Arguing with atheists

My friend Fred described a weak atheist as a person who simply doesn't believe any sort of God exists, while a strong atheist wants to get in your face and tell you why you're stupid for believing in an invisible man in the sky, or some such nonsense. I liked those helpful definitions, and knowing the distinction. You might believe that, having written a book titled Counterargument for God, I relish every opportunity I get to argue with every atheist who I might happen to encounter. But you would be wrong. In fact, you couldn't be more wrong, and always remember that there are gradations of wrong. There's simply no reason to argue with a weak atheist. He or she isn't spoiling for a fight, and it would be rude to goad them into one by insulting them or calling them names. I have no interest in flaunting my faith, and it most certainly isn't my place to judge somebody else and tell them they're going to Hell for not believing exactly as I do. Isn't that fun to hear! For that reason among others, I'm still quite reluctant to invite strangers to church because I don't want weak atheists to feel like I'm trying to shove my God down their throat. In my opinion, it requires the mutual interest of two people to maintain a dialogue, and my interests are far from limited to theological discussions. Now, if someone is interested in polite conversation about what I personally believe and why I wrote the book, I'm more than capable and happy to accommodate, if returning three times to the same radio show to be interviewed by the same atheist friend serves as … [Read more...]

Really big and very small numbers

During my recent sojourn in Disney World, I began thinking about really big numbers as I tried to calculate the total value of that enterprise as a whole. I knew the Magic Kingdom theme park was built in the early 1970s, at the cost of roughly $331 million dollars. More than two decades later, Disney's Animal Kingdom Theme Park was added at the cost of a cool $1 billion. Epcot cost about $1.4 billion to construct, more than twice its estimated budget. Golf courses, hotels, shopping malls, Hollywood studios, infrastructure: it was pretty easy to estimate the net worth of the forty-seven square mile intelligently designed world of alternate reality would run into the hundreds of billions, perhaps as much as $1 trillion dollars. Mickey Mouse is worth a considerable amount of money. We're talking about some really big numbers. Given the fact that advocates of evolution seem to frequently argue that I fail to grasp the significance of a really big number, as I rode around on the monorail and pondered the value of Walt Disney World, the idea for writing this article popped into my head while I watched a river of cash flow through the Magic Kingdom. If only that were the case...I almost wish that I couldn't grasp the concept of a really big number. After all, ignorance can be bliss. The sad truth is that I’m constantly worried about big numbers. I'm painfully aware that the amount of outstanding federal debt for the United States is currently well over $16 trillion dollars. Granted, it is more money than I've ever seen, but the numbers do follow a … [Read more...]

A brief glimpse of the Big Picture

Life cannot evolve until it exists. When I recently made that point during a series of questions I asked in another post, Dr. Benoit Leblanc responded by writing, Your fourth question is the least contentious one, because it deals with matters that lie outside of evolutionary biology. “Until life exists, how can it evolve?” The answer is, of course, “it can’t”. Evolutionary theory is not concerned with abiogenesis, although its principles do apply to the evolution of increasingly-efficient unliving replicators (such as self-replicating nucleic acids) that may, in time, acquire characteristics that we associate with living creatures. Such is the power of the natural selection concept: in a population of replicators that can accumulate mutations, the replicators that gain a replicative advantage will, by definition, replicate better. To his credit, Dr. Leblanc made the effort to respond, though he conceded my point while simultaneously suggesting he and his colleagues don't care that the spontaneous origin of life was a wildly improbable anomaly, at best With all due respect and while I’m sure Dr. Leblanc is considerably more knowledgeable about evolutionary biology than me, I cannot begin to fathom how he could possibly make the statement that evolution theorists could be completely unconcerned about the hypothesis called abiogenesis while simultaneously agreeing with Dr. Coyne's assertion that evolution theory is true, beyond any question or reproach. Quid est veritas? What is the purpose of studying science? Is it to cherry-pick from the evidence that … [Read more...]