I keep hoping we can crush them under the weight of the evidence, but they can scuttle into very tiny space.
Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
I keep hoping we can crush them under the weight of the evidence, but they can scuttle into very tiny space.
It’s a matter of efficiency in epistemology, in my opinion. It’s simply always easier to make stuff up than to actually know something. If the objective is to impress people, feel smart, or get their money, it’s more efficient to make stuff up. For example: “the moon is made of cream cheese.” Look, I just saved myself the entire cost of a space program, and if you actually go determine it’s made of dusty rocks, I just call you a liar.
I think that soul-of-the-gaps is way under looked and much harder to wiggle out.
The belief in wossname “souls moving to new bodies but forgetting everything so what is the point anyway?” should be the easiest to disprove. 😂
Also, the devil took Jesus up to a really really tall mountain and showed him the whole world???
Other religions….The sun sets in a warm spring/ a murky spring every evening. Then it sits under god’s throne awaiting the command to rise in the east, until the end of days when it will instead rise in the west…
Also “turtles all the way”.
Believable religious claim: Thor gets violent after drinking too much
(Ukko seems like a calmer thunder god… which is weird, considering how much vodka is consumed in Finland).
Being an atheist in USA must feel like being this robot… but persistence will pay off.
https://youtu.be/Sqev0yQk5qk
There must have been a time in our evolution when we didnt have a soul. So there must have been a day when we were given one. When do theologians say this occured?
Well obviously civilization was going to end! But all those billions of years of stellar evolution, planetary excretion, and biological evolution did not go to waste. God enjoyed our company for those tens of thousands of years since He outfitted us with eternal souls. He’ll just go and make new playthings to entertain Himself with now that we are non corporeal.
@7- That was supposed to be accretion, not excretion….
I’ll take the bad kerning as indicative for the gaps, I like to think.
…they can scuttle into very tiny space.
And feed off our blood without contributing anything in return, and maybe spread some nasty diseases to boot…yeah, they’re A LOT like ticks.
I gave up “debating” this question a long time ago. True believers will not be dissuaded, and it doesn’t matter which god is in the gaps. I saw a video clip the other day of George Carlin or Noam Chomsky saying that a substantial number of people in Congress believe that the Bible is literally true. That’s truly disturbing.
birgerjohansson @ #5 — Yes, but without the weapons.
As a child, I found the idea that cats didn’t have souls and would not go to heaven disturbing.
I get it now, though. If you let cats into heaven, they’d push everything over the edge and stuff would fall to earth and do some serious damage.
God has gained lots of power since when he was the biggest and baddest god in the Old Testament. Other gods mentioned in the Bible were not to be had before Him.
But it is obvious that the omnipotent creator of our incredibly vast universe cares about the same things as I do. In order, that’s my family, my church, my culture, my nation, my species… We are special.
Interestingly, there’s a misconception about medieval beliefs in the first frame: earth’s position at the centre was taken to be because that was the lowest, least exalted place to be. Everything in the higher spheres was perfect and unchanging, while earth was corrupted. It was phenomena such as the supernova of 1572, shown by the observations of Tycho Brahe and Jerónimo Muñoz to be situated beyond the orbit of the moon, that challenged this belief.
Weird, I’d almost say wierd: Eight arms? Good! Eight legs? If spider, good. If tick, bad! Where’s the biologics in that?
@2 I’ve always like the image of heaven as a great sea of the souls from embryos (~70% of fertilized eggs die before birth) sloshing around the feet of the lord, with their mindless, senseless, experience-free souls in endless communion with the lord. Makes perfect sense to me.
The God of Gaps is nothing if not flexible.
If we define the soul as “the source of consciousness” or “the source of our decision-making abilities”, then it’s hard to see that as not being a physical part of the brain. If it’s independent of the body, then it’s hard to see why I don’t remember the things that happened before I was born, or why I don’t hear what’s going on around me while I’m asleep, or why I make more impulsive decisions when I’ve been drinking.
Oh what a great/terrible cartoon!
They’ll just make more space by burning books and banning science.
Francis Collins has found the smallest gaps yet:
(https://www.pbs.org/thinktank/transcript1281.html)
@3:
Technically, that was the second Jesus. The first one said “yes, but given the curvature of the Earth I can only really see about 100 miles from here…” and had to be disposed of and replaced at short notice.
I just do not see why I should twist all the data to justify the belief in a personal god – a god personality when there is no objective evidence for such a thing at all.
@21@23 That is a really embarrassingly bad interview from Collins. I’ve never had any time for the man – seriously, of all scientific disciplines, you can be an expert on genetics/DNA and still pretend to believe in god? That awful woman on Answers in Genesis falls into the same category.
He even gets the time of origin of life wrong!
birgerjohansson @ # 4: Thor gets violent after drinking too much…
We have more thunderstorms in north central Florida than anywhere else in the world*, so living here has taught me:
Thor hates modems.
*Probably that will “destabilize” along with everything else meteorological.
René @ # 9: … the bad kerning as indicative for the gaps…
Nice catch!
feralboy12 @ # 12: … I found the idea that cats didn’t have souls and would not go to heaven disturbing.
Per John of Patmos (Revelation 22:15), Heaven is dogless.
Cats, as we’ve discussed here before, appear nowhere in the JudeoChristian bible.
René @ # 15: … ticks …
~ as arachnids, must always be discussed in reverential terms around here. (Funny our esteemed seems not to record any of those in his field reports…)
nomdeplume @ # 24: He even gets the time of origin of life wrong!
Collins also tells two obvious lies in the same “waterfall” testimony. But when the crunch came (in the Republican tantrum against embryonic stem cell research), he promptly and unequivocally took a pro-science stand.
So god is, by default, responsible for everything that we can’t explain, and every time we explain something we kill god a little bit.
God == Ignorance.
I’m good with that.
[ObRepost — oldie but a goodie]
@24–
Dobzhansky is the obvious example of a devout Christian who was also a phenomenally important to the development of evolutionary theory. Unlike Collins, he never felt the need to hammer his religious beliefs into science-shaped holes. IMO the Dobzhanskys of this world are better Christians than apologists like Collins. It’s not a strength, it’s a weakness that Collins needs all his spurious and transparently motivated contortions to reconcile his beliefs. Not exactly a hallmark of coherent philosophies.
In the beginning the Universe was created.
This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.
Enough said.
We apologize for the inconvenience.
Honestly I think I’m just starting to notice the similarities bewteen creationists’ God of the Gaps argument and transphobes’ continually shifting definition of “biological sex.”
First they said “biological sex” was just genitals. But some transphobes really really want to believe that it’s impossible to change sex, and we’ve been able to change our genitals for almost a full century. So then the definition of “biological sex” changes so that it has nothing to do with genitals: it’s just gametes. Except we can change those too, so then it’s actually what gametes your body is “designed” to produce.
Sometimes they also jump to chromosomes, but they usually backtrack if you point out that every person has a unique DNA sequence in their sex chromosomes. And I have no doubt that if we ever gain the ability to easily “change chromosomes,” then suddenly chromosomes will no longer be related to “biological sex.”
Considering how the gaps have shrunk, it doesn’t surprise me when I encounter people who skip the “God of the Gaps” approach altogether and just outright deny facts.
“No, evolution isn’t real.” “No, the sun orbits the Earth.”
I guess it’s less effort than having to constantly compress their god into smaller and smaller spaces. And as Fred Clark has pointed out in the past, it lets them LARP as The Only People Who Know The Truth, heroic freedom fighters battling the forces of evil.