Tuesday, July 22, 2008

Slate Ridicules Intelligent Design

Darwin's theory of evolution really doesn't bother me the way it seems to bother fundamentalist Christians. In fact it seems quite logical. It doesn't seem to bother the Catholic Church all that much either. What IS irritating is when some pompous antitheist tries to hijack the theory of evolution and use it as some sort of proof that God does not exist.

Christopher Hitchens tag teams with Richard Dawkins to come up with this gem in yesterday's edition of Slate.
"Vestigial eyes, for example, are clear evidence that these cave salamanders must have had ancestors who were different from them—had eyes, in this case. That is evolution. Why on earth would God create a salamander with vestiges of eyes? If he wanted to create blind salamanders, why not just create blind salamanders? Why give them dummy eyes that don't work and that look as though they were inherited from sighted ancestors?"
Well there you go. God's idea of what a blind salamander should look like does not agree with Richard Dawkins' idea of what a blind salamander should look like. Therefor, God does not exist.

Brilliant!

...or maybe God gave blind, cave dwelling salamanders vestigial eyes for the same unknown reason He gave antitheistic liberals vestigial brains.

(Oooh lookey, I can be a pompous jerk too!)

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

What IS irritating is when some pompous antitheist tries to hijack the theory of evolution and use it as some sort of proof that God does not exist.

Evolution does not disprove God. However evolution does remove a major gap that the God-of-the-gaps used to hide in.

Biological evolution requires no supernatural intervention. The evidence for evolution has shown beyond any doubt the development of every species was a natural process.

How the first living cells developed is a different subject and there's still no consensus on exactly how that happened. However every scientist working on this problem agrees it was a natural process.

Other places where the God-of-the-gaps used to hide have been explained by science. For example scientists now have an excellent understanding of how solar systems develop. God certainly wasn't need to create our sun and our planet.

During the next several hundred years our understanding of the universe and nature will be thousands of times greater. With every new scientific discovery, it becomes more and more ridiculous to believe God was ever necessary for anything.

God is just another word for magic. Magic might have been a satisfactory explanation for the natural world in the Dark Ages, but it doesn't belong in the 21st century.

Kevin - "pax tecum" said...

Mr. bobxxxx,

methinks somebody is gonna be in for a big surprise come judgement day....

Anonymous said...

methinks somebody is gonna be in for a big surprise come judgement day....

The most important difference between scientific ideas and religious ideas is science requires evidence for everything, but religion requires faith. For example the idea there's going to be a judgement day requires faith. People believe that because they were brainwashed to believe it when they were little gullible children. Faith means believing in impossible idiotic things that have no evidence. Religious people think faith is a virtue, but faith is really a mental illness. Faith is also a lazy excuse to not think. It's so much easier to invoke God (also known as magic) than it is to do the hard work of understanding the natural world.

Kevin - "pax tecum" said...

Oh noooo.... you mean I've wasted this much of my measly life working towards something that doesn't exist... I wish you would have said something sooner, I have so much to do before I die. I will pray for you though...

Anonymous said...

Why do people who don't believe in Faith seem to be so arrogant?

If a person doesn't believe in God, then why spend the energy and effort trying to persuade other people to do the same? What's the point?

Where does our sense of right vs. wrong come from if not based in Faith? As the world distances itself gets more secular, it is obvious that as a society we are taking a turn for the worst.

But what do I know, I'm just a dumb coonass... so stupid and all.

Malcolm said...

""Why do people who don't believe in Faith seem to be so arrogant?""

I assume you mean "people who don't believe in *god*..."

We all believe in "faith" because we see people like you all around us. It's just that some of us think faith (= belief without evidence) is not a virtue, and should not be celebrated as such.

We atheeists have many and varied reasons for not believing in your god, or ant others, and actually most of us don't seem arrogant - because we just keep ourselves and our beliefs to ourselves. There are a lot more of us than many people suppose. The ones who come over as arrogant are the ones who are fed up with having someone else's beliefs (usually evangelical Christians') shoved at us night and day. Stop demanding respect for your refusal to accept where the accumulation of human knowledge is pointing, and we'll stop telling you to shut up....

""If a person doesn't believe in God, then why spend the energy and effort trying to persuade other people to do the same? What's the point?""

Surely that question is better asked of the millions of evangelical religionists? When was the last time you saw an atheist standing on a street corner handing out pamphlets?

Most of us have far better things to do than evangelicize atheism. It's the religionists who try to push their ideas on others. Leave us alone, gather in your twos and threes to pray, and we'll be quiet. But get in my face, or try and force your myths into my daughters school, and I too will be an aggressive anti-religion campaigner, not just a bystander...