A simple challenge for atheists

[Losty]

I bow to you on the subject Losty

That's only a little creep frodie

[IATIA]

Saying religion stunts science is your subjective opinion. Do you have any objective evidence?

My favorite, though there are others, INQUISITION. To defy the 'science' of the church was considered heresy. This was punishable by anything from jail time, torture to death.

[dyresand]

Saying religion stunts science is your subjective opinion. Do you have any objective evidence?

My favorite, though there are others, INQUISITION. To defy the 'science' of the church was considered heresy. This was punishable by anything from jail time, torture to death.

All those people showing hard facts against... the church and showing how stupid the bible and its passages are R.I.P. If only they lived and the people would have overran the churches corrupt power over them.

[Jenny A]

how do you know it is capable of putting any thing any where?

Am I the only one that raised an eyebrow at this??

It didn't raise mine. Unless you assume a god, why would you hypothesize a god creating anything? And beyond lacking any other answer why hypothesize god?

[The Grand Nudger]

You are confining God to the rules of our universe. God is outside of our universe. He created the rules.

Agreed, if there's some "god" it isn't here, in our universe. IOW, it isn't present so far as we are concerned.

[Gawdzilla]

There's an alternate, mirror-image universe, where Dog created an anti-hydrogen atom.

Then things went to lleh.

[bob96]

You are confining God to the rules of our universe. God is outside of our universe. He created the rules.

Again with the unsupported assertions.

Please explain how you went about discerning this to be true.

My faith in God comes from the Bible.

The bible, ~6000 years ago said that the universe had a beginning. Scientists for centuries believed that the universe had no beginning. When evidence for a beginning began to appear, some leading scientists put up fierce resistance because they thought it would give too much support to those who believed in Creation. They did not get their way, however, as the evidence for a beginning was too strong.

Arno Penzias won a Nobel Prize in physics for discovering a trace of that beginning - an echo of Creation - the so-called cosmic microwave background. He later told the New York Times, "The best data we have ... are exactly what I would have predictged, had I nothing to go on but the five books of Meses, the Psalms, and the Bible as a whole."[1]

Another reason for my faith in God is the complexity of life. Philosopher Antony Flew, for much of his life, was Richard Dawkin's predecessor as the world's most famous athiest. He frequently and vigorously debated Christians. However, in recent years, he has become convinced that biologists' investigation of DNA "has shown, by the almost unbelievably complexity of the the arrangements which are needed to produce life, that intelligence must have been involved."

Richard Dawkins himself flip-flopped on his position on the complexity of DNA. He previously stated that if god created DNA, it was a terribly inefficient design, where the vast majority does nothing. ie "Junk DNA".
"The standard evolutionary picture tells us that evolution is messy, incomplete and inefficient."
However, when the ENCODE group published their findings, he changed his stance.

"The ENCODE group has produced a stunning inventory of previously hidden switches, signals and sign posts embedded like runes throughout the entire length of human DNA. In the process, the ENCODE project is reinventing the vocabulary with which biologists study, discuss and understand human inheritance and disease."

Dawkins in 2009:
"It stretches even their creative ingenuity to make a convincing reason why an intelligent designer should have created a pseudogene -- a gene that does absolutely nothing and gives every appearance of being a superannuated version of a gene that used to do something -- unless he was deliberately setting out to fool us...
Leaving pseudogenes aside, it is a remarkable fact that the greater part (95 percent in the case of humans) of the genome might as well not be there, for all the difference it makes."

Dawkins in 2012:
"I have noticed that there are some creationists who are jumping on [the ENCODE results] because they think that's awkward for Darwinism. Quite the contrary it's exactly what a Darwinist would hope for, to find usefulness in the living world....
Whereas we thought that only a minority of the genome was doing something, namely that minority which actually codes for protein, and now we find that actually the majority of it is doing something. What it's doing is calling into action the protein-coding genes. So you can think of the protein-coding genes as being sort of the toolbox of subroutines which is pretty much common to all mammals -- mice and men have the same number, roughly speaking, of protein-coding genes and that's always been a bit of a blow to self-esteem of humanity. But the point is that that was just the subroutines that are called into being; the program that's calling them into action is the rest [of the genome] which had previously been written off as junk."

[1] Arno Penzias, interview by Malcolm W. Browne, "Clues to the Universe's Origin Expected," New York Times, March 12, 1978

[Esquilax]

Saying religion stunts science is your subjective opinion. Do you have any objective evidence?

First of all, I feel like I need to highlight the immense hypocrisy of you dismissing what I say as an opinion and asking for evidence, while earlier you were defending your case with little more than assertions with no objective evidence of your own. So which is it Bob? Do we need objective evidence for our assertions, or not? You can't ask it of others while refusing to present any of your own.

But since I do actually appreciate the need for evidence, even if you're only willing to consider it necessary when views you disagree with are aired, here: religiously motivated censorship of science standards for education, religiously motivated lawsuit stunting science education standards, religious groups smearing basic scientific concepts due to ideological disagreement, religion causes people to reject established scientific facts and to hold their belief in spite of the evidence, and scientific literacy decreases scaling with the fervency and strength of religious belief.

Now, since I've shown you mine, how about you show me yours? Where's this objective evidence detailing the existence of god outside of the universe, where he creates physical laws?

If religion does attempt to stunt science, then objectively it is failing miserably, as the stats I posted above attest to.

Once again, "religion stunts science," and "there are no religious scientists," are two different claims, of which your stats address the second, not the first, which is the claim under discussion, and which I already rebutted in the post you're responding to here. Are you even reading my posts before you respond?

[IATIA]

My faith in God comes from the Bible.

You have put your faith into manuscripts about bronze age nomads with no peer review or substance, yet you ignore the science journals of the 21st century with facts, empirical data and repeatable results.

AND, there is not a single bronze age manuscript that was written from a first hand account. The bible itself was not created until 4th century AD, but this is valid information?

[Esquilax]

My faith in God comes from the Bible.

So you believe the claim, because the claim says that the claim is true. Oh my.

The bible, ~6000 years ago said that the universe had a beginning. Scientists for centuries believed that the universe had no beginning. When evidence for a beginning began to appear, some leading scientists put up fierce resistance because they thought it would give too much support to those who believed in Creation. They did not get their way, however, as the evidence for a beginning was too strong.

We don't know about the whole universe, just the current expansionary state of it. Which you would know, if you weren't just looking for whatever confirms what you already believe.

Besides, if we found out tomorrow that the universe didn't have a beginning, you'd be either spinning the bible so that it "confirms" that new evidence, or disagreeing with the science based on the bible, right? The one conclusion you wouldn't come to based on that is that the bible was wrong.

Another reason for my faith in God is the complexity of life. Philosopher Antony Flew, for much of his life, was Richard Dawkin's predecessor as the world's most famous athiest. He frequently and vigorously debated Christians. However, in recent years, he has become convinced that biologists' investigation of DNA "has shown, by the almost unbelievably complexity of the the arrangements which are needed to produce life, that intelligence must have been involved."

Ah yes, the argument from ignorance regarding complexity; "I can't think of how this could have happened naturally, therefore it didn't." Sorry, but complexity is not exclusively a sign of design- in fact if you think of it simplicity is more a hallmark of design than complexity- and not knowing how it happened is not evidence for god. Try again.

Richard Dawkins himself flip-flopped on his position on the complexity of DNA.

"Flip flopping"? That's called "learning," champ. It's what you do when you gain more information, you change your position to suit the facts. Only a religious person would think that changing with the evidence is a sign of weakness.