Its like reading one of Petes posts. If you don't agree you are either ignorant, uneducated or an absolute idiot. I'm not a fan of that particular public school debating society methid of being convinced
It all sort of means by what you are terming "God". Do you mean en entity that makes things turn out for the best? An entity that cares about individual human affairs? Or just a sort of "force" that created the universe? If the first, I see no evidence for things "turning out for the best" (the best for whom?) If the second, I look at the scale of the universe and I just can't believe it. If the third, fine. We're never going to know why the universe is there, even if we get closer to the how. But then the whole notion of God just seems irrelevant to me. I don't think the universe has a purpose; it just is.
You can re-define the word "god" to mean the laws which define the way the universe works, if you like. In that case, no-one could deny that "god", thus defined, exists. However that kind of "god" has nothing at all to do with prayer & sin, churches & priests, heaven & hell, souls & bibles. If you redefine god as science, there is no need for religion, which stands revealed as just a phenomenon of psychology.
That's a bit of a cop-out. Does that mean that you reckon that there is no difference in the likelihood of a single deity vs a pantheon of them à la Greek and Roman belief systems?
I've read the god delusion, selfish gene, the extended phenotype,the matter myth.That last one is not his actually. It may be true that Mr Dawkins has a bee in his bonnet but i see no issue with that. Dawkins Bee is the most well argued Bee i have read. Big fan of the late mr Hitchens also.
Your choice. Anyone is more than welcome to disagree with anything I (or anyone else) says, of course. You can disagree with the facts, or their relevance; you can adduce more evidence; you can find flaws in the reasoning; you can find a better explanation, or explain more clearly; etc etc. So where does that leave us? If you don't have any better facts, better evidence, better reasoning, or better explanations, and yet you still refuse to accept the argument ... well, I can see why you wouldn't be a fan of debating.
Hitchens was an impassioned polemicist; he could certainly be vitriolic. Dawkins is a rational scientist and as far as I can see Dawkins is not remotely vitriolic; on the contrary he is calm, considered, meticulous, and reasonable. He sets out to deal with the matters he addresses thoroughly and clearly. His opponents are unable to refute the truth of what he says, so they resort to vague ad hominem whinging.
I need convincing of nothing, because I believe nothing. The big questions interest me, where did we come from, how did we lurch from the sea, where is the lineage that tales us from the seas to a walking, thinking human. Like quantum science, and those nutters who still belive it was 6 days in the building and we all stem from a rib, it falls upon an unknown key which is to be unlocked. No one knows how or why it works, just that it does. Both have set 'rules' of how it 'had/has' to happen. Your scientist zealot will make a coesive argument, your religious zealot same so. Neither will ever agree. Still a shame a great thread about one subject, science, is ruined being drawn into yet more religious debates.
Come on Bradders! You can be a bit agnostic (fair enough, even if Dawkins thinks it's chickening out of atheism) but you really can't put the theory of evolution on one side of a scale, and the belief that woman was made from a rib by a deity sometime after coming up with the Universe in 6 days and say that they balance! Tell me you don't!
Is an Earth day equivalent to a God day? What if the context is a day is a billion Earth years, and a rib is actually an element of evolution, with Adam being that first animal that the apes were created from/evolved into. How did apes come about btw? Did they just appear? Now THATS magic Its not as black/white as some would have you believe.
Well then, that might be different. If you're saying that the holy books are just mythological renderings of evolution and the Big Bang. But then you'd have to wonder how the ancients knew this and I am not about to believe that they were taught be aliens. Apes came about through evolution, same as everything else. No magic there.
Explain it Glidd. As if for a cild. How the apes became to be, from where and how over what period of time. Darwin explained pretty well how a bird developed a beak over time to adopt to its surroundings. But the bird existied already.
I find it fascinating how modern scientists are finding that some of their possible explanations of the creation of the universe concur with Eastern mysticism. Heart of Hinduism: Creation
It didn't. Birds are supposedly what is left over from the dinosaurs. Nothing magically appeared. Over eons, bacteria developed into fish. Fish developed into mammals, eventually. Fins became legs. We have remnants of tails and perhaps embryos have gill-like structures. Read up on evolution (or just check out some Youtube videos). It's all explained, cogently and believably.
