bloodyrosemccoy | Door-To-Door Atheism

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Phil Plait from The Bad Astronomy Blog links to a very good article by Lauren Becker on why young-Earth creationism isn’t just an idiotic belief, but also a scary one.

As someone who holds the Scientific Method as a core belief—as somebody who cannot believe something contrary to the evidence—I find that every once in a while I have to post an evangelical scientist link. I say that I respect everyone’s right to believe whatever they believe, but I may not always respect the beliefs themselves, and sometimes their implications and potential consequences make me downright nervous.

Also, I’d just like to point out that when I look at a mind-blowingly awesome image of the cosmos and say, in reverent tones, “And people wonder why I’m an atheist,” I am dead serious. Life is so much cooler that way. You cannot use that garbage about how you must believe in a god when you’re holding a newborn baby in your hands, because I don’t, and it makes it even more incredible. That’s the one big misconception about skeptics—that they’re sad and dead inside—so I work hard to debunk that whenever I can.

Trust me, folks. The real version of the Grand Canyon, the 300 million year old one with the fossils and the erosion and the cryptobiotic soil, will make you happy to be honest with yourself and be a lot cooler into the bargain.

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I've never understood why all people couldn't agree that the creation of the earth is "the same miracle whether it took six days or many centuries." It's still here, right here, right now and it's AWESOME, whether it was created by some sort of intelligent being or ensued from a random asteroid bearing alien bacteria hitting a space rock and over a period of billennia terraforming said rock into what we now call Earth (which is just my fanciful idea on what actually happened. :) )

Agreed, though I tend to be biased toward the many centuries as more interesting.

I've also asked people why they don't think that God was clever enough to orchestrate this whole mechanism of evolution by natural selection or the big bang or any of it, because that seams reasonable enough to me, and in fact a lot smarter on this mysterious god's part. (Still don't believe that, but it would make it easier for me to understand THEIR belief.) I have yet to get a satisfactory answer. They just insist, as Robin Williams put the belief: "Nope. God just went 'click.'"

I don't mind religion as a metaphor, but I am rather obsessive-compulsive and often have trouble fathoming a belief that conflicts with clear empirical evidence. I'm afraid it makes me snarky at times. ;)

Ya, really it makes much more sense (and it's much more amusing) to think of God as a ten year old kid that leaves an orange in a dark corner of the pantry, forgets about it and then a week later (a cosmic week, since time is relative, so for us it would be like a crazy many eaons later) he comes back and finds, y'know, civilization and mold and stuff all over it and is all like HOLY CRAP! MOM! LOOKIT! and she screams and makes him throw it out. I like that creation myth. :)

I'm a pagan, but I also believe that unexplained phenomena does happen all the time, but there just isn't a scientific explanation out there for it yet. It's like thinking about what Newton or Galileo might think if they woke up in present day New York.

Hee, I can picture that as a Far Side cartoon. (I always liked Douglas Adams' story about the people who believed that the universe was sneezed out of the nose of something called the Great Green Arkleseizure, and the people wait in terror for the day they call the "Coming of the Big White Handkerchief.")

It always surprises me how often people assume that not knowing an explanation means that there IS no explanation for something. Just because people in Ye Olden Days didn't KNOW about gravity doesn't mean that there wasn't an explanation for it. It's the difference between, when presented with an unexplained phenomenon, responding with "Oh, God did it" or "I don't know what did it. Let's find out!"

On a completely unrelated note, I love your hair in the new icon. Makes me wish I could do that with my hair, but I think it would wind up a ragged mess.

I've also asked people why they don't think that God was clever enough to orchestrate this whole mechanism of evolution by natural selection or the big bang or any of it, because that seams reasonable enough to me,

Me too!

Actually, that's exactly what I think. A meddling God who went 'click?' That'd be terribly depressing.

But where did the alien bacteria come from?

The fundies can't accept compromise, because any chink in the belief system invalidates the 'Inerrant Bible' proposition which most of the young earth people believe.

I don't think most scientists are devout atheists. I am, (or claim to be,) when what I really believe is that God's existence or lack thereof is irrelevant. It's a lot easier and less time consuming in most cases to simply say I don't believe in God than to explain why her existence is irrelevant.

Most mainstream Christians are not 'anti-evolution', or young earther's. The problem is that they fail to shut up the more vocal minority in their group, and thus all get painted with the same brush. However, having said that, any argument for creationism, no matter how carefully and moderately configured, eventually leads to unsupportable or simply silly premises. That's why there's never any true agreement. The scientifically minded keep asking questions, while the religiously minded want to stop, at some point, and say God did it.

I used to be much more tolerant, and accept that people will believe in God, no matter what I say, and so as long as they aren't shoving it down my throat, I should just forget and forgive. The probelm is that they all, eventually, end up being fodder or support for the fundies, even if just through sheer numbers of 'christian' believers. The nutcases are few, but if the believers won't denounce them, they're at least complicit.

The alien bacteria thing always bugged me, too. "Now you've just moved the question of how life began out to an asteroid! That doesn't help at all!" It's actually the same thing as saying that "The universe is so complex that it MUST have been designed by someone!"--which always brought me straight up against "Yeah, but by your own logic, the designer is too complex to have just appeared, right?" It's just moving the problem over.

Although some of the studies of alien life do suggest they're another possible way to extrapolate the existence of life in lots of places, which is cool, but we'll see ...

oog, just read the article. Yeesh. Why I think fundamentalist Christians need to herded to Idaho and walled off away from everyone and everything else.

People are scary. You can believe what you want to believe in the privacy of your own head, fine, but when you use it to formulate public policy or laws or try to force it on anyone else, there's a problem.

Astronomy pix of the day make nifty desktop wallpaper, though! I change mine on whim, and almost always from that site. It makes me happy!

That's what makes me worry. And you see the harm done on smaller levels--parents refusing to take their sick children to the hospital and opting to just wait for God's will, or the teaching of willful ignorance. Tough stuff.

Yeah, the pictures of the day are incredible. I stick 'em on my desktop, too, but they have to take turns with the other thousands of images in my wallpaper program. Just for variety. ;)

See, as someone who's both a Christian and a paleontologist (who believes in evolution and all that stuff), I get both sides of the argument. I get the rabid Fundies who feel they must convert me back to the One True Way, and I get rabid atheists berating me (and I do mean berating) because I believe in a God. I grew up in the Bible belt, and I've had to live and work with people most definitely not from the Bible belt. And while both of those have had some amazing things for me, neither was a good experience at all when it came to personal values and beliefs. Neither side is totally right, and imho it's dangerous to go through life thinking that.

I see the wonder in rocks that are millions of years old. In those rocks I also see the wonder of being created, of a set of natural laws so complex that, in my mind at least, they had to be created by a higher being. I see honestly no reason why either side feels this needs to be such an exclusive 'all or nothing' issue, and to me at any rate it just gets tiring to hear all the arguments after these many years I've been studying paleontolgy. In the end it just boils down to how you interpret what you see, I guess, but to me it's all become one big blur of 'blah blah blah I HAET U' and really, where's the productiveness of that?

Well said. I'm Jewish (but not a paleontologist, although I admire paleontologists a lot) and I also often run into those problems.

I can respect a position that says a god may be behind creating everything, but that he created the natural laws that make the world work the way it does. A Christian paleontologist isn't an oxymoron to me.

I do, however, try to explain that I find wonder without a god, because many people seem not to understand that's possible.

I'm an agnostic because I don't think there is any way of deciding between atheism and deism. Nor do I think there's much reason to.

True. The only trouble with deism in the "intelligent design" argument is that after they argue that something so complex as the universe must have been designed, they turn around and argue that the complex designer of the universe doesn't have to be explained, and just IS. They don't understand that if they're going to argue that for the designer, why not for the universe itself? Can't have it both ways, now, can they?

Thanks for sharing, love. That indeed was a fascinating article. And one more reason why I don't want to have children. Twelve billion people in the next forty years! Yikes!

I agree with you but disagree at the same time. While believing that something was created by God would cut things off and be the end of it, that's still impressive that something would have the power to do that.

But, I am of your mind in that I find it even more amazing that our little speck called Earth had one in a million chance to have life on it, and boom, it did. Out of all the planets out there, ours survived. We could've ended up like the Mars bacteria and been killed off.

So, while my dad looks up to the sky and states reverently, "How can you look at that and not believe in God?" I'll shake my head, look up, look down, poke the campfire with a stick and think, "Easy. You just do".

On a seperate note, I haven't seen you in over a week! We should get together over the weekend. I need to go grocery shopping, too. Want to come?

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