Anytime someone comes up to you and starts squawking about Jesus dieing for us, God sacrificing his son, or any sort of variant of that, ask them to really explain what they mean.
For example, let's take a look at this statement: "Jesus died for your sins"
Atheist: Ok, if Jesus died for my sins then he is still dead right?
Christian: Well, no, not exactly. He actually rose again.
Atheist: Ok, so he didn't die for my sins then?
Christian: Stop trying to twist things around. He DID die, and then he came back to life.
Atheist: Mmmm...seems he never really died to me then. Once you're dead you're dead. How exactly does an omnipotent being die anyway? I mean if Jesus is God and God is all powerful how can it suffer and die? I would happily get beaten and whipped if I knew for a fact that it was just a temporary thing and that I was eternal. How do we know that this so called "suffering" Jesus did was real? If it's God, how do we determine that real suffering was done? What's the big deal? What REAL sacrifice was made? I just don't see it.
Christian: I'll pray for you.
Atheist: Sigh
Saturday, May 30, 2009
Tuesday, May 12, 2009
The so called "fine tuning of the universe"
Sorry fan (Hi Mom!) for the delay in posting. I've been looking for a job. That sort of takes precedence. Feel free to check out some of my side links (wink, wink)
Anyhoo, what I want to talk about today is the "fine tuning argument put forth by some Christians. They squawk:
"Well, I heard that if the weak forces were like .00000001 different life as we know it wouldn't exist. How do ya splain that?!!?"
Well, first of all I don't HAVE to explain it. Just because I can't explain something doesn't then by default meant your god dun it. I could ask you, well how exactly did your god create the universe from nothing? WHAT??? you don't KNOW?!! well, by default that means your god doesn't exist.
See, that's not really true, it works both ways. A persons god may exist but they have to show that and not just claim some sort of victory if their god is not "dis proven".
Ok, I sort of got off on a tangent. I've heard people just throw out astronomical type odds on life existing as it does now. I'm not sure where or how that they come up with these numbers, they probably just "heard it somewhere". I'm going to make a point about this here:
Let's look at a situation where someone (let's just say a pro golfer) is going to swing his driver to drive the golf ball down the fairway. There are about 300 dimples on a golf ball. There is about 100mm's along a blade of grass. Each golf ball dimple is about 3mm, so let's just say there is about 30 different locations along the blade of grass that ONE of those dimples may lay. Maybe the pro golfer is having a bad day and he could either slice, hook, hit it down the center, basically anywhere in between. Let's make a CONSERVATIVE estimate that there are a million possible blades of grass that the ball can roll and lay on.
My probability calculation may not be precise but that's not important. Basically the odds of having one specific dimple of the golf ball roll up and touch a specific spot along a blade of grass is...drum roll.....
300x30x1000000, or 9 billion to 1. So, when the golfer hits the ball, and the ball eventually does roll up on a blade of grass on one specific dimple, do we say that it was IMPOSSIBLE because the odds were so high against it? Of course not, the ball had to land SOMEWHERE. Now if somehow before humans existing something/some being predicted that we would be like were are now...that would be impressive.
To sum up, what I'm saying is that we are what we are. We could have very well developed into something else. We could have 8 eyes and no legs. We could all live in volcanoes, we could have not evolved at all. BUT we did evolve to what we are and there isn't really anything special about it. It's no more special than the golf ball.
Anyhoo, what I want to talk about today is the "fine tuning argument put forth by some Christians. They squawk:
"Well, I heard that if the weak forces were like .00000001 different life as we know it wouldn't exist. How do ya splain that?!!?"
Well, first of all I don't HAVE to explain it. Just because I can't explain something doesn't then by default meant your god dun it. I could ask you, well how exactly did your god create the universe from nothing? WHAT??? you don't KNOW?!! well, by default that means your god doesn't exist.
See, that's not really true, it works both ways. A persons god may exist but they have to show that and not just claim some sort of victory if their god is not "dis proven".
Ok, I sort of got off on a tangent. I've heard people just throw out astronomical type odds on life existing as it does now. I'm not sure where or how that they come up with these numbers, they probably just "heard it somewhere". I'm going to make a point about this here:
Let's look at a situation where someone (let's just say a pro golfer) is going to swing his driver to drive the golf ball down the fairway. There are about 300 dimples on a golf ball. There is about 100mm's along a blade of grass. Each golf ball dimple is about 3mm, so let's just say there is about 30 different locations along the blade of grass that ONE of those dimples may lay. Maybe the pro golfer is having a bad day and he could either slice, hook, hit it down the center, basically anywhere in between. Let's make a CONSERVATIVE estimate that there are a million possible blades of grass that the ball can roll and lay on.
My probability calculation may not be precise but that's not important. Basically the odds of having one specific dimple of the golf ball roll up and touch a specific spot along a blade of grass is...drum roll.....
300x30x1000000, or 9 billion to 1. So, when the golfer hits the ball, and the ball eventually does roll up on a blade of grass on one specific dimple, do we say that it was IMPOSSIBLE because the odds were so high against it? Of course not, the ball had to land SOMEWHERE. Now if somehow before humans existing something/some being predicted that we would be like were are now...that would be impressive.
To sum up, what I'm saying is that we are what we are. We could have very well developed into something else. We could have 8 eyes and no legs. We could all live in volcanoes, we could have not evolved at all. BUT we did evolve to what we are and there isn't really anything special about it. It's no more special than the golf ball.
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