Hello and welcome to my blog about my life (science) and whatever else takes my fancy (hint: it's more science). You may call me Redford and I'm 19 Earth years old, currently double majoring in physics and chemistry in New Zealand. In reality I have no idea what I'm doing or what I'm going to do though so you'll find a little bit of everything.
Every account of a higher power that I’ve seen described, of all religions that I’ve seen, include many statements with regard to the benevolence of that higher power. When I look at the universe and all the ways the universe wants to kill us, I find it hard to reconcile that with statements of beneficence.
- Neil deGrasse Tyson [source]
I’d give him a few pointers on how to make a universe.
What would you do?
Take with you seven pairs of every kind of clean animal, a male and its mate, and one pair of every kind of unclean animal, a male and its mate
- Genesis 7:2, The Bible
(Because 1 pair of all animals would just be too easy)
Figured you guys may be interested in this.
All flying insects that walk on all fours are to be detestable to you. There are, however, some winged creatures that walk on all fours that you may eat: those that have jointed legs for hopping on the ground. Of these you may eat any kind of locust, katydid, cricket or grasshopper. But all other winged creatures that have four legs you are to detest.
- The Bible (leviticus 11)
I believe in God. I spent a while thinking I was an atheist, but that just didn’t work for me.
I just can’t imagine that its just random that we have a universe that can be studied effectively with evolving scientific models, where the laws of physics are constant throughout the macroscopic…
New evidence is coming to light that constants are not in fact constant due to the diffraction of light through clouds that are now just reaching us (The absorption spectrums are bizarrely different than what we should expect and what can be experimentally proved). Secondly you speak of why can’t science and religion coexist. The fact is that God is directly opposed with thermodynamics: the very core of cosmology and indeed physics. Continuing on with this, science is the process of making hypotheses and then testing them against evidence either theoretically or preferably experimentally. Religion does not follow this pattern, evolution can be proven both theoretically and experimentally (In the form of bacterial samples becoming immune to antibiotics and the such) and of course observationally. Creationism on the other hand, cannot be proven and in accordance with science it cannot be a credible scientific theory. Honestly, I cannot envision anyone being capable of supporting both a scientific outlook on life alongside one that holds creationism as a viable theory for existence.
Agnosticism seems a pretty good compromise really. But I dislike it. I dislike their admission of ‘defeat’ in that they don’t believe we’ll ever know if God exists or doesn’t exist for sure. I think this mind set is slowing down the discovery of the truth. To be honest I think we’re already pretty certain and I don’t think we need to go out of our way to disprove something when it’s hugely unlikely to exist. The evidence is strongly on the side of atheism, you wouldn’t be agnostic about a murder trial in which all the evidence given shows that the defendant is guilty, so why be so when it comes to God?
Lately my dash has been inundated with anti-religion things. I guess that’s because I follow a lot of atheists. Probably because I’m an atheist. Anyways, my days of warring against stupidity in the form of nonsensical beliefs are mostly over, but I did realize a pattern in the ‘arguments’ of creationists and subsequent religious nuts. Here is a list of all the arguments I can think of and how to combat them.
Pascal’s Wager
Pascal’s wager is simply that “why not?” believe in God and live your life by the teachings of that faith. Basically it’s a win-win, if you believe and God turns out to be real, you go to heaven/nirvana/valhalla and if God does not exist, no worries. This argument usually seems to serve as the justification for born again Christians that are also quite smart but perhaps confused about the world.
What’s wrong with this argument:
The obvious problem is that God being omniscient and all that jazz he’s going to see right through your little ploy and you’re going to go to Hell anyways so you may as well not believe in the first place and of course this still leaves the question, of which God is it anyways?
Religion makes you happy
I’ve seen this one quite a lot and I’ve always been confused by it, as you may have guessed this is stating that a religious organization provides community and also faith in something that doesn’t exist may add to peace of mind.
What’s wrong with this argument:
A lot. Firstly religion is probably not for everyone, just like how skydiving isn’t for everyone. It may make some people happy but for others it may just cause them to lose control of their bowels. The second is that it can be applied directly in reverse with “Atheism makes you happy” which is a great angle to take if you’ve realized this person is beyond all hope and just want to annoy them, you could perhaps say that being free from a menacing old-testament God and searching for the truth makes you happy. The third best counterargument to this point is that it doesn’t actually have to be religion, and providing a community is not something solely religion can do, you could for example join a club or a gang.
Something can’t come from nothing!
This argument usually is an attempt to rebut the big bang, stating really that the universe couldn’t come spontaneously into existence and would need a creator to do so.
What’s wrong with this argument:
What most people don’t realize is that the big bang is not a theory for the actual creation of the universe but merely of it’s expansion. Of course this point at first may lend weight to the argument of the religious person there’s really several good ways to do this, it helps if you know about physics. The first is to say that time came into existence simultaneously with space, which it did. Therefore there was no “before” the big bang. Next it may help to go into talking about thermodynamics stating that energy cannot be created or destroyed, as would be the case with a creator, ya know, creating the universe. Really there’s a whole bunch of theories for this approach out there, personally if all else fails just run with the whole multiverse thing and if that doesn’t work just say that you don’t know how the universe started but you don’t believe God is a very good explanation, perhaps ask for evidence why and then automatically say “But that’s not evidence” until they get bored.
Life is too complex to have come about by random chance
This one focuses upon the origin of life itself and often into the evolutionary processes by saying that intelligent design is necessary to create complex things such as organisms, it’s also known more formally as The Blind watch maker or What good is half an eye argument.
What’s wrong with this argument:
Oh hey there evolution. This one is really entirely about evolution, if they don’t believe it, too bad just have an example of it at work on hand, like maybe the evolution of the human hand. My personal favourite is that of Biston betularia commonly known as the peppered moth which underwent a startling transformation during the industrial evolution in which it changed from white to black to camouflage better on trees now covered in soot. The next point to make is to confirm that it is entirely possible to arrive at these complex modern organisms in 3.8 billion years. You can then say that it takes only (from memory) 50 grandfathers (A unit of time, which I think is about 25 or 50 years) to evolve a regular patch of tissue into a basic eye, this was done of course using a computer simulation.
Well, that’s all the common arguments I can think of right now. March on brave Atheist soldiers.
It’s about science. Just a warning. The thing that annoys me most about peoples views on science is that they’re all “It takes the magic out of things”. No it doesn’t, you’re wrong. If anything science adds magic in my opinion, the wonders that we know about from quarks to neutron stars are infinitely more amazing and bizarre than anything the human imagination can come up with. I don’t envy the ignorant who can look at a rainbow and be like “fuck yeah unicorn power” or whatever, probably something more along the lines of Rainbows are God’s eyebrows or something. Because the fact is, that’s the easy explanation to make, the fact that white light diffracts through droplets of water that are suspended in the air into a spectrum of light (noticeably the visible spectrum) and then for some bizarre reason the colours are in an order and don’t mix together due to the angles of refraction and then form an arc that can reach miles across? A-fucking-mazing. Or what about quantum entanglement in which two particles are entangled and influencing one particle directly influences the other despite the distance between them and is instantaneous or as I like to call it: faster than motherfucking light. Or maybe the Mandelbrot set, atomic bonding, gluons, gravity, magnetism, string/M theory, quantum super position, entropy, black holes. I could go on all fucking day about how much more amazing the world is once you know something about it. So stop believing in your Gods and your fairies; your four leafed clovers and your crop circles and get out and see just how bizarre the world really. is
