Yazata
Valued Senior Member
Penn ofPennandTeller said:If you have ever stopped at a red light, you are an atheist; because you are not counting on God not to drive the fucking semi into the side of your fucking car. You are counting on common sense and logic. If you've ever taken a pill, if you've ever used science, if you've ever put a splint on your arm instead of having God save you, you Mother Fucker are an atheist. End of story.
That's pretty dumb, in my opinion.
For one thing, I have never seen cars and semis fucking, and I don't believe that those kind of human artifacts can have sex. He's confusing them with biological organisms. (I'd like to see car and truck sex. It must look like the Transformers movies.)
A more serious criticism is that he is turning whatever his target is (non-atheists I guess) into a caricature. What's more, he's doing it intentionally. (He certainly isn't an idiot, he knows precisely what he's saying. My guess is that he was playing to an audience of atheists, for laughs.)
I don't know of anyone, theist or atheist, who completely ignores the natural order. What the theists assert, and the atheists deny, is that the natural order is the work of God. Some theists even go further and imagine that natural laws exist as Platonic-style forms in the mind of God, as God's eternal ideas so to speak.
In other words, if God created the natural order complete with the regularities that govern it, and created human beings as part of that order, then God presumably intended human beings to pay attention to the rules of creation. I don't know of any theists who would interpret their doing so as a denial of God.
If atheists believe that they are totally different from theists because they count on logic as opposed to faith, perhaps they would be willing to explain to everyone else what logic is and where it comes from. I don't think that they can. (Of course, I don't think that the theists can either, since saying that it is the will of God just exchanges one mystery for an even bigger mystery.) But whatever logic is, atheists certainly have faith in it.