Evangelical atheists like Newdow delight in the Santa Claus analogy. It's memorable, sounds clever and is incredibly insulting. I've even heard the same assertion made with the Easter Bunny. In part, the evangelicals make such callous remarks because they see themselves as bringers of "Truth." And if a few feelings get hurt along the way, they reason, that's the price for the liberating light they bring.This part I don't understand. I don't see how you can empirically verify that there is no Santa Claus. You can't prove a negative. I have lost my faith in Santa Claus, for the same reason I lost my faith in God - there's no empirical evidence for either magical person's existence.But I would never make such a comparison, nor would many atheists I know. We wouldn't because it not only is bad manners and shows a lack of intellectual humility, it's also grossly unfair. It's empirically verifiable that there is no Santa Claus. The same cannot be said of God.
Instead of going to the media, Virginia could have stayed up all night waiting for the jolly old elf to come down the chimney. Seems pretty empirical to me.
This reminds me of an old email that I dug up out of my Humor box:
There are approximately two billion children (persons under 18) in the world. However, since Santa does not visit children of Muslim, Hindu, Jewish or Buddhist (except maybe in Japan)religions, this reduces the workload for Christmas night to 15% of the total, or 378 million (according to the population reference bureau). At an average census rate of 3.5 children per household, that comes to 108 million homes, presuming there is at least one good child in each.
Santa has about 31 hours of Christmas to work with, thanks to the different time zones and the rotation of the earth, assuming east to west (which seems logical). This works out to 967.7 visits per second. This is to say that for each Christian household with a good child, Santa has around 1/1000 th of a second to park the sleigh, hop out, jump down the chimney, fill the stocking, distribute the remaining presents under the tree, eat whatever snacks have been left for him, get back up the chimney, jump into the sleigh and get onto the next house.
Assuming that each of these 108 million stops is evenly distributed around the earth (which, of course, we know to be false, but will accept for the purposes of our calculations), we are now talking about 0.78 miles per household; a total trip of 75.5 million miles, not counting bathroom stops or breaks. This means Santa's sleigh is moving at 650 miles per second--3,000 times the speed of sound. For purposes of comparison, the fastest man made vehicle, the Ulysses space probe, moves at a poky 27.4 miles per second, and a conventional reindeer can run (at best) 15 miles per hour.
The payload of the sleigh adds another interesting element. Assuming that each child gets nothing more than a medium sized LEGO set(two pounds), the sleigh is carrying over 500 thousands tons, not counting Santa himself. On land, a conventional reindeer can pull no more than 300 pounds. Even granting that the "flying" reindeer can pull 10 times the normal amount, the job can't be done with eight or even nine of them---Santa would need 360,000 of them. This increases the payload, not counting the weight of the sleigh, another 54,000 tons, or roughly seven times the weight of the Queen Elizabeth (the ship, not the monarch).
600,000 tons traveling at 650 miles per second creates enormous air resistance - this would heat up the reindeer in the same fashion as a spacecraft reentering the earth's atmosphere. The lead pair of reindeer would absorb 14.3 quintillion joules of energy per second each.
In short, they would burst into flames almost instantaneously, exposing the reindeer behind them and creating deafening sonic booms in their wake. The entire reindeer team would be vaporized within 4.26 thousandths of a second, or right about the time Santa reached the fifth house on his trip. Not that it matters, however, since Santa, as a result of accelerating from a dead stop to 650 m.p.s. in .001 seconds,would be subjected to acceleration forces of 17,000 g's.
A 250 pound Santa (which seems ludicrously slim) would be pinned to the back of the sleigh by 4,315,015 pounds of force, instantly crushing his bones and organs and reducing him to a quivering blob of pink goo.
Therefore, if Santa did exist, he's dead now. Merry Christmas
Jenny, here is something to think about. Consider the WAY the Bible was written. The way that God proves and verifies His existence through Prophesy.
In the Old Testament, God showed us how He created a small nation of people called the Jews. Then He said that a Messiah would rise up from THIS group of people -- and no other. He said this Messiah would be born in one particular little town -- Bethlehem. He would be descended from one particular family line -- David.
God provided many hundreds of details about this Messiah's life and personage, even down to the exact date He would be proclaimed King of the Jews, all in prophesy, written down, committed to writing, beforehand, many hundreds of years before the Messiah's birth.
Then Jesus came along at exactly the time, and in the manner, and in the place, and did the exact things prophesied in the Bible. That's why we Christians adamantly believe in Jesus to the exclusion of all other "gods".
A question to ask yourself. How is it possible that one teeny, tiny, insignifigant little nation, could produce both The Bible -- the most read, studied, discussed, profoundly impactful book ever written -- AND, ALSO produce Jesus Christ, the most moral, wise, honest human being that ever walked the Earth, so obviously superior to any other human that ever lived that we reckon time by His birthdate... what are the odds BOTH the Bible and Jesus Christ could come from the same tiny insignifigant little nation, less than the size of New Hampshire?
Jenny, throw something ELSE into your calculations. What are the odds that a nation, ancient Israel, could be born INSIDE of another nation? In other words, the Israelites became a nation before they had a land to be a nation in! As they sweated and suffered and toiled in forced slavery to Pharaoe's Egypt, they were suddenly set free. What could have caused Pharoae, the most powerful man in the WORLD of that day, to allow his entire slave force to just leave Egypt?
Now, there will always be people who say "That whole Exodus thing was an unhistoric myth that never happened." (Some people say that about the moon landing, too) but THEN, conisder this...
In 1948, IT HAPPENED AGAIN!!! To the same exact tiny little nation!! Israel found itself in the same position, sweating and toiling and suffering in the belly of a SECOND beast, Nazi Germany. And they were brought out of THAT situation back into their ancient homeland AGAIN!!
Now for those who desperately want to NOT believe, it will be easy to glibly shrug these historical events off. But if you really are the honest truth-seeker you say you are (and I believe you are) try to calculate the realistic odds of that kind of thing happening only TWICE in recorded history -- both to the same teeny tiny insignicant little nation -- Israel -- the nation that ALSO gave the world both The Bible, AND Jesus Christ.
I believe it can be shown that Santa Claus does not exist, because, according to his mythology, he must exist here on earth, in a place that simply could not hide his existence.
According to legend, Santa Claus lives at the North Pole. We have explored the entirety of the North Pole, and haven't seen Santa Claus there. Thus, since according to the legend that describes him, Santa Claus is at the North Pole, at the very least, the legend that describes him is wrong. Either way, a reasonable person cannot believe in Santa Claus, unless they are willing to throw reality out the window. In other words, the belief in Santa Claus is falsifiable because his "story" is reliant upon the physical world.
The same is not true of God, or other dieties that are not, by definition, "part of this Earth" or on this Earth. (at least not now, where we can record their presence with reproducable instruments like a video recorder). The objective observer is, of course, still free to not believe in God, or any other supernatural being, but, there is no way to falsify claims of supernatural beings, because of their very nature, they remain "un-falsifiable".
Just my two cents in this conversation!