Oh, I think it's a great argument. Nothing like an apparently cast iron certainty to make the other side sharpen up it's debate. Human ingenuity is boundless.
And who knows, one of us might actually be right ;-) ---In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, <turquoiseb@...> wrote: This is one of those hideously specious arguments that weak-minded "believers" trot out from time to time that I simply have no patience for. If I choose to argue with an idiot who believes that the moon is made of green cheese, I don't have to accept the possibility that it really IS made of green cheese, or read and appreciate the elaborate treatises they've written about the moon's green cheesiness. It's enough to recognize them as the idiots they are and laugh at them. Same thing with theists. From: salyavin808 <no_re...@yahoogroups.com> To: FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com Sent: Monday, February 17, 2014 9:33 AM Subject: [FairfieldLife] RE: Quote of the day... "sympathy for theology" Interesting choice of words. I would say that these "new" atheists are scientists, so why would a scientist have sympathy for something that refuses to demonstrate any actual evidence in favour of its position? And I don't agree with the idea that Dawkins etc are smug or arrogant, they are coming from a position that is so well sussed there is simply no room for the old ways of believing to be necessary. And they are deliberately starting a fight in the hope of making people think about what they decide is real, it's a post 9/11 thing to try and shake people out of the religious stupor they walk around in without questioning it. Why would they want to do that? This the funny bit, Dawkin's thinks people will be happier with a more accurate description of reality than the superstitious ones that people still get brought up into. LOL, he obviously didn't read Xeno's security blanket list. If atheism promised a life after death he might have more takers. If you want a scientist to take a theory seriously you have to show that what it explains is a superior explanation to the current one. And here's your problem, the cornerstones of scientific thought are so sussed that trying to lever in a supernatural being or creator (or whatever this brahma does) is really going to take some doing as it's been shown to be unnecessary. We have a couple of good theories as to how the universe got here without any help. We know about stellar evolution and the creation of dense matter from supernovae. Evolution from simple forms to more complex. Not finished but there is an undeniable drift away from biblical explanations for creation. This is where the apparent smugness comes from I think. God has been forced into such a small corner by our understanding that you have to wonder if all that is left over as his domain is actually an insult to the old dude. So you have to get all "god is a manifestation of all things" to still keep the concept alive. A far cry from his glory days. Progress happens when someone spots that a theory is contradicted by the evidence. To get any concept of god taken seriously you'll have to show how any current explanation of our experience is inadequate without some sort of supernatural being. Good luck with it but blissful states of consciousness aren't going to do it, I had all of them and it didn't convince me. ---In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, <s3raphita@...> wrote: Judy is correct. What Stephen Roberts (who he?) doesn't get is that "God" is not a proper name. The trouble with these new atheist types is that they have no sympathy for theology so completely misunderstand the language that theologians use.
