First, why would you think it’s your god? Why isn’t it Vishnu, Amatatsuru or Zeus? There is just as much evidence that it’s one of them.
Second of all, why couldn’t it have just happened? Because it’s too complicated for you to understand?
Of course you think there must have been a designer, you don’t know how it could have happened without one. This of course has absolutely nothing to do with whether or not there was a designer. This is an argument from ignorance: ‘I dont know how it happened, so it must have been X’. And it’s a bad argument. You can’t say it was X unless you have evidence it was X, not having another ready explanation is not evidence. The whole argument from design just ‘we dont know, so god did it’. Sorry, try again.
But isn’t God responsible for natural disasters? For example, the 2004 tsunami killed over 200,000 people. Very few humans have ever been evil enough to kill that many people, yet God did it just three years ago, and has done it repeatedly down through the ages.
I would need logical and reasonable connections between religious belief and the real world. That is, the world that’s supposed to exist, according to the Bible and other sacred texts, would have to actually exist in the everyday world. It would have to make sense. This, of course, would eliminate the mystery of God and we would know his true intentions and what he really wants us to … hey wait a minute … according to that criteria, my wife doesn’t actually exist!
Is not God more perfect than Man? Is He not more complex as well?
Then by your own reasoning, God must have been created by another even greater designer.
Having actually studied a great deal of biology, I would have to say that your “designer’s” name must be Rube Goldberg.
I did, actually. She misattributed the line.
In this particular case he was arguing that Scrabble tiles do stick like that, but the creation of a dictionary was such an impossibly unlikely way for a bunch of random tiles to stick together after one attempt that it was effectively impossible, i.e. God did it.
So I’d responded with my slow-selection explanation with many millions of attempts gradually narrowing in on something that was like a dictionary and he’d turned around and said they didn’t stick like that, I could justly accuse him of moving the goalposts.
Not that it would matter. He was a nut promoting a fringe religious belief, immune to logic.
What makes you think that God is good and man is bad? Why can’t it be just the opposite?
Why is God not credited with terrible floods, earthquakes and tsunamis? Isn’t He powerful enough? Biblical references abound where He caused horrendous calamities upon even His chosen people. Has he reformed since? Has he mellowed out? When and why did this happen?
I never insinuated man is bad. I’m saying man is capable of evil.
Why credit God with things nature is responsible for? floods, earthquakes and tsunamis are part of existence on this earth.
So is God, if you believe the copious biblical accounts.
Personally, I believe He caused the last great tsunami. Prove me wrong.
OK. So what things are caused by God and which ones are caused by nature? Explain your work.
God created nature? He could have made a world where those things *weren’t * part of existence on this Earth.
That’s just the *nature * of nature…
So in other words you can’t reconcile the horrors of the natural world with a loving god so you resort to gibberish?
Very convincing.
Are you perhaps suggesting that God does not have the power to change the nature of nature?
But you’d want an explanation for that, wouldn’t you? and the explanation would be gravity.
Living things are incredibly complex, and people naturally want an explanation of how such complexity came to be. Evolution provides that answer, but it’s a phenomenon a lot more complicated and difficult than a bunch of marbles coming to rest in a sink. Richard Dawkins is no friend of religion, but in The Blind Watchmaker he states he has more sympathy for the Christian naturalist William Paley–author of the Watchmaker argument for God–than with atheist philosophers who handwave the design question away. Your marble argument reminds me of creationists who confuse evolution with blind chance and then state–correctly–that blind chance could never explain living things. However, evolution is not blind chance, but a process of selection. Bryan’s Scrabble analogy strikes me as a good metaphor for evolution.
Actually, I’d refuse to accept that gravity could have created the pattern, asking why this marble ended up here, and that marble ended up there. I’d ask why they’re arranged in triangles and hexagons related to one another, and why they’re all in one flat sheet and not piled on one another (assuming I didn’t throw too many marbles in). If they then said anything about how smooth round things tend not to pile up and how the hexagonal arrangements are a more likely way for smooth round things to arrange themselves, I’d claim not to understand or claim that things didn’t work the way they said it did, without ever supporting my arguments. Basically, I’d do my best to show them how it seems from the pro-evolution side to be arguing against their persistent ignorance.
Sure, the marbles aren’t really a close analogy to evolution, and they don’t even address the incremental aspect that is so critical to evolution’s functionality. However, they do present a situation where ‘side effects’ of the natural way things work are able to make order (of a sort) out of chaos, and by parodying the creationists’ argument from ignorance I would hope to open their eyes to the flaws in the arguements from ignorance.
Sure, it’s a good metaphor - perhaps too good. It’s close enough that they’d likely transfer their rote-learned objections to evolution to it. At the least, they wouldn’t have any pre-programmed response to me marvelling over my lost marbles.