You can't make this stuff up, part MCXVII

-
You often hear the old creationist canard that life cannot arise from non-life. Well, abiogenesis is a nascent field of science, and we're not sure how life first arose. We certainly have no reason to assume that it must have been supernatural. Our very bodies – and indeed all life – is composed of the exact same elements (indeed the exact same atoms) that ancients stars spat out when they exploded, seeding the galaxy with heavy elements. That such elements were synthesized by the laws of chemistry is certainly more plausible than the old "A Magic Man done it!" excuse. I've always thought it was peculiar that creationists insist the universe was designed for life, but then insist that biogenesis itself required an extra bit of divine intervention. I mean, that's pretty arbitrary, no? If God designed the universe for life, then why wouldn't he make it so the laws of the universe allowed life to arise by the natural processes he created? So I posed this query to a creationist (former frequent visitor Jack Hudson), and this is what one creationist commenter had to offer:
That would obviously make it much too easy for naturalists to then dismiss life as being a product of design. Why should He make things so convenient for naturalists?
Checkmate, atheists!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Why Christianity is bullshit, part 1: The Bible is stupid

-
Imagine that you were the perfect, omnipotent, all-knowing Lord and Creator of the universe. You decided that you were going to give one -- just one -- book to humanity. It would be their moral compass, an insight into their nature and into yours, and act as a guide for how they could live rightly and walk a path that would lead their souls into an eternity with you. Obviously, the first thing you'd want to put in there are some totally unscientific, archaic behavioral codes for menstruating women, and for pregnant women after they give birth. You'd want to be sure to help them regulate slavery, and specify how badly they were allowed to beat their slaves. And of course you'd want the book to be chock full of mythology -- a creation myth, a flood myth, a fictional exodus, and hagiographical stories about how your loyal armies killed the shit out of everyone who dared to worship the wrong gods. There's a point here about the Bible that, in my estimation, really canno
Read more...

Why Christianity is bullshit, part 2: The Bible isn't true

-
In part 1, I pointed out the absurdity of believing that the Bible is the divinely inspired word of God. That leads to closely related, but no less important point: most of what is in the Bible is simply not true . And in some cases, that actually impacts Christian theology rather profoundly. Adam and Eve did not exist. Overwhelming evidence from every field of biology points to humans evolving from a population of no fewer than 10,000 individuals. Any way you slice it, it's simply impossible that we can from one man and one woman. That's not an innocuous detail, either: the entirety of Christian theology is built upon Adam and Eve being real people. I'm fond of this quote from Pastor Tim Keller: “[Paul] most definitely wanted to teach us that Adam and Eve were real historical figures. When you refuse to take a biblical author literally when he clearly wants you to do so, you have moved away from the traditional understanding of the biblical authority.  If Adam d
Read more...

There is no such thing as sophisticated theology

-
Image
I often roll my eyes when atheists indulge "sophisticated" theological arguments. There's a belief among some atheists that Dawkins and other "new atheists" didn't engage with religious philosophy seriously enough, and that there needs to be a newer, better dressed atheism that indulges in the purportedly more nuanced and complex arguments for theism.   The problem is that without exception, every "sophisticated" argument for theism I've ever seen is couched in the same bad assumptions as the less-sophisticated ones. There is no such thing as a sophisticated philosophical argument that is based on (to name a few) Aristotelian metaphysics, substance dualism, unembodied minds, or transcendent causation. All of these concepts are absurd and false.   It's not that I don't think we should talk to theists at all; absolutely we should. But we should be very careful about the framing of the questions and be quick to identify spurious assumption
Read more...