1. Atheists are people who don't believe in gods. That's all. There is no requirement about believing anything about evolution, or the big bang, or dinosaurs or whatever. True, there is probably a correlation between being atheist and being a person who accepts established science rather than denying it, but being reasonable is not an absolute requirement of atheism.
Correlation is worthless, James. I've tried discussing this aspect with identifying, evangelical atheists, and they're pretty much unreasonable. The assertion of reasonability has precisely nothing to do with atheism. Watching atheists freak out about it actually makes your line about correlation feel like a really skeezy lie. I mean, honestly, for how hard atheists at Sciforums, for instance, throw down on the point of extending rational consideration beyond screeching that there is no God, It's true, that part of your answer really, really, reads like a bad joke.
But that's the thing: I think I get what you're after. It just doesn't prove out in practice.
2. Atheism and science have nothing to say about whether the universe started with "nothing".
3. The big bang theory is a scientific theory. There is nothing "magical" about it. Science is concerned with nature, not magic.
4. The big bang theory describes how the universe "exploded". The theory is supported by real-world observations and evidence of many different kinds.
Would you agree with the following statement: "There is no practical reason to explore how the Bang came about, or how its circumstance developed, as this has nothing to do with the Bang itself."
If you agree with that statement, your answers suit the circumstance.
If you don't, then science has something to say about such questions unless it is simply incapable.
(There is also a religious answer of Bang ex nihilo.)
Or we could be strictly rationalistic and remind that science has nothing to say about anything: It's the
scientists who do the talking.
5. Chemistry and physics are not "magical", and neither are things that rearrange themselves in accordance with physical and chemical laws of nature. Physical laws do not count as "no reason".
6. Dinosaurs were an accident, essentially, just as human beings are. If we were to run evolution on Earth again, there's no guarantee there'd be anything like* a dinosaur or a human being after 3.9 billion years.
Hmph. You mean science might have something to say about scientific issues?
Imagine that.
Oh, and yes, it does make sense if you bother to educate yourself just a little.
It's always good advice.
Like this story I tell about how the atheist at Sciforums who couldn't have the argument unless we redefined the word "religion" to make his argument easier.
Bait like the topic post tell us more about that poster than anyone or anything else.
Funny thing is that religious people tell me lots about hwo awsome and smart their faith is, too. The difference is always one of abstraction compared to reality.
Of whatever you do and don't remember about your time here, James, can you remember the early days? It's one thing to complain about religious evangelization, but in the whole of Sciforums our "atheissts" have never really transcended the religious fanatics they hate. Calling oneself an atheist is easy. Saying rude things about religious people is easy.
And as an
identity, that sloth is the point.
As a matter of logic and rhetoric, the atheistic assertion has its clear function as a counterassertion against
religion.
Otherwise, it just is: It's just this idea, you know? It exists as a potential whether we identify it or not; the answer is only relevant if the question arises. In the end, this counterassertion against religion is
reactionary, which, incidentally, is why it is even possible for me to tell the story about the time the atheist apparently hopping his track decided the rational thing to do was start redefining the words.
The result of this is that the atheism we witness in the public discourse is a weird mix of revolt and surrender.
An example from life, and having nothing to do with God:
• Corporate personhood — Wait, what? Okay, so there was a case before the U.S. Supreme Courty, it is known as Santa Clara, and pits a county against a railroad company. There came a point where the objections flying back and forth compelled the Court to smack them all down at once, and in order to get through this part of the trial they were going to skip arguing the ontology of the corporation and just look at it as a normal question of a person's rights. Corporate personhood was not explicitly argued or resolved by the 1886 decision in Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Co., nor explicitly decided. The first publication of the decision lacks any substantial resolution or address of the question. However, two railroad men, namely the Chief Justice and the Clerk of the Court, exchanged letters afterward and decided that the latter would enter a headnote to the syllabus asserting the the Court had resolved coroporations to have the same rights as individuals. Subsequent questions on the matter simply referred to precedent. One of the reasons it is hard to argue against corporate personhood is that there really isn't anything to argue against.
Most of what atheists argue against is backfill. Consider this rational argument:
If [Theist] says [God] does [_____],
and [Atheist] can demonstrate [_____] false,
then God does not exist.
This slothful fallacy is the primary "atheistic argument". What makes it unreliable is allowing
what it considers unreliable to assert and set conditions. That is to say, the
reaction is against an
irrational proposition. Extending that logical resolution—
e.g., that the Earth exists as such, as compared to this silly, untestable seven-day thesis—to a larger framework can be, and in this range generally is, inappropriate.
If you let someone else set the terms, and you demonstrate that two plus two does not equal five, what is anyone else supposed to say if your argument tacitly requires that it equal three? The problem might be your math or not; it also might be that you agreed to argue irrational terms.
Why would anybody do that, by the way? Quite simply, because they're human, and start focusing too narrowly on what annoys them.
What we witness in the Sciforums experience is far different than we see in the world, but the way it all works out, people might not notice, especially if they disdain issues operating outside the immediately workable range of the physical sciences. The thing is that there are a lot of nonbelievers that haven't the strange trouble discussing history and theology that identifying atheists do; the reason they don't is they're not wasting their time on such petty satisfactions. And, you know, okay, they're human, so they probably are in some way, shape, or form, but matters of proportion might explain why it doesn't stand out so much. We can argue all we want with the SBCs, SDAs, LDS, Kingdom Hall, traditionalist Catholics,
ad nauseam, and all we ever win out of it is that no, their personal perversion of what "God" means does not represent a real or true condition in this Universe except as a thought in someone's mind and subsequent practice of their will.
Comparative theology isn't a physical science. Neither is pschoanalysis, and especially not as a paraliterary exercise such as we might find in classicist Norman O'Brown's "psychoanalytic meaning of history". Still, though, there is this: The historical record we have is the historical record we have, and unless we intend to abandon all questions of "meaning" and "purpose" beyond the immediately utilitarian. To wit, sure, it would be nice if everyone could come right out and say it, but
Perdurabo↱ is not necessarily wrong, and, sure, the commentary is as pretentious as the pretense is ridiculous, and it really, really helps to understand the man ineffably loathed his parents. It actually helps to not believe; Perdurabo does appear to approach proximity to genius, but that can also be an illusion fostered by madness. These days he would merely be annoying; we probably would have banned him three or four times after he got his ego on. In his day, he was astonishingly crazy, and largely because people had forgotten about Newton.
In mythopoeic terms, I am the parallelogram, and don't ask, but it's also true I find that point hilarious. I use the word "Apathetic" to describe my outlook on God; I am neither theist nor atheist nor agnostic, and I literally do not care if God exists because it is just a word, and in the monotheistic framework describes an abstraction; this notion is not any pioneering work of my own, but something I learned from reading really smart people giving their best historical analyses to notions they personally didn't believe.
And I also learned that bit about accretions, years ago, from Sufis.
The error I perceive in points 2-4 has to do with your framework, which in turn seems reactive; it's one of those things by which I think I get what you're after, but you're hemming yourself in by surrendering terms to the theists, and thereby ... I think
overstating what you mean.
