The Case for Atheism

[Ryantology]

I try not to get too involved in the discussions of creation vs evolution - which is probably a bit of a cop out. I'm more confident of the evidence for 'itsy bitsy' evolution - which I think is unquestionable. But I'm undecided whether the data's sufficient for the 'trans-species' variety - although of course I'm aware that puts me in a bit of a minority opinion.

It's not hard, even for a non-scientist: the 'trans-species' variety of evolution is nothing more than a sufficient number of 'itsy bitsy' evolutionary changes to produce a life form that is sufficiently different from the original generation. And, that's not a determination you can really make, objectively. There is no universal criteria for what separates one species from another. I would suggest that the closest we have for sexual life forms is their ability to reproduce with existing members of the original species that have not undergone the same level of evolutionary change, but even that's not very sufficient.

That's why the macro/micro distinction is meaningless. It attempts to redefine what evolution actually is, and how it works, so that it is impossible to work, and then it is used as 'evidence' that evolution is false.

But I want to make the distinction between using the scientific method for empirical research and the philosophical belief (naturalism) that the only things we can know have to be amenable to the scientific method.

The problem with this approach of course is that you can't do a scientific experiment to test naturalism. But if you can't test this assumption scientifically but claim this to be true - then you've refuted your assumption that knowledge can only be obtained through scientific means.

We don't assert that naturalism is definitely the only way to know something. We state the fact that naturalism is the only reliable and objective way to know something that we know of. We'd all be open to alternatives, but none of them are ever testable and all of them have fatal flaws in regards to being poisoned by personal bias. If God is real, I shouldn't have to assume he's real before having any evidence of it. Any evidence I get through that method cannot be reliable because I have no way of knowing for sure that I can trust any evidence that exists only for myself, be it of God or of anything else. It should be objective and open to examination without any preconceptions of any kind. My evidence should be examined by others in precisely the same format as I have received it, and that's not possible. As such, I can't treat any of that as knowledge, and that's why this same general method has produced tens of thousands of gods and thousands of variations for many of those gods, many of them contradictory and all of them conflicting.