I think we have a perfect example with
Harvard professor Stephen Jay Gould. He did live to be 61 but his co author Niles Eldredge is not only 80 years old. He is still working or at least still on the staff. Gould WAS a militant atheist and Eldredge IS an agnostic. Notice the difference between was and is. Gould came down with cancer when he was around 40 so he struggled with it for 20 years.
First, you need to learn that "anecdote is not data". Not only is this just an anecdote, but it's a particularly odd one at that. In this case the connection between the two is that they were colleagues, but not with some sort of incident that might relate to their survival. (Normally, I'd expect it to be something like two people in your town who both fell asleep at the wheel and the atheist hit a tree and died and the Christian crashed through the hedge and came to a stop at the stairs of his church. Now that's a proper, but wrongheaded, anecdote about faith and survival.)
Second, depending on what Elderege actually believed, he may be just as much of atheist by the definition I (and many other atheists) use. It could only be that he wanted to be non-confrontational.
For a Christian, cancer is an easy cure because it is often the cause of a person being in a struggle or conflict with themselves.
Oh it is, is it now. OK, here's a test you can do:
1. Go to the obituary section of your local newspaper (or its website).
2. Find 10 obituaries that mention the deceased had cancer.
3. Check those biographies to see if they reference religion.
Are there any Christians who died of cancer in your town? Are the cancer victims frequently non-believers?
(Struggle with oneself is common in believers and non-believers of all stripes.)
That is why atheists went to fight with believers.
Oh it is, now is it? Let see how that sorts out...
They are in a conflict with themselves
No more so than anyone else. As for myself, I am definitely not in conflict with myself about god or religion -- I don't believe in the former and don't have any desire to participate in the latter. As you note in a different post in response to me -- I am opposed to religion. That is not a secret desire to be religious.
and it offers them some relief to quit fighting with themself to fight with someone else.
It isn't. I disagree with you about religion and will push back on attempts to mash religion into science.
I feel sorry for them that they have their conflict and that they are so hard on themselves.
I don't want your pity.
Gould biggest contribution was
punctuated equilibrium which actually is an atheist form of the creationist catastrophic theory.
It isn't any such thing. Punctuated equilibrium is a sort of alternation of slow and rapid apparent (physical) change in organisms. During the slow phase genetic variation accumulates. During the fast phase there are strong selection pressures make large apparent changes in the physical form.
Even more importantly, no evolutionary theory or hypothesis is "atheist". It is not concerned with belief (or non-belief) in gods.
Gradualism has its place but we have to deal with catastrophic issues all the time.
And here comes a neck-breaking nonsequitor ...
In 2017 they had to evacuate 185,000 people during the Oroville Dan crisis. The spillway came dangerously close to failure.
I remember it.
I use to sell sprinkler systems so I know all about water pressure.
Not really. I don't think it makes you an expert on water pressure. I'd probably trust a plumber first. (I've also taught basic fluid physics.)
The dam was not designed to handle that much pressure and so they had to reinforce it so it would handle it.
The problem is that isn't what happened at the Orovile Dam. What did happen:
The spillway had a flaw in it (a crack I think). That flaw caused the water flowing down the spillway in normal times to slowly erode the rocks and soil below the spillway causing the spillway itself to fail and drive more erosion. The concern was that additional flow and erosion from it would erode away the dam until it failed. There was also concern after closing the regular spillway that the increased level of the lake (because the regular spillway was closed) flowing over the emergency spillway would cause that to fail as they no longer trusted the design. The problem was solved not by reinforcing the dam, but by repairing the spillway.
You can call them what you want but they were both Christian beliefs before Science adopted them.
What?
Darwin got gradualism from a Christian geologist.
[citation needed]
We were talking in another thread about how Creationst Dr Kurt Wise studied under Gould at Harvard.
Where is this going?
Wise said: “I loved him; I witnessed to him often, and I prayed for him almost every day of my life until he died.”
I guess it didn't work, then. He still died of the cancer and didn't become a believer.
“I believe God was drawing Stephen Jay Gould to Himself in ways that were unique to Stephen,” Wise said. “For instance, it struck him that the fossil record looked like Creation, and that bothered him. He was struggling with spiritual issues in the realm of science.
Wow, Wise is just like so many Christians on this site who keep insisting they know the "inner struggles" of non-Christians. How very disappointing.
