Atheist always bash us about our faith in God? Well, their faith goes to the brink unbelievability.
Well, let’s put aside for a moment the relatively minor errors: the fact that “atheists” is the correct plural and the sweeping false generalizations that atheists
always bash Christians for their faith.
Your biggest mistake right out the gate is the claim that atheism involves faith. Atheism (literally, “not theism” or “without gods”) isn’t a faith or belief: it’s the lack of faith and the lack of belief in gods.
This isn’t a minor semantic distinction. I equally lack faith in plenty of other gods, including the Hindu gods. I don’t walk around all day holding on to some “faith” that Shiva’s not real. There’s no faith involved: I just don’t believe there’s a Shiva because there’s no convincing evidence of it. In the same exact way, I lack belief in the Norse gods, the Hebrew god, and the Greek god.
It’s not faith to say, “I only accept claims for which there is a good evidence.”
As to your video – and don’t you just love these posters who throw up a link and run? – right from the title, it’s already an epic fail. Physics itself indicates that there’s a creator? Please.
Theists like to point out that if the cosmological constants for our universe had been only slightly different –
slightly different – then the universe would be totally different and we wouldn’t be here. Therefore, there must have been a god who made it
just so.
Can you spot the flaw in this logic? Go on, take a minute to think about it.
I like to use the analogy of a bridge hand. Do you know what the odds are of being dealt a perfect bridge hand (ace through king, all of the same suit)? It’s somewhere in the range of one in several billion. But what are the odds of being dealt any other hand at all, any other random arrangement of cards that we don’t think of as special?
The odds are exactly the same.
Just because something is unlikely – and any combination is equally unlikely – doesn’t mean that it’s arranged by an intelligence. We happened to get this outcome, and we happen to be here. If the constants had been different, we’d have a different universe. Perhaps that universe would have a different kind of life, and perhaps it would have no life. You’re making the mistake of taking the current situation and assuming – without any good reason – that it was the
goal.
Some theists say that the odds of life forming on its own are so radically unlikely that there must be a god, but this argument also has two fundamental mistakes. First, without knowing the exact way that life came to be – and we don’t know the exact way it happened, along with other factors – it’s impossible to determine likelihoods at all. And second, even if we could deterine that it’s “unlikely” for life to form, the claim that some eternal, infinitely complex and intelligent “creator” exists all by himself without any explanation
increases the unlikelihood and
increases the complexity you’d have to explain away.
If the claim is just “there are laws that the universe operates by; therefore, god,” then that’s just ridiculous. The “laws” of physics are not proscriptive laws, like the speed limit. They’re
descriptive: they are descriptions of how matter behaves. Just because our language happens to use the word “law” for both doesn’t mean you can conflate them. You can’t say, “Oh, gee, laws have creators, and so the universe has laws, and so therefore, the universe’s laws have a creator” when the word “law” means completely different things each time you use it.
Anyway, those are my typical responses to this kind of intellectual claptrap from believers. I didn’t watch this particular video you posted because it looks very much like a hack job that has nothing new or original to offer. If you disagree, please post a short summary of what you consider to be the most compelling points offered in the video, and we can discuss them.
