AronRa
Administrator
Yesterday, I got the following email:
Imagine having the exact same conversation repeated point by point at least once a week every week for 25 years and counting, correcting the same mistakes every single time; except that those mistakes are never acknowledged and will only be repeated yet again by that same person, as if those errors had never been pointed out.
>> Obligatory citation of Romans 1:20.
As I explained in my book, after this, the passage goes on to imply (in the modern interpretation) that all atheists are hateful, evil, twisted, perverted, arrogant, and full of gay pride. It also says we worship the creation rather than the creator. I take that to mean that we actually study the natural world with awe and wonder, and that we accept evidence while apologists deny it to believe something else on faith. Remember also that everywhere except the Bible, a fool is defined as one who too readily accepts improbable claims of credulous sources on insufficient evidence and is thus easily duped by a lie. So it's no surprise that the Bible and the Qur'an both give the opposite definition from common parlance. So whenever someone says to me, “the fool says in his heart there is no god,” I like to reply with Jeremiah 8:8: “How can you say, ‘We are wise, and the law of the LORD is with us’? Behold, the lying pen of the scribes has made it into a lie.”
Somehow apologists interpret the above citation of Romans 1 from verse 18 onward to mean that everyone really knows that God exists, whether we admit it or not. First off, even if we pretend that the Bible is the authority they imagine it to be, these comments still didn’t apply to everyone in the world; they were directed only to a particular subset of Jews and Gentiles who were quarreling over who knew God better. Secondly, the passage actually requires that the reader simply assume the conclusion that “creation” requires a creator, but that’s the fallacy of question begging. What if we call it “reality” instead? Otherwise the passage gives no explanation of how anyone (much less everyone) is supposed to “know” that God exists.
There are also many other verses which prove that this cannot be the correct interpretation, beginning with the 16th verse of this very chapter from Romans where it says that the gospel is the power of God for salvation “to everyone who believes,” which implies that there are also those who do not believe. 2 Thessalonians 1:8 says the same thing. 1 Thessalonians 4:5 says the Gentiles don’t know God. According to 1 Samuel 3:7, Samuel didn’t know God, and Exodus 5:2 says Pharaoh didn’t either. Jeremiah 9:3 has God himself complaining about people who don’t know him. 1 Corinthians 8:6–7 also states unambiguously that there are people who do not know that there is a creator god, much less who he is. So the Bible clearly admits in several places that there are people who do not believe in the god of Abraham, either because they believe in other gods instead or because they believe in no gods at all.
>> "….even the material universe declares the glory of God!"
Christians claim that the rocks and stones themselves sing praises to Jesus. The Qur'an says much the same thing about Allah, and the Bhagavad Gita says something similar about Lord Krishna too. But in fact, there is nothing in nature that is actually indicative of any god, much less any particular god. That again is just the question-begging fallacy of circular reasoning that is ubiquitous throughout religion, every religion. The Jewish Torah, the Christian gospels, the Qur’an of Islam, the Kitabi-Aqdas of Bahá’u’lláh, the Hindu Vedas, the Avestas of Zarathustra, the Adi Granth of the Sikhs, the Mahabarata’s Bhagavad Gita, the Book of Mormon, and the Urantia Book are all declared by some devotees to be the “absolute truth” and the “revealed word” of the “one true god,” and believers of each say the others are deceived. The only logical probability is that they are all deceived, at least to some degree. You all believe in your various scriptures without question, reservation or reason, and you think the strength of your faith is that you're unreasonable. Which is why you will never correct any error no matter how solidly proved, and thus you will never improve.
>> Obligatory citation of Hoyle's "tornado in a junkyard" fallacy, followed immediately by the argument from improbability fallacy.
Natural selection is a deterministic process, one of several to show that things don't "just happen by chance". You have to ignore an awful lot about physics and chemistry, population genetics and everything we really do know about evolution to instead pretend that a bunch of dirt gathered together to make a man like it says in the sacred fables. Declaring "zero chance" of evolution is no different than remembering everything you did yesterday, logging every interaction you had exactly where and when all that happened, and inevitably calculating that the odds against all of that happening in precisely that sequence and timing make yesterday virtually impossible. You do that because you don't want to understand evident reality. You want to make-believe something else instead.
Another error in your perception is the assumption that complexity implies a designer. Quite the opposite actually. Any pattern emerging from the molecular level will inevitably be complex with numbers that seem vast at our scale. A hallmark of intelligent design would be an efficient simplicity such as we do NOT see anywhere in biochemistry. The absurdly unnecessarily complex mechanisms we see instead imply a haphazard incidental incremental assembly.
>> Obligatory Projection fallacy,
as if evolution is a religion;
as if science relies on faith, just like religion does;
as if science is biased just like religion is;
as if there is no evidence for evolution, the Big Bang, abiogenesis, etc.;
as if there is evidence for creation, Noah’s flood, God, etc.;
as if religion is reasonable just like science is;
as if religion can be confirmed empirically and experimentally just like science;
as if creationism is scientific.
It's the time-honored apologetic of "I'm rubber, you're glue", projecting your own faults onto those who will not share them. It's a form of the tu quo quee fallacy that I call "the pot calling the silverware black". By pretending that those without faith have faith too, and are therefore just as bad as you, you are admitting how bad faith is. I know that already. I am an apistevist. I reject faith as the most dishonest position it is possible to have. Any belief that requires faith should be rejected for that reason. I have evidence instead, and it is compelling.
The truth is what the facts are, what we can show to be true, NOT whatever else we might rather assume or imagine beyond or instead of that. But you will run and hide from the facts like believers always do, literally in fear of the truth. You believe as you do because you've been indoctrinated, inculcated and conditioned to defend the faith or else face the threat of a fate worse than death, as if your belief is your personal identity and that any correction to the errors you're parroting would be a damnable offense, be it blasphemy, heresy or apostacy. Your religion says these are all crimes; according to your fragile, faith-based belief system of nothing but lies, each of these alleged crimes deserve the death penalty, because they are all penalties against indecent inquiry. You're not allowed to think. Instead you're forced to believe what you're told, simply because you were told to, and don't you dare question that.
No evolutionary scientist ever embraced creationism, but the reverse happens quite often. Because some few people out there actually care what the truth is. That's why atheism is on the rise in all fifty states and around the world, even in Sharia countries where unbelievers can be executed for the thought crime of disbelief.
You don't understand what natural laws are either. Everything that exists has properties. When we humans recognize those properties, we jot them down in the form of short summary statement or simple mathematics equation. We don't always get it right either. In the late 1800s, there were two laws proposed at about the same time with very similar names, the biogenetic law and the law of biogenesis. Both turned out to be flawed and thus discarded.
>> I will stop here, but would like to say more! Can we have an email correspondence?
You will not present even one argument that is verifiably true, logically valid and indicative of "creation". Every creationist argument depends on frauds, fallacies and fallacies and nothing else. Every logical fallacy has been used as an argument for God and every argument for God is a logical fallacy. Since you will not correct any of your own mistakes, you will only continue to misrepresent my position however you can. It is dishonest to assert your own baseless speculation as though it was a matter of fact, pretending to know things no one even can know, yet that is what all religions do.
Same conversation every day, with all the same fallacies and nonsense presented, corrected and repeated again, regardless of the believer or the religion. Can you break that pattern? I don't think you can.
Today, he answered back:
To which I replied:
Imagine having the exact same conversation repeated point by point at least once a week every week for 25 years and counting, correcting the same mistakes every single time; except that those mistakes are never acknowledged and will only be repeated yet again by that same person, as if those errors had never been pointed out.
>> Obligatory citation of Romans 1:20.
As I explained in my book, after this, the passage goes on to imply (in the modern interpretation) that all atheists are hateful, evil, twisted, perverted, arrogant, and full of gay pride. It also says we worship the creation rather than the creator. I take that to mean that we actually study the natural world with awe and wonder, and that we accept evidence while apologists deny it to believe something else on faith. Remember also that everywhere except the Bible, a fool is defined as one who too readily accepts improbable claims of credulous sources on insufficient evidence and is thus easily duped by a lie. So it's no surprise that the Bible and the Qur'an both give the opposite definition from common parlance. So whenever someone says to me, “the fool says in his heart there is no god,” I like to reply with Jeremiah 8:8: “How can you say, ‘We are wise, and the law of the LORD is with us’? Behold, the lying pen of the scribes has made it into a lie.”
Somehow apologists interpret the above citation of Romans 1 from verse 18 onward to mean that everyone really knows that God exists, whether we admit it or not. First off, even if we pretend that the Bible is the authority they imagine it to be, these comments still didn’t apply to everyone in the world; they were directed only to a particular subset of Jews and Gentiles who were quarreling over who knew God better. Secondly, the passage actually requires that the reader simply assume the conclusion that “creation” requires a creator, but that’s the fallacy of question begging. What if we call it “reality” instead? Otherwise the passage gives no explanation of how anyone (much less everyone) is supposed to “know” that God exists.
There are also many other verses which prove that this cannot be the correct interpretation, beginning with the 16th verse of this very chapter from Romans where it says that the gospel is the power of God for salvation “to everyone who believes,” which implies that there are also those who do not believe. 2 Thessalonians 1:8 says the same thing. 1 Thessalonians 4:5 says the Gentiles don’t know God. According to 1 Samuel 3:7, Samuel didn’t know God, and Exodus 5:2 says Pharaoh didn’t either. Jeremiah 9:3 has God himself complaining about people who don’t know him. 1 Corinthians 8:6–7 also states unambiguously that there are people who do not know that there is a creator god, much less who he is. So the Bible clearly admits in several places that there are people who do not believe in the god of Abraham, either because they believe in other gods instead or because they believe in no gods at all.
>> "….even the material universe declares the glory of God!"
Christians claim that the rocks and stones themselves sing praises to Jesus. The Qur'an says much the same thing about Allah, and the Bhagavad Gita says something similar about Lord Krishna too. But in fact, there is nothing in nature that is actually indicative of any god, much less any particular god. That again is just the question-begging fallacy of circular reasoning that is ubiquitous throughout religion, every religion. The Jewish Torah, the Christian gospels, the Qur’an of Islam, the Kitabi-Aqdas of Bahá’u’lláh, the Hindu Vedas, the Avestas of Zarathustra, the Adi Granth of the Sikhs, the Mahabarata’s Bhagavad Gita, the Book of Mormon, and the Urantia Book are all declared by some devotees to be the “absolute truth” and the “revealed word” of the “one true god,” and believers of each say the others are deceived. The only logical probability is that they are all deceived, at least to some degree. You all believe in your various scriptures without question, reservation or reason, and you think the strength of your faith is that you're unreasonable. Which is why you will never correct any error no matter how solidly proved, and thus you will never improve.
>> Obligatory citation of Hoyle's "tornado in a junkyard" fallacy, followed immediately by the argument from improbability fallacy.
Natural selection is a deterministic process, one of several to show that things don't "just happen by chance". You have to ignore an awful lot about physics and chemistry, population genetics and everything we really do know about evolution to instead pretend that a bunch of dirt gathered together to make a man like it says in the sacred fables. Declaring "zero chance" of evolution is no different than remembering everything you did yesterday, logging every interaction you had exactly where and when all that happened, and inevitably calculating that the odds against all of that happening in precisely that sequence and timing make yesterday virtually impossible. You do that because you don't want to understand evident reality. You want to make-believe something else instead.
Another error in your perception is the assumption that complexity implies a designer. Quite the opposite actually. Any pattern emerging from the molecular level will inevitably be complex with numbers that seem vast at our scale. A hallmark of intelligent design would be an efficient simplicity such as we do NOT see anywhere in biochemistry. The absurdly unnecessarily complex mechanisms we see instead imply a haphazard incidental incremental assembly.
>> Obligatory Projection fallacy,
as if evolution is a religion;
as if science relies on faith, just like religion does;
as if science is biased just like religion is;
as if there is no evidence for evolution, the Big Bang, abiogenesis, etc.;
as if there is evidence for creation, Noah’s flood, God, etc.;
as if religion is reasonable just like science is;
as if religion can be confirmed empirically and experimentally just like science;
as if creationism is scientific.
It's the time-honored apologetic of "I'm rubber, you're glue", projecting your own faults onto those who will not share them. It's a form of the tu quo quee fallacy that I call "the pot calling the silverware black". By pretending that those without faith have faith too, and are therefore just as bad as you, you are admitting how bad faith is. I know that already. I am an apistevist. I reject faith as the most dishonest position it is possible to have. Any belief that requires faith should be rejected for that reason. I have evidence instead, and it is compelling.
The truth is what the facts are, what we can show to be true, NOT whatever else we might rather assume or imagine beyond or instead of that. But you will run and hide from the facts like believers always do, literally in fear of the truth. You believe as you do because you've been indoctrinated, inculcated and conditioned to defend the faith or else face the threat of a fate worse than death, as if your belief is your personal identity and that any correction to the errors you're parroting would be a damnable offense, be it blasphemy, heresy or apostacy. Your religion says these are all crimes; according to your fragile, faith-based belief system of nothing but lies, each of these alleged crimes deserve the death penalty, because they are all penalties against indecent inquiry. You're not allowed to think. Instead you're forced to believe what you're told, simply because you were told to, and don't you dare question that.
No evolutionary scientist ever embraced creationism, but the reverse happens quite often. Because some few people out there actually care what the truth is. That's why atheism is on the rise in all fifty states and around the world, even in Sharia countries where unbelievers can be executed for the thought crime of disbelief.
You don't understand what natural laws are either. Everything that exists has properties. When we humans recognize those properties, we jot them down in the form of short summary statement or simple mathematics equation. We don't always get it right either. In the late 1800s, there were two laws proposed at about the same time with very similar names, the biogenetic law and the law of biogenesis. Both turned out to be flawed and thus discarded.
>> I will stop here, but would like to say more! Can we have an email correspondence?
You will not present even one argument that is verifiably true, logically valid and indicative of "creation". Every creationist argument depends on frauds, fallacies and fallacies and nothing else. Every logical fallacy has been used as an argument for God and every argument for God is a logical fallacy. Since you will not correct any of your own mistakes, you will only continue to misrepresent my position however you can. It is dishonest to assert your own baseless speculation as though it was a matter of fact, pretending to know things no one even can know, yet that is what all religions do.
Same conversation every day, with all the same fallacies and nonsense presented, corrected and repeated again, regardless of the believer or the religion. Can you break that pattern? I don't think you can.
Today, he answered back:
Repeating the same pattern is not breaking it. I'm working on a project at the moment, and will address this troll tomorrow.
