Thank you for responding and for your detailed comments. I won’t respond in kind in terms of length (though I may come close) because I stand by what I wrote. In fact, I wouldn’t change a word of what I wrote. However, in deference to you, I’ve considered a number of things that you wrote and have responded to them below. No, your comments aren’t “taken out of context” (a common refrain from believers when they get argumentatively cornered). Your quoted remarks below stand on their own, free from the paragraphs from which they were taken.
Here we go!
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I am not “hostile to God.” I don’t believe in God. Similarly, if you don’t believe in the existence of Sasquatch or Nessie or both, you’re not “hostile” toward them. You simply don’t believe in the existence of Sasquatch or Nessie.
I don’t acknowledge the validity of faith because faith — and I’m speaking of religious faith here, not “colloquial” faith (“I have faith that Joe will do the right thing”) — is centered on what one believes to be true, not on what one knows to be true, and if someone knows something to be true, there’s no reason to have faith.
The problem of evil doesn’t have a simple answer — or maybe it does. To quote Sam Harris: “Either God can do nothing to stop catastrophes like this [earthquakes, hurricanes, pandemics], or he doesn’t care to, or he doesn’t exist. God is either impotent, evil, or imaginary. Take your pick, and choose wisely.” I’ve made my pick: Imaginary is the best explanation. Oh, and before you haul out the “god works in mysterious ways” line, I give you this meme:
Your disquisition on my first question neatly or conveniently sidesteps my only point that was made there: Genesis says nothing about the nature of the world and the universe. There’s lots we don’t understand about existence, and Genesis has absolutely nothing compelling or interesting or true to say about what we do know. As stories, they may be enjoyable, but as solid arguments for how things are and/or how things came to be, Genesis has nothing to say. If you were in need of brain surgery, would you want your surgeon to rely on a medical text from 1920? No, you wouldn’t. Instead, you’d want a surgeon who is up to date on modern methods. Same goes for That Book. We’ve discovered and learned so many things since the time when the “Old Testament” and the “New Testament” were written, and yet so many people still want to fall back on That Book as their go-to source for all things that are true and real about existence. Amazing (and pathetic).
“A non-matter, non-material Being — should we call this Being ‘God’? — created matter.” There is no evidence to support this claim. All you have is a belief. Yes, the concept of eternal is difficult. So is the idea of a powerful being that… just exists (in your view) with no origin story.
“Nothing around us really exists, but everything is just the creation of our minds.” False. There is a world that exists externally from you and me. True and false things can be said about the nature of the world and about the way things do or do not interact. If you don’t believe this, you’re welcome to fill up your bathtub, sit in it, and then dump a turned-on electrical device into the water. Feel free to tell me what happens. Oh, wait. You won’t be able to tell me because you will be dead.
“[I]n rejecting that God did it, you make an equally extraordinary claim: Either nature is eternal or it created itself from true nothingness.” No, I’m not “rejecting that God did it.” I’m rejecting the belief that a Supernatural Being did it because there is no evidence for the existence of such a being.
“It makes more sense to me that a non-material Being existing outside of time and space created matter than either matter is eternal or matter somehow self created itself from nothing.” I see a variation of this all the time: that God exists “outside of space and time.” Oh yeah? But humans live “within” space and time. How could anyone know that a certain supernatural being exists “outside of space and time” (whatever that means)? “Know” is the key word in that previous sentence.
“Remember, I come from the viewpoint that God not only created mass and energy, and therefore the universe, but God also created life.” Yes, you’ve made that clear. However, there is no evidence to support that assertion.
Yes, scientists do remain clueless or ignorant about certain things. What caused the Big Bang? Nobody knows. How did life emerge on Earth? Nobody knows. But not knowing something is never an excuse to resort to “God did it.” People once resorted to “demonic possession” to account for certain physiological behaviors. Later on we discovered that certain microbes or genetic malfunctions accounted for the existence of diseases and illnesses.
Adam and Eve never existed. Here’s an essay that helps to explain why this is so. At one point in Earth’s history, rabbits didn’t exist. Now they do. Are you saying there was some magical, voilà moment where rabbits just appeared out of the blue? Really? That’s what you believe? That’s what you’re also suggesting with your belief in Adam and Eve. At one point in Earth’s history humans didn’t exist. Now we do. The “explanation” in Genesis of how humans came to be is a silly story rooted in nothing more than imaginative thought.
“If God has created life on other planets, I would think there would be a religion much like Christianity existing on each of these planets and there would be a document, much like the Bible, that would reveal the history of the relationship between God and the inhabitants of that planet.” Why? I’m surprised you’re not able to see yourself here, that what you’re doing is confabulating a fictional enterprise. Notice your peculiar “bias” here as well: that some religion that involves prayer and worship and deifying some being that nobody can see would have to be part of the alien picture. Interesting.
What I wrote about a priest gesticulating and saying certain things in front a vial of water remains true. There is no evidence that doing such things changes ordinary drinkable water into something else. Now, if you drop and English Breakfast tea bag into some hot water, yeah, the water has “changed” (scare quotes because the water is still water, but it is no longer pure water).
That Henry Ford quote is pretty good. But note that Ford’s comment about faith in this regard has to do with the colloquial faith that I mentioned above. Religious faith is irrelevant to Ford’s get-up-and-go/you-can-do-it remark, which is more related to self-help and garnering self-esteem (and doing hard work) to achieve something. Yes, belief is powerful — secular belief, that is — as a motivating force to get off one’s tush and to do something in life.
It doesn’t matter that cooperation among animals isn’t motivated by “thoughtful” altruism. My point was to show the continuum: Certain animals express “rudimentary” moral behavior and that we humans express or engage in moral behavior on a “higher” plane (because we’re animals capable of language and self-reflection). Don’t forget: Homo sapiens are animals. We’re apes, actually.
“However, skeptics, atheists, and agnostics have not [a] solid foundation for their morality.” Wrong. The foundation that you think doesn’t exist is called secular humanism. Give this helpful meme a close read:
You didn’t address my contention that God, as conceived by those who believe in this Being, is the biggest abortionist in the history of the world. Once again: “The soul enters at the moment of conception” (a common and popular belief held by many believers) — and then God kills the burgeoning fetus just days or weeks later. Seems to me that God is weird for doing this.
Big whale, big fish. My point is that the Jonah story is stupid and that no self-respecting or intelligent person who knows even the most basic facts about biology and physiology would believe it. Occam’s razor: You ought to use it some day. Here’s an interesting question for all believers in the Jonah story. It’s not that you believe in the Jonah story, it’s that you want to believe in the Jonah story. That “want” is key. Why does anyone want to believe in the Jonah story when the easy deployment of Occam’s razor points to a better answer?
There is no evidence for the existence of Hell. Any chatter on this issue either bores me or offends me depending on my mood. It bores me because such nonsense isn’t interesting, and it offends me because “Hell,” which is nothing more than something invented by humans, is just a projection of the twisted human desire to enact eternal revenge on people. Stalin isn’t in Hell because there is no evidence that Hell exists. To paraphrase the famous Monty Python dead parrot sketch, Stalin has ceased to be. That is all.
“Our sins are only a symptom of our primary problem.” There is no such thing as “sin.” There is bad, wrong, and immoral behavior in the world but “sin” is a religious fiction.
I don’t “reject” Heaven. I don’t believe in Heaven (or Hell). Once again, you seem to have a problem understanding the distinction between not believing in something and rejecting something. To reject something is to acknowledge the existence of something, be it a thing or a social policy or cultural tradition. “I reject the tenets of unregulated free-market capitalism,” for example. So let me say this again: I have never rejected God or Satan (because I don’t believe in the existence of those beings).
As to your final paragraph, all I can say is that your talk about “Satan” amuses me. You do have a talent for writing fiction! But here’s a project for you. Instead of expressing implicit concern for the fate of other people — if it is implicit; for all I know you may not give a crap about the fate other people’s “souls” (there’s no evidence for the existence of these ethereal entities, by the way)—try to get into the mind of a secular humanist. Try to imagine why we are amused by the notion of “Satan.” Hint: “Satan” and “Sauron.”
And there you have it.
Barry
