Stupid Atheist Tricks

From Sandwalk Blog

The Thought CriminalWednesday, May 30, 2012 8:19:00 AM
No time to listen to him this morning. Is it important?

"The answers, by the way, are no, no, and no. But you already knew that, didn't you?"

You "know" that? Don't you actually believe that?

If God did actually do 1 and 3, then the most determinedly atheistic and most rigorous of science (in my experience the one isn't anything like a guarantee of the other) couldn't do more than tell you how it was done and not more than that - even if full evidence and full analysis were available and possible, which they never will be. Science can't go beyond what the physical evidence can show and if God is the actual creator of the universe, that physical evidence can show no more than how God did it. What you think on either side of the question of if God did it can't be anything but belief or, as I suspect it usually is, preference.

2. is more problematic because it is a question about actual events in prehistory. We have no access to "original" humans, never mind access to their actions, understanding or intentions. We don't even have that in many non-original people living now. As even the biblical creation myth says that the first two people went bad fairly soon after they were first made, you'd have a mighty narrow range of entirely missing evidence to consider before you could know anything about it.

As someone who accepts evolution, you'd have to convince me you'd come up with a definitive definition of what African population constituted the "original" humans. And that would be before trying to divine what their actions, understandings and intentions were in order to assert their moral stature. Convincing me you'd identified the Adams and Eves would be a lot easier than the rest of it.

Of course, that is if you want to make a meaningful distinction between belief and knowledge. Muddying that line would seem to me to serve efforts like climate change denial, anti-vaccination fanaticism, the Intelligent Design industry, etc. Pretending to know what is merely believed can make someone arrogant, it can't make them any more accurate or persuasive to those not already predisposed.

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Arek W.Wednesday, May 30, 2012 11:53:00 AM
The Thought Criminal said:

"Science can't go beyond what the physical evidence can show..."

Science can "see" everything humans can "see" (because science is made by humans) and much more (because it uses advanced technology).

If science cannot go beyond what the physical evidence can show, then how can you?

"If God did actually do 1 and 3, then the most determinedly atheistic and most rigorous of science (...) couldn't do more than tell you how it was done and not more than that..."

And how do you know if 1 and 3 were done by God and not by Unicorn?

Are you using "other way of knowing" (aka making stuff up) ?


The Thought CriminalWednesday, May 30, 2012 2:56:00 PM
Arek. I don't need science to tell me that the invasion of Iraq was a moral atrocity and a political disaster, which is good because science couldn't do that. I don't need science to know it's wrong to torture and murder children, which is just as good because science can't do that. I don't need science to know that the axioms and laws of mathematics are valid or that deductive logic is, which is good because science can't do that and, since science depends on those as prerequisites, I couldn't take science seriously without those. I can't even use science to know that it's a bad idea to lie about science or anything else because there is nothing in science that could possibly demonstrate that it is a bad idea.

And how do you know if 1 and 3.....

I wish atheists could comprehend the conditional mood, they don't seem to be able to twig onto it. Not to mention your need to cherry pick a partially elided -jeesh!- sentence out of a paragraph that ends, "What you think on either side of the question of if God did it can't be anything but belief or, as I suspect it usually is, preference."

It's an "other way of knowing" to believe that you can know 1, 2, or 3, instead of believing them. Which was the point of my comment.

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