She also describes herself as a nonbeliever, then comments to me “However, I have not seen any convincing evidence to support your view point.”

Uhhh, Courtney? Aren’t >believers

While most of your tone is polite, please don’t denigrate your host. I pay attention, I understand. You do not agree with me, and salvation issues aside, I have no problem with you choosing not to believe in God. Call me “grossly ignorant” again or impugn my intelligence and your posting privileges will be removed. Faith and intelligence are not contradictory.

While my beliefs affect my view of the facts, so do yours. You are predisposed to see no evidence of God, and therefore you don’t.

Ephesians 4:18. “Their closed minds are full of darkness; they are far away from the life of God because they have shut their minds and hardened their hearts against him.”

Yeah. Sure is boring all this agreement, like on gravity, for example. Wish somebody would come up with a more interesting take on why objects fall to the ground. We need some “diversity”!! I, mean, like, it doesn’t really matter if its true or not; just, you know, like, different.

And Michael! Either you don’t pay attention, and repeat things as if they had not been addressed, or you simply don’t understand what is being said. And you are grossly ignorant of science. Ideally, facts should serve as the basis upon which you build your beliefs; clearly in your case and those of believers I talk to, your beliefs predispose you to misinterpret the facts. You can and should do better!

I wish you both well. You have a lot to learn, but first you must learn to want to learn. As Marks & Kammann said, “Our beliefs are not automatically updated by the best evidence available. They often have an active life of their own and fight tenaciously for their survival.”

And as long as you’re into book recommendations, I’d suggest “I Don’t Have Enough Faith to Be an Atheist.” There’s a book graphic link on the sidebar you can click. Among other things, it points out Hume’s fallacy that argue against God can often be argued against atheism. Hume himself fell into dispair [David Hume, Treatise on Human Nature, ed. L.A. Selby-Bigge (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1951; first published in 1739), p. 269.], saying “Where am I, or what? From what causes do I derive my existence, and to what condition shall I return? Whose favour shall I court, and whose anger must I dread? What beings surround me? and on whom have I any influence, or who have any influence on me? I am confounded with all these questions, and begin fancy myself in the most deplorable condition imaginable, inviron’d with the deepest darkness, and utterly depriv’d of the use of every member and faculty.” Clearly, atheism wasn’t working for him either.

I reject the “natural selection …giving rise to fantastically complicated and elegant forms.” It violates the Second Law of Thermodynamics which leads to disorder, and so now you have two conflicting rules of science. Regardless of the way you resolve it, it doesn’t ask who created the laws of thermodynamics, who created natural selection, and who can resolve the inherent conflict between the two.

Your last paragraph was insulting. I am neither childish nor uninformed about my faith. On the contrary, I study nearly daily. If study alone is necessary to become enlightened, then I considered a learned theologian to be the most enlightened.

As you can see in this little discussion, both believers & nonbelievers, liberal & conservative, seem to have problems understanding that the free expression of opinions, including the opinion that any one idea is better than others, is not in any way hostile to the RIGHTS of individuals to hold them.

Wouldn’t we all be rich if we had a dollar for every time we heard someone say someone has “a right to their opinion”?! Well, you will never hear me say that!

But you will hear me say this: “I have a right to YOUR opinion too!”

And you will hear me say this: (Part 1)”Everyone, everywhere, should believe what I believe or else I will conclude they are mistaken…”

Now, I can just see the hair on all of your backs raising as you read what you think is one of the most arrogant statements you’ve ever seen. But of course, it is no such thing, because it is exactly the position everyone, everywhere should take if they truly care about ideas. It is the position that private truths are invalid because anything would be permitted, and it is the position that is intellectually honest, which can be demonstrated fairly easily.

If you believe something because you think it is true, then on what grounds would you not want others to believe it? Again, I remind you to fight the urge; no one is telling you you MUST believe it – where people get the idea that oughts and shoulds are fascistic laws is baffling (or as Michael said: ‘And your “No person anywhere, at any time, should believe in a god or gods, or in tooth fairies or any other man-made myth” would lead to a atheistic-theocratic secular society.’ Yikes, Michael! Where do you get this stuff?! Now, I would certainly like to get to a secular society, but I’d prefer to get there by successfully raising public understanding to such heights that enough people were reasonably good critical thinkers to see rubbish for what it is! I want better ideas to win!)

Now, of course, if you have what you think is a better idea, then you must present it as the one all of us should consider, assuming you can support it with reasoning and evidence which is of higher quality than that in support of conflicting ideas. This is where part 2 of my arrogant statement comes in, with part 1 in front: “Everyone, everywhere, should believe what I believe or else I will conclude they are mistaken, UNLESS I can be convinced that *I* am mistaken.” It is simply logically necessary that we should all strive to be compelled by the best ideas rather than preferring comforting fictions and getting insulted when they are criticised. The best way to grow is by WANTING & INVITING criticism, by jumping the highest hurdles presented, by reading the best presentations of opposing views, by daring your ideas to survive; NOT by having unshakable convictions and “personal” evidence combined with a total lack of understanding of other views, and certainly not by *preferring* a certain view to the extent you dismiss or are willfully ignorant of better ideas!

So you can see why the question Michael asks– “how would you feel if I felt the same about your opinions?” — does not present the problem he thinks it does. As Al explained, that is exactly the way we want Michael and anyone else who disagrees with us to feel! We want our bad ideas refuted, dissected, and replaced with better ones. Ours are NOT unshakable; if new and better information comes along we revise our views. We are amenable in principle to new lines of reasoning and understanding that we may not have considered.

And it is precisely by using this type of thinking that we have arrived at our disrespect for the hollow and ill informed case that believers present. When it comes to the religious question, the difference in the opposing sides is stark. As Michael has so richly, but unintentionally illustrated, there is no case whatsoever for a reasonable person to believe. However, as to whether he or anyone else in this discussion can or will take the time to avail themselves of the abundant information proving this, it is beyond our control.

Many millions of people believe things which are not true. Many millions of people all over the world are not trained to think critically. This is why they hide behind personal truths and faith.

I’d like to suggest a book entitled “How To Think About Weird Things” by Theodore Schick & Lewis Vaughn. I don’t know if it is still in print, but it is worth trying to find.

Again, I could go on with a line-by-line demolition of the numerous mistakes above, but I’ll cite just a few:

- Michael has trouble believing in a universe without a god but does not think about the added complexity of accounting for where this being came from. Here is a quote from British scientist Richard Dawkins concerning that: “For a long time it seemed clear to just about everybody that the beauty and elegance of the world seemed to be prima facie evidence for a divine creator. But the philosopher David Hume already realized three centuries ago that this was a bad argument. It leads to an infinite regression. You can’t statistically explain improbable things like living creatures by saying that they must have been designed because you’re still left to explain the designer, who must be, if anything, an even more statistically improbable and elegant thing. Design can never be an ultimate explanation for anything. It can only be a proximate explanation. A plane or a car is explained by a designer but that’s because the designer himself, the engineer, is explained by natural selection.”

- Michael thinks we’re suggesting an orchid came about by “random disorder”, showing a complete misunderstanding of the evolutionary process, which is NOT random. Here is another quote from Dawkins: “This is a spectacular misunderstanding. If it was random, then of course it couldn’t possibly have given rise to the fantastically complicated and elegant forms that we see. Natural selection is the important force that drives evolution. Natural selection is about as non-random a force as you could possibly imagine. It can’t work unless there is some sort of variation upon which to work. And the source of variation is mutation. Mutation is random only in the sense that it is not directed specifically toward improvement. It is natural selection that directs evolution toward improvement. Mutation is random in that it’s not directed toward improvement.

The idea that evolution itself is a random process is a most extraordinary travesty. I wonder if it’s deliberately put about maliciously or whether these people honestly believe such a preposterous absurdity. Of course evolution isn’t random. It is driven by natural selection, which is a highly non-random force.”

Of course Michael and other believers *prefer* that all good things like orchids were put on this world by some well-intentioned being for our benefit, but the idea is childish! And I suppose he is right when he says it is easier to believe that *something* is behind our creation (which explains why that is the more common view), so I suggest he not take the easy road, do the hard work, and improve his understanding! It is not easy, but it is worth the effort and truly liberating!

And I believe our God the creator is it, based on what I perceive in our world with my own eyes, historical records of Christ’s miracles and the disciples that were crucified in His name, the peace that I see in true believers and the personal miracles I’ve seen in my own life.