Theism is literally childish

[emjay]

Citation required. Also a definition of what you mean by inanimate matter vs animate matter. And define life while you're at it.

I see you ignored my example of a car being made up of inanimate matter, yet no one would argue that a car can't be animated. What you are doing is performing a fallacy of composition. It is energy that animates the car. The only difference between inanimate and animated matter is whether there is a flow of energy through it that can perform work. I could have instead used the example of an ice crystal growing, or snow recrystalising over time while the temperature (energy) changes but stays below freezing.

@emjay: I get that some theists appear to be playing word games in order to cling to their belief.

Can you understand that I see the same thing in some atheists?

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I'm glad you're not hurt by it... this is already one of those threads I wish I hadn't partaken in for all the division it's creating. My point about delusion was not that belief in God itself was delusional, but that to the extent that I see (any) belief as emotionally/irrationally driven I find it less credible. But I daresay you're the same;

Yep. See above. The difference is that I see emotionally/irrationally driven beliefs among atheists as well as theists.

As I've already said, so do I, and I assign them no more credibility and have no more desire to talk to them about certain issues than I do theists showing the same signs.

Dawkins said that evolution allowed the atheist to be intellectually fulfilled. That's a powerful emotional driver.

I don't know what came before the big bang, and it may be impossible to know. But I'm comfortable with that.

Copout. When you need to appeal to personal credulity/incredulity and then ignorance and apathy in order to maintain your position, don't you get that I see that the same way you see certain theist arguments?

Maybe it is but it is nonetheless how I feel. I do not have a burning desire to fill every gap, and do not lose any sleep over not knowing the answer to certain questions, only the questions that are important to me.

Maybe not, but at least it's trying to find them and looking to this universe, rather than speculating about the unknown and unknowable, to do so.

Only materialist bias has you congratulating them for sticking to this universe (which they really don't).

Fair enough, but it remains the case that magic is not the simplest explanation for... anything.

Do you even know what Occam's razor says? It says that you shouldn't multiply entities needlessly. In the case of a universe with a beginning, as science says ours has, it's not needless to infer an additional entity, i.e. a creator.

What I'm saying is whether you see me as biased... and clearly you do... any even if you're right... doesn't make any practical difference to how I perceive others; I'm still no more likely see what I personally consider irrational/emotionally driven belief as credible.

You find irrational/emotionally driven arguments that agree with your existing biases as credible. It's only those that go against your biases that you have a problem with.

I disagree. I have seen some atheist arguments that despite agreeing in parts with my own positions, have lost all credibility to me due to the amount of confirmation bias they show.

But yes, I can admit I have a materialist bias. But so does science... by necessity... because it can only study, test, and measure the material world.

As to Occam's Razor... yeah, but then it's just turtles all the way down isn't it? If there was always something rather than nothing, which I believe is possible, then there is no need to 'multiply entities needlessly' by adding a God, and if there was not always something rather than nothing, then adding a creator only defers the question to them; if the creator always existed, why couldn't the universe without that extra assumption have always existed, and if didn't always exist, then it needs another creator to prop it up, and on recursively down the line.

Yeah, I wondered what that was about but at the same time, tbh I'm not hugely interested; the idea still remains perfectly plausible to me in principle based on the nature of chemistry and physics, so if that's referring to human experiments, no amount of them can compare to the billions of years worth of 'trials' nature itself had the chance to perform.

Bingo - billions of years worth of opportunity for abiogenesis, but it supposedly only happened once.

I'd find abiogenesis and evolution more believable if there were multiple instances and trees rather than just one.

Once in a million, billion, or gazillion still shows possibility; statistically rare but materialistically possible will always trump magic for me. And from that perspective, we're only here to talk about this because of that one in billion or whatever possibility.

Anyway you clearly know more about this than I do, so I at least read a bit of the wiki on abiogenesis; it's more than I knew (specifically at least... maybe I knew it in the back of my mind from long ago) that amino acids had already produced in experiments designed to replicate the supposed early conditions of earth. So here's me been waiting for something like that to happen... and it already has... sixty odd years ago but then I've always been a bit behind the times So the current state of research is presumably what you're talking about? ie the move from organic molecules to living cells? From what I gather, there are many competing theories, so despite your millions of negative results, if that's what you were referring to, it looks like a hot field with a lot of potential... and as far as I'm concerned... if amino acids have already been produced that way, there's every reason to be confident that the rest is just a matter of time. So thank you... you may have actually sparked an interest for me here. But really I shouldn't comment on it further until I have researched it further.