AtomSmasher

I have often debated the existence of god with coworkers and I can easily argue them into admitting that they have no proof and base their belief on blind faith, or they claim to know of evidence that provides solid proof, but they can't produce it immediately. Afterward a coworker sent me this link with supposed proofs of god's existence. I see the immediate fallacies and have begun a systematic rebuttal but I thought I would get some other oppinions, I know most of you have seen quite a few of these supposed proofs of god. It presents most of the basic arguements for christian fundamentalism but in the context of prooving the existence of god. I feel that this is so poorly put together I am loath to even respond but my silence would be an admission. So grudgingly I must show how poorly constructed this document is, even though it claims from the start to targetting a "logical person", it appears that the person who wrote it is not well versed in logic themself, or simply being dishonost to support a preestablished conclusion.

from: http://www.bibletruths.org/proofgod.html

Some Proofs of God
What would a logical person accept as proof of God? Would he require God Almighty to appear before him in order to acknowledge His existence? Would he apply this same criterion to everything else in life?

For example, do you believe in the President of the United States? Have you ever seen him in the flesh? He might counter that you have seen his photograph, but this does not meet the original criterion. Such photos are evidence based upon other evidence. That is, you have confidence in the news media and photography.

And what of George Washington of whom we have no original photographs? To believe in him requires that we depend on other evidence, primarily written documents by other men.

In all practicality and fairness then, let us apply the same criterion to the proofs of God that we would to anything else in life...namely evidence that demands our belief and places upon us a responsibility.

CREATION VS EVOLUTION
Either man was created by GOD with a purpose and a destiny, as the Bible declares, or he is a multifaceted complex organism accidentally and with no reason or purpose formed from non-living nothing.

If the latter be true, my innermost being is revolted at the loss. In addition, self-gratification is the only value to physical life so "eat, drink and be merry for tomorrow we die!" On the other hand, if creation is our origin, how our being rejoices with hope and life takes on real meaning beyond the animal senses. We now have a purpose for living that gives our very existence real value. Let's examine the FACTS...

ENTROPY
The second law of thermodynamics states that in a closed system entropy increases1, which is to say that disorder increases or things become more disorganized. The ultimate closed system is the universe. According to many astronomers, the universe came into existence about 15 billion years ago2 out of nothing---the "Big Bang." Since then the universe has been running down, that is, it is becoming more disordered, or to say it another way, its entropy is increasing, and its energy is being irretrievably scattered, never to recover. Who caused the universe to appear suddenly out of nothing? Who decreed that its constituent particles must behave in a certain fashion---so that there is such a thing as nuclear energy, atoms made of assemblages of subatomic particles, unions of atoms (chemistry), and all that? The answer is obvious.

FOSSIL RECORD
If evolution (the slow process of natural selection and the transmutation of one plant or animal species into another) were true, many, many forms of transitional life should be easily found in the fossil record, but they are not. In the fossil record we find the absence of gradual evolutionary transformations, too few of "transitional" intermediates, and sudden appearances of fully formed organisms. Evolutionary biologists excuse themselves on this, and point to a claimed "incompleteness" of the fossil record. Paleontologists now regard the fossil record as adequate and complete.3 And, the missing links are still missing.

LIFE FROM LIFE
All observable evidence tells us that only life begets life. Life has never been observed to come from inorganic or lifeless materials, either in nature or in the laboratory. Those who put their faith in abiogenesis (life arising from lifeless chemicals by chance) have never advanced a credible scenario to explain how this might have happened. They make a number of implicit assumptions, none of which is supported by evidence. One of these is that life in its minimal form is simple (i.e., a self-replicating molecule). But without the protections of the cell, the lifetimes of these molecules are very, very short. Second, they presume that there was a "prebiotic soup" on the early earth. Evidence should exist in the geologic record if this were so, but none exists. While there are organic chemicals in the oldest rocks, they are all remnants of living things.4 There are also theoretical objections to the "prebiotic soup." Amino acids, the building blocks of life, cannot form if there is oxygen in the atmosphere. And if there is no oxygen, there is no ozone, which filters out almost all the sun's harmful ultraviolet radiation. With no ozone the lethal dose of ultraviolet is acquired by contemporary organisms in about 0.3 second; for the organic compounds required in the abiogenesis theory it would be comparable.5 Another assumption is that life emerged gradually over a long period of time. Paleontologists tell us that the fossils from the Cambrian epoch---the earliest epoch in which fossils are found---came into being very rapidly ("the Cambrian explosion"), representing at least 70 phyla6, including all of the 30 or so counted today.. This is evidence that all life, including you and me, came from the hand of the ONE Who is life.7

PROBABILITY
The probability of the origin of life by accident is beyond all reason. To illustrate probability, we may line up two objects, "A" and "B" in two orders, AB or BA. Three objects may be lined up in six different orders. (The formula for calculating the number of ways n objects can be arranged is 1×2×3×4 … ×n, called n factorial or n!.) For four objects, the number of ways is thus 24, for 5 objects it is 120 ways, for 10 it is 3,628,800, and for 15 it is a little over one trillion (1 followed by 12 zeroes, or 1012), for 20 it is a little more than 1018. Now, what is the point? A cellular enzyme molecule in a modern cell consists of a chain of some 100 to 500 amino acids, of which there are 20 or so kinds in living systems. Calculating the probability of a functional enzyme happening by chance out of the supposed "prebiotic soup" of randomly-occurring organic chemicals is more complicated than the n! used in the examples above (which assumes n kinds of items arranged n at a time), because in an enzyme there can be repeated amino acids and there are more than 20 places in the chain to put the 20 amino acids. Molecular biologist, Michael Denton, generously estimates that there is one chance in 1020 for amino acids to just happen to join up in the right order to form a simple enzyme molecule.8 Even if this did happen, we still would not have life, only a tiny part of a complete set of enzymes and DNA for a living cell.

Now calculate the chances of this one enzyme molecule somehow coming together with some 100 other required different but similarly improbable enzymes at the same time and somehow being enclosed by a membrane in order to hold them all together to form a living cell: the probability is less than one in (1020)100, or one in 102000. Compare this number (102000) with the total number of atoms in the entire observable universe. Now this must be a really a mind-boggling number! It is "only" 1080, cosmologists estimate.9 So one chance in 102000 is too infinitesimally small to be imagined!

Critics say "but there are billions and billions of planets out there!" Scientists are now finding that the universe is not as habitable as once thought, and that a life-friendly planet like the earth is rare indeed.10 But let us suppose for the sake of comparison that every atom in the universe is a life-friendly planet. Then the probability of life arising by chance on at least one of them is 1080 times as large, or one chance in 101920 (that is, 1 in 102000/1080). Is one chance in 101920 any more imaginable?

But the critics say, "You don't calculate the probability right!" They suppose that there would be billions of simultaneous trials going on all the time, and in their theory you only have to get one molecule that self-replicates (self-replicators do exist).11 You must not base your calculation on sequential trials, they say. However, because these long-chain protein molecules do not last long unprotected, abiogenesis requires the occurrence by accident of all 100 or so enzymes, plus matching DNA or RNA (the "blueprint" molecules which contain the code for assembling the necessary enzymes), all at once, in one place, within a very complicated membrane. Therefore we believe that the probability calculation stands.

THE WORD OF GOD
The Bible alone is proof of the existence of God! Write P.O. Box 962, Loomis, CA 95650-0962 for a FREE study entitled "Proofs the Bible is the Word of God."

THE EVIDENCE OF CHRIST IN YOU
If you are a Christian, your new spiritual birth is evidence of a living God. You have the evidence within yourself!

He that believeth on the Son of God hath the witness in himself: he that believeth not God hath made him a liar; because he believeth not the record that God gave of his Son. And this is the record, that God hath given to us eternal life, and this life is in his Son. I John 5:10-11
Therefore if any man [be] in Christ, he is a new creature: old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new. II Corinthians 5:17
"…Christ in you, the hope of Glory." Colossians 1:27


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1 Microsoft Bookshelf 98 CD.
2 Deborah Zabarenko, "Universe to Endure and Expand Forever, Teams of Astronomers Say," Reuters News Service, Nando Times at www.nando.net, 9 Jan 1998 (quoted in Hugh Ross, "Big Bang Gets New Adjectives-Open and Hot," Facts & Faith Vol 12 No 1, 1st Quarter 1998); Hugh Ross, "Spectral Lines Don't Lie," Facts for Faith 7 (4th Quarter 2001)
3 Christopher R. C. Paul, "Adequacy, Completeness and the Fossil Record," The Adequacy of the Fossil Record. New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1998; M. J. Benton, M. A. Wills and R. Hitchin, "Quality of the Fossil Record Through Time," Nature No. 403, 2000 (both quoted in "Evolutionists are losing their best excuses," Facts for Faith, Quarter 2, 2000).
4 Hubert P. Yockey, "The Soup's Not On," Facts & Faith 10, no 4 (1996).
5 Michael Denton, Evolution: A Theory in Crisis. Adler & Adler, 1986, p. 262.
6 Fazale Rana, "Extinct Shell Fish Speaks Today," Connections, Vol 3, No 2 (2nd Quarter 2001)
7 John 1:1-4.
8 Michael Denton, op. cit., p. 323.
9 Encyclopædia Britannica,. "Superunification and the Planck Era," Encyclopædia Britannica CD 97, 1996.
10 Gonzales, Brownlee, and Ward, "Refuges for Life in a Hostile Universe." Scientific American, October 2001; Brownlee and Ward, Rare Earth: Why Complex Life is Uncommon in the Universe. Copernicus, 2000.
11 Ian Musgrave, "Lies, Damned Lies, Statistics, and Probability of Abiogenesis Calculations," The Talk Origins Archive at www.talkorigins.org, 21 Dec 1998.

SanDiegoAtheist

If all I had to go on was a SINGLE book which contained George's supposed story, and that book was the centerpiece of a religion, I'd have reasons to doubt George's existance as well. Religions aren't exactly known for unbiased accounts - something that should CERTAINLY be evident given the number of competing and contradictory religions that humans have given birth to. Even a theist should be willing to acknowledge that every religion EXCEPT theirs is not only biased, but fraudulent.

With these other contemporaries named, we have numerous different sources which ALL agree on the basic facts of who that person was, what they did, and when they existed. There is no such attestation towards Jesus of Nazareth until well after his death. The evidence provided for Jesus is much more in line with that provided for the events and characters in the Iliad and the Odyssey. It is much more akin to asking me whether I believe Odysseus or Achilles were real historic personages - in BOTH of the previous cases, I tend to believe that the Homeric versions of the same may very well have been based on real people and events, but that the ACTUAL people and events are probably blown considerably out of proportion and I don't consider the account reliable (even though the ancient Greeks considered it to be quite accurate history) unless there is other evidence supporting the allegation (for example, there is external evidence that Troy WAS besieged by the Greeks, so I tend to believe that it's very likely that the stories were based on an actual event).



Can you say "bifurcation fallacy"? I knew you could. There are, of course, FAR more possiblities - there are probably ten thousand different types of religious creation around ALONE, and many modern versions have ZERO problem with including evolution into their paradigm (see Catholicism, some forms of day-age creation, etc).

Of course, this is beyond a bifurcation fallacy in that the phrasing is also designed to "poison the well" by casting scorn on the alternative.



*snicker* you mean lets examine MY misrepresentation of the facts which either comes from dishonesty (Pious fraud anyone?) or simple ignorance.

Besides, even *IF* this sadsack routine is correct:

1) whether or not you like a fact doesn't change it - if existance IS meaningless, bewailing that fact won't actually make it go away.

2) what is the actual difference between GOD giving you meaning and YOU giving you meaning? In the end, they appear to both be rather arbitrary - just in the GOD case, YOU don't have to actually make decisions and chart your own course, finding your OWN meaning in the universe - GOD's already done that for you.



Really? Do tell - ok, show me some evidence as to who/what YOU think caused the universe to 'suddenly appear' - please note, a book written by a nonscientific tribe with substandard knowledge of astronomy and astrophysics (even for the time period) WELL after the fact (even if somehow you think the universe only 6000 years old) is NOT admissible as evidence.

Until then, I'll be perfectly content to say that there are some questions that we don't yet have answers to. The fact that the ancient hebrews believed that insanity was caused by demons simply because they didn't have a better explanation did NOT make that explanation right. It might be NICE to have a ready answer for every question, but that doesn't mean the universe will oblige you.

In short, the answer is obvious ONLY if you already decided on the answer before looking at the question.



Typical quote mining here I believe, but I'm not interested enough to look it up. I do however know for a fact that paleontologists do NOT regard the fossil record as complete in the sense that this author seems to mean (e.g. that we have a fully complete record of species). The consensus on this issue is that we've found far less than 1% of the fossils that are out there - indeed, there are fossil deposits that contain literally cubic miles of fossils still to be excavated I SUSPECT that the authors misquoted here are noting that the record IS complete enough to demonstrate morphological change due to evolution at every major demarcation level from species on up.

And of course, the missing links aren't missing when you realize that EVERY fossil is in reality a transitional fossil. Ten thousand years ago, humans looked slightly different from now - shorter & stockier as a rule. They were the human species THEN - we are it now.

Generally, when creationists speak of a "missing link", they want a species that is exactly "half this" and "half that", without realizing that is a complete and total misunderstanding of evolution - that evolution is a very gradual shading of one species into another - a smooth slope, rather than a disjunction.



Again, an argument from ignorance. First off, and most telling to the scientific knowledge of the author of this website, the odds of having a high O2 atmosphere without life is essentially nil, since oxygen is highly reactive and will bind with just about anything else in the environment. The reason we have O2 in the atmosphere is BECAUSE of life - photosynthetic processes produce it as product.

A second problem with this paragraph is the fact that it makes the unstated assumption that life began on land - something I don't think ANY biologist would agree with - there would be HUGE problems associated with abiogenesis emerging on land, the LEAST of which would be UV radiation.

Water, apparently unknown to the author of this website, is a FAR better radiation blocker than O3, and water would certainly be required for abiogenesis.

The notation about the Cambrian explosion is also ignorant, since it is apparent that the Cambrian explosion, while seeming to be quite quick from OUR vantage point hundreds of millions of years away, actually DID take quite a lot of time - many millions of years. HARDLY simultaneous creation. And of course, we DO have fossils from before then, just not very many - for several reasons, the first being that the further back we go, the more 'primitive' life was - and fewer and fewer species had body plans involving hard parts - the only things that can really fossilize at all. You don't exactly expect things like amoeba's to fossilize well, do you?




Despite paying lip service to self replicating molecules above which are FAR simpler than the modern cell that is used as an example here, he seems to have forgotten about it completely. Last I checked, there wasn't a single line of abiogenesis research that was operating under the assumption that a modern cell was the starting point for life. Here's a hint - they EVOLVED into that complexity - they didn't start with it. Indeed, the citation for this particular paragraph is from a FAQ from talk.origins which notes that self-replicators of 16 subunits are known - a far cry from the "100 or so enzymes, plus matching DNA or RNA" that the author of this piece uses in their 'abiogenesis' calculation. Another example of either pious fraud, or outright ignorance.

The issue of protection IS a real one, but many hypothesis have been provided to account for it - early evolution occuring in clay substrates for one example - and of course, you don't have to have a modern cell for an early form of life to survive on its own - a simple 'ur-cell' with a simple lipid barrier around it (far far less complex than the example used above) would do just fine. Of course, we don't know how the stages evolved from a simple self-replicating molecule to a simple ur-cell, to a modern variation of the same - but by breaking it up into smaller chunks of evolution, rather than the GIGANTIC leap that the writer seems to assume is the case, the probabilities become dozens of orders of magnitude more likely.



From the reasoning of the rest of this tripe, I'm guessing it consists of a dozen Chick tracts and the sentence:

"The Bible is true because God says it is, and God is true because the Bible says He is".



Well, some of us were born right the first time. I guess others need to practice at it.

Cheers,

The San Diego Atheist

themistocles

Ah man, San Diego, I thought it was my turn to debunk the common fallacies.

Wheres the IIDF schedule?

AtomSmasher

My response:

I would consider a proof of anything supernatural as an acceptable proof that things supernatural exists, this would include a god in the Christian sense. As it stands, I have no reason to believe in the supernatural, which includes, gods, demons, psychics, faith healing, astrology, aliens, faeries, santa clause, unicorns, etc. God himself would not have to just appear in front of me, he would have to proove that he is supernatural. For example anyone can stand in front of me and claim to be god, but can he perform supernatural acts? A person dressed as Santa Claus does not prove the existance of the mythological Santa Claus, can he produce flying reindeer? That would be satisfactory proof.

According to the criteria I have established, god would not have to appear personally, but simply to demonstrate that the supernatural exists, and then communicate to me which particular theology is true.

Everything else is consistently verifiable, this introduction is meant to establish a criteria by which no proof of anything is possible, as we will see soon.

Yes.

No.

Following from the criteria previously established: "Would he require God Almighty to appear before him in order to acknowledge His existence?" then no. In fact, according to these criteria I cannot, right now, prove that my car exists, even if I have just left in the parking lot an hour ago. Unlike gods, cars and presidents do not violate physical laws, I have no reason to think it would not exist and I have a volume of consistent and easily verifiable evidence to support that. Therefore, it would be illogical to believe otherwise.

I see where this is going, to make a case for mysticism, one must first defeat logic.

Actually, there are many documents written personally by George Washington in addition to ones written by others, but that's besides the point. This is leading to the argument that: I cannot prove conclusively that George Washington existed, therefore the bible is true. The difference is that, George Washington does not make spectacular claims and there are not extraordinary things attributed to him. Nobody says George Washington killed 5000 Philistenes with a donkeys jaw.

What evidence demands belief? It it requires belief then it is not evidence. So far there have been no examples provided that support this.

But this is just an attempt to debase logic and facts based argument as a setup for the following "proofs" which do require faith.

False dichotomy. The auther obviously believes the former, but I doubt very many people can agree with the latter. Especially classifying it as an "accident", this argument already smells of straw.

fishbulb

Have a look at Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors by Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan (ISBN 0-345-3847205). It does an excellent job of addressing all of the "scientific" arguments presented here, and is a fascinating read too.

As for the other arguments, the first invites you to believe that there is just as much evidence for God as there is for Bush. Poppycock. There are literally thousands upon thousands of independent, verifiable documentary sources that attest to the existence of the President of the United States. God has one book that isn't even internally consistent, much less able to be corroborated with external sources, and personal testimony that also cannot be empirically corroborated and based on interpretations and assumptions which are also unsupported.

The last two aren't arguments at all; they are statements of faith.

Grumpy

No I don't, and yes I have. Funny how that works out, isn't it?

Brother Fred

Site states:

Why is it so incomprehensible that something could be without purpose? Since when does everything have to have a purpose?

Jinto

Wow. This site is really amazing. I used to be an atheist, but this site's impeccable logic and abundant evidence have convinced me of the error of my ways. I have confess my sins to God and accepted Jesus into my heart, and for the first time in my life I feel truly free!

By the way, it's still April 1 over here.

Godot

I just love how many theists choose to invoke the Great Chain of Being as the accepted form of evolution. Little d othey know that Romantic Darwinisticism pretty much died stillborn.

The real problem you face Atom, is that this shit isn't worthy of a response. Because the 2nd law of thermodynamics exists, the universe must have been created by god?!?
:banghead: :banghead: :banghead: :banghead: :banghead:

Hawkingfan

This falsely assumes that the two claims are equal. You can go to Washington and see the President, touch the President, hear the President. But you cannot do the same for god.
You can think of facts and theories (not just scientific ones, but ordinary everyday ones) as being on a scale of certainty. The certainty of a President is much higher than that of a god.

That almost describes the two ideas correctly, but not quite. Man is, in fact, "a multifacted complex organism accidentally and with no reason or purpose formed from" excess matter left over from the big bang and from the creation of the solar system (specifically from particles leftover from the particle/antiparticle annihilations).
That is not true. The big bang is thought to have come from an extremely hot and extremely tiny singularity which is indeed "something".
There is much more proof to natural selection than fossil records. We have witnessed rapid evolutionary changes in modern-day finches, for instance. Some changes were under 30 years.
This is an absolute lie. As I once said in another thread--If you stick some ammonia, methane and a few other simple chemicals into a jar and subject them to ultraviolet light then after a week or two you get a mixture of organic molecules, including amino acids (the building blocks of protein). So current theories propose a "primordial soup" of dilute organic chemicals. Somewhere a molecule happened to form which could make copies of itself out of other molecules floating around in the soup, and the rest is history.
Amino acids can't produce UNLESS they are exposed to UV light! So the above statement does not argue against the theory, but supports it!
And that is exactly what happened. The person above is assuming pure oxygen has always been around since the beginning of the earth. This could not be farther from the truth. The early atmosphere was one that had very little oxygen and would have in fact been very poisonous to modern man. It had sulfur oxide, methane, and other gases that were emitted into the atmosphere from within the earth and from the rocks. And as someone else pointed out, a small number of molecules were able to combine with them and release oxygen as a waste product.