Isn’t it nice of a Southern Baptist minister to expose his ignorance with a question?
via Twitter:
For instance, why would there need to be a God if we just evolved, are really just animals, and that everything happens purely by chance? If the entire universe is just a random set of events and a collection of beings with no purpose, then having a Creator is unnecessary.
Fact: We evolved. That we are related to every living creature on Earth is unambiguously demonstrated by the evidence.
Fact: We really are animals. We are part of a metazoan clade that’s over half a billion years old.
Fact: Everything doesn’t happen purely by chance. I seem to be breathing rhythmically right now, and there’s a rather clearly established chain of cause and effect, with rhythmic activity in the respiratory centers of the brainstem leading to autonomic activation of muscles of the ribs and diaphragm. But the chain of effect is entirely natural. Supernatural intervention is not required to make me inhale.
Fact: The entire universe is not a random set of events. It is a natural consequence of events that includes an element of chance, however, which is completely different, but still makes a damning point against Graham’s faith.
Fact: There are multiple levels of “purpose”. That we are free of the imposition of a purpose by the universe does not mean that we as individuals cannot find purpose in our lives. We are beings with no cosmic purpose.
Therefore, by Graham’s logic, a Creator is unnecessary. And I think that is a good thing.
Note that this is part of the standard Christian circular argument. How do we know the Creator exists? Because the world exists. But how do we know that the world was created? Because there wouldn’t be any point to having a Creator if it wasn’t.
And round and round it goes…
” We are beings with no cosmic purpose.”
It’s been suggested we are DNA’s way of getting off the planet.
I’m getting vertigo….
For me, this is nonsense. Why must we have “purpose” or “meaning” to justify our existence? Hell, what does that even mean?
God likely wouldn’t want a large chunk of humanity appearing in front of him. They’d ask all sorts of uncomfortable questions, like why he intends to send them to Hell simply for the Jesus story never reaching them properly.
…or at all.
I fail to see any divine love whatsoever in Genesis 1.
Sure (I really hope so!), but calling that a “purpose” is confusing cause and effect, and attributing agency to a mindless process.
Stop criticizing religion in America! I’m damn tired of it ’cause there’ good money to be made scamming the totally ignorant and gullible believers. It’s like hitting a race-track trifecta every day plus winning the Irish Sweepstakes all at the same time.
I believe in the morality of unrestrained American Capitalism and it’s reward of unimagined profits – Don’t you?
Funny how it you don’t presuppose a deity, there is no need to use or justify one. And one doesn’t get dizzy.
If God just created us with a snap of His fingers, why did he feel the need to plant all the evidence that we evolved from apes and ultimately from single-celled life forms? Is God just playing a huge joke on scientists? Why is God such a jerk?
Isn’t it wonderful to have “no purpose”?
I’m not a character in somebody’s novel, just serving some plot point, having all sorts of things done to me and imposed on me just so somebody can learn something or derive pleasure from watching me struggle or suffer or have fun.
Actually, whenever I’m suffering, it’s great consolance to me that there was no superior power who set all of that up just so they could make some point.
Prayer in C (music video)
I’m particularly fond of the whole argument that without God life has no purpose or is bleak and without hope.
Even if that were true, it doesn’t prove that God exists. Maybe life just sucks.
“god created man in his own image…”
god has a beer belly?
No, Pianoman; god drinks Dos Equis. It doesn’t give you a beer belly, and it makes your blood smell like cologne.
For a lot of Americans, that message would be quite appealing. In fact, I’m tempted to send him some money just because of the heartwarming emotional vibe he unleashed in me.
Or maybe I just need a cup of coffee.
Correct phrase is embolded. The rest is just misstatements of reality. Yes, chance is our characterization of unpredictable outcomes, but that does NOT result in “random set of events. Some events are entirely predictable, with just small errors in our precision. “Everything happens purely by chance?”: wrong. Chance is involved, but the results are not “purely chance”.
[Further down:] Yes, it is good that we know where we are going, but don’t you think we can choose the route ourselves and not just the particular imaginary road your imaginary deity imaginarily built for us?
Yes, Man created God (as a concept), not the vice verse. We were young (as a species) and used God as a concept to teach morality to the rest of us. God was a tool, we are not God’s tools.
You said it yourself, do you even read what you wrote, “Genesis 1 is a week long story …”
You said _story_, it is a story, not history, just a story. It was just an early attempt at accounting for all the reality around them, so their imagination fabricated a visual story. We’ve moved passed that. We’ve increased our understanding of that confounding reality around us. Let’s continue that, don’t keep us stuck in the past. We’re moving forward, you acknowledge that’s good; so let us continue, even if we have to _drag_you_ along.
I don’t understand this train of thought. What purpose and meaning do we have in life if God does exist? Are we made to be slaves? His servants that he judges out of sadistic, capricious authority based entirely on might?
Why in God’s name would that be comforting? We should be devoting resources to finding and destroying such a being, so that we can take hold of our own destiny.
“beer belly” is a myth.
beer doesn’t give you a belly. It’s all the munchies consumed with the beer that the body instantly stores as fat, in order to prioritize metabolizing the alcohol in the beer.
/derail
Giliell, professional cynic -Ilk-
“I’m not a character in somebody’s novel”
I think I’ve seen that movie: Emma Thompson was great (as usual) and even Will Ferrell wasn’t too annoying—and it all worked out in the end.
What greater purpose could man aspire to than to constantly tell God how awesome he is?
“So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him.”
I never understood why this God, who is everywhere and nowhere, controls the entirety of the universe etc., why does He have feet? Why did God need a rotator cuff, opposable thumbs, an appendix… none of that speaks to an all-powerful being that has his act together.
Why don’t they mention that he created gorillas almost exactly in his image too?
They tend to leave that out.
Given the current evidence, all you can say is that we are DNA’s first attempt at finding a way off the planet. An attempt that has not yet worked out, and may not ever.
dam the christians (baptists?) really just never seem to ask many questions. they really just shut off all inquiry. Not to single out the christians (baptists) like we have here but that is the religion I have the most experience with. Like What is this creation anyway? What is it made up of etc. All the basic questions of science are just not engaged in wow.
Why should there be a purpose outside of just being any way?
Like above what would constitute a valid purpose.
They are so use to thinking about the world from the perspective of religion and its ideas that are “super natural” unrelated or counter the reality actually experienced that they seem unable to understand the simplicity of the incite offered by evolution by natural selection and instead get stuck on one element chance has in the process.
They know by their own everyday experience how chance and selection works they can’t make the connection so they makeup some impossible irrational explanation out of it (like religion does) which they dispute. It sounds almost pathological.
uncle frogy
Lovely how he just gives the game away like that. “If evolution is true, then the Creator is unnecessary.” Yeah, we’ve been saying this for years.
His real argument follows Klang from “Help!” “Without the ring, there will be no sacrifice. Without the sacrifice, there will be no congregation. Without the congregation, no more…ME.”
Already we’re confused. Is God male or female? Or both?
That’s a veiled reference to hell isn’t it. The preacher is suggesting that if you disagree with his version of Christianity you are going to burn in hell. He’s no better than the ISIS crowd.
Even apart from the “I want it to be true; therefore it is true” variation on “reasoning” (which is all too common), this doesn’t make sense. He’s got randomness backwards: The universe is not random except at the quantum level. If there were gods or other supernatural entities interfering in the universe, then events would appear random rather than having cause-and-effect. And he has purpose backwards too. If his invisible bully in the sky existed, we would have to defeat him in order to have our own lives with our own purposes.
That train of thought has occurred to a lot of anime heroes and villains. Their success rate is pretty good.
@Margaret #29:
Sounds like a good idea to me.
this reminds me of a cartoon I saw once which I have forgotten the name of.
In it a whole world of people were living in a land in kind of a simi-medieval state. very prosperous and contented. One of them discovered that they were existing inside the dream of a guy sleeping in a bed and there was a clock on a side table with an alarm set to go off soon. so they had a big meeting and discussed and debated and decided that they needed to go there which they did and very carefully they put cotton in his ears and blindfolds on his eyes and very quietly dragged him and the bed back into their world before the alarm could wake him. it was all drawn in a classic mid 30’s style.
made about as much sense as anything I ever heard in religion class
uncle frogy
“If evolution is true, there is no need for God”
It is nice of creationists to do half the work for us.
@28/grumpyoldfart
Why yes. Yes it is. Too bad they’re too cowardly and vicious to come right out and say it. I wonder what they’re ashamed of?
@30/Bronze Dog via 22/Dave Boyer
Bingo. Anyone who gets up off their knees for 30 seconds and thinks about how very much like an abusive spouse or father Yahweh sounds like comes to this conclusion. The being described in the Bible not only doesn’t sound omnipotent or omniscient, it sounds insecure about something. And Judges 1:19 and II Kings 3:24-27 certainly will raise a few eyebrows…
I think the line of thinking Jack Graham professes here reveals the kind of disgusting character which Christians are perfectly willing to accept as normal if they didn’t have Jesus in their heart. I think they are actually saying they have no problem being disgusting and cruel people if they want to be. But, for now they are going to hold back and be nice to you because, and you better chant “there is nothing between them and you but Jesus.” They want you to think: Watch out, we can be horrible if we get to do the things we want to do. So everybody better ‘say they see the Jesus’ that is standing there protecting you from them.
To me, that is the most vile of threats. No better than the most dangerous of violent extortionists.
“The entire universe is not a random set of events. It is a natural consequence of events that includes an element of chance, ”
Come on, PZ, rather will the pope become a buddhist than a minister with a toothpaste smile understand the difference between chance and probability.
I’d love to see a cage match between this guy and a theistic evolutionist.
QFT. Also, comment 12.
…Actually, that text is a vestige of polytheism…
Certainly mine. I knew about the iron chariots, but… that’s interesting.