asking you how many dots are on an index card I’m holding.
Your use of fruit fly experiments is laughable. The fruit fly experiments were conducted by an intelligence (get it!). They replicated literally dozens of mutations, yet achieved not one single new species. With each new mutation, the fruit flies became weaker.
“Richard Goldschmidt fell into despair. The changes, he lamented, were so hopelessly micro [insignificant] that if a thousand mutations were combined in one specimen, there would still be no new species.”—Norman Macbeth, Darwin Retried
I agree. But when there is a good reason, when the evidence shows that the exitence of an intelligent agent behind the universe is more plausible than the impossible odds of random chance, then belief is reaosnable.
What you see out of your eyes is a subjective belief. It’s not the same thing as thinking the TV is a box full of fairies. Or that a Bronze-Age Storm God built the universe.
Your *gotcha *is weak and thready, please build up steam and try again.
No, it’s not a belief because it’s conditional. I have not said “it does not exist,” I merely presume it conditionally the way I make the same presumption about smurfs. I’m perfectly open to seeing proof that smurfs exist.
I don’t take drawing advice from the blind or education advice from people who think evolution is a liberal hoax.
Any credibility you may have had has sailed. Everyone, that is everyone who has a good high school education knows you couldn’t care less about facts and reality now.
The word atheism comes from the Greek word atheos which means “without gods”.
The reason most ‘atheists’ have softended their position is because ‘hard atheism’ was demonstarted to be philosophically untenable by the ‘all places at all times’ argument.
If you don’t hold to athiesm, pronounce yourself an agnostic. The rest is intellectual dishonesty.
These distinctions seem both arbitrary and disingenuous to me. Words have no inherent meaning anyway, and redefining them in these ways seem more than fishy to me.
The fact is there are varying levels of conviction in any belief system. In this context we might plot this out with pure agnosticism in the dead center and hard atheism and hard theism on the polar extremes. As we move in either direction from dead center we encounter subjective observations.
We’ve seen more than a few theists who show doubts, or ambivalence towards their belief in a God of some sort. We’ve also seen more than a few strident, fully invested theists with deep convictions.
The other side of this continuum is nothing more than the mirror opposite of the theist. Yet for some reason (although I suspect i know why…) there is this board penchant to blur the line between where agnosticism ends and [soft] atheism begins.
The fact is, once you take a position for the existence or non-existence of God you’ve left agnosticism and you’ve embraced----no matter how strong or weak----a subjective belief system.
You raised the issue of the fruit flies. After 90 sum years and millions of generations of fruit flies subjected to X rays and chemicals which cause mutations, where are the new species?
You don’t know anything about evolution. You think you do, but you’ve don’t. Here’s a clue for you, the distincy=tion between “micro” and “macro” evolution is a phoney one. All evelution is “micro.” “Macro” is just a whole bunch of “macro.”
Would you like to see a list of observed speciation events?
Are you familiar with something called endogenous retroviral genes? Those little things prove evolution all by themselves.
And please read my post abut evolution again. My objection is not to ‘evolution’ at a micro level. However there is no empirical evidence whatsoever for the hypothesis of common descent. Of course you are wecome to provide some. You could use the whales, the horses, or various other previously discredited claims. Or do you have something new?
"The fruit fly has long been the favorite object of mutational experiments because of its fast gestation period [twelve days]. X rays have been used to increase the mutation rate in the fruit fly by 15,000 percent. All in all, scientists have been able to “catalyze the fruit fly evolutionary process, such that what has been seen to occur in Drosophila is the equivalent of the many millions of years of normal mutations and evolution.”
"Even with this tremendous speedup of mutations, scientists have not been able to come up with anything other than another fruit fly. Most important, what all these experiments demonstrate is that the fruit fly can vary within certain upper and lower limits but will never go beyond them. For example, Ernst Mayr reported on two experiments performed on the fruit fly back in 1948.
“In the first experiment, the fly was selected for a decrease in bristles and, in the second experiment, for an increase in bristles. Starting with a parent stock averaging 36 bristles, it is possible after thirty generations to lower the average to 25 bristles, “but then the line became sterile and died out.” In the second experiment, the average number of bristles were increased from 36 to 56; then sterility set in. Mayr concluded with the following observation: Obviously any drastic improvement under selection must seriously deplete the store of genetic variability . . The most frequent correlated response of one-sided selection is a drop in general fitness. This plagues virtually every breeding experiment.”—*Jeremy Rifkin, Algeny p. 134.
Would you then say that “a non-belief” in God (FSM/PU etc etc) is reserved more for agnosticism and for soft atheism, or would you say it is a valid description throughout the atheistic viewpoint/continuum, all the way through hard atheism?
I know the etymology. I actually know Greek. I’m guessing you don’t. The etymology is not the definition.
You don’t know what you’re talking about on any level, do you?
Agnosticism is not a position on the existence of gods, but a position that the question cannot be answered with available evidence.
The way the word atheism is used academically, by people who are trying to actually be precise with their language and terminology, is to refer to the entire set ofr people who lack theistic beliefs. This larger set has subsets, including “strong” and “weak” atheism. Weak atheism is what often gets erroneously called “agnosticism.” It’s a lack of belief in the existence of gods, but not a positive assertion of the existence of non-gods.
The definitions were not “softened” because of any theistic counter-argument. That’s complete fantasy on your part. I don’t know where you get some of this crap.
I once more have to reiterate that you don’t have the slightest idea what you’re talking about. The evidence for common descent is voluminous and dispositive. Those retrogenes I was talking about are the absolute smoking gun.
There is no difference between “micro” and “macro” evolution by the way. They are the same thing. Macro is just a whole bunch of micro. Don’t use words if you don’t know what they mean.
Not a bad post, but I need to complain: your misspelling of Cthulhu gave me the mental image of a gigantic cephalopodic Elder God wearing a grass skirt low on its hips and dancing – a horrific vision I felt it necessary to share with you.
