(December 17, 2020 at 6:13 pm)Klorophyll Wrote: Sure, birth defects happen. To object to that is to object to an unexistent claim - that the universe under the theist worldview is supposed to be perfect.
I'm not claiming that universe is supposed to be perfect, (although the question remains "How do you know your God-designer is perfect?") but that there is no evidence for the designer because so called design fails, and it fails more than it works, like that 70% pregnancies don't come to full term but end instead. Now, you can make endless excuses for why that is so, like maybe God gets drunk and he makes mistakes, or some kid takes his magic wand and plays with it - but those are just speculations based on your wishful thinking that don't prove there's God, it only proves that you want to believe there's God. It doesn't mean that if I can type this that someone designed me, just like there are millions of people who can't write this or have to use their feet to write it don't prove there's a designer - you have to see the whole picture and not just the stuff you like.
Like "Yeah, birth defects happen, you know shit happens, but look at my card trick."
teachings of the Bible are so muddled and self-contradictory that it was possible for Christians to happily burn heretics alive for five long centuries. It was even possible for the most venerated patriarchs of the Church, like St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, to conclude that heretics should be tortured (Augustine) or killed outright (Aquinas). Martin Luther and John Calvin advocated the wholesale murder of heretics, apostates, Jews, and witches. - Sam Harris, "Letter To A Christian Nation"
