Design?

I do believe I've written on this before, but I will again.

     Position of the earth.  A creationist will claim that the universe was designed for us because of the position of the earth.  There are billions of galaxies, with at least trillions of stars/planets/moons in each.  How vain is humanity to suggest that it's all here for us?  So back to the position of the earth, which is perfect for life.  The earth is really a harsh environment for life.  We only do so well because we adapt and more yet, we adapt our environment.  The earth isn't naturally a good place for human life.
      Now, more literally on the celestial position of the earth and less on the planet itself.  There are billions of galaxies with trillions or quadrillions of celestial bodies in each to my knowledge.  Now think of earth as a candidate planet as I will call it.  A candidate planet is one which has the requirements to support life in a given form.  Keep in mind as well that this is based only on our carbon-based life and there may be many different kinds.  Can it be rationalized that earth is the only candidate planet in the universe/multiverse?  No, we can't rationalize that.  There can be so many candidate planets, not all of which will produce life.  What we wind up with is a grand dice roll.  We seem to have won that roll.
     Nature...  Can we call this cruel system designed?  Why would a designer make a prey animal fast, only to make the predator as fast or failing that, sneaky?  There's no clear reason why.  Natural selection has survival to account for on both sides.  But a designer has no motivation to make such a cruel game unless the designer is a sadistic bastard, to be polite.
     What evidence even suggests design?  Almost every science points to a materialistic origin.  I've come to the conclusion that either I am completely and horribly ignorant or there isn't much backing it up really.

God and free will

     God makes a race to worship and serve him.  He gives us free will.  He commands us to act a specific way, but makes doing so impossible.  When we fail to act this way, we're supposedly punished.  Not only slap-on-the-wrist sort of punishment either, eternal torture.

     Say I write a computer program, I write it to complete an equation.  I then give it several different types of equations to solve and expect it to always have the same result.  My analogy fails when we come to punishment, because nothing is less just than infinite punishment for finite crime.  The worst person who ever lived or will live could not possibly deserve that.

     So we've got the celestial "screw you" down.  Let's talk about God's plan for us.  God is supposed to have this divine plan for each of our lives.  That is not possible if we have free will.  Imagine you are commanding an army.  The catch is, none of your soldiers follow orders unless it suits their personal agenda.  Can you imagine commanding a free-willed army?  The only thing which holds a plan involving multiple people together is knowledge of how they will act.  If they change what they are to do, they can endanger the entire plan and screw it up completely.  The typical counter-argument to this is that God can work all things that happen into his plan.  The problem is that it's still a plan, which requires manipulation of at least several elements.

     Next, divine intervention.  Some people think God intervenes on a daily basis for them.  If God saves parking spaces and the like for the individual like some believe, he must deprive another of that parking space.  The other person would have to be swayed divinely to park somewhere else or not make that particular stop.  What does that do to free will?  I suppose God would have to make them want to not stop or not park there so that they'd freely choose to avoid it, but can that be considered free choice?  The educated person cannot believe in both the divine and free will simultaneously.  

     A friend of mine recently posted on facebook "If I had a time machine, I would go back to the Precambrian, throw a pebble in the ocean, and then fast forward to the present to see how much had changed.".  The result in this experiment could be catastrophic, or it could have almost no effect.  In the same way every time God meddles, he disrupts the entire natural order.  When he does that he could change almost everything and what does that say about free will?

     As a Christian, there can be no free will.  Without free will we're not responsible for our actions.  That removes sin, making us sinless.  We'd have no need for God to "save" us.  No hell to punish us for the sin.  If  one argues that we're still responsible without free will then God is a tyrant (which is a notion I wouldn't be above, I derive great pleasure from knowing that he doesn't exist).

Argument from design - Teleological argument

     The first error is in assuming that natural selection is a random unguided process.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  Natural selection is the filling of a need via necessity.  Let's look at a few examples;

1. Foals can walk and nurse within an hour of being born, can trot and canter within several hours and can gallop within a day.  They need this ability to be able to move away from predators.  This ability can be confidently suggested to be rooted in natural selection.  A horse which is born and has to sit around for days will be killed more easily than a quickly mobile one.  That causes the more mobile horse to be more likely to pass along it's genes and as a result eventually cause horses in general to be able to move faster after birth.
2. Let's look at a predator.  Cheetahs are a rather optimized predator.  They are stealthy, accurate, fast and deadly.  These abilities came when the cheetah was hunting prey animals and I'll use gazelles as an example.  The gazelle is fast and can turn in an instant.  To be able to hunt and kill a gazelle the cheetah must be able to move very fast after stealthily hunting.  Any cheetahs which didn't have these traits wouldn't as easily catch their prey and would find survival and thus reproduction hard to sustain.
3. The crocodile looks rather like a log to the unsuspecting creature.  It sits still and watches until a creature wanders past or comes to drink and launches itself at the animal.  It then often drags the creature underwater, drowning it and allowing the crocodile to eat it's prey at leisure.  These traits have solid roots also in natural selection.  

     Chance is involved in the mutation used in evolution and defined by natural selection.  Take a boggle game and decide on a configuration you'd like to see.  The first thing you need to do is make sure that your dice have all of the sides required, if they don't, your metaphorical species will go extinct.  So assuming that you picked a possible combination, let's begin.  Each time a dice falls in the correct position, have it not change any more.  You'll find that eventually through dice rolls you get an incredibly unlikely configuration which for all intents and purposes would be nearly impossible to come to through chance.  Now think of each dice as a trait in a genome or a phenotype.  When one of them is beneficial, it goes on to be reproduced.  That's the dice you keep.  To take the boggle analogy to another level you could land the wrong dice on the right trait and by doing that lose the potential for another trait you need.  This has a couple of possible results.  The first is that your species cannot survive.  The second is that your species has to make another change.
     Let's take the native's watch.  The native living in a primitive culture finds a watch on a beach, he doesn't know what it is, but he knows that it was designed.  The watch is correlated with the universe and us with the native. Theists will take that to prove God.  The problem is that the watch has clear markings on it which indicate design, and that watches are to my knowledge only ever created by humans.  If I, right now found a machine with effects beyond our current level I would have to postulate a more advanced person than myself.  The tribesman, were he wise could do the same.  We should not aspire to be the ignorant tribesman, we don't see the clear markings of design (later post more based on lack of design).

IDiots

     ID of course, being the "Cheap tuxedo" of creationism, trying to make it sound vaguely scientific by coining the term "Intelligent Design", often amended with the word 'theory'.  This is insane for a few reasons.
     The most obvious reason is that ID isn't a theory.  It would be lucky to attain hypothesis status.  For a suggestion to become a hypothesis, it must be testable by the scientific method.  Creationism is not testable by the scientific method.  Evidence cannot be found which points to creationism, and evidence is key to the scientific method.
     At this point, the ID postulation is laughed out of the academic arena.  There's no historical, natural or philosophical evidence for ID.  The natural evidence which we have points to the earth being about 4.5 billion years old.  The historical evidence we have suggests naturalistic and materialist origin.  Lastly out of those three, our current philosophy correlates us nicely with evolved animals based on instinct.  This makes evolution and the big bang theories which to date survive the academic arena as opposed to ID, whose bloodied corpse is dragged out of the academic arena.
     To merely try to rename young earth ideology to make it sound scientific is dishonest.  There's no way to prove young earth theory, we have many dating methods which place the earth at 4.5 billion years.  There's no mistake here, no "Oops, turns out that the earth was only 6,000-8,000 years old.".  It's just so improbable at this point.  Young earth ideology is now entirely kept alive by the willfully ignorant, a Google search is a way to disprove that in under 10 seconds.

If a person manages to believe in ID, they have an Olympic level of ignorance, and to call them IDiots is fair.

“Five percent of the people think;
ten percent of the people think they think;
and the other eighty-five percent would rather die than think.”
― Thomas A. Edison

“We are all born ignorant, but one must work hard to remain stupid.”
― Benjamin Franklin

“One of the truly bad effects of religion is that it teaches us that it is a virtue to be satisfied with not understanding.”
― Richard Dawkins

Have gay sex to improve chance of rapture!

Luke 17:34-35
I tell you, in that night there shall be two men in one bed; the one shall be taken, and the other shall be left.

Two women shall be grinding together; the one shall be taken, and the other left.

To be fair, in the NIV they added "grain" to that second sentence.  Also in the NIV, they substituted "men" for "people".  Because whatever happens, the Bible can't sound gay...at all!

This is a mostly jovial post.  Just saying, go gays and lesbians!  Even if you're atheists, you've got a 50/50 of being included in the rapture, the Bible says so.

Why is this real?

     Why do people still try to use the cosmological argument?  Let's take a look at it.

Premise 1: Whatever begins to exist has a cause.

Premise 2: The universe began to exist.

Conclusion: The universe has a cause.

Conclusion 2: The cause for the universe must be an uncaused cause, which is God.

     So special pleading aside...  Let's prove that you and I mean YOU can fly using this argument.

Premise 1: You are a mammal.

Premise 2: Bats are mammals.

Premise 3: Bats can fly.

Conclusion: Mammals can fly.

Conclusion 2: You, as a mammal, can fly independently.

     All of my premises are correct, demonstrably so.  My conclusion, like the cosmological argument's conclusion is false.  A major difference between the two is that I don't invoke special pleading.

    I know I've posted on this previously, but come on.  The logical fallacies should have people who use this argument weeping uncontrollably in corners.  Yet people use this argument proudly even now.  It diminishes my already very slight faith in humanity.

It's the devil!

     I was informed today by a Christian that mental illness is demon possession.  In fact, most everything Christians don't like can be traced back to devils.  Isn't that convenient?  Rather obviously, there are no demons at all.  This was specifically in relation to the book Extreme Evil: Kids Killing Kids which has to do with school killings and how they're rooted in demonic activity.  Again, this is patently ridiculous.
     We can forget psychology and physiology, it's all the demons.  If the Christian is willing to back into the "medical symptoms are the effects of the demon" corner, there's no real argument to be had.  There's no argument because when someone is willing to concede any hope of evidence in favor of unfounded claims of causality, there's no way to make any progress.
     People tried blaming everything we didn't understand or like on demons, it set science back and cost thousands of innocent lives.  That people would take this dark-ages mentality into the 21st century disgusts me. The outright rejection of science in favor of superstition is so terribly harmful in so very many ways.  There should never be a conflict here, yet the majority of America is still in the dark ages.
     Anything which is beyond testing and observation should immediately raise a flag of warning.  This includes all things spiritual.  It's a shame that so many theists are advocates of the unfalsifiable hypothesis, it greatly inhibits my ability to learn from and talk to them.

     The same Christian who went off on the devil thing is a conspiracy theorist (go figure), but oddly enough he also thinks governments are incompetent.  The two are mutually exclusive.  To plan a conspiracy and have almost no people know about it, a person or group must be incredibly prepared, organized and intelligent.  An incompetent person or group would never manage to pull off such an elaborate plan.
     At any rate, he submits on a regular basis the One-World-Government idea*.  He says it's forming now, and that the devil is behind it.  There are so many reasons why this is improbable, here are a few;

1. So many governments don't like each other and couldn't merge peacefully.
2. Many people would protest the idea and anarchy wouldn't be a ridiculous assumption.
3. Religions of all colors which make up almost all of the world wouldn't let it happen.
4. There are no real advantages to it.

     Those are a few of many points against One-World-Government.  Another, which is just an appeal to reason is that the theory is from Revelations.  As I've said previously "When Paul wrote Revelations he was either using symbolism or hallucinogens, I normally opt for the latter suggestion.".

     Next, he decried Wicca as Satanism.  He wasn't talking about the mainstream Satanism either, more the "Kill cute puppies, small children and anyone who annoys you" version, or put more simply, the bastardized Christian version of Satanism.  Wicca has a karma system...On steroids.  The law of three as it is called states that any energy one puts out into the world will come back threefold to bite them in the ass.  Wicca has a requirement for the respect of free will and offers cosmic punishment for those who disregard free will. The semi-famous Wiccan's creed "An ye harm none do what ye will" shows the awful, evil, violent nature of Wicca, except oh wait IT'S ALL BUT THE DAMNED GOLDEN RULE!

     I mentioned Satanism in the past paragraph.  The version I stated was as I said, bastardized.  Satanism is essentially religious libertarianism.  There are rules of Satanism saying that harming animals and children is wrong.  I'd go further to say that harming anyone who isn't trying to harm anyone is wrong in most cases, but it's still not the kitten-blood-drinking, bonfire-lighting, demon-summoning ideology which people assume.  Most of the cases which the author of Extreme Evil: Kids Killing Kids gives in his promotional video are high-school related, naturally.  The problem is the factor of rebellion in high school, an angry child will reach for what they perceive to be the darkest thing out there to impress their peers and annoy authority.  Some times there's more to it, but to entirely discount rebellion as a cause of this is disingenuous.



*I don't grace it with calling it a theory, even as far as conspiracy theories go.