Posted on 10/17/2003 4:04:27 PM PDT by TXLibertarian
Excerpted from a longer op-ed. Author discusses the danger of legal proselytizing by a few firebrand secularists. Worth a read, IMHO.
What Atheists Want
By Chris Mooney
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Unfortunately, in my experience, the U.S. atheist and secularist communities contain a number of activists who are inclined to be combative and in some cases feel positively zestful about offending the religious. Madalyn Murray O'Hair, easily America's most famous atheist firebrand, wasn't dubbed "the most hated woman in America" for nothing. Despite her landmark 1963 Supreme Court victory in a case concerning the constitutionality of school prayer, O'Hair's pugilistic and insulting public persona hurt atheists a great deal in the long run. A head-on attack on the pledge seems to epitomize the confrontational O'Hair strategy.
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(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
A billion year ago, what were the odds that I would be here at 10:18 AM typing on these words on this computer? Pretty slim? How do you compute it? How do you compute the "odds" of the universe being created "by chance" (whatever that means)? Before you trash your own probabilistic model of the universe's creation, how about developing it a bit further first? For example, describe the probability model describing the likelihood of various events before the creation of the universe. For that matter, explain what could possibly be meant by "before the creation of the universe".
Or was this probabilistic theory you alluded to merely a straw man?
How many different opinions can there possibly be about a God that doesn't exist?
I agree that there can be lots of differeng opinions about how to live in a world without God, though.
So are you suggesting that such atheists are themselves guilty of being "duped" just like we theists are? Are you saying that they should just accept the fact that the universe is finite, that it simply sprung up from nothing 15 billion years ago? And that doing so would be the most intellectually "enlightened" thing?
Not the absence of religion, but the absence of God. As I said, atheists have a hard time coming up with a convincing argument for human rights.
Indeed, and yet we don't know what any of those other possibilities could be. So that's why cosmologists, origins experts, and so forth must speculate on what those possibilities can be. Steady-state cosmology was a rather comfortable place for atheism because it seemed a sensible "default" position. But as Big Bang cosmology has gained so much more credibility, effectively eliminating steady-state cosmology from consideration, it's been necessary for cosmologists to return to speculation and theory.
and there's no reason it should immediately rise above all other possibilities. To the contrary I can reasons to doubt it.
I agree, there are reasons to doubt. I say that as a Christian.
For instance it seems to me that intelligence is a property of certain sorts of things within the universe. So where did this intelligent entity come from?
Let me restate (and probably oversimplify) what I think you're saying: "if God created the universe, who created God?" Please correct me if I'm wrong.
That's a common question. A common answer is that God is infinite and transcendent and therefore needs no creator. (I'd say "he always was" but that assumes he is in time, which he is not.)
Cosmologists actually understand the logical consistency of that claim, because that's exactly what they're looking for in an atheistic explanation of the origins of the universe: something infinite and transcendent, whether that is a multiverse, oscillating universe, or whatever. Once they reach infinity, they know they can stop. There's no sense in asking what came "before" something of infinite duration.
This point in your post struck me as unusual. I had never associated atheists with a view either of the finitude or infinitude of the universe, though I admit I haven't exactly made a study of atheistic thought. I presume that the finitude you write of has to do with the big bang theory, general relativity, etc., etc., that currently dominates the thinking of cosmologists.
What I don't understand is what it is about the atheists' view of the universe's origin that is inconsistent with finiteness. Will you explain?
Now, now ... are you telling a fib? Hmmmm? ;) I've encountered you before ;)
Neither is there any sense in asking what came "before" time.
The apparent absurdity of infinite quantities thus gives the big bang theory, or at least a finite time theory, logical credence. It obviates the need for a moment of creation b/c the universe has always (=for all time) existed, while simultaneously allowing us to not attempt to force the man-made concept of infinity upon observable reality.
They don't. But to admit atheism can result in discrimination. Friends you thought you had suddenly look at you differently, as a pariah or as some puppy that needs to be rescued. In either case it's offensive.
I would be willing to bet that a good 90% of Christians never even wonder what those atheists are doing and how can they can be made ashamed.
I'd bet maybe more than 90%. But that <10% is very good at making us feel like second class citizens. For example, I didn't appreciate former President Bush saying that atheists can't be American patriots. I hope you can understand how my commander in chief saying that I am not a patriot while I am carrying arms in defense of my country in combat is a little insulting.
What atheists and homosexuals have in common is the hatred of the idea that they will ever come under judgement by any one or any Entity.
For atheists at least, we don't. Like your 90% of Christians, we don't really even consider it. It is a non-issue. I hold the Christian threat of damnation at the same level of confidence as if some Mayan told me I was going to be damned for not making a sacrifice.
I don't believe in overt conversion unless a person asks or shows an interest.
I appreciate that. Believe it or not, the only place I've even consistently seen that attitude was in Saudi Arabia.
Good question. Which holders of the ultimate truth are we supposed to believe? Followers of Christ, Allah, Zeuss, Osiris or the Invisible Pink Unicorn? Each says that if we follow the other then we're damned.
Remember, a Christian rejects 10,000 gods while holding one as true. An athiest simply rejects one more god. We're a lot more alike than you think.
It would, except the atheist tries to lead the believer to a life of utter hopelessness, moral fog, and eternal nothingness.
Then how is it I have hope, clear moral vision and no fear of death? False hope for eternal life is dangerous.
while others belief 'Allah' may be merely the male name for a well known Pagan deity of the time
I don't hold that in very high confidence. First of all, Allah has no gender. Second, both Allah and Eloah are titles of the one great deity, not names.
I don't know. You haven't really explained what you expect to find after you die. As far as morality, you haven't told me what standard you base your moral code on.
Well for starters, theres "No gods exist" (notice that yours isn't specially singled-out). Then there's "You all have fun with your strange beliefs and funny ceremonies. I'll be over here living my life."
OK, pick apart the semantics. You know what I mean.
I'd like to see you make a convincing argument that human rights don't exist in the absense of God. I'm a Christian and I certainly don't believe that.
That's like denying that you are a parent simply because your child keeps disobeying. Rights are given by God. They must be guaranteed by moral governance, and/or the vigilance of the individual.
By the logic expressed in your post, neither you nor anyone else has a right even to live. And that is a very dangerous road to travel down.
If you work, you have the right to get paid, correct? Yet sometimes businesses close down without paying their employees. Sometimes people get swindled. Does this mean that you never, at any time, have the "right" to be paid for your labor? Does life just amount to what we can fatalistically horde for ourselves?
The only right I see that is a God given right to everyone is the ability to think and make a decision.
By your logic there is no such thing as rights because not everyone enjoys the ability to think or make a decision. No, rights are based on something eternal. They have to be or they do not exist.
If there is no God, what is forbidden? Nothing.
If there is no God, then where do rights come from?
That is a wondrous way of looking at things and I'm glad it gives you pleasure. But others don't take that step to think that there must be a cause for everything. Different people, different perceptions of the same reality.
Since any god of the Christian type is far beyond our knowing, we'll never really know the answer in this life, will we?
And of course there are plenty of examples of human rights NOT existing in the presence of God.
No ... this is straight observation; the odds against chance being responsible are too high to have ever happened in the observed lifetime of the universe.
I await your probability calculation for universe formation. Be sure to show your work.
I'm not trying to prove that the God of the Bible created the universe. SOMEONE did as the odds against natural formation are so laughable that you would have to win the lottery every day of your life to duplicate it.
Again, I await the details of your probability calculation. And if your calculated result is larger than 10-184000, then your above claim is wildly overexagerated. Don't make claims about probabilities and numbers unless you've actually produced some.
I'm not talking about belief or faith in deducing the existence of an intelligence guiding creation.
Sure you are.
30 physical constants in the universe are EXACTLY what's needed to provide life ot the universe. Move any of them by more than 2% higher or lower and life becomes IMPOSSIBLE.
Please name the 30 physical constants, and provide the calculated range of their "allowable" values, and by what criteria each range was calculated. Specify whether by "life" you mean "life of *our* particular type", or "life of any conceivable form, chemistry, or composition". Again, show your work.
Also please demonstrate that a) those constants *could* have had other values (for all you know, their current values may be the only values possible, making their probability 100%), b) there is only one universe (as opposed to a multitude (or infinitude) of varying universes, vastly increasing the odds of a "good" one appearing in the bunch, c) that all "30" physical constants are entirely independent of each other (if not, then there may be far fewer degrees of freedom, again raising the odds), and d) that you have accounted for every conceivable alternative form that life could take when calculating your calculation of what the constants would "have" to be to make some form of life possible.
Finally, address the Anthropic Principle (in its six primary forms) and explain how it impacts your thesis.
Use a #2 pencil and show your work. You have sixty minutes, at which time the proctor will collect your papers. Begin.
Biochemistry : abiogenisis cannot be duplicated.
If you mean it's impractical for us to set up a virgin planet and let it cook for several hundred million years as some sort of long-term experiment, you're right. On the other hand, I don't think you can duplicate the first book of Genesis, either.
But that doesn't mean we can't reconstruct what most probably happened by studying chemical properties and tracing clues from the physical configuration of the prebiotic Earth, and the internal structure of extant life. For example, The Path from the RNA World .
There's not even a model that allows for it.
Man, are *you* behind on the literature...
Here's a model for you: On the origins of cells:a hypothesis for the evolutionary transitions from abiotic geochemistry to chemoautotrophic prokaryotes,and from prokaryotes to nucleated cells. Here's another: The emergence of life from iron monosulphide bubbles at a submarine hydrothermal redox and pH front. For much more, follow the dozens of references contained in those papers.
Just evolutionary 'faith' that it had to happen.
No, evidence and painstaking reconstruction.
Look at a bee, mathematically it should not be able to fly, yet it does.
Because mathematically, it can. The silly old urban legend about bees (actually, the original statement was about bumblebees) not being able to fly according to mathematical analysis dates back to the 1930's, and was based only on the Reynolds number of bumblebee wings, which basically only shows that they couldn't *glide* if their wings were held out flat and rigid like an airplanes. But needless to say, that's not how bumblebees fly -- they flap their wings very rapidly, and even back in the 30's a more comprehensive analysis which included the flapping demonstrated that there's nothing "mathemagical" about their ability to fly. See McMasters (in the Amer. Sci. 77:164-169).
So... Why are you 70+ years behind on this? And doesn't your example actually show that overly simplistic calculations (like your "30 constants" case above) are likely to be missing some key factor and thus achieve a misleading result?
There is evidence of an intelligent design across the universe.
Back to unsupported assertions so soon?
It take more faith to deny the existence of a God than it does to merely acknowledge it's presence.
So who created God? It seems that by postulated some unspecified "god" to explain what you consider to be an unlikely combination of "settings" for our universe, you're creating an even bigger problem for yourself by now leaving unanswered the issue of how to explain the infinitely more unlikely existence of an ultrapowerful being whose substance must surely be vastly more "fine tuned" than just 30 or so physical constants. You've "solved" one question by swapping it for a vastly bigger one.
Conversely, if you're going to wave your hands and just say, "god didn't need to be created by anything to end up existing", then why can't that same notion be applied to the much simpler universe itself, thus undercutting your claim of a "need" for god in the first place as an originator of the universe?
Well, nothing is forbidden (except apparently violating the laws of physics). Does that mean that there is no God? (Or is the physical world His only manifestation?)
So is Frodo Baggins.
So do theists.
There are 6 billion people in this world. Only a fraction of them are Christians. Somehow the great majority of the world manages to live a life that's moral and not anarchic without looking to God for their strictures.
Only if you consider as bigger questions such things as existence without time, or an infinite past, extracorporeal consciousness, extracorporeal sense perception, omniscience, omnipotence, not to mention the age-old Christian quandary of the suffering of the righteous and the innocent as witnessed by a loving omnipotent entity.
So, people who agree with you are healthy. Those who disagree are diseased and dying. Don't you think that's a little smug and haughty?
let me assure you, you will not like living in what remains. You will not like living under a totalitarian government, or the manevolent compassion of socialism, and that is where not only the world, but the USofA is heading now...
So, Christians are free to express their Constitutional freedoms, but if homosexuals or atheists do the same, you see it as a nihilistic slide into the apocalypse? Or perhaps you're just being melodramatic.
You have bought into the lie that with Christians in charge you will be jailed and persecuted
That's an enormously presumptive statement for someone who doesn't know me whatsoever.
when it is because Christians have been in charge that you have not
This is also presumptive and a baseless contention.
There were laws on the books in Texas regarding the act of sodomy, never inforced except when sodomy began to show up in public parks in the daytime with children playing.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but the Lawrence v. Texas decision did nothing make public sex in the parks legal, did it? If not, what's the relevance of your point here?
Christians in the USofA believe...that He has poured out riches, power, and freedom on this nation more than any other in the history of the world.
You're perfectly free to believe that, and you should if that helps to affirm your faith. But the atheist can just as easily contend that it was a secular nation free from religious medling, freedom from onerous regulation, and the ingenuity of free men that created the most prosperous nation in the world.
On another thread a poster protested my claim that all western nations have been historically ahead of the pack because of their respect for God, and the USofA's purity of worship has put us even ahead of them... there is no comparison between the mixture of voodoo/Christianity that has been the norm in S. America
Please tell me this is a bad joke. This just displays an unbelievable amount of cultural ignorance I'm nearly speechless. Most of South America is staunchly Catholic.
So do theists.
Perhaps, but one good argument is readily accessible to both. It was advanced by Hinton Helper in 1857 in his analysis of the southern economy based on slavery and the results of decades of census data. Notably, it took the south an additional 100 years to wake up to the message after the Civil War.
I'm curious if you think the snake-handling and strychnine-drinking churches in the Appalachian hills are practicing "pure" Christianity. They are part of the USofA.
If you contend that these are merely cultish aberrations, why would you think that the "voodoo" Christianity in South America isn't also a similar aberration?
It’s a fraud because it’s a clumsy and misleading definition, not appropriate as a basis for a philosophical discussion. My Webster’s just defines an Atheist as “One who denies the existence of God”. The first online source that I went to defines Athiesm as Disbelief in or denial of the existence of God or gods . Neither requires the acknowledgment of the existence of something in order to disbelieve in its existence. That’s silly.
Come to think of it, if you have to so misrepresent atheism to feel confident in your religion, it looks like your faith is dependent on my ideology, not the other way around.
That’s a misconception of Objectivism that’s common in people who have only the briefest exposure to some of it. Believing that something is in one’s self interest does not make it so. Otherwise, Objectivism would be “subjectivism”. That’s why Objectivists are usually careful to say “rational self interest”. It’s up to us to discover what is in our rational self interest, first through guidance and education but then through observation and reasoning. Opinions vary, but recognizing the most fundamental social values that we should share (beyond the “self-engrossiveness” that I think you are referring to) is not rocket science.
By the way, theists are just as prone to differences of opinions and conflict, perhaps more so.
Only one man who ever lived was perfect--but that gets us into a discussion of religion/God.
If it is true, what does that say about Islam? Does Judaism's (and therefore Christianity's) genesis from a polytheistic nomadic desert tribe corrupt it? Do many of Christianity's roots in local Mediterranean pagan religions corrupt it?
Both of your religions have shed more primitive forms, moving to the modern monotheistic construction.
If you are talking about the Jew Jesus, yes, I have seen enough evidence of his existence outside of Christian manuscripts to convince me that he existed, although some entries are of questionable origin.
For factual evidence, however, this still leaves the question of a god far beyond our knowledge.
OK, I'll try to, but I think a cosmologist or an origins theorist would do a better job than I.
A "steady state" theory of cosmology posits that the universe is infinite in age and in a steady state. That it always was, and always will be. Infinite time makes it very easy to explain away the need for a transcendent creator: because given enough time, even the most "improbable" of events, such as the spontaneous generation of life and its evolution to human intelligence, are hardly improbable at all: given enough time, they are certain to happen.
A similar argument can be made for "oscillation" theories about our universe: if our big bang was just one of an infinite number, then we humans happen to be "lucky" enough to exist during one of those oscillations where the conditions were just right for our spontaneous creation.
That's why the rapidlly coalescing consensus that our universe is finite in size and only 15 billion years old---and that it could not possibly be oscillating, because its expansion is accelerating, not decelerating---causes a genuine problem. First of all, it causes a mathematical problem, because improbable events like the spontaneous generation of life now are genuinely improbable because they have a finite opportunity to occur.
And secondly, it causes a philospohical problem, in that because our universe has a beginning, that it should somehow have a cause. Something that is infinite in duration does not need a cause; something that is not, does. Admittedly I may not be defending that point very well; you may ask, "why must it have a cause just because it has a finite beginning?" Like I said, that's why I say that cosmologists would probably give you a better answer than I.
But even though I'm not defending their position very well, the fact remains that they agree that the finite beginning of this universe is just "not enough" to provide a complete explanation of the origin of this universe. Somehow, there needs to be something more. Thus, cosmologists come up with ideas that connect our finite universe to something infinite and uncaused. One common example is the multiverse theory: our universe is but one of an infinite number of alternate universes, and this one just happens to be the one that produced our existence. This is another way to provide the "infinite" opportunity required for improbable events like the spontaneous generation of life to occur with certainty. After all, if there an infinite number of universes, and they cover all the possible ways that the universe could have evolved, the certainly at least one would turn out the way ours has. Some also hold out hope that perhaps our universe will be proven to be decelerating, eventually moving to a collapsing "heat death." Then they could argue some sort of circular timeline with no beginning or end. Alas, evidence of a "cold death" to this universe seems to be mounting.
So I'm not saying that an atheist must believe in infinity. But the ones who study the universe's origins most certainly seem to.
Beavus, this is a very fair point from our layman's perspective, but for some reason most cosmologists seem to disagree. As I tried to explain in my last post, they seem to need to force this man-made concept of infinite onto their models for the universe, despite the big bang.
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