Atheist Memes on Facebook: Natural Explanations

Scarlet letter

I’m doing a project on my Facebook page: The Atheist Meme of the Day. Every weekday, I’m going post a short, pithy, Facebook-ready atheist meme… in the hopes that people will spread them, and that eventually, the ideas will get through.
If you want to play, please feel free to pass these on through your own Facebook page, or whatever forum or social networking site you like. Or if you don’t like mine, make some of your own.

Today’s Atheist Meme of the Day:

In human history, natural explanations of phenomena have replaced supernatural ones many thousands of times. Supernatural explanations have replaced natural ones exactly never. So how likely is it that any currently unexplained phenomenon is supernatural? Pass it on: if we say it enough times to enough people, it may get through.

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Atheist Memes on Facebook: Natural Explanations
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3 thoughts on “Atheist Memes on Facebook: Natural Explanations

  1. 2

    We use ideal situations to explain the world.

    No. Teachers use “ideal” – better described as greatly simplified – situations to teach the basic principles to novices.
    Modern scientists often use highly complex models to explain the world. For example – climate models simulate the interaction of numerous layers of ocean and atmosphere. Within the atmosphere they simulate the radiative physics and thermodynamics of many gasses – N2, O2, CO2, CH4, CFCs, HCFCs, H2O – just to name a few. They also simulate the behavior of aerosols – both sulfate aerosols which cause cooling, and black carbon aerosols which contribute to warming. They simulate the interaction of dry and humid air masses, and the interaction of more saline and less saline water masses. A few climate models also contain a carbon cycle component – and simulate the exchanges of carbon between the ocean, the rain forests, the swamps, the tundra, animals, and the atmosphere.
    Models which simulate the physics of stars are similarly complex; they simulate both thermodynamics and electrodynamics, the radiative properties of many gasses, and that’s just the beginning.
    It’s true that scientific models are necessarily much simpler than the real world. But the modern models which do explain the world are so complex they cannot reasonably be called “ideal”.

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