Hi - nice atheist here

grahamsnumber said:

Sure!

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grahamsnumber said:

I watched the video, and have a few comments.

• It is said, a few minutes into the video, that belief in evolution is based entirely on faith, and that no "true facts" have ever been found in support of it. Here I must strenuously disagree. A very common misunderstanding of the scientific community is that scientists are deathly afraid of accepted theories being disproved. In fact, the very opposite is true. In academia, the way you get ahead is exactly by changing or significantly extending current theories. You get a Nobel Prize by showing that something long accepted is wrong. Every physicist out there would be delighted to be the one who showed that Einstein's theory of gravity, General Relativity, was wrong. He'd be famous for centuries. The same holds true for evolution. No one has "faith" that evolution is true, and everyone would love to be the one to overturn it if it were false. However, the evidence for it is absolutely overwhelming. For example, it has been pointed out by biologists that we actually have more evidence for evolution just in genetic and chemical studies than we do that the Roman empire existed! And notice - this is not including the fossil record. Think about that. How do you know that the Roman Empire ever actually existed? It all comes down to evidence. Now, we have tons and tons of evidence that it did exist: we have many physical structures all over the western world, and we have lots and lots of written evidence from the time. But there is still some probability, some tiny, tiny probability, that it's all false - forged or misunderstood. Nothing has a probability of true zero. So maybe there's a 1 in a trillion trillion trillion chance that the Roman Empire didn't exist. Well, the chance the evolution isn't true, based only on genetic and other biological evidence, is less than that number. Throw in the fossil record, and the number drops way, way lower. Another misunderstanding I see a lot is that evolution is now at the same state that it was in the 19th century when Darwin first proposed it. Nothing could be further from the truth. Many scientists, over decades and decades, have tried to disprove it (that's what scientists do, all the time: try to disprove things) and have failed. What has happened is just the opposite: evidence has done nothing but accumulate at an ever-increasing rate. Remember, we now no longer even need the fossil record to prove evolution - that's just how the theory got started, and the vast majority of critics, such as are shown in the video, seem to be stuck arguing the evidence that was presented in 1859. Not only is it not true that "no true facts have ever been found that support it", in fact, no true fact has ever been found that doesn't support it.
  
  
• The Wall Street Journal article he quotes, from 2014, uses the long-disproven "fine-tuning" argument, which basically sees the apparent fine-tuning of the universe to support life as evidence of a supernatural intelligence. The article was not written by a scientist, but by a religious writer. Now, obviously, that's not a problem in itself. But it does frequently mean that the understanding of complex scientific ideas may not be completely accurate, and we do indeed see that here. For example, we really don't know all the factors that would be required for life to exist. Rather, we have some idea of the factors that would allow life as we know it here on Earth to exist. And even that understanding is limited because the process is so complex. It has been pointed out that this really is an example of life being fine-tuned for the environment in which it evolved, rather than the other way around. Another claim the article makes is that since we haven't discovered any life anywhere else, the theory of evolution is shot. One problem here is that although we haven't found life yet, we continue to find planets around other stars that seem like they'd be capable of supporting life of some kind, and we're finding them at an increasing rate. The search continues, but even if no life is found, it is not a disproof of evolution, but rather a statement of something we already know - that the process itself is complex and takes a long time - maybe complex and slow enough that it just hasn't happened anywhere else in our part of our own galaxy (remember, there are over a hundred billion galaxies, each with hundreds of billions of stars). And quoting Fred Hoyle, a physicist, not a biologist, on evolution is a weak version of the argument from authority, in which an expert is found and cherry-picked, rather than looking at the overwhelming number of actual biologists on the other side. Being an outsider is fine, and the arguments are interesting and valid to have, but you can't use the one person you can find who agrees with you and plop him down on the table as if it vastly bolsters your case. Because I'll find thousands of academics, every bit as qualified as Hoyle (much more qualified, actually, since they are experts in the biology itself) to say the opposite.
  
  
• Farther in, the 1st and 2nd Laws of Thermodynamics are brought up in a way that has long been shown to be based on a faulty understanding of those laws. One argument he makes is that the radioactive elements such as uranium must all have come into existence in the beginning, since they've been decaying ever since. However, this is false. The big-bang model states that originally, only energy came into existence (but even this is hard to understand, because a common version of the theory has time itself starting at the same event), and eventually you got only one type of atom: hydrogen. All the other atomic varieties come into existence through fusion taking place in the center of stars, and the heavier elements like uranium are created when a star explodes in a supernova, and the vast forces involved end up making the heavy elements by fusing together lighter ones. This happens continually. Physicists like Lawrence Krauss have talked a lot about the "nothing from nothing" idea that is so counter-intuitive to humans. His book A Universe From Nothing is a very good popular-level discussion of the issue. A subtle and oft missed point, I think, is that the word "theory" in science and math doesn't mean the same thing that it does in everyday English. When we use the word in our daily life, we mean something more like a hunch or an idea. Scientifically, the word refers to a solid body of work that has a consistent model and has been vetted by different experts for a very long time. The "theory of evolution" isn't just some armchair-based speculation that happened over a beer by a couple of dudes having a good time. Rather, it is a consistent model of an enormous body of data that has been examined from every possible direction and tested over and over again in every possible way for over a century by hundreds of thousands of scientists from all over the world. Another point is that it is tempting but disastrous to use your everyday visualizations when trying to understand physics that is outside our everyday experience. Those visualizations are very useful for living on Earth as a biological being of our size. But they can lead you far astray if you rely on them when thinking about the huge scale, like cosmology, or the tiny scale, like quantum mechanics. In both of those areas, you have to cast aside your preconceived visualizations of how things work, and rely solely on the mathematics. This is because visualizing things like a 4-dimensional curved spacetime are impossible to directly do. But understanding them is not impossible if you use mathematics. You might not be able to "see" a curved spacetime, but you can work with it and apply it successfully by using the math, and that leads to a certain kind of understanding. This is all the more true when trying to talk about the origin of the universe, where time itself becomes highly nonlinear - something that is utterly foreign to us.

Haha, well, this post got a bit longer than I thought it would. So I'll shut up now.

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grahamsnumber said:

The standard interpretation of the alpha and omega references in Revelation and the other "first and last" statements are that Jesus (and/or God) are eternal, and that there is no other god (CATHOLIC ENCYCLOPEDIA: Alpha and Omega (In Scripture)), not that God himself evolved.

It seems to me that your understanding of dark matter is not quite correct. Dark matter is an assumed form of matter that exerts gravity (like everything else) but that doesn't otherwise interact with "normal" matter, as you say above. Dark matter behaves similarly to neutrinos (for a while it was thought dark matter might consist of neutrinos). But there is nothing particularly significant about it, and it most certainly isn't "Nothing". It didn't exist "before" the universe as a whole (I put that in quotes because it's not clear that there ever was anything that would qualify as being before the universe), and can't qualify as some kind of "storehouse" for creating the universe. I think you're ascribing too much importance to dark matter. Although it's not completely understood yet, there's nothing to indicate that it contains a mystery so deep that it implies God's existence.

Saying that it is impossible for life to evolve is not correct; it is well understood how life could evolve. There are two questions here: (1) Can life evolve? and (2) Did life evolve? The answer to (1) is absolutely yes, as it's theoretical, and the answer to (2) is yes, but for a different reason, i.e., evidence. So you and I can disagree on (2) while still agreeing on (1). (1) is more fundamental, so that's the place to start if you don't believe it.

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Apostle Joseph said:

Hello

My name is Apostle Joeseph Atobatele and I am the general overseer of Light of God Deliverance Church a full gospel ministry devoted to the revival of Apostlic signs, Holy Ghost fireworks, signs and wonders and unlimited demonstration of the power of God to break the chains of darkness and set the captives free.

I am a Prophet, Evangelist, teacher, Pastor AND Teacher of the word. His life and that of his wife (Pastor Joy) and their daughters Praise and Prosper are living proofs that all power belongs to God.

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SavedZeroPointEnergy said:

Hello and welcome. I am a Christian whom loves professing atheists and all people for that matter. I would like your understanding and responses to two questions that are thoughts on my mind in regards to the universe. I welcome to see all views on this.

First, the issue of eternal Hellfire. You seem to be an intelligent person and have most likely heard of the claim of "Pascal's Wager" put forth by the famous Christian mathematician and philosopher, Blaise Pascal. The basic Wager idea is that if God does not exist, and the atheist is correct, then the person whom chooses to believe in God loses nothing. He or she at the moment of the physical death of the body (brain death? Heart death?) ends all conscious thought. As one professed atheist friend of mine told me in the past: "Life is complex chemistry. There is no soul, no spirit, beyond poetic symbols in stories. The mind is the chemical processes of the brain, nothing more, nothing less." The Wager goes on to say that if the professed atheist is wrong, and the Christian is right, then the atheist will experience eternal conscious torment in Hell (ignoring for the time being the claims of Annihilation of the soul or conditional immortality believed by some or Universalism in it's different forms believed by others) and the Christian Theist will spend eternity in conscious joy in Heaven and the New Earth.

The main objections to the Wager come from both Christians and professed atheists. The standard atheist response is: "What about the gods and goddesses and deities of other faiths? What if both the atheist and the Christian are wrong, and the right choice was one of them?"

The Christians who oppose Pascal's Wager generally oppose it on the ground that it is not being sincere with faith, it is like placing a possible bet and not "placing all of one's eggs in one basket" namely faith in Christ. I would like your view on this. As a professed atheist, have you considered the idea of the Biblical eternal Hell and the possible danger it poses to those whom leave this Earth without having secured a place in Heaven by faith in Christ and what are your thoughts on such a thing?

If somehow God Himself were to say to you in such a way as that it was undeniably Him, "Yes, Jesus is God and My Son, the Bible is true and all whom do not trust in Him alone will spend eternity separated from My love and conciously burning in Hell. I want you to apologize to Me and place your trust in Jesus Christ," how would you respond most likely?


The second issue I would like your understanding on: According to quantum and other physics, space is not empty. Rather, it is filled with and made up of a nearly endless number of virtual particles that are called the zero point energy field. This has been shown to be real through various experiments such as the Casimir Effect and Lamb Shift and numerous others. Most physicists now agree it is real. What is more controversial is this: Can the zero point energy be somehow used by human science and engineering to generate usable energy that does not violate the laws of thermodynamics, and, to manipulate matter and energy through it's use? What are your thoughts on that?

Thank you sir

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