I pray to God that we will outgrow religion at some point.
I havenāt heard this analogy for a while, Kudos for that sir.
you could look at it as more than 99.9999% of the University would kill us instantly or you could ask why and how is there 1% of the universe which humans can thrive inā¦Earth floating in the middle of nowhere surrounded by dead planets but we are on part of 1% which can support human lifeā¦I guess this must be just out of luck, not purposely done?
Interesting that you āPray to God that we will outgrow religion at some pointā but you call yourself Atheist which I am lead to believe is someone who does not believe in God, so from you comment you obviously believe in God, therefore you are not an atheist
So, no attempt to acknowledge the answers to your other canards, instead you post another one. One thatās known as the āDouglas Adamsā Puddleā canard for reasons you will discover quickly upon looking that term up.
The idea that some fantastic magic entity arranged the Solar System for our benefit is an infantile fantasy. We are here because the conditions permitting our existence were in place here, and the relevant prior interactions took place.
Oh, and Earth isnāt unique in this respect. Numerous exoplanets have been discovered that exist in orbits around their parent stars, facilitating the existence of aqueous chemistry on those planets. If memory serves, the Trappist-1 system alone has three such planets.
Just because you donāt understand basic scientific concepts, doesnāt validate the fatuous āMagic Man did itā assertion. Not least because the mythology asserting that your cartoon magic man exists, also contains other assertions that are known to be cretinous bilge.
Any chance youāre going to learn any of the facts we keep presenting to you, as part of a free education that Harvard would charge you $200,000 for?
So sarcastic humour is another concept you donāt understand.
Have you learned anything of real substance at any time in your life, or have you wasted all of your neurons on a goat herder mythology?
Serious question, @Soldier4christā¦do you struggle with reading comprehension?
@CyberLN ⦠the obvious riposte would be classified here in the UK as āunparliamentaryā ā¦
I live in the desert. But yet there is algae in my backyard. What is really strange is the algae only seems to appear in the one location that is suitable for algae. Must be a miracle! [satire]
I LOLed! Go, Kevin, Go!
Seriously, @Soldier4christ, i think reading that bible has made your brain rot. You must have a seriously dysfunctional humour and satire detector. But thatās what comes with a brain on religion is, I guessā¦
I was being ātounge in cheekā and indulging in sarcasm and irony. I was trying to get a laugh.
Doesnāt sound like much of a university to be honest.
Only if you presuppose there is a why? I personally try not to reason by making unevidenced presuppositions. How is much easier to answer, again just research how solar systems are formed, and you have an example of at least one that has formed in this way. You are asking why and how a hole exactly fits the puddle in it, the errancy of this reasooning has already been explained to you, but you seem unwilling to acknowledge this.
The existence of everything for it to be lucky is obje ctive fact, what we have no objective evidence for is any purpose behind it, and you havenāt even the integrity to acknowledge requests you demonstrate some objective evidence for this āpurposeā you are presupposing.
Or you have the irony impairment, that seems to be quite common among many religious apologists.
I shanāt even feign surprise you have again returned to preach, and again failed to address any of the objections to your verbiage.
It was so obviously meant as irony, that I am starting to think @Soldier4christ is simply trolling. He does not seem interested in honest debate.
An earlier poster in this same thread mentioned the puddle anology, which was a much, much better way of expressing the idea that I tried to present by my anology with seeds (it was Get Off My Lawn who posted the puddle anology).
As GOML indicated, the hole was there and water took itās shape in the process of becoming a puddle. It is the same with life. The conditions on this planet created life adapted for it, not some lottery with insurmountable odds that our plant is ideally suited for our kind of life. No luck involved.
Also, Soldier4christ, I donāt deny Godās existence out of spite, because I like to sin, or because I donāt want to be held accountable. I started questioning Godās existence when organized religion began to interfere with my job in the medical field . . . and people were dying because of religion.
Once I began questioning religionās validity, I began to question Godās existence.
I can honestly say that abandoning religion (althoughāin fairnessāI still observe Yom Kippur, I fast, and I light memorial candles. This may seem two-faced, but I still have my culture) made me a better paramedic and allowed me to give a better standard of care to my patients.
There have been āreal worldā benefits from abandoning God.
As for how religion killed people in my field, please consider:
- Firebombing abortion clinics and Planned Parenthood centers. There were innocent casualties, such as small children with horrific burns.
- People with AIDS dying alone after being ostrasized by family, friends, and society.
- Queer bashing.
- Jehovaās Witnesses dying (including children) from a want of a blood transfusion.
- Children dying during exorcisms instead of the parents seeking psychiatric help.
There are many other examples. The Brescia church explosion in Italy (an example that I frequently use to reinforce my points about religion) is another example.
Religion kills.
It simply means life will emerge where it can. Whatās your point? What would really be amazing is if your god thing created life on the sun. Now that would be a trick worth admiring.
By the way, your 1% number is being challenged regularly. While we have not yet found life on another planet, the potential for life has grown exponentially in the past 10 years. Itās now estimated that, depending on how you define the habitable zone, 29 to 74 percent of all planets could be belatedly habitable. Our definition of ālifeā has changed dramatically. Our ideas of āhabitableā have changed also. You are wallowing in ignorance of the universe around you.
Oooh, Iād watch that documentary.
Meanwhile, itās indicative once again, of how being a mythology fanboy has destroyed not only your critical faculties, but your basic human curiosity, and replaced both with a blind, facile attachment to the āMagic Man did itā mantra.
You see, with respect to the matter of the possibility of life being found on bodies other than Planet Earth, we have an entire thread devoted to this. Which you manifestly never bothered to look for, despite it appearing fairly frequently in the ālatest threadsā list, for example.
In that thread, I devoted an extensive dissertation to the approach being taken by scientists on this matter, with respect to the possibility of indigenous life forms being found in the future in the subsurface oceans of Europa and Enceladus here in the Solar System. Along with a discussion of the formidable technical difficulties that need to be overcome for certain types of mission to those bodies.
Youāll find said dissertation here.
Note that I stated therein, that I would actually be more excited if missions to either of those moons found a fully functional RNA world, because this would kill stone dead any doubts about the viability of prebiotic chemistry research. A fully functional RNA world found on either Europa or Enceladus would vindicate the decades of research by such people as Jack Szostak and Gerald F. Joyce, much of which Iāve covered in other dissertations here.
The irony applicable here, is that it was hearing the pontifications of mythology fanboys like you, that motivated me to check actual peer reviewed scientific papers, and determine whether or not said mythology fanboys were uttering anything remotely substantive. Whereupon I found that they were all lying.
Numerous specimens of your ilk have gatecrashed this and other rationalist forums, peddling the usual duplicitous apologetic fabrications in a vain attempt to dismiss cosmological physics, prebiotic chemistry and evolutionary biology, and all of them have lied through their teeth on these matters.
Itās amusing to see so many of your ilk treat the Ninth Commandment from the mythology they claim to be upholding, as discardable whenever it suits their apologetic convenience.
You might want to consider how badly this reflects not only upon the perpetrators of the aforementioned discoursive offences, but the religion they think theyāre ādefendingā via said conduct.
Thus far, youāve been fortunate in that your discoursive deficiencies have been primarily those of ignorance and indolence, though in a world where proper science education is freely available from a huge number of reputable sources, these are far from forgivable.
You are strongly advised to note, that several of us here are veteran observers of duplicity on the part of pedlars of apologetics, in some cases able to call upon decades of accumulated data in this regard. Yet others have benefited from a properly constructed, rigorous scientific education, and view darkly the dishonest treatment of science as a branch of apologetics by the usual suspects.
The short version: donāt bring a peashooter to an ICBM exchange.
Sorry, Iām a little late to this party. Been busy lately. Caught a bit of a break tonight. Anyway, to answer your questionā¦
For starters, are you looking for complete and exact, or would an overall general percentage suffice? I ask only because to get the answer you THINK you want, you will have to track down every atheist in existence and ask each individual atheist that question so that you can categorize each answer into its relevant group. (Just so you know, it might take a little while to do that.) Then you could (possibly) count the answers in each category and determine the percentage of each answer. To put it another way, you might as well have asked, āWhat is the favorite ice cream flavor of atheists?ā
It would seem you have zero understanding of what atheism is. Not that it was really necessary for me to point that out. But, hey, they donāt call me āCaptain Obviousā for nothing⦠(shrugging shoulders)ā¦
Gee, thatās a tough one⦠⦠Iāll give it a shot, thoughā¦
Isnāt it absolutely AMAZING how a pothole in the road is designed PERFECTLY to hold the water that fills it when it rains? Blows my mind every time I think about it. Oh, waitā¦
(Edit for cause and effect.)
Along with not understanding atheism, itās obvious that sarcasm is also not a strong point for you.