A simple challenge for atheists

[Esquilax]

Ok, so scientists have created a self-assembling molecule that can self-replicate. I was wrong. But still, the environment proposed for this to happen in nature is still highly unlikely.

How many times do you theists need to be told that improbable is not impossible? And if your argument is just that it's improbable, well, at least we've established that it is possible, something that god has never had.

Francis S. Collins, M.D., Ph.D., is the director of the Human Genome Project. His most recent book is "The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief."
edition[dot]cnn[dot]com/2007/US/04/03/collins.commentary

Francis Collins: A man who is right on a lot of questions, but wrong on the god one. So what?

As a former atheist, he asked: "Why are the physical constants in the universe so finely tuned to allow the possibility of complex life forms?"

And here, we see the fallacies that led a smart man to come to god: he's begging the question something awful, right now. Fine tuned? How did he possibly demonstrate that the constants were fine tuned, rather than just a specific set of unguided circumstances, no less improbable than any other set? Because to be clear, they are no less improbable than any other set of constants, if they were to happen randomly. Collins is just heaping a lot of unjustified extra significance on these specific constants because they happened to produce life, and he's life too, but he has no way of knowing whether the universe began with that significance in mind. It's all just assuming the conclusion before the question is even asked. Fallacy.

He search lead him to God, through the writings of C.S. Lewis and G.K. Chesterton. C.S. Lewis makes the argument that Jesus was either Lord, a liar, or a lunatic. You are forced to make a decision.

C.S Lewis was a moron, and his Lord, Liar or Lunatic crapola is a grotesque oversimplification. Just off the top of my head, Jesus could also never have existed, or the accounts of his life could have been exaggerated later. Those are two extremely obvious alternatives, and they never occurred to Lewis? Moron, or he's just as dishonest as all the other apologists.

His existence is recorded in the history books. Flavius Josephus' account is enough. Josephus was a Jewish military leader and an historian. He lived at the time of the first church and Jesus' followers.

Josephus' account was a known forgery, and none of the "accounts" of Jesus in the history books are written by anyone born even in the same decade as his death. Try reading those history books, instead of just assuming Jesus is in there.

"Here was a person (Jesus) with remarkably strong historical evidence of his life, who made astounding statements about loving your neighbor, and whose claims about being God's son seemed to demand a decision about whether he was deluded or the real thing. After resisting for nearly two years, I found it impossible to go on living in such a state of uncertainty, and I became a follower of Jesus."

Every part of this quote is wrong, for the reasons I listed above. Therefore, Collins converted on faulty premises. Not a particularly good argument for your religion, Bob.

He is still a scientist:
"Yes, evolution by descent from a common ancestor is clearly true. If there was any lingering doubt about the evidence from the fossil record, the study of DNA provides the strongest possible proof of our relatedness to all other living things. But why couldn't this be God's plan for creation?"

And here we have a shifting of the burden of proof: "It doesn't rule out my unjustified assertions!"

"I find no conflict here (in miracles), and neither apparently do the 40 percent of working scientists who claim to be believers."

And bizarrely, an appeal to popularity, which actually acknowledges that the popularity is on the other side. Collins might be a brilliant scientist, but like all other religious scientists, when he speaks about his religion his intelligence seems to vanish entirely, and his argumentation is as weak as they come.

I think there's a pretty good reason for that.