Atheism is unreasonable

[Chas]

I actually do have basis, and the fact that you even question this makes me draw the conclusion that you really don't know the history of 20th century cosmology, son.

Man oh man. Just let me go, man. I would really hate to (actually, I would rather enjoy it) prove you wrong yet again. Do you think I just said it just to say it??? No. So please spare me of having to provide you evidence of my claim about Einstein originally believing the universe was static and eternal until his equations proved otherwise. If I do, this would be at least the 4th thing you've been proven wrong on.

Just do some research, educate yourself, and stop arguing with someone that is above your intellectual superior...

I believe you are a textbook example of:

The Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias whereby unskilled individuals suffer from illusory superiority, mistakenly rating their ability much higher than is accurate. This bias is attributed to a metacognitive inability of the unskilled to recognize their ineptitude. Conversely, highly skilled individuals tend to underestimate their relative competence, erroneously assuming that tasks which are easy for them are also easy for others.

[Mister Agenda]

Cut the bio-babble and tell me when has the reptile-bird change ever been observed? I mean, it isn't as if there is a thousand differences between the two. Please tell me how that could have ever occured, sir.

By 'bio-babble' you seem to mean 'scientific explanation of biological phenomena'. It's like kryptonite to people who depend on their ignorance to maintain their opinions regarding biology.

Never. Birds are not derived from reptiles, they're derived from dinosaurs. Mammals derived from reptiles, and there is an exquisite series of fossils demonstrating every important step of the process, including how part of the jawbone of reptiles became mammalian ear-bones.

As far as how birds evolved from dinosaurs, a thousand differences can accumulate over millions of generations. In the fossil record we have discovered over forty dinosaurs with direct evidence of feathers and precursors that give a good illustration of how feathers evolved from scales, a feathered dinosaur (Microraptor) that almost certainly at least glided if not flew outright, and later, Anchiornis with large wings with flight feathers and smaller 'hind wings' than Microraptor (Microraptors legs were feathered in a way similar to wings, so it would have used all four limbs to glide). Anchiornis has more avian wrists than Microraptor, and long legs that make it resemble a Road Runner with teeth and a long tail.

Evolution explains why we find a gradation of fossils from dinosaur to birds in the fossil record, why birds do not precede dinosaurs, why only dinosaurs and birds have feathers, and why we won't find bird fossils earlier than the Jurassic period. They can't exist before their precursors evolved. Creationism doesn't explain any of that, and a bird in the Cretaceous would send evolutionary biologists back to the drawing board scratching their head because an important prediction of evolution will have been falsified.

Interestingly, birds and crocodiles are the only surviving clades of the superclade Archosauria. Birds are in the clade Avemetatarsalia, which includes dinosaurs and pterosaurs which are all more closely related to birds than to crocodiles.

[Anomalocaris]

Mammals derived from reptiles, and there is an exquisite series of fossils demonstrating every important step of the process, including how part of the jawbone of reptiles became mammalian ear-bones.

Except that group of animals from which mammals would later derive, and which had been called "mammal like reptiles" for about a century, are no longer called reptiles very much in the professional community. When they are still so called, it is not because reptile continue to be considered a sensical grouping of different lineages to which mammalian ancesters naturally belong. Instead they are so called out of habit and out of the fact that most people, due to long history of use of the term, know what you are trying to say if you say it, even if the term might imply things no longer thought to be true if taken to be a meaningful taxonomical term.

Basically, the group of animals formerly called reptiles really belong to 4 separate and distinct lineages. 2 of those lineages are definitely not more closely related to the others in the reptile group than they are to groups of animals that are traditionally not considered to be reptiles. So reptile is a term of superficial similarity. Not a term denoting fundamental relatedness.

[Esquilax]

The sad thing is, the hypocrite is just going to offer a one sentence reply featuring the word "bio-babble" again, guys.

It's just his standard response when he can't answer something.

[abaris]

The sad thing is, the hypocrite is just going to offer a one sentence reply featuring the word "bio-babble" again, guys.

It's just his standard response when he can't answer something.

I'm done with that clown. Yesterday he asked us to prove that dinosaurs evolved into birds and I provided him with a link. Obviously he didn't even look at it. He's just riding his high horse of ignorance all over the place.

[downbeatplumb]

[u]

Well..isn't that delightfully unscientific and unspecific.

Do you mean..morphology? Because that's more than just "how it looks".

And where is the standard for 'looks'? Is there a codified standard that everyone can access and use, or are you just making judgement calls based on your opinions of how various animals look?

There is no standard in my eyes...all I know is we all tend to look like the "thing" that begat us. That is why all dogs tend to look like....DOGS. You take a domestic cat and a lion...there may be an obvious size difference, but they clearly look the same..because they are the same kind of animal.

Sharks kinda look like dolphins are they the same "kind".

[Mister Agenda]

And that's it? Nothing else?

So a lion and cheetah don't look alike?? They aren't the same kind of animal?...and organisms don't tend to look like the same organism that begat them?

Yes, they do, and evoluton explains why: they have a recent common ancestor (about 11 million years ago), although the cheetah is a different genus than lions, which are more closely related to tigers. leopards, and jaguars. Go back about 55 million years ago, and you can find a common ancestor for felines and canids...and they both look kind of like it, as evolution predicts. What Creationism fails to predict is that if you trace the fossil history of both groups back far enough, then you'll probably find a good candidate for a common ancestor.

http://www.gmanetwork.com/news/story/343...here-it-is

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A lion and a cheata are big cats. they are not the same species of animal do not call them kinds please. Yes they can breed to make ligers.

I hope you don't feel like I'm picking on you. Lions and cheetahs are a different genus, they can't interbreed. Lions and tigers are the same genus (Panthera) and can produce sterile hybrids, the ligers to which you refer.

[FatAndFaithless]

Utterly misrepresentation/misunderstanding of evolution? Check.
Shifting the burden of proof? Check.
Offering absolutely no standardized or scientific way of classifying animals? Check.
Refusing to give even a curosry look at scientific evidence provided? Check.
Conflating abiogenesis and evolution? Check.
Insulting the intelligence/education levels of opponents? Check.



Guys...I think this actually might be Ray Comfort or Kent Hovind.

[Mister Agenda]

I've debated atheists on this forum who say that atheism is not a belief that God doesn't exist, but rather a belief that God hasn't been proven to exist. I always thought that agnostics believe a god exists, but don't understand the nature of god.

That's true of some agnostics, it's a wide field. You understanding of atheism is better than a great many of your co-religionists, you're not far off the mark at all. Agnostic works best as an adjective: there are agnostic theists (don't know, believe) and agnostic atheists (don't know, don't believe) as well as the 'gnostic' versions of both theists and atheists.

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Do you believe that there is no God or just that God hasn't been substantiated?

Most likely FatandFaithless holds the latter position, but there are some atheists who frequent the forum who hold the former position.

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Do you think that there is a chance that the energy that makes up the cosmos either always existed or that it came into being from absolutely nothing?

I can't speak for Chuck, but yes, I think there's a chance that one of those alternatives was the case, with the caveat that I think the possibility of there having ever been 'absolutely nothing' remote, but the possibility of there haveing been 'practically nothing' very plausible.

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The reason I'm asking is that according to scientific "fact" matter had to always exist and will always exist.

It's a natural law of the universe that matter/energy can neither be created nor destroyed. It doesn't hold up well at the quantum level, and it may not hold up well in conditions before the expansion of the universe. We can't extrapolate that a property of this universe applies prior to our space/time beginning. But the total matter/energy of the universe seems to add up to zero, with the positive matter/energy balanced by negative matter/energy. A case of 0=1+2-3=0.

It's really hard to fathom something that always was and always will be.

True that.

Since matter always existed, it couldn't have come from nothing (the total absence of anything), but obviously some of you hold that one or the other of these assumptions is true.

No. The total absence of anything seems to be physically impossible. The closest we can come is 'quantum vaccuum', a state which hypothetically can produce a universe so long as the net energy budget of the universe is zero, as appears to be the case for ours.

[Anomalocaris]

It seems to me that if "something" denotes some menifestation of any sort of cause, in whatever imaginable form that takes, then if casuality is found to be a derived or superficial, not fundamental, property of reality, as might be inferred from some behavior seen in quantum mechanics, then presumably rigorous causality chain, when examined in sufficient detail, would be shown to be a illusion. In that cause, it is not so much that there is no cause because cause is itself is flawed concept. Pursuing the flawed concept to its seemingly logic end (such as what is the "something" that is the ultimate cause) would be an absurd reduction of an approximation.