Door-To-Door Atheism

[bloodyrosemccoy]

A Room of One's Own Day
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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.

Comments

[kjpepper.livejournal.com]

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. :) )

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

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. ;)

[kjpepper.livejournal.com]

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.

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

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.

[chibicharibdys.livejournal.com]

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.

[blackbyrd2.livejournal.com]

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.

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

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 ...