Douglas Adams on his atheism

A Nice Creationist Post

Sent in by Kevin T

absolute origin what is it? of life that is,the universe is another story
put a frog in a blender turn it on puree......what what do you get?
frog soup right? ok....lets put it(the frog soup) in the perfect environment for lets say a couple trillion years or so...what do you get? a couple trillion year old frog soup...anyone disagree? let me continue....all the components needed to PUT the frog together again are all there however there is no way possible no matter how long you wait for it to become a frog again...anyone dissagree? the idea of primordial soup being an absolute origin is proposterous to say the least. with what we know about DNA today it is a statistical zero that life arose from nothing. how did the eye develope? in whole working all at once? anyone think thats possible? the eye is a very complex machine and requires many working parts all at the same time: optic nerve, pupil ,retina are you really saying it all just happened at once? complex machines dont just happen they are designed anyone disagree? the truth is evolution doesnt hold up to the standards of science....it is the best guess scenario science has to offer for now. you cant prove the existance of GOD either, it is a faith in something not being seen,in the beholding there in lies the truth. is the glass half empty or is it half full? or is it simply a half glass of water? all three are correct but its how we chose to view the evidence that matters....so who is right? now we see in a mirror darkly, then i shall know even as i am known


Jim Arvo responds:
Good grief, Kevin T, those are some really ridiculous straw men you've erected. I'll briefly expose them for you, then you can attempt to shore them up if you wish, but with any luck you'll see the futility of it.

KT: "...lets put it(the frog soup) in the perfect environment for lets say a couple trillion years or so...what do you get? a couple trillion year old frog soup...anyone disagree?"

Well, not exactly. Most of the long molecules will eventually break down and you'll probably be left a mixture of short organic molecules. But if you still want to call that "frog soup", that's okay by me.

KT: "...all the components needed to PUT the frog together again are all there however there is no way possible no matter how long you wait for it to become a frog again...anyone disagree?"

Yes, all of the original components are still there. The only difference is the organization of the matter. Without an input of energy, and without other molecules to mediate the assembly, you are right, the short molecules will not re-assemble into a frog. Check.

KT: "...the idea of primordial soup being an absolute origin is preposterous to say the least."

Hold on! That was a huge leap you just made. The "frog soup" story is vastly different from the idea of life arising from a primordial soup. For example:

1) The "primordial soup" implies innumerable pockets of chemicals in different concentrations, at different temperatures, with various inputs of energy. In your scenario, the "soup" is presumably a uniform mixture of ingredients that is left to sit. It's absurd to think anything interesting will happen under those conditions. Life requires an environment that is far from equilibrium.

2) Only a vanishingly small proportion of the "primordial soup" need eventually find its way into a living organism. In your scenario, all of the material is needed for the organism, which is absurd.

3) The process of abiogenesis need only account for the simplest living organisms, with evolution then bootstrapping to higher forms. In your scenario the molecules must magically assemble into a higher organism directly, which is absurd.

4) Neither abiogenesis nor evolution have any foresight; if the process were to start anew, the chances of ending up with anything remotely similar to what we see today is effectively zero. In your scenario, the outcome is a specific higher organism, which is absurd.

KT: "...with what we know about DNA today it is a statistical zero that life arose from nothing."

Again you are making an enormous leap from one idea to another, probably paraphrasing something you heard from a creationist (and, frankly, I suspect that neither of you understands much of what you're talking about). First, it's very likely that the initial life forms were NOT DNA-based. Second, even if they were based on DNA, the sequence would be minute compared to what we see today. Third, your assertion about the statistical likelihood is no doubt based on ab initio assembly, which is a radically naive idea; nobody in their right mind is suggesting such a thing. So, if you wish to critique present theories about abiogenesis, a good starting point would be to learn something about what those theories are. Otherwise, you will continue to attack ridiculous straw men.

KT: "...how did the eye develop? in whole working all at once? anyone think thats possible?"

Again you attack a ridiculous straw man. The possible development of the eye has been explained in detail in many places (e.g. "The Blind Watchmaker" by Richard Dawkins). No, all the parts that we see in eyes today are NOT necessary for a useful eye. Even a single light receptor (something akin to a single rod in the eye) confers an advantage to the organism.

KT: "...the eye is a very complex machine and requires many working parts all at the same time: optic nerve, pupil ,retina are you really saying it all just happened at once?"

No, of course not! Only creationists make such outlandish claims. The rest of us are more concerned with doing real science and trying to solve real puzzles.

KT: "complex machines don’t just happen they are designed anyone disagree?"

It depends on what you mean by a "machine". Taken in the broad sense, which includes biological organisms, then obviously I disagree. Hundreds of complex self-assembling molecules have been identified and observed in the laboratory, and numerous adaptations in microorganisms have lead to radically new and useful structures and processes, such as the ability to metabolize nylon. So there are plenty of examples of highly complex things that arise through natural processes, without being "designed". The "argument from design" also has numerous other fatal flaws, so it never even gets past the stage of a logical fallacy, but that's another discussion.

KT: "the truth is evolution doesn’t hold up to the standards of science..."

Once again I'll make my usual observation and then challenge you to prove me wrong. I wager that you are completely ignorant of what the theory of evolution is, and what the evidence has shown. In my experience ONLY those who have no idea what science has shown with regard to evolution can make such absurd statements. You can easily shoot down my conjecture by showing me that you've actually studied evolution, and know what the major lines of evidence supporting it are. Can you do that? I strongly suspect that you cannot. It sounds to me that you've only availed yourself of creationist literature, which leaves you totally in the dark.

KT: "you cant prove the existence of GOD either, it is a faith in something not being seen,..."

Nobody is demanding that you "prove" the existence of your god; however we do demand that you provide some EVIDENCE for her. Without credible evidence, we have no more reason to believe in your particular deity than Zeus, Osiris, Mithra, Isis, or Krishna, to name just a few. One could just as easily choose to have "faith" in any of them. If you think the onus is on us to disprove your fanciful notions, then I challenge you to disprove Zeus.

By the way, I don't expect you to actually take me up on any of the challenges I've issued; I predict that you will either ignore them, or twist them into something absurd that you will feel capable of attacking. But... please do try to prove me wrong.

By the way, please learn to spell "empirical".

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10 Myths and Truths about Atheism

This was written by Sam Harris:
December 24, 2006
The Los Angeles Times

SEVERAL POLLS indicate that the term “atheism” has acquired such an extraordinary stigma in the United States that being an atheist is now a perfect impediment to a career in politics (in a way that being black, Muslim or homosexual is not). According to a recent Newsweek poll, only 37% of Americans would vote for an otherwise qualified atheist for president.

Atheists are often imagined to be intolerant, immoral, depressed, blind to the beauty of nature and dogmatically closed to evidence of the supernatural.

Even John Locke, one of the great patriarchs of the Enlightenment, believed that atheism was “not at all to be tolerated” because, he said, “promises, covenants and oaths, which are the bonds of human societies, can have no hold upon an atheist.”

That was more than 300 years ago. But in the United States today, little seems to have changed. A remarkable 87% of the population claims “never to doubt” the existence of God; fewer than 10% identify themselves as atheists — and their reputation appears to be deteriorating.

Given that we know that atheists are often among the most intelligent and scientifically literate people in any society, it seems important to deflate the myths that prevent them from playing a larger role in our national discourse.

1) Atheists believe that life is meaningless.

On the contrary, religious people often worry that life is meaningless and imagine that it can only be redeemed by the promise of eternal happiness beyond the grave. Atheists tend to be quite sure that life is precious. Life is imbued with meaning by being really and fully lived. Our relationships with those we love are meaningful now; they need not last forever to be made so. Atheists tend to find this fear of meaninglessness … well … meaningless.

2) Atheism is responsible for the greatest crimes in human history.

People of faith often claim that the crimes of Hitler, Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot were the inevitable product of unbelief. The problem with fascism and communism, however, is not that they are too critical of religion; the problem is that they are too much like religions. Such regimes are dogmatic to the core and generally give rise to personality cults that are indistinguishable from cults of religious hero worship. Auschwitz, the gulag and the killing fields were not examples of what happens when human beings reject religious dogma; they are examples of political, racial and nationalistic dogma run amok. There is no society in human history that ever suffered because its people became too reasonable.

3) Atheism is dogmatic.

Jews, Christians and Muslims claim that their scriptures are so prescient of humanity’s needs that they could only have been written under the direction of an omniscient deity. An atheist is simply a person who has considered this claim, read the books and found the claim to be ridiculous. One doesn’t have to take anything on faith, or be otherwise dogmatic, to reject unjustified religious beliefs. As the historian Stephen Henry Roberts (1901-71) once said: “I contend that we are both atheists. I just believe in one fewer god than you do. When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours.”

4) Atheists think everything in the universe arose by chance.

No one knows why the universe came into being. In fact, it is not entirely clear that we can coherently speak about the “beginning” or “creation” of the universe at all, as these ideas invoke the concept of time, and here we are talking about the origin of space-time itself.

The notion that atheists believe that everything was created by chance is also regularly thrown up as a criticism of Darwinian evolution. As Richard Dawkins explains in his marvelous book, “The God Delusion,” this represents an utter misunderstanding of evolutionary theory. Although we don’t know precisely how the Earth’s early chemistry begat biology, we know that the diversity and complexity we see in the living world is not a product of mere chance. Evolution is a combination of chance mutation and natural selection. Darwin arrived at the phrase “natural selection” by analogy to the “artificial selection” performed by breeders of livestock. In both cases, selection exerts a highly non-random effect on the development of any species.

5) Atheism has no connection to science.

Although it is possible to be a scientist and still believe in God — as some scientists seem to manage it — there is no question that an engagement with scientific thinking tends to erode, rather than support, religious faith. Taking the U.S. population as an example: Most polls show that about 90% of the general public believes in a personal God; yet 93% of the members of the National Academy of Sciences do not. This suggests that there are few modes of thinking less congenial to religious faith than science is.

6) Atheists are arrogant.

When scientists don’t know something — like why the universe came into being or how the first self-replicating molecules formed — they admit it. Pretending to know things one doesn’t know is a profound liability in science. And yet it is the life-blood of faith-based religion. One of the monumental ironies of religious discourse can be found in the frequency with which people of faith praise themselves for their humility, while claiming to know facts about cosmology, chemistry and biology that no scientist knows. When considering questions about the nature of the cosmos and our place within it, atheists tend to draw their opinions from science. This isn’t arrogance; it is intellectual honesty.

7) Atheists are closed to spiritual experience.

There is nothing that prevents an atheist from experiencing love, ecstasy, rapture and awe; atheists can value these experiences and seek them regularly. What atheists don’t tend to do is make unjustified (and unjustifiable) claims about the nature of reality on the basis of such experiences. There is no question that some Christians have transformed their lives for the better by reading the Bible and praying to Jesus. What does this prove? It proves that certain disciplines of attention and codes of conduct can have a profound effect upon the human mind. Do the positive experiences of Christians suggest that Jesus is the sole savior of humanity? Not even remotely — because Hindus, Buddhists, Muslims and even atheists regularly have similar experiences.

There is, in fact, not a Christian on this Earth who can be certain that Jesus even wore a beard, much less that he was born of a virgin or rose from the dead. These are just not the sort of claims that spiritual experience can authenticate.

8) Atheists believe that there is nothing beyond human life and human understanding.

Atheists are free to admit the limits of human understanding in a way that religious people are not. It is obvious that we do not fully understand the universe; but it is even more obvious that neither the Bible nor the Koran reflects our best understanding of it. We do not know whether there is complex life elsewhere in the cosmos, but there might be. If there is, such beings could have developed an understanding of nature’s laws that vastly exceeds our own. Atheists can freely entertain such possibilities. They also can admit that if brilliant extraterrestrials exist, the contents of the Bible and the Koran will be even less impressive to them than they are to human atheists.

From the atheist point of view, the world’s religions utterly trivialize the real beauty and immensity of the universe. One doesn’t have to accept anything on insufficient evidence to make such an observation.

9) Atheists ignore the fact that religion is extremely beneficial to society.

Those who emphasize the good effects of religion never seem to realize that such effects fail to demonstrate the truth of any religious doctrine. This is why we have terms such as “wishful thinking” and “self-deception.” There is a profound distinction between a consoling delusion and the truth.

In any case, the good effects of religion can surely be disputed. In most cases, it seems that religion gives people bad reasons to behave well, when good reasons are actually available. Ask yourself, which is more moral, helping the poor out of concern for their suffering, or doing so because you think the creator of the universe wants you to do it, will reward you for doing it or will punish you for not doing it?

10) Atheism provides no basis for morality.

If a person doesn’t already understand that cruelty is wrong, he won’t discover this by reading the Bible or the Koran — as these books are bursting with celebrations of cruelty, both human and divine. We do not get our morality from religion. We decide what is good in our good books by recourse to moral intuitions that are (at some level) hard-wired in us and that have been refined by thousands of years of thinking about the causes and possibilities of human happiness.

We have made considerable moral progress over the years, and we didn’t make this progress by reading the Bible or the Koran more closely. Both books condone the practice of slavery — and yet every civilized human being now recognizes that slavery is an abomination. Whatever is good in scripture — like the golden rule — can be valued for its ethical wisdom without our believing that it was handed down to us by the creator of the universe.

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