Pompous and self-deluded Atheists…of various degree.
John Cleese, Penn Jillette, Bill Nye, Stephen Hawking, (above) Frederick Nietzsche, (below) George Carlin,, Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, Charles Darwin, Neil DeGrasse Tyson, Adam Savage, Michio Kaku
(I exclude Carl Sagan…. as though he was an evolutionist he was an honest Agnostic not an atheist)
Without wasting too much precious time, I wish to hack off another limb from the Mythical Atheist Beast.
It is connected to that absurd delusion that reason and science are the preserve of Atheism…
Many Atheists rationalize that the theistic mind is given wholly over to Superstition and Mysticism, and as such opposes Naturalistic explanations and scientific progress. They love to quote the common interpretation of Galileo’s conflict with the Roman Catholic church re The Heliocentric model of the Solar system as being typical of The Religious mentality, and other such gems as ‘American Farmers superstitious attitude towards Jefferson’s scientifically designed Steel plow replacing the wooden Old world style plow ‘proposing the steel ‘would poison the soil’.
It is via such arguments that Atheists sit smugly in their assumed intellectual and rational superiority, and further argue that with the advance of Naturalistic science God himself will be increasingly squeezed out of existence… there being nothing left for him and his hocus pocus to do.
Now I of course understand that superstition and myth has always been a problem for mankind and that it does thrive in ignorance, yet I would argue that Atheists are not immune to either.
I suggest that atheism is itself a form of Anti-scientific superstitious Ignorance!
Yet let me show you that contrary to the Atheist assertion that Theists are quick to accept Superstitious explanations for phenomena , that Judeo-Christian theism has always maintained strong opposition to superstition, and condemned it, and that The Judeo-Christian cosmology embraces the idea that the Natural realm obeys Natural Laws.
First of all The Book of Genesis states that after the six days in which God had restored the Universe to order and created Man, that on the seventh day he rested from his work.
…and yet the Universe continued to function!
This shows that not only is God distinct from the universe, but also that it does not require any ‘work’ from God to function. Ie He has set it up so that it maintains itself and operates independently.
Thus while Egyptian and Maori myths may say that The Sun rises and sets according to the ‘work’ of deities and spirit beings, the bible does not say this.
The Bible says The Universe operates according to the Order of God’s design.
It was in appreciation of this Divine order that Einstein said that the Natural Laws inspire Awe and reveal super intelligent design.
“God is a Geometer”. “God forever arithematises” saith other Mathematicians.
Now let’s see how the Bible disproves the Atheists idea that Biblical theism corrodes the mind and renders a believer susceptible to superstition and mysticism by looking at biblical accounts and personalities.
Let’s consider the Birth of Isaac, which was a Divine intervention into the Natural order.
Now The Book of Genesis lays out the strict Natural Laws of Kinds… Humans give birth to Humans, fish to fish, Sheep to sheep, etc.
Furthermore in 2000 BC, it was understood by Experience that a woman’s natural ability to bear children was limited to her youth.
This was Natural.
And so when Abraham told his aged wife Sarah that God was going to ‘open her womb’ and that she was going to bear him a son… she did not automatically… superstitiously believe Abraham.
Instead she laughed! (Isaac means Laughter)
This is because she knew that ‘Naturally speaking’ she was too old to have children, and that though she believed in God, still she did not expect ‘Divine intervention’ to step in and alter the natural order of things.
Yet She did fall pregnant, and History was forever altered.
This shows that Sarah’s Naturalistic rationale, though understandable was wrong!
That God can and does intervene in the natural order when it suits his purposes to do so.
This is what miracles are.
Rare and exceptional interventions.
What is important to appreciate in this historic account is that Sarah displayed what we today might call ‘a healthy skepticism’ towards miraculous interventions of the Natural Order.
This attitude explodes the atheist notion that Theists are Brain dead morons given to swallow suppositious and mystical ideas and fables.
We find this same attitude… a resistance to accept supernatural explanations… in the events that surround the incarnation. When Righteous Joseph discovers his espoused Woman Mary is Pregnant with Christ, Knowing how woman get Pregnant he naturally assumes she has had sex with someone else and was thinking about ditching her.
It was only when he is visited by an angel whom explains Mary’s miraculous condition that he accepts Mary has been faithful and that the Child she is carrying is very special.
Again this account shows that the Jewish Theistic mind does not leap to supernatural …’Superstitious’ conclusions.
When Miracles do occur Theists can be very stubborn and slow to accept them.
When The woman returned from Christ’s tomb declaring he had Risen from the dead the response of the Disciples is a natural incredulity, not belief.
They check the tomb themselves, and discuss it as a mystery. Thomas Refuses to believe it point blank…unless he puts his fingers in Christ’s nail holes!
Christ Obliged him.
The Miracle of the resurrection changed World history. The Disciples of Christ, and the Apostle Paul were willing to die for the testimony that Christ really did rise from the Dead.
This was not something they herd.
This was not an ideological ‘faith’.
It was something they witnessed as really happening!
A real time event… an Extra-ordinary Empirical Fact!
The reality is Miracles only have the power to amaze if the person recognizes them as deviations from the normal nature.
The miracles of Christ we see this truth.
Ie whenever Christ performs a miracle it creates a sensation!
People are well aware something unusual has occurred.
That is why Miracles are considered ‘Signs and wonders’ because they violate what is known to be the understood Natural Order of Things!
The Narrow Atheist mindset is a throwback from the ignorant past when Materialists assumed the Universe was Eternal. Though this cosmology has been overthrown, Atheists have clung to their superstitions, and would still have you think that The Natural order is absolute, and thus to believe in a supernatural realm is to be utterly deceived, yet the reality is That The natural order is a temporal, and finite, and dependent orderly system, which exists within a greater Super-natural/ primary reality… ie It is within the bounds of modern science to say that there was ‘a time’ when this universe did not exist, and neither did the Laws of physics as we know them.
True Science has caught up with the Bible!
The Universe is a created thing, and there is no good reason to say that super-natural events can not or have not ever taken place within the universe.
Statements such as ‘Miracles never happen’ are articles of blind faith… an unsubstantiated dogma which contradicts some of the Greatest milestones of recorded History.
To maintain this they enter into far fetched and convoluted attempts to explain away these recorded miraculous events of history like the celebration of the Passover, or the disciples belief in the Resurrection of Christ… in Naturalistic terms… eg they conjecture that Christ faked his death… or that his body was stolen… and one of their chestnuts they like to employ is thir delusion that ‘primitive theistic minds’ were ignorant of nature, and thus quick to accredit mystical causes for things they experienced.
Yet as my post has shown. Jews living 2 millennia ago were not ignorant of the natural order, nor were they quick to claim miracles or other supernatural explanations for things.
Thus the Atheist notions that theism necessarily corrupts the mind is proven false… It is their arse which is hanging out in the breeze!
Isaac Newton.
Their delusion is also exposed by the reality that most of the greatest scientific Minds have been also men of Religious faith.
Science owes a great debt to Theists.
Thus it is the atheist whom is found to be self-deluded and irrational with their false dichotomies between Religion and science, between Faith and Reason.
I have encountered several times the Delusion of atheists that men of faith like myself are incapable of understanding how the Natural world functions and so have expressed that they would not trust in my capacity as an engineer!
Again Reality shows up just how Pompous these atheist delusions are.
My religious faith makes me a better Engineer than many of my contemporaries, not because I am more intelligent, but because it imposes ethical standards of behavior.
God is not the Author of confusion.
I aspire to emulate his Reason, and Purpose, and Art.
In environments of Laxity and poor work culture, my Christian Ethics drive me to resist the flow of apathy and maintain High Order discipline and Methodology even when I am Tired, or angry, or see that nobody else gives a damn.
This results in a consistently superior quality of workmanship …Better Engineering.
Christian Ethics inspire me to do an Honest Job, to go the extra mile to provide Good value to those whom employ my service, and not to cut corners to maximize my personal profit.
Consistent adherence to these ethics helped Me out perform hundreds of others to win ‘Contractor of the year 2012’ at Fonterra Te Rapa.
As a scientist, Christian values ought to keep your integrity to objective truth, as a higher priority than serving corrupt political agendas… like Global warming, etc… resisting the urge to provide Pseudo scientific endorsements of Ideas which may Bring personal wealth and Status via, government funding and pandering to popular delusions.
“… whatsoever ye do, do it heartily, as to the Lord, and not unto men…”. (Col 3vs23)
Thus it is that not only does Theism *not render me stupid and irrational*, It actually inspires Betters Engineering, Higher standards of scientific Rigor, etc… the very opposite of what Atheists assert.
Thus it is the Atheist whom today suffers superstition. They have deluded themselves as to the Efficacy of Theistic faith in stimulating, integrity to objective truth, and superior prowess via self-discipline in the Secular arts and in reason.
We live in a secular society which has actually Banned the teaching of Creation science and Christian values in our schools, thus is their any surprise that Today Science is in Disorder?
That Scientism and Atheism dominate our centers of learning and permeate the values and ideals of our society?
Secular Science has not saved us.
Science has been corrupted by Politics, Profit, and Atheism, and Atheist Pseudo science has in turn corrpted our politics and ethics.
Materialism has ‘successfully’ exorcised Man of his God given inalienable rights and unchained the Totalitarian secular state.
Materialism has destroyed Moral absolutes and rendered all ethics to be merely culturally relitive or Evolutionarily ‘expedient’.
Every type of phobia and crackpot idea is served up to us on a scientific dish.
The result is chaos and confusion… mass supperstition and delusion!
This is what the result of Materialism has been.
Divorcing Science from Theistic ethics.
Tim Wikiriwhi
Christian, Libertarian, Dispensationalist, King James Bible believer.
https://theconversation.com/our-latest-scientific-research-partner-was-a-medieval-bishop-42857
Why does science work at all?
by Jonathan Sarfati
Telescope
stockxpert
Many anti-Christians claim that Christianity and science have been enemies for centuries. This is the opposite of the truth. Informed historians of science, including non-Christians, have pointed out that modern science first flourished under a Christian worldview while it was stillborn in other cultures such as ancient Greece, China and Arabia.1
This should be no surprise when we ask why science works at all. There are certain essential features that make science possible, and they simply did not exist in non-Christian cultures.2
http://creation.com/science-biblical-presuppositions
I am in fact happy to read this web site posts which carries plenty of useful data, thanks
for providing these kinds of statistics.
More proof that evolution is impossible that that it is far more likely we were created by God.
Despite any and all wails and cries from Atheist materialists, this statistical analysis vindicates what Creationists have been arguing for decades and decades… Evolutionists are wrong…. there is not enough Time… and it takes miracles….
‘We’re as good as it gets: Intelligent life is extremely UNLIKELY to exist anywhere else in the universe because it took a series of miracles for humans to evolve, say scientists
Oxford researchers outline the various evolutionary steps to human existence
These steps take longer than a planet is actually habitable before its star dies
What’s happened on Earth is unlikely typical of what happens on other planets’
Statisticians say the evolution of intelligent life is ‘exceptionally rare’, and that human-like civilisations are extremely unlikely to exist on other planets.
In a new paper, Oxford researchers theorise that, for life to evolve in the same way elsewhere in the universe, it would take longer than the whole of Earth’s projected lifespan.
Evolution on Earth from the Big Bang up until the current day has involved a series of what they call ‘evolutionary transitions’ that were helped by chance.
These include the emergence of primitive life from non-living matter (known as abiogenesis) and eukaryotic life (with cells that have a nucleus enclosed), the evolution of sexual reproduction, multicellularity, and intelligence itself.
If intelligent life does exist on other planets, it would need to have gone through a series of comparable evolutionary transitions.
The research draws on the Fermi paradox, which is the apparent contradiction between the lack of evidence for extra-terrestrial civilizations and various high estimates for their probability.
‘It took approximately 4.5 billion years for a series of evolutionary transitions resulting in intelligent life to unfold on Earth,’ the experts, from Oxford University’s Future of Humanity Institute, say in their paper.
‘In another billion years, the increasing luminosity of the Sun will make Earth uninhabitable for complex life.
‘Together with the dispersed timing of key evolutionary transitions and plausible priors, one can conclude that the expected transition times likely exceed the lifetime of Earth, perhaps by many orders of magnitude.
‘In turn, this suggests that intelligent life is likely to be exceptionally rare.’
The researchers used a special statistical technique called a ‘Bayesian analysis’ to determine the probability of events in Earth’s history – a ‘chain of multiple evolutionary transitions’ – happening elsewhere.
‘Our methods were basically statistics,’ Dr Anders Sandberg at the Future of Humanity Institute told MailOnline.
‘We made use of the assumption that what happened on Earth is typical for what happens on other planets – not the exact times, but that there are some tricky steps life needs to get through in sequence to produce intelligent observers.’
For example, eukaryotes – organisms with a nucleus – needed more than a billion years ago to emerge from their nucleus-less prokaryotic predecessors.
This was a far less probable event than the development of multicellular life, which is thought to have originated independently over 40 times in nature.
The fact that some transitions occurred only once in Earth’s history suggests a remarkable stroke of luck that resulted in intelligent Earthlings today.
The team quote American evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould, who said that if the ‘tape of life’ were to be rerun, ‘the chance becomes vanishingly small that anything like human intelligence’ would occur.
‘What we added was a statistical approach that allows us to get estimates of just how unlikely the steps could be,’ Dr Sandberg told MailOnline.
‘We feed in data about when things happened on Earth and a guess of how many steps there were, and in return we get the most likely levels of difficulty.
‘[These] turn out to indicate that, yes, we are an unlikely planet.’
Arriving at the opposite conclusion – that life in the universe isn’t rare at all – would require evidence for much earlier transitions than the ones that occurred on Earth, or multiple instances of transitions.
The classic version of this argument stems from the work of Australian theoretical physicist Brandon Carter, who sought to explain why intelligent life emerged so late in Earth’s history.
Earth is 4.5 billion years old and in another billion years, the increasing luminosity of the Sun will likely destroy Earth’s ability to support complex life, due to increased surface temperatures.
But humans – including our human-like ape ancestors that walked on two legs – have only existed on Earth for about the last 6 million years.
Homo sapiens, meanwhile, arrived around 200,000 years ago.
‘[Carter] pointed out that there is no reason to think the tricky steps on average may take much more time than planets remain habitable,’ Dr Sandberg said.
‘There might well be entirely different kinds of life and minds but they are likely as hard (or harder) to evolve than us.’
Dr Sandberg added that the new study fits into what one could call ‘armchair astrobiology’ as it deals with probabilities.
‘Just because we got our results doesn’t mean it is a waste of time to look at the actual universe,’ he said.
‘Data will always trump ever so careful reasoning and statistics.’
WHAT IS THE FERMI PARADOX?
The Fermi Paradox questions why, given the estimated 200bn-400bn stars and at least 100bn planets in our galaxy, there have been no signs of alien life.
The contradiction is named after its creator, Italian physicist Enrico Fermi.
He first posed the question back in 1950.
Fermi believed it was too extraordinary that a single extraterrestrial signal or engineering project has yet to be detected in the universe — despite its immense vastness.
Fermi concluded there must a barrier that limits the rise of intelligent, self-aware, technologically advanced space-colonising civilisations.
This barrier is sometimes referred to as the ‘Great Filter’.
If the main obstacle preventing the colonisation of other planets is not in our past, then the barrier that will stop humanity’s prospects of reaching other worlds must lie in our future, scientists have theorised.
Professor Brian Cox believes the advances in science and engineering required by a civilisation to start conquering the stars ultimately lead to its destruction.
He said: ‘One solution to the Fermi paradox is that it is not possible to run a world that has the power to destroy itself and that needs global collaborative solutions to prevent that.
‘It may be that the growth of science and engineering inevitably outstrips the development of political expertise, leading to disaster.’
Other possible explanations for the Fermi Paradox include that no other intelligent species have arisen in the universe, intelligent alien species are out there — but lack the necessary technology to communicate with Earth.
Some believe that the distances between intelligent civilsations are too great to allow any kind of two-way communication.
If two worlds are separated by several thousand light-years, it’s possible that one or both civilisation will be extinct before a dialogue can be established.
The so-called Zoo hypothesis claims intelligent alien life is out there, but deliberately avoids any contact with life on Earth to allow its natural evolution.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-9000797/Scientists-say-intelligent-life-planets-exceptionally-rare.html?ito=social-facebook&fbclid=IwAR0Tl_8BF7UdiQIdouio8_uibAEQcwjxnIog4pQ08afK9mGaLnFM0QOvXeY
Tyson looks to be softening his militant atheism…