A simple challenge for atheists

[Davka]

This is why the year is "2015". We count the years from the birth of Christ.

No.

No, we don't.

We count the years from a miscalculation of the birth of a semi-fictional character. At best.

Most Biblical historians put the birth of Jesus at ~ 4 BC.

[dyresand]

This is why the year is "2015". We count the years from the birth of Christ.

How would a being that never existed with no physical evidence or record.... why would people use it to count years.... and we don't count years like that try again.

[helyott]

Imagine an alternate universe which contains a single hydrogen atom. (Lets not include dark matter or other forces in the discussion for the purpose of simplicity.) You could replace the atom with a proton, a neutron, a sub-atomic particle, or a string. The point is, it's real. It can be measured.

Now where did this hydrogen atom come from?
Was it just always there?
Did it spontaneously appear, ie. magically?
Did someone create it?

How did it come into being?

Hello,

I don t know, but you don 't know too.
Your answer is god.
God hypothesis explain everything but explain nothing. The answer of god isn't a explanation.

And nobody can explain the before big bang. But what we know more and more is that atoms are a kind of energy and interstellar space isn't really empty.

[bob96]

Imagine an alternate universe which contains a single hydrogen atom. (Lets not include dark matter or other forces in the discussion for the purpose of simplicity.) You could replace the atom with a proton, a neutron, a sub-atomic particle, or a string. The point is, it's real. It can be measured.

Now where did this hydrogen atom come from?
Was it just always there?
Did it spontaneously appear, ie. magically?
Did someone create it?

How did it come into being?

Every second, vast numbers of virtual particle pairs come into existence and mutually destroy each other. What has been called collectively, the quantum foam. Where do they come from? There is a vast sea of energy out there in the Universe that is drawn on to create these particles. Where did that come from? Where does this supposed God come from that religious theologians prattle about?

IF God exists, then it is possible that He created the energy from nothing. By definition, God can do this. It is outside the realm of science, and of our understanding. It is the realm of faith - believing without evidence.

IF God does not exist, then this energy could not have come from nowhere. To believe that this energy did come from nothing requires faith - believing without evidence.

Logically, it would require greater faith to believe that something came from nothing, than to believe that someone created the something - despite there being no empirical evidence for either.

Therefore, atheists have more faith than theists - in this respect.

[Cyberman]

So faith is a bad thing to have?

[bob96]

Dawkin's himself has acknowledged that there is not enough time in the Universe for it to have self assembled, blind mutation after blind mutation.

Please provide a citation for this. Otherwise, it's bullshit.

"The Selfish Gene" 1976 (page 21-22)
"The Blind Watchmaker" 1982 (Chapter 6)

(Yes, I've read both books.)

Dawkins says that the since there is not enough time for the first strand of self-replicating DNA to have assembled by random chance, a plausible explanation that others have come up with says that it may have involved crystals - which are capable of self-replicating.

The only problem is, is that DNA is several orders of magnitude more complex than crystal lattice.
Besides being able to create an exact duplicate of itself, DNA can
perform self-repair for minor errors.
99.9% of human DNA is identical to other humans [1]
Approximately 2 g of DNA could hold all digitally stored information in the world. [2]

[1] http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNA_profiling
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orders_of_m...%28data%29

---

Please provide a citation for this. Otherwise, it's bullshit.

Actually, I seem to recall this from a TED talk. It was about how evolution is not simply "blind mutation," but is instead constrained and shaped by environmental pressures. Once the process of molecular reproduction begins, mutation and development are anything but blind.

So it's an accurate quote, ripped from context to make it seem as if it means something other than what Dawkins was saying. Quelle Surprise.

Dawkins wasn't talking about evolution. He was talking about the beginning of life on earth.

[Exian]

If we don't know how the first strand of DNA assembled itself, how are we to say how long it should take?

[Cyberman]

No, he's talking about random chance. However, Prof Dawkins has said again and again that evolution is not a purely random procedure.

[Davka]

IF God exists, then it is possible that He created the energy from nothing. By definition, God can do this. It is outside the realm of science, and of our understanding. It is the realm of faith - believing without evidence.

Yup. That's faith all right - believing something with no evidence.

IF God does not exist, then this energy could not have come from nowhere. To believe that this energy did come from nothing requires faith - believing without evidence.

Two problems with that statement. 1) We don't know where the energy came from, whether or not it's possible for something to come from nothing, or whether something always existed. That's one of the things science is trying to figure out.

That means that what you're arguing against is a Straw Man: a position that nobody actually holds or believes.

2) What we actually do believe is simply that the Universe exists, and that we don't know why. And there is certainly evidence for that. Look around, it's a Universe! How did it get here? Was it always here? We don't know. And neither do you.

No faith required.

---

Dawkins wasn't talking about evolution. He was talking about the beginning of life on earth.

Ah - abiogenesis. A different matter entirely, and he's right. It couldn't have happened randomly. And those are older books, written before the more recent work on abiogenesis.

Chemical biologists today believe that they have a fairly accurate model of the chemical makeup of the primordial Earth. And upon studying that model, they state that, given the attractive and combinant properties of the chemicals in the mixture, life would have almost no chance of not forming. In other words, when you have a specific set of planetary circumstances - energy from the sun, atmosphere, liquid water, and the chemical soup that should be found on every earthlike planet in the "Goldilocks Zone" - those chemicals will assemble themselves into primitive self-replicating molecules.

Just as certain conditions produce crystals, or gas giants, or methane snowstorms, so certain conditions produce life. It's not chance, any more than two magnets attract each-other by "chance."

[Esquilax]

IF God exists, then it is possible that He created the energy from nothing. By definition, God can do this. It is outside the realm of science, and of our understanding. It is the realm of faith - believing without evidence.

Well, we'd best not believe that then, eh? After all, things that require you to believe them without evidence are indistinguishable from things that don't exist.

IF God does not exist, then this energy could not have come from nowhere. To believe that this energy did come from nothing requires faith - believing without evidence.

There's lots of problems with this: for one, what you're saying would only be true in a causal framework similar to the one we experience now. We have no reason to think that this was true prior to the big bang, and in fact, given the radically different set of physical properties a pre-big bang universe would have had, we have far more reason to believe that time would work differently there. Something happening before our local iteration of spacetime began, by definition, is not bound by the rules of it necessarily.

Secondly, when you say the energy couldn't come from nowhere, it's equally true that we've never seen anything come into existence from nothing; all the things we've ever observed are arrangements of pre-existing matter. Given this, we can propose a third possibility, easily within the bounds of our observations and evidence, which is that existence is eternal in one state or another.

Thirdly, since we're on the subject, I must point out the false dichotomy at play here; either the energy came from nothing, or there's no other answer? No no, Bob. That's very evidently untrue, meaning your premises are equally false.

Fourthly, I can't let this end without pointing out the tremendous hypocrisy involved in an argument that paints your faith as acceptable, Bob, while simultaneously trying to denigrate atheists for the same. Can you get any slimier?

Logically, it would require greater faith to believe that something came from nothing, than to believe that someone created the something - despite there being no empirical evidence for either.

Therefore, atheists have more faith than theists - in this respect.

Who the hell told you you could tell us what we believe?

Seriously, doesn't that seem a tad presumptuous to you? The atheist position, I'll have you know, is that we don't yet know how the universe began, but that leaving our beliefs on it up to faith is irrational, something you've adequately demonstrated here. So you can drop this whole "atheists have more faith than theists because they believe X!" schtick right here, because you are flat, fucking, wrong.

Do I sound mad? I think I sound mad. Frankly, I get tired of guys like you trying to denigrate my position by dictating to me what I believe, simultaneously oversimplifying our position to an insulting level, and robbing us of the chance to speak for ourselves, as though we don't have anything substantive to say about the contents of our own damn heads.

Imagine if I did that to you. Imagine if I came to an intellectually insulting conclusion about your position, based on lies that I made up myself because I didn't just ask you. Would you be irritated?

Now imagine if ninety percent of the people you met in conversations like this one, and in fact just on the street too, did exactly the same thing. Get it yet?