Comic Discussion > QUESTIONABLE CONTENT
Atheist Penelope
Surgoshan:
--- Quote from: Saints on 19 Dec 2008, 03:13 ---Science does not refute the idea of god. It doesn't attempt to. It doesn't want to. It just attempts to explain our world. That is it.
The idea of god is NOT irrational because of scientific evidence. Science has offered absolutely no evidence that suggests a god doesn't exist.
It's offered no evidence that the Christian God doesn't exist.
Do not assume that you are a more rational person because you are an atheist. Do not assume that rationality holds no sway in deist/theists/Christian/Jew/whatever's life.
--- End quote ---
The god that most people believe in is an overwhelmingly interventionist god. It interacts with the universe on a minute-to-minute basis, altering things for the benefit of its believers. It helps football players score touchdowns, it alters traffic to get believers to work on time, it opens up parking spaces, it heals the sick, it watches out for children, etc.
Anything that interacts with the world must be observable due to the fact that it's interacting with things we can observe. Time and time again, there has been a complete lack of observation.
Try this analogy.
Anna and Kate are walking down the street when they come to an empty lot.
"Look at that beautiful garden!" cries Anna, "It must be tended by a particularly skillful gardener!"
"What are you talking about? It's an empty lot full of weeds! It couldn't possibly be tended by a gardener." is Kate's reply.
"He must tend it to grow that way."
"I have never once seen a gardener there."
"You must have simply missed him. He must come only at night, when you don't walk by here."
So Anna and Kate decide to watch the garden. They keep watch for days, and don't spot a gardener.
Kate shrugs and says, "I guess there's no gardener."
"He must be invisible."
"... invisible?"
"Yes, that's why we couldn't see him."
So Anna and Kate build a fence. When Anna suggests he might be able to fly, they put a net over the fence. When Anna suggests he might be very small, they put a solid dome over the entire plot. Then Anna suggests he might be intangible. Kate gets fed up.
"You've got an invisible, intangible, flying gardener whose garden looks exactly like there isn't a gardener. What's the difference between that and a gardener who doesn't exist?"
In strict, deductive logic, absence of evidence does not mean evidence of absence. But in life we mostly deal with inductive logic. Thousands of years of observation have completely failed to turn up evidence of the invisible gardener. Absence of evidence, when one would expect evidence, is evidence of absence. There is no gardener.
Dotes:
I really wasn't hoping to open Pandora's Box, here, with all this arguing about atheism vs. religion. There are arguments to be had, but far too often they're wasted on deaf ears as neither side tends to be convinced. This certainly isn't the place for them.
The original topic was about the perceptions of atheists, and how they are often caricatured. I'm certainly not any kind of moderator, and don't intend to be, but can we play nice? Pretty please?
Jeff7:
--- Quote from: Dotes on 19 Dec 2008, 06:34 ---...
The original topic was about the perceptions of atheists, and how they are often caricatured. I'm certainly not any kind of moderator, and don't intend to be, but can we play nice? Pretty please?
--- End quote ---
This is nice. :)
Visit 4chan /b/ sometime, if you dare. The religion arguments there are fun. :laugh:
I'm not responsible for any horrific trauma you may incur in the process. There's some nasty stuff there. Also some extremely funny stuff.
This is surprisingly civil thus far.
Tropylium:
--- Quote from: pwhodges on 18 Dec 2008, 02:28 ---
--- Quote from: jtheory on 17 Dec 2008, 17:27 ---we have no idea what came before the big bang, and we'll probably never know.
--- End quote ---
If there even was a "before". The big bang happened at time zero; but plot time on a log scale, and zero disappears infinitely far to the left, which may be a more understandable representation of it.
--- End quote ---
And I was basically saying that you don't even need a logarithm there; sure you can make up a coordinate system where Big Bang = zero, but this is one of the same kind of coordinate systems where "everything gets frozen forever into the event horizon of a black hole". Heck, you can even make up a "last Thursday = zero" coordinate system easily. (= Something that comes in at lightspeed last Thursday, and sharply decelerates from there.)
As for the "science as religion" quip, I mean going with "Big Bang, end of story" even if one hasn't the foggiest idea about how Big Bang or modern cosmology in general works. The thought process needed to get to that kind of a conclusion resembles in some crucial parts the one needed to go with "God made it, end of story". Everyone who has ever advocated a scientific result as "true" without hirself understanding how it was discover'd is believing in something in part because an authority said so. (Note however that Big Bang / God are not automatically equally sensical or or nonsensical scenarios. Science appears to work a lot better.)
This is what I see Penelope basically doing. I wouldn't berate her for that. Humans seem to have an innate need for an "official" explanation. (But yes, she could use some tact.)
Someone with a truly open mind will however admit "I dunno for sure, but the experts say that X." I'll call myself an atheist in casual conversation, after all, I do not believe in any god. If we go deeper stuff however, I'm what you don't call an extreme agnostic; I believe I do not, and cannot, kno anything at all about reality with certainty. (Well, okay, it exists…) But that's okay, 99.99999999% certainty is just fine for me. If one feels the need to distinguish this from "atheist", the the term is "boolean".
Jackie Blue:
--- Quote from: pwhodges on 19 Dec 2008, 04:11 ---Simply saying that something can't be disproved doesn't make it true, nor does it even provide a basis for believing in it.
--- End quote ---
No serious theist or theologian would argue that it does.
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