(October 15, 2014 at 4:51 pm)orangebox21 Wrote: When the atheist claims that people suffer eternal punishment for finite crimes they leave out an important qualification: against an eternal being. The argument should be: eternal punishment for finite crimes against an eternal being is immoral.I don't understand why that matters. We can extend that to its "logical" conclusion and assume that the punishment for a crime committed against a 1-year-old cannot last longer than one year.
I think the more accurate qualification would be "against a being of incomparable power" who can do as he pleases because no one is capable of staying his hand. But that factor, when combined with a moral code that amounts to "it's good if he says it's good" makes for a very scary deity.
"Well, evolution is a theory. It is also a fact. And facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts don't go away when scientists debate rival theories to explain them. Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's in this century, but apples didn't suspend themselves in midair, pending the outcome. And humans evolved from ape- like ancestors whether they did so by Darwin's proposed mechanism or by some other yet to be discovered."
-Stephen Jay Gould
-Stephen Jay Gould
