A question for Athiests

by EndofMysteries 125 Replies latest watchtower beliefs

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  Caedes

  Life came about from a "primordial soup" "all powerful being with no beginning and no end"?

  Are you kidding me?

  Talk about a fantasy.

  Prove it.

  NightOwl

  Beks

  Beks,

  Don't try to flip it on me.

  NightOwl

  NightOwl, Beks didn't try, she did. That horse has already bolted. Anyway you seem very unwilling to actually get into the specifics of this argument, why is that? Is it because it is very easy to march in shouting 'I am right' and very difficult to actually come up with specific arguments against evolution and planetary and stellar formation theory. Best of luck.
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  Fernando

  With life being so fragile, and complex, I do wonder about the statistical probability of everything that led to it, and that sustains it, arising by chance.

  Would it be one in infinity?

  In other words zero? (1/∞ = 0)

  Surely someone has done some calculations of this sort?

  Maybe someone like one of the greatest atheists of our time, Professor Anthony Flew, a founding father of modern atheism?

  He was "committed to the Socratic principle of 'following the evidence wherever it may lead'". This ultimately led him to a belief in God as a creator. The response from his "fellow atheists verged on hysteria".

  After publishing many books powerfully supporting atheism, his book "There is no a God" was also described as follows: "Towering and courageous... Flew's colleagues in the church of fundamentalist atheism will be scandelized."

  How did they deal with the scandal? "The same people who complained about the Inquisition and witches being burned at the stake were now enjoying a little heresy hunting of their own. The advocates of tolerance were not themselves very tolerant. And, apparently, religious zealots didn't have a monopoly on dogmatism, incivility, fanaticism, and paranoia".

  Admittedly the above radicalism is likely evident in only a small percentage of atheists, who then present as rabidly virulent. Possibly for the most part though, peace loving atheists have come to associate God with religion and understandably want nothing to with either.
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  simon17

  With life being so fragile, and complex, I do wonder about the statistical probability of everything that led to it, and that sustains it, arising by chance.

  Would it be one in infinity? In other words zero? (1/∞ = 0). Surely someone has done some calculations of this sort?

  Yes, there are a few elementary calculations that take into consideration every event in the history of the universe, this planet's development, and evolution. If you would like one that isn't written in the abstract language of higher education, I believe you can find such calculations in the "Life, How Did it Get here? By Evolution or Creation" book.
• 

  Phizzy

  Simon17 , I must find my copy, oh no, too late, it got burned along with all the Bound Volumes of WT and AWK and other WT trash.

  I read a thread on here some long time ago dealing with this, I do wish I could remember the title and search for it, but on that thread it showed the most recent calculations for the chance of life occuring once the various necessary ingredients for the "soup" were in place. The chance was not so very high as to be anywhere near impossible.

  The Creationists then want explanations of how the right conditions and ingredients came to be on Earth, Ho Hum, that can be done too, but then they want to go further back until scientists say "We do not know, as yet" and they pounce and say "You see God must have done that bit !"

  Their problem is that their Creator/God is receding further and further back in time, so as I inferred in my previous post, such a being would hardly impinge on my life now if it really did exist.

  I asked one Creationist, and Bible Literalist, how he got from a Creator (if for a moment I allowed the hypothesis) to Bible God. He ran off down the street without giving me an answer.
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  Qcmbr

  Fernando - the odds of each individual through to species through to life itself is astronomically high. If you went back in time and re-ran the system but changed one small thing then , depending on when you made the change, things would turn out very different. For example , the night before you were conceived, you change the music being played, now your parents (to be) dance instead of chatting, sure they still end up in bed but they do so an hour later, the sperm that represents you get's juggled to a different location in the great race and doesn't even make it into your mother. Sure your parents still conceive but its your genetic sibling that exists while you no longer do. Widen the scale to the first life (whether seeded from an asteroid or beginning here) and , statistically, you almost certainly don't get self-aware, poetry creating, truck driving humanoids but maybe you get a world where reptiles rule 'forever' until one day getting wiped out by a ELE asteroid (the one mankind in our timeline sends Bruce Willis up to knock out.)

  What I'm saying is be awed by the improbability of you and be grateful for your existence but don't be fooled by the figures and assume that you couldn't have been here despite all the events that preceded you unless some divine being was selecting pre-sex music choices. In short you are the amazing but humble result of history not a necessary, imperfect result of a divine plan.
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  NomadSoul

  For one thing, the orbit of the Earth is in the precise distance from the sun to sustain life.

  Wrong, the Earth is on a habitable zone in our solar system. Move the Earth 1% either direction and it would be capable of sustaining life. I'll give you a math problem for homework. Take the distance of the Earth to the Sun. Take 1% of that and divide it by the diameter of Earth and let me know if that changes the meaning of the word precise for you.
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  Qcmbr

  Nomad - like all other poorly thought out arguments this one will fade when the first permanent Mars bases are up and running and we prove that Mars is also habitable with the right tech. What's amazing to me is how much of the earth itself is downright hostile to life.
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  nicolaou

  With life being so fragile, and complex, I do wonder about the statistical probability of everything that led to it, and that sustains it, arising by chance.

  I accept that if key requirements for life were not met then we would not be here arguing about it. What does that prove? That 'obviously' a higher intelligence created the Universe with the conditions that we observe in order that life could exist? No. There is a much, much simpler explanation.

  If conditions were not right for life to exist, then life would not exist.

  That's it. It's that easy. You may find it unsatisfying but your feelings or mine don't affect reality. To arbitrarily introduce a super-complex, hyper-intelligence into the equation just so that you can 'feel' better or find some 'purpose' in existence is intellectually dishonest.

  If conditions were not right for life to exist, then life would not exist.

  Read that again until it sinks in.

  And while we're at it, non-believers like myself would dearly love to find the answer to the question; 'How did life begin'? We don't have an answer yet but at least the Anthropic Principle has been offered up for discussion. I find it promising, after all it only needs to explain the tiniest, simplest most rudimentary spark of cellular life and proven evolutionary theory successfully takes over from there.

  For believers on the other hand the answer to the question; 'How did life begin'? is far more complex. Your 'original life' isn't a single, microscopic self replicating cell, it's an awesome, all-powerful, super-intelligent, universe-creating, GOD!!

  You are of course, free to call the Anthropic Principle 'bollocks' but at least you've been offered a possible explanation for the origin of life. To the best of my knowledge the same offer has never been made by religious folk to explain god's existence.

  Seriously, in 2012 what are the excuses for the types of staggering ignorance and yes, stupidity, as are displayed in this thread. Spend a day in your local library or a couple of afternoons on wikipedia. Better yet, get the latest information from knowledgeable professionals. Don't expect to find the answers on an ex-jw forum (although some here deserve medals for their patience and well researched posts).

  Educate yourselves!

  

  God? Of course there's no fricking god!

  This unapologetic, believer unfriendly post was made from fully recycled old Nic' posts . . .
• 

  King Solomon

  Fernando said:

  With life being so fragile, and complex, I do wonder about the statistical probability of everything that led to it, and that sustains it, arising by chance.

  Would it be one in infinity?

  In other words zero? (1/∞ = 0)

  While the existence of life forming spontaneously is admittedly small if considered as a single (one-off) event, most creationists don't consider the incredible time-frames that are involved in the life-history of the Universe PLUS the absolutely massive numbers of stars and planets in existence. Considered in that light, the odds of such a chemical event occurring increase to the other side of the scale, where it's relatively improbable that life WOULDN'T evolve in the Universe elsewhere.

  Another mistake is thinking that the evolution of life is a 'one-off' event where the changes are not cumulative (not time-limited), but that life must spontanously appear as a complex multi-cellular organism, complete with DNA/reproduction and other organisms with which to mate! That IS incredibly impossible, and the reason why NO CREDIBLE person (much less a scientist) would expect it to occur: it violates all known physical laws. Hence why Dawkins went to the extreme lengths of even naming one of his books, "Climbing Mount Improbable", a reference to the fact that while you cannot climb a mountain by approaching it from the cliff face and jumping up to the summit, you CAN get to it's summit rather easily by approaching from the gentle ascending slope on it's back-side.

  NOW, compare that thinking to that needed to believe in God of the Bible: this incredibly powerful and complex being didn't have a beginning or end, but just always WAS; he'd have to be magnitudes more complex than the life forms He created, as He had the power to cause ALL LIFE to magically appear by word of mouth, alone, by speaking "Let There Be".

  So, which scenario is MORE improbable? The former, or the latter?

  Theists make the mistake of falling for the fallacy of discounting the improbable and accepting the even MORE improbable (or, the completely impossible).

  It's like saying that the rational explanation doesn't suffice, due to probability: so let's just accept the impossibly-impossible explanation instead!

  It's goofy reasoning used by people who clearly don't understand statistics and probability, but it IS quite successful: people fall for it, as the reasoning is bolstered by appeals to tradition ("well, my Grand-Daddy believed in God, so it's good enough for me!"), appeals to popularity ("we have 100 million believers in our church: they ALL can't ALL be wrong!") etc, etc, ad nauseum.
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  simon17

  I have found it fairly useless to engage in these "prove evolution", "prove abiogenesis", "prove the big bang" type threads. One things I find interesting is to challenge creationsists to prove something we all accept.

  Say, "Prove that the sun is the center of the solar system." Yes, do that in a few sentences so that we can all understand and so it is absolutely clear that it is true.