I believe in intelligent design because the theory of evolution boils down to: if you left your room messy for 1 billion years, when you came back it would be the Taj Mahal.
The real fundamental root cause of my belief in God comes from personal experiences.
What? So first of, it really doesn’t. You don’t understand evolution if you think that’s what it is, but that’s beside the point.
You believe that a supernatural sky being made a mud man and a rib woman, who were tricked by a talking snake into eating magic no no fruit. Then 4 thousand years later, a zombie came and made everyone drink it’s blood and eat it’s body in order to get into the good magic sky place.
It’s real easy to dumb down peoples beliefs and make them sound stupid, especially if you misrepresent them.
The question was why do you believe in YOUR beliefs. It was not an invitation to be a superior asshole.
As I said, personal experience. I’m not sure how I was insulting anyone else’s beliefs. That’s literally why I believe in intelligent design: I believe that evolution is mathematically impossible.
You are correct and don’t deserve the down votes.
It is insulting because it downplays the theory to the point of “to believe this would be absurd and stupid” which obviously has implications for its believers.
Imagine an atheist stated: “I am an atheist because intelligent design boils down to: if you leave your room empty for 6000 years, a magic fairy will appear and create the Taj Mahal”. Can you see how this is not only just an outright false statement, but also making a mockery of those who believe?
Not really. I don’t find that statement insulting at all. That is what Creationism boils down to.
If you think that the theory of evolution puts forth the any argument like Taj Mahal coming from a messy room, then you don’t understand the theory of evolution.
Evolution does not “boil down” to that.
Except the room is entire Earth, it’s filled to the brim with most elements of the Periodic table, and constantly receives hundreds of terawatts of energy. Oh, and it actually took several billion years, not one, to come from this to Taj Mahal.
Modern science has shown ways in which many of the organic molecules could be spontaneously formed out of basic elements under conditions observable on early Earth. We’re also about to bridge synthesis of organic molecules and synthetic biology.
Intelligent design, on its end, gets stuck with several big questions, like the fact our design is actually very bad, just workable, and the fact we share not only visual properties, but most of our DNA with other animals - particularly other primates.
Not here to alter your beliefs - you do you - but setting the record straight.
So the record is, we’ve never been able to achieve synthetic biology under the most ideal laboratory circumstances?
What do you mean by bad design?
Just because we share DNA with other animals doesn’t mean it wasn’t by design.
Conditions of early Earth are often complicated to recreate, and it takes a lot of simultaneous reactions going just right to make it work - but Earth had billions of years, and we don’t have such a luxury. Still, we are very close, and we already created a lot of biomolecules out of basic blocks like water, carbon dioxide, and ammonia.
Humans have plenty of faults in their design - why do we have reproductive organs, which need to be kept clean, right next or combined with exhaust (urethra/rectum)? Why do we have two legs and vertical organization of the body that adds huge gravitational stress? Why do we have pelvis shaped in a way that makes birthing more painful and complicated? Why people with uterus have bloody and painful periods? Why do we have so many vulnerable spots on the body where they should clearly be reinforced? etc. etc.
We also have plenty of rudimentary organs we don’t need anymore, that are either just sitting there for no intelligent reason at all, or are actively causing trouble for us (like appendix or wisdom teeth).
This all doesn’t fall into the line of intelligent design, unless divine creatures just enjoy crafting us at random and see how we survive anyway.
Sure, they could still do that, they may engineer us in a very odd and imperfect way, they could make our DNA similar to other animals to make us guess if we actually descent from them instead, etc. But this involves so much jumping through the hoops we may as well cut it off with Occam’s razor. Evolutionary theory offers clear sequence of how we got where we are, it shows clear relation of all living organisms and the ways they develop into what we know today. So, it wins.
The analogy to a messy room fails. I recommend you read this (and the rest of the archive, it’s great stuff):
https://talkorigins.org/indexcc/CF/CF001.html
Of note is “The Earth is not a closed system”
Realizing that the root cause is just because you want it to be true is fine, commendable even. Just don’t try to justify it post hoc with sciency-sounding arguments.
Also, The God Delusion.
I understand that the sun gives low entropy energy to earth, and pockets of entropy can decrease as long as the whole system increases. However, my room exists on earth, so I still think it is an adequate analogy.
More seriously, I would like to see a mathematical treatment of the probability of biologically detrimental mutations vs. beneficial or neutral mutations.
That treatment has been done. From the same page:
https://talkorigins.org/indexcc/CB/CB101.html
Most mutations are neutral. Nachman and Crowell estimate around 3 deleterious mutations out of 175 per generation in humans (2000). Of those that have significant effect, most are harmful, but the fraction which are beneficial is higher than usually though. An experiment with E. coli found that about 1 in 150 newly arising mutations and 1 in 10 functional mutations are beneficial (Perfeito et al. 2007).
The harmful mutations do not survive long, and the beneficial mutations survive much longer, so when you consider only surviving mutations, most are beneficial.
First, I want to thank you for having this discussion with me. I’ve been wanting to discuss these ideas with someone for some time.
As to the referenced article, a couple of points stand out to me:
- The first paper cited by Nachman and Crowell compares pseudogenes between humans and chimpanzees assuming that one evolved from the other over a known period of time. Rejecting the assumption that humans did not evolve from chimps would render this sort of evaluation inaccurate.
- The last sentence of the first point, that harmful mutations do not survive long, is not supported by any literature on the page, and I believe it to be wishful thinking. There are many examples of human genetic diseases that do not decrease the reproductive capacity of those carrying them, which to me would imply, again without literature support, that those mutations would accumulate over time in a population.
- I would also disagree with the 5th point, where any beneficial mutation disproves young earth creationism. Young earth creationists must believe in a much higher rate of so-called micro evolution, since all the variation we see on earth must have taken place in the last 6 thousand years or less.
- It’s a common misunderstanding, but humans and chimps didn’t evolve from each other. We each evolved from a common ancestor. Regardless, it seems like you wouldn’t accept anything other than something from the now, so here’s a study that agrees with the general mutation rate done by comparing parents and children in Iceland: Parental influence on human germline de novo mutations in 1,548 trios from Iceland Here’s also a paper on calculating the distribution of those mutations across deleterious/neutral/beneficial: Assessing the Evolutionary Impact of Amino Acid Mutations in the Human Genome
- If a mutation doesn’t decrease the reproductive capacity of the carrier, then it’s not harmful. If it’s harmful, then it will affect the reproductive capacity. That’s just how it’s defined in this context.
- I think it’s slightly sloppily phrased, but is a counter to a specific claim found in this book: https://www.amazon.com/Scientific-Creationism-Henry-M-Morris/dp/1982697091. I don’t have a copy so can’t comment further.
When I was a little kid, I took what I was told at face value and didn’t question it.
Magical thinking is normal for little kids. By about age 7 you’re supposed to have grown out of that shit though - like it’s normal to still enjoy the concept of magic, but there comes a point when you should have a pretty intuitive understanding that it’s fiction.
For some reason we give religion a pass.
Some old dude in a dress raving about how ghosts built the pyramids is instantly recognized as crazy; but some old dude raving about how the chief master ghost shat out our entire universe in a week is… somehow worthy of respect?
So, my religion is no religion: I believe what can be tested and verified.
The most concise test to disprove the notion of God is one of simple logic: the Epicurean paradox, which recognizes the mythology of God being composed of three core pillars: that he is 100% good (complete absence of evil), 100% powerful (his will is our reality), and 100% omniscient (he knows everything about everything)… but despite those three pillars, it takes no time at all to recognize evil behavior all around us, and for evil to be able to exist in our reality, one of those pillars must always fall.
He either doesn’t know evil is happening in his universe, is powerless to stop it, or is okay with it.
Every single time a religious person attempts to address the Epicurean paradox, the just shuffle the pillars to fill in the gap left open by the missing third (feel free to take that as a challenge if you think you’ve got the answer).
Anyway, it became clear that at the very least, my religion wasn’t being honest about the nature of its own god, and that realization was the final nail in the coffin for me.
I think for some people the scale of God simply doesn’t compute, which is why old man with big beard image persists. Look at the size of our galaxy, and the size of the universe as a whole. If any being was the creator of such a vast and complex universe as ours, that being would be to us like we are to a “Hello world” script.
The analogy is flawed, but that is what we are saying if we believe in a being capable of creating our universe, defining its laws and bending them to create us. We could not truly begin to comprehend such a being, and largely we are left to our own. However, if you believe, then this being does care about us in some way. And it has shown us this through inspiring humans to share its path for our improvement.
That is the reason I believe in the teachings of the Christ. The path of loving your enemies, of caring for everyone as one would your own family, forgiveness, that is the path to a better world, revealed to us through a man and his story. I am unable to fully live up to such ideals, but like Data says, the struggle yields its own rewards. Those who take such ideas to heart are worthy in the eyes of the creator, because if all people were such, there would be little suffering in our world. We have the means to reduce our suffering, but we choose not to. God could, remove it for us, but then we will not become the free and good beings we are meant to be.
You don’t need God to have such ideals as the Christ demonstrated, but I find such ideas so much better than any of the alternatives, that I suspect they have divine origin. And even if they don’t, if I follow them, then I will contribute to making the world better regardless. God could take away my struggle and suffering, but that would leave me still flawed and unable to improve, and so it would be for all humanity as well.
(feel free to take that as a challenge if you think you’ve got the answer).
Muslim here and sure (I’ve wanted to try this for a while now): The criteria for the first pillar are arbitrary. What’s being proposed is that a good creator wouldn’t allow their creation to suffer, or—taking it a step further—wouldn’t create a world where suffering is even possible. However, that would require human (or, really, lite in general) not to exist; give humans free will and suffering will happen. You could argue then that the act of creating humans was evil, which would be logically consistent, and in that case my answer is: I’ll drop (your conception of) the first pillar. God knows about suffering and is capable of stopping it but tolerates it for one purpose or another.
Muslim
Full disclosure, I have no idea if the Muslim concept of god applies to the Epicurean paradox. I’m much more familiar with the Christian version which presents god as perfect in an absolute sense.
a good creator wouldn’t allow their creation to suffer, or—taking it a step further—wouldn’t create a world where suffering is even possible.
Yeah there’s a degree of obscurity - for the sake of this conversation I’d be okay with defining evil as deliberate suffering. Step on a Lego > hurts > not evil. Stick a knife in someone or like commit genocide > very clearly evil. Idk if the former is technically incompatible with the Epicurean paradox, but we have no shortage of actual extremes to choose from, so might as well focus on those.
create a world where suffering is even possible. However, that would require human (or, really, lite in general) not to exist; give humans free will and suffering will happen.
Under the current laws of our universe, yes, but those are what are being scrutinized. The question this prompts is: is god not capable of creating free will without evil?
my answer is: I’ll drop (your conception of) the first pillar. God knows about suffering and is capable of stopping it but tolerates it for one purpose or another.
Needing to drop a pillar to make god work is the point of the whole exercise: a god that’s aware of evil and has the power to stop it, but chooses not to, is himself some degree of evil.
I’m much more familiar with the Christian version which presents god as perfect in an absolute sense.
Islam does too, but with less emphasis on the idea of benevolence. Most relevantly, Islam states that life is a test by God and therefore suffering is an inherent part of it, which is kind of my framework here (though I don’t assume that in my argument below).
Step on a Lego > hurts > not evil. Stick a knife in someone or like commit genocide > very clearly evil.
My point is that that’s logically inconsistent. A genocide killing thousands of people and an earthquake or famine killing thousands of people both leave thousands of people dead. Hell, even letting people die at all is suffering. Back to our postulates, pillar 2 states “his will is our reality.” When you get down to it, the only kind of world that would not run afoul of the Epicurean paradox would be a no-scarcity paradise with only 100% happy thoughts, and at that point we’d be looking at robots (or I suppose angels, if there’s a material difference), not humans. Worse, when you get down to it in such a world people would either lose the ability to even conceive of evil, or be prevented from committing it by an external force. Imagine if at the mall you always had an angel making you return your shopping cart, now multiply that by ten thousand times. Essentially we’re looking at a world of lobotomized robots, which to me doesn’t sound all that appealing.
is god not capable of creating free will without evil?
It might be possible in some outlandish alternate universe, but restricting the discussion to things we can conceive of, evil is baked into the concept of free will. As I argued above, take away the capacity to commit evil and you remove almost the whole breadth of human emotion and activity, by definition running afoul of free will. Perhaps most importantly, though
a god that’s aware of evil and has the power to stop it, but chooses not to, is himself some degree of evil.
at the core of this is the assumption that suffering is ontologically evil. This is very egotistical, but it also betrays a fundamental instability in the whole thing: Without objective morality (which immediately follows from the lack of belief in a creator), how can there be good and evil? This application of the Epicurean paradox assumes that evil can exist independent of a higher authority able to determine good and evil, so it’s a case of circular reasoning more than anything else. The Epicurean paradox can only be used to reject complete benevolence (which, well yes), not complete goodness.
My point is that that’s logically inconsistent. A genocide killing thousands of people and an earthquake or famine killing thousands of people both leave thousands of people dead.
The distinction is intent, which is an important factor if we’re talking about will. If you stub your toe on your coffee table, there’s no ill will coming from the table. If I approached you and whacked your toe with a mallet, there would be ill will coming from me. In those cases, the outcome is the same, but you’d be silly to be upset at the table; but very justified in being upset at me.
So, take something like thousands of deaths from an earthquake: in a godless universe, it’s a shitty situation, but not an evil one. There’s no intent: the universe has no will. Throw an omnipotent and omniscient controller into the mix and suddenly that earthquake isn’t something that just happened as a result of planetary physics; it’s something that was intentionally designed to happen.
…which kinda makes sense that you’d think of them as being the same, since through a theocratic lens they kind of are, it’s just that ones a genocide at the hands of men, and the other’s a genocide at the hands of god. Either way, both are very much evil.
When you get down to it, the only kind of world that would not run afoul of the Epicurean paradox would be a no-scarcity paradise with only 100% happy thoughts, and at that point we’d be looking at robots (or I suppose angels, if there’s a material difference), not humans.
Agreed, hence my disbelief.
Worse, when you get down to it in such a world people would either lose the ability to even conceive of evil, or be prevented from committing it by an external force. Imagine if at the mall you always had an angel making you return your shopping cart, now multiply that by ten thousand times. Essentially we’re looking at a world of lobotomized robots, which to me doesn’t sound all that appealing.
I’m kind of surprised to see that’s something that isn’t appealing - isn’t a blissful existence completely devoid of evil basically what we understand heaven to be? (or the Islamic equivalent - I’m kind of a dumbass when it comes to religious-anything outside of Christianity, so if I mislabel something or otherwise say something stupid, please call me out)
evil is baked into the concept of free will.
Disagree here as well. We are incapable of many actions - I’m sure you could rattle off hundreds of examples just off the top of your head - we can’t fly, breath under water, teleport, see in the dark, speak with squirrels, etc - you get the gist. But the absence of those abilities never calls into question whether or not we have free will, they’re just accepted as things we can’t do despite having free will. So why is the ability to commit evil so critical to the notion of free will?
Another way to look at it: I haven’t had dinner yet tonight: there are literally thousands of options to choose from, between what I have the means to cook or by having a restaurant do it for me. There’s a lot of freedom in that decision. I could also satiate my hunger by abducting my neighbor’s 4 year old son and committing cannibalism. In this case, my freedom is narrowed not by a divine force, but by the law: if I make that kind of evil a part of my dinner decision making, then I spend the rest of my life in prison. Let’s switch to a different universe where my meal options are the same, but instead of a legal force, this time it’s divine: I’m literally incapable of even considering cannibalizing my neighbor’s kid, let alone performing the act. The other thousands of dinner options are there, but evil is fully off the menu… do I have free will?
Without objective morality (which immediately follows from the lack of belief in a creator), how can there be good and evil? This application of the Epicurean paradox assumes that evil can exist independent of a higher authority able to determine good and evil, so it’s a case of circular reasoning more than anything else.
Good and evil can exist without divinity because the lack of an omniscient creator means the baseline for the universe is apathy. It doesn’t care if you choose to be good or bad. Those are values that we created, and that we adhere to or not according to our choice… and as we see every time we turn the news on, there’s no shortage of people who choose evil. …and the ones who are proficient at it go on to become billionaires or world leaders or w/e. None of that would make sense in a universe that had a omniscient, omnipotent, and benevolent god.
The Epicurean paradox can only be used to reject complete benevolence (which, well yes), not complete goodness.
Edit - misread that part earlier, sorry if you’ve already read this part of my reply. Anyway: I don’t understand the distinction between benevolence and goodness. How can the two be offset in the context of godly absolutes?
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You sacrifice for me, I sustain you. I sacrifice for you, you sustain me.
I believe this because nature is hungry, but expected to sustain life.
I used to, because my parents did and I went to church and all that.
But then I started to actually think about it.
Now I don’t believe in anything supernatural.
There are parts of nature we don’t understand (yet) but I don’t think there’s any ‘higher power’ that created the universe, and especially not earth or humankind specifically.What’s the term for not knowing for sure if there’s a god or not and not giving a fuck about it either way?
Apatheism
Agnostic
Santa’s elves don’t make toys, Chinese children do.
Because I know exactly what death will be like. So do you. Think back to before you were born, there was nothing. There, that is death. Not much to be afraid of.
I’m an atheist due Roman Catholic grade school. The teachings about religion were crazy.
I also went to Roman Catholic high school and college but religion was very miner. College required four religion type courses but including courses such as ethics and logic.
I’m an atheist bcs I don’t have a wild imagination.
I do not really know. I was not raised in a practicing family, and my country is very secular.
Philosophically, I’m agnostic. I’m not convinced either by arguments for or against the existence of God. I think a being which could exist outside time and space is not approachable by our reason.
But I can’t stay neutral, the question is too important. And I feel the presence of God in my life. This feeling came first, and when I tried to understand it, I went to the culturally nearest place of worship, and it was Protestantism, and I felt at home. I read the Bible, not as a theology manual, but as the story of people who try to understand the presence of God; sometimes they’re right, sometimes they’re wrong, but their quest is mine, and theirs inspires mine.
I feel the same way reading the Bible. Even as early as Genesis I was like damn Abraham I already don’t understand why you tried to pimp out your sister-wife ONCE so why did you KEEP DOING IT? Somebody recently commented that they find the Bible boring and I was like you need to find a modern translation because if you can even vaguely understand what’s actually going on that shit is WILD. Turns out humans have always been crazy AF and personally I actually find that kinda comforting. Makes a lot of modern shit seem less unmanageable. Another great example is the whole Onan thing. It’s wild that somebody decided to make it about masturbation when if you really get down to it it’s a story about a dude who thinks he’s being slick by obeying the letter of the current law to (literally) screw his widowed sister in law out of her rightful property and THAT story is TIMELESS.
I have personally experienced librarians and they have helped me when in need.
I rejected christianity sometime as an early teen.
I don’t remember my full reasoning but I did not like the idea of getting up early Sunday morning to do the church stuff.
It never got replaced by anything.
I find it funny that there was a time where atheists on the internet were just called edge lords (or still, idk) for not believing in god and voicing that opinion. I remember being like 8 years old and thinking: wow that is stupid, why would anyone believe that. That was pre internet, i didn’t have to be influenced by other edge lords and i didn’t read any books about it. But somehow it’s in certain parts of the world weirder to come to that conclusion than believing in the all mighty super being.
Same. My mother actually sent me to Sunday school and I even did 1st grade at a Catholic School. I too remembering how silly it all seemed even at that age. Luckily the school closed down after that first year or she would have kept sending me there. I always wonder if the indoctrination would have taken if I’d have to keep going year after year.
During that time period it wasn’t so much being an atheist that made someone an edge lord, but in how they went about communicating that to others.
I’m an atheist but I think Zoroastrianism is cool.
My religion is fundamentally based on the idea of gay catgirl supremacy and worship. Service to the catgirls may come in the form of headpats and sacrifices are accepted in the form of baked juicy chicken :3
I believe it partially, I’m sikh and I think a lot of rules were based on them needing to identify each other or living in times of war, like keeping long hair and a beard, always carrying a kirpan (dull small blade these days used to be a full sized sword til the british forced changes)
Most of the shit is legit just telling you to be a good person because we all come from the same place and goto the same place. Energy, doesn’t really have an afterlife, which I hated as a kid. Was so jealous other ppl get afterlifes lol.
I kinda like the concept, like the one omniscient god can’t die or really live becaue they can’t die, experince pain, or get hurt, so we live and exist to experience life/death, etc. for them. That’s why once you stop caring about wordly desires you rejoin god.
Idk it’s kinda fun and makes sense, kinda supports my personal belief that we all evolved to eventually become god like beings (not us but descendants millions of years from now)
Like if a god exists, they would set into motion all the events that need to occur for life to exist and eventually humans to evolve, but we aren’t the final step or goal. It’s like a simulation game where they know what combination of events leads to another god like being existing.
Or the more fun option is that time isn’t linear, and whatever god is, is the furthest evolution of the human race and it loops back creating itself in a paradox.
