Exposing Atheistic Myths

[Keith&Co.]

And fifty quatloos, Half's response would boil down to Nuh uh...

 

[Keith&Co.]

In this thread, I will be exposing common atheistic myths. Anyone want to try to stump me?

Hey, why pussyfoot around, anyway?

Clearly, your point in this is 'atheism is stupid, there is a god,' right?
Plenty of believers, of various religious traditions, accept any science you can come up with as an 'atheist belief.' So attacking, say, evolution, the Big Bang, 4-color map theory, relativity, or Murphy's Law isn't really attacking atheism, just modern science.

Go forbthe gold ring. The ONLY thing common to all atheists is a disbelief in gods.
Various reasons, to varying degrees, but that's what we all share. So prove a god exists, or gods exist, and be done with this.

Because illustrating your shallow, shallow, shallow, shallow grasp on science AND atheists is not making anyone question the state of their conscience or soul.

 

[Keith&Co.]

Halfie appears stumped.

 

[atrib]

Wrong again. While science can say nothing about the supernatural, it can be used to test for the effects of the supernatural on our everyday lives. To date, pertaining to any area that has been the subject of scientific inquiry, science has never concluded that a phenomenon has to have a supernatural origin. Never! Not in a single instance! In other words, if your god exists, it is powerless to have any perceptible effect on our lives. Which would be exactly like a god that doesn't exist.

Ignorance can be cured. But you have to be willing to work at it.

It's worse than that for fans of the supernatural.

One of the interesting things that has fallen out of the Standard Model is that we have determined every possible interaction with matter, between a very broad range of energies. There are no unknown forces - if there were, they would have a corresponding particle, and it would have been detected by the LHC and other particle accelerators.

The ONLY unknown forces that might exist would either need to be very long-range (the graviton, for example, might exist; But it's influence is irrelevant on human scales - that is, you cannot use gravity to have an influence on a specific person in a crowd, much less to influence a specific neuron or group of neurons. So gravity isn't a possible way for a hypothetical god to place visions in the mind of a prophet, or for a hypothetical soul to be transmitted to the supernatural realm on a person's death); Or very short range - perhaps there's a force that can subtly influence quarks, that we haven't yet detected, but if so, it would have no discernible influence on an object as large as a molecule, unless so much energy was used that the resulting explosion could level a city. Humans probably can't survive a divine intervention that is that energetic.

Science hasn't disproven gods in general. But it has disproven gods that interact on scales bigger than atomic nuclei, but smaller than solar systems. And as almost all of religion is interested in the influence of god(s) on Earth and its inhabitants, science has disproven all of those parts of every god hypothesis.

There's no way to eliminate the "god of the gaps"; But the remaing gaps mean that we can eliminate, and have eliminated, gods that have any direct influence on humanity.

A deist god, that crafted a universe in extreme conditions, and has had no influence on that universe since, could still be posited without absolute certainty that it is false. But any god that hears (much less answers) prayers; any soul, or supernatural influence on our physical bodies or brains; any afterlife (or pre-birth existence of personality or "self"); all these things have been ruled out by physics.

It's over. Fortunately for the theists, the vast majority of humans don't know or understand Quantum Field Theory. But ignorance doesn't make things untrue; and it is undeniably true that QFT rules out the vast majority of the gods that humans have ever developed.

And QFT could be wrong; But only in the same sense that the Moon could be made of green cheese. It's possible that there's a massive error in QFT, and it's possible that the Apollo missions just happened to miss the outcrops of Stilton at the edge of the Sea of Tranquility.

Actually, given the relative stringency of the tests done, and the accuracy of the results, it's considerably more plausible that the Moon is made from dairy products than it is that QFT is sufficiently wrong to permit the existence of an unknown force at human scales.

There are only four forces at our scale. All four are easy to detect. If a soul or god were using any of these to affect humans, we would have detected it long ago. And as humans are made of matter, any influence that doesn't affect matter isn't relevant. So 'Dark energy' or 'Dark matter' don't help the theistic case - unless their god is only interested in objects the size of galaxies.

So not only have we never detected any supernatural influences on reality; We have positively ruled out any possibility that such influences could exist.

While this is all true, Half-Life likely doesn't even understand Newtonian mechanics. A discussion on QFT and the Standard Model, and how our findings rule out any possible godly interventions in our everyday lives, would be way over his head. Have you seen him post an intelligent response to anything that has been posted to counter his claims in this thread?

 

[Treedbear]

...
God is pure immaterial spirit outside of the universe. This is what makes Him the True God. Other gods were finite such as the greek gods. God Himself came along and said "I am" which implies no beginning and no end.

There is no energy that sustains God. It is just God.

Might take a while to wrap your head around it.

What I get is that mankind has an insatiable need to know things like ... oh, where the universe came from along with all this stuff. But instead of simply saying we don't know yet, or perhaps even that it's something we'll never be able to know, we've invented a God thing that, by definition, needs no explanation for how it came to be or exactly where it is.

 

[skepticalbip]

...
God is pure immaterial spirit outside of the universe. This is what makes Him the True God. Other gods were finite such as the greek gods. God Himself came along and said "I am" which implies no beginning and no end.

There is no energy that sustains God. It is just God.

Might take a while to wrap your head around it.

What I get is that mankind has an insatiable need to know things like ... oh, where the universe came from along with all this stuff. But instead of simply saying we don't know yet, or perhaps even that it's something we'll never be able to know, we've invented a God thing that, by definition, needs no explanation for how it came to be or exactly where it is.

Explaining how something happened to a four year old brings a string of "Whys" until they are told it was magic. This seems to satisfy them since there was a 'cause' that was named. As people get older, most are not satisfied with 'magic' as an explanation - some become skeptical and continue to seek understandings. Some become religious and accept as an explanation a more descriptive sounding cause than the old magic explanation they accepted as a child. That more descriptive sounding cause is 'god'. It's the same answer as 'magic' but with 'punishment' for not accepting it.

 

[T.G.G. Moogly]

...
God is pure immaterial spirit outside of the universe. This is what makes Him the True God. Other gods were finite such as the greek gods. God Himself came along and said "I am" which implies no beginning and no end.

There is no energy that sustains God. It is just God.

Might take a while to wrap your head around it.

What I get is that mankind has an insatiable need to know things like ... oh, where the universe came from along with all this stuff. But instead of simply saying we don't know yet, or perhaps even that it's something we'll never be able to know, we've invented a God thing that, by definition, needs no explanation for how it came to be or exactly where it is.

Halfie is telling us why reindeer can fly. They just can. So convincing. Cool.

 

[bilby]

Wrong again. While science can say nothing about the supernatural, it can be used to test for the effects of the supernatural on our everyday lives. To date, pertaining to any area that has been the subject of scientific inquiry, science has never concluded that a phenomenon has to have a supernatural origin. Never! Not in a single instance! In other words, if your god exists, it is powerless to have any perceptible effect on our lives. Which would be exactly like a god that doesn't exist.

Ignorance can be cured. But you have to be willing to work at it.

It's worse than that for fans of the supernatural.

One of the interesting things that has fallen out of the Standard Model is that we have determined every possible interaction with matter, between a very broad range of energies. There are no unknown forces - if there were, they would have a corresponding particle, and it would have been detected by the LHC and other particle accelerators.

The ONLY unknown forces that might exist would either need to be very long-range (the graviton, for example, might exist; But it's influence is irrelevant on human scales - that is, you cannot use gravity to have an influence on a specific person in a crowd, much less to influence a specific neuron or group of neurons. So gravity isn't a possible way for a hypothetical god to place visions in the mind of a prophet, or for a hypothetical soul to be transmitted to the supernatural realm on a person's death); Or very short range - perhaps there's a force that can subtly influence quarks, that we haven't yet detected, but if so, it would have no discernible influence on an object as large as a molecule, unless so much energy was used that the resulting explosion could level a city. Humans probably can't survive a divine intervention that is that energetic.

Science hasn't disproven gods in general. But it has disproven gods that interact on scales bigger than atomic nuclei, but smaller than solar systems. And as almost all of religion is interested in the influence of god(s) on Earth and its inhabitants, science has disproven all of those parts of every god hypothesis.

There's no way to eliminate the "god of the gaps"; But the remaing gaps mean that we can eliminate, and have eliminated, gods that have any direct influence on humanity.

A deist god, that crafted a universe in extreme conditions, and has had no influence on that universe since, could still be posited without absolute certainty that it is false. But any god that hears (much less answers) prayers; any soul, or supernatural influence on our physical bodies or brains; any afterlife (or pre-birth existence of personality or "self"); all these things have been ruled out by physics.

It's over. Fortunately for the theists, the vast majority of humans don't know or understand Quantum Field Theory. But ignorance doesn't make things untrue; and it is undeniably true that QFT rules out the vast majority of the gods that humans have ever developed.

And QFT could be wrong; But only in the same sense that the Moon could be made of green cheese. It's possible that there's a massive error in QFT, and it's possible that the Apollo missions just happened to miss the outcrops of Stilton at the edge of the Sea of Tranquility.

Actually, given the relative stringency of the tests done, and the accuracy of the results, it's considerably more plausible that the Moon is made from dairy products than it is that QFT is sufficiently wrong to permit the existence of an unknown force at human scales.

There are only four forces at our scale. All four are easy to detect. If a soul or god were using any of these to affect humans, we would have detected it long ago. And as humans are made of matter, any influence that doesn't affect matter isn't relevant. So 'Dark energy' or 'Dark matter' don't help the theistic case - unless their god is only interested in objects the size of galaxies.

So not only have we never detected any supernatural influences on reality; We have positively ruled out any possibility that such influences could exist.

While this is all true, Half-Life likely doesn't even understand Newtonian mechanics.

Probably. But his ignorance shouldn't be assumed to preclude learning. And it doesn't make the things he doesn't understand false.

A discussion on QFT and the Standard Model, and how our findings rule out any possible godly interventions in our everyday lives, would be way over his head.

But might inspire him to go out and learn these things.

Have you seen him post an intelligent response to anything that has been posted to counter his claims in this thread?

No, but anyone can learn, if they choose to do so.

 

[Treedbear]

...
God is pure immaterial spirit outside of the universe. This is what makes Him the True God. Other gods were finite such as the greek gods. God Himself came along and said "I am" which implies no beginning and no end.

There is no energy that sustains God. It is just God.

Might take a while to wrap your head around it.

What I get is that mankind has an insatiable need to know things like ... oh, where the universe came from along with all this stuff. But instead of simply saying we don't know yet, or perhaps even that it's something we'll never be able to know, we've invented a God thing that, by definition, needs no explanation for how it came to be or exactly where it is.

Explaining how something happened to a four year old brings a string of "Whys" until they are told it was magic. This seems to satisfy them since there was a 'cause' that was named. As people get older, most are not satisfied with 'magic' as an explanation - some become skeptical and continue to seek understandings. Some become religious and accept as an explanation a more descriptive sounding cause than the old magic explanation they accepted as a child. That more descriptive sounding cause is 'god'. It's the same answer as 'magic' but with 'punishment' for not accepting it.

As a person matures that whole search for meaning and purpose thing develops. Belief in religion with or without a God provides those answers, especially insofar as living within a community goes. So it's often just an off the shelf remedy rather than seriously introspective. But when doubts arise the faithful look to their religious authorities who have reasoned out the basic questions of existence, and in western religions have decreed that a creator God is necessary. But the logic is invariably anthropic and teleological, not to say down right arrogant.

 

[aupmanyav]

Belief in religion with or without a God provides those answers, especially insofar as living within a community goes. So it's often just an off the shelf remedy rather than seriously introspective. But when doubts arise the faithful look to their religious authorities who have reasoned out the basic questions of existence, and in western religions have decreed that a creator God is necessary.

Yeah, but Indian religions (Hinduism, Buddhism,Jainism and Sikhism) found that they could do without God/Gods/Goddesses.

 

[ronburgundy]

Things existing without a cause is a theistic assumption that is part of the self-contradictory cosmological argument put forth by the idiot Aquinas who was laughed of serious philosophy many centuries ago.

It starts with the premise that everything is caused, then once it gets to God, it violates it's own premise by assuming that God was not caused (otherwise he wouldn't be much of a God). IOW, theists simultaneously claim that things need causes and things don't need causes, depending on when it's emotionally convenient for them.

Atheists don't need to make this patently absurd self contradictory argument. They could either assume that everything does not need a cause and therefore no God is needed to cause the known universe, or atheists could assume that everything does need a cause and therefore all things are an infinite chain and there cannot logically be a first-cause, a beginning, a God, etc..

 

[Treedbear]

Belief in religion with or without a God provides those answers, especially insofar as living within a community goes. So it's often just an off the shelf remedy rather than seriously introspective. But when doubts arise the faithful look to their religious authorities who have reasoned out the basic questions of existence, and in western religions have decreed that a creator God is necessary.

Yeah, but Indian religions (Hinduism, Buddhism,Jainism and Sikhism) found that they could do without God/Gods/Goddesses.

That's why I didn't go beyond western religions. But Indian religions vary widely. For instance:

Hinduism is a diverse system of thought with beliefs spanning monotheism, polytheism, panentheism, pantheism, pandeism, monism, and atheism among others; and its concept of God is complex and depends upon each individual and the tradition and philosophy followed. It is sometimes referred to as henotheistic (i.e., involving devotion to a single god while accepting the existence of others), but any such term is an overgeneralization.

The Nasadiya Sukta (Creation Hymn) of the Rig Veda is one of the earliest texts which "demonstrates a sense of metaphysical speculation" about what created the universe, the concept of god(s) and The One, and whether even The One knows how the universe came into being. The Rig Veda praises various deities, none superior nor inferior, in a henotheistic manner. The hymns repeatedly refer to One Truth and Reality. The "One Truth" of Vedic literature, in modern era scholarship, has been interpreted as monotheism, monism, as well as a deified Hidden Principles behind the great happenings and processes of nature.

God in Sikhism is known as Ik Onkar, the One Supreme Reality or the all-pervading spirit (which is taken to mean God). This spirit has no gender in Sikhism, though translations may present it as masculine. It is also Akaal Purkh (beyond time and space) and Nirankar (without form). In addition, Nanak wrote that there are many worlds on which it has created life.

 

[Tom Sawyer]

Belief in religion with or without a God provides those answers, especially insofar as living within a community goes. So it's often just an off the shelf remedy rather than seriously introspective. But when doubts arise the faithful look to their religious authorities who have reasoned out the basic questions of existence, and in western religions have decreed that a creator God is necessary.

Yeah, but Indian religions (Hinduism, Buddhism,Jainism and Sikhism) found that they could do without God/Gods/Goddesses.

And where are all the believers in those religions now?

Burning in Hell for heresy, that's where they are. Nuff said.

 

[Gun Nut]

Because it is pointed out by atheists that the universe has always existed. This is impossible because the universe has a finite amount of energy and will run out. If it was infinite, it would've run out already.

Energy does not 'run out'. Many, many experiments have confirmed that energy can not be created or destroyed. It can only be converted to different forms.

So you do not believe the universe will ever end one day?

What does an "Ended" universe "look" like? That is, what do you mean by the "end"? If you mean the end of "time", then that will happen when the amount of energy in any part of the universe is the same as every other part... total homogeneity. When that occurs (so many trillions of trillions of years from now), there will be no potential for change. The universe will have reached a steady state whereby nothing "happens". And at that point, we will have reached the end of "time".
But the end of the "universe" is a lot harder to define.

 

[Gun Nut]

One common atheistic myth is that, "Things can exist without a cause! Radioactive decay has no cause!" Of course, this is a lie..... Anyone want to try to stump me?

If this is a 'common' atheist myth, can you find ten atheists making this exact claim?

Well, it's actually two claims, but whatever. If it's 'common' that should not be difficult to show.

Keith, when it is pointed out that God is eternal with no cause, many atheists have clapped back at me, "Radioactive decay has no cause!" as a way to "prove" things other than God can have no cause. But, doing a quick 5 second google search quickly reveals that radioactive decay DOES have a cause.

Atheists pushing propaganda? I am shocked.

You should get your information about current science from current scientists.
Feel free to ask a theist or atheist to opine on bibles and churches and whatever if you are interested in that old fashioned stuff.

 

[Gun Nut]

Atheists are a very small fraction of the population.

I don't think that is true.
My observation is that pretty much everybody is an Atheist.. very few exceptions.

 

[Gun Nut]

Because it is pointed out by atheists that the universe has always existed. This is impossible because the universe has a finite amount of energy and will run out. If it was infinite, it would've run out already.

What prevents God from running out of energy?

God is pure immaterial spirit outside of the universe. This is what makes Him the True God. Other gods were finite such as the greek gods. God Himself came along and said "I am" which implies no beginning and no end.

There is no energy that sustains God. It is just God.

Might take a while to wrap your head around it.

no He didn't. He said, "I am the lord of justice". "I am" is not the whole quote. You only seem to be half-informed, half-life.

 

[Keith&Co.]

Atheists are a very small fraction of the population.

I don't think that is true.
My observation is that pretty much everybody is an Atheist.. very few exceptions.

An intriguing observation. How are you defining 'atheist,' then?

 

[Gun Nut]

Atheists are a very small fraction of the population.

I don't think that is true.
My observation is that pretty much everybody is an Atheist.. very few exceptions.

An intriguing observation. How are you defining 'atheist,' then?

One who does not believe in the existence of any god.
My observation is that almost no one I have ever met, or read, or heard about, believes in the existence of any god.
Many people say things or pantomime their way through rituals in such a way as to appear to be theist as a survival instinct... but none of them have ever demonstrated a belief in existence of a god.

I will stand corrected if provided sufficient evidence of someone's belief, though.

 

[abaddon]

An intriguing observation. How are you defining 'atheist,' then?

One who does not believe in the existence of any god.
My observation is that almost no one I have ever met, or read, or heard about, believes in the existence of any god.
Many people say things or pantomime their way through rituals in such a way as to appear to be theist as a survival instinct... but none of them have ever demonstrated a belief in existence of a god.

I will stand corrected if provided sufficient evidence of someone's belief, though.

If they say they believe, they've demonstrated their belief. You stand corrected if you cannot show that people don't believe what they say they believe.