Questions from Tabassum:
1. Things are existing around us. Why do they exist? Someone once answered that things exist because they just have to. But why do they HAVE to? How do I answer this without metaphysical ideas?
2. Evolution.
How did genders arise? People usually answer by giving some of the benefits of sexual reproduction but I am asking the how not the why. I mean how can we believe that genetic mutations led to perfectly complementary organisms when the two organisms (male and female) are separated in space and time? Or do I have the concept wrong here?
3. Evolution.
Evolution does not violate the 2nd law of thermodynamics, as I was taught. This is because there is energy continually being supplied to the organism so it can have the opportunity to become more sophisticated. Overall, the universe becomes more complex because the energy released from the sun increases the randomness of the overall system of the universe.
My query is:
If energy is being made available to the organism constantly, how would the organism use that energy. Shouldn’t there be a system to consume and use that energy in a useful way in the first place? So there needs to have evolved a system to use the energy, but it could only have evolved if it was able to use energy. Or maybe it can evolve without consuming energy? Answers?
Answer by SmartLX:
1. The short answer is that we don’t know, but that’s not a good reason to assert any particular explanation.
Matter exists right now either because it has always existed or because it came into existence at some point. If it always existed in some form, then like most people’s concept of a god it has no need of an origin. If it came into existence, not only do we not know how but we don’t know if it needed a cause at all. We’ve never seen anything come into existence from nothingness, so for all we know it could be entirely spontaneous, though very rare. The exception is in quantum mechanics where current theory suggests that (and of course this is a gross oversimplification) small particles are regularly winking in and out of existence, without any known cause or even much of an effect. This hardly supports the idea of deliberate creation of matter.
2. The most popular hypothesis is that gender and sexual reproduction began as a simple transfer of DNA material between two almost identical entities. We know it evolved extremely early in eukaryotic single-celled organisms, and for such creatures an exchange like this could be as simple as pushing material through their cell walls while in contact. Even if this happened regularly but by accident, it would have altered the population’s overall genome much more quickly than cell division alone. That would have meant disaster for many individual cells that got the short end of the helix, but overall it meant more unique material for natural selection, faster evolution and better survival prospects. The organisms that won out and continued to reproduce would have been the ones that made this exchange a hard-wired part of their life cycle. After that, all that was required to achieve genders as we understand them today was the emergence of a DNA structure with a switch, or a split probability of going one way or the other – in other words, a chromosome.
3. Living organisms have evolved very efficient means of harnessing energy from outside themselves, like photosynthesis and digestive systems, but while such complex mechanisms are useful they are not essential. There are chemical reactions caused by light, water, oxygen and especially heat which have nothing to do with life at all. Molecules break down and recombine, elements move between states of matter and so on. For a crude thought experiment, imagine a variety of inorganic objects and what happens to them in a pot of boiling water, or on a stove, or when left in the sun all day.
The very first living organisms simply needed to include substances within their membranes that could absorb heat, light and maybe bits of other organisms, and use the material to do something chemically interesting enough to keep the whole thing running for another few seconds until it happened again.
Good Reasons To Believe
Question from Adam:
What is the best (in your opinion) argument that you have ever heard or had thrown at you about the credibility/correctness of the Bible? Obviously the Bible is full of crap, but, I’m trying to understand why a person would ever believe in it (logically). Not just from indoctrination, or blind faith, but an actual good reason.
Answer by SmartLX:
Who said people need good reasons to believe? For those who even consider why they believe and therefore need to give a reason at all, they just have to think their reason is a good one.
The most powerful and persuasive reason to begin to believe, by far, is an apparent personal experience of the divine. Never mind that it’s useless for convincing others and it’s objectively a terribly flawed reason. If you really think God’s spoken to you, you’re going to implicitly believe in God as the basic premise of what you think is true, and there’s little that anyone can do about it.
As for reasons that are convincing on their own merit, that you could use to convince others, I’ve been through them all in my Great Big Arguments series (tell me if I’ve missed any, of course) and each is fundamentally flawed, so I’m hesitant to call any one of them the best. That said, many of them sound very convincing upon first hearing, or else so complex that it seems pointless to try to rebut them. That first impression that the debate has already been fought and won for Christ can be all a proselytiser needs to elicit a religious experience; Ray Comfort and Kirk Cameron are always talking about “bypassing the intellect”.
If there were a reason to believe in God which I thought was a genuinely good reason, I would believe in God. The fact that I don’t implies a certain upper limit on my opinion of any argument for God’s existence.
Science and the Bible
Not-a-question-as-such from Joel:
I don’t have a question as such. But I just wanted to point out my views…I am devout Christian.I am in fact very rational. I know the first thought that you will have when you hear the word Christian and Rational in the same sentence will be “Bull shit”. But I was on verge of becoming an atheist…And I had this thought.
Science is a continuous process of understanding the laws of nature and coming to a conclusion with a set of irrefutable equations. It is finding answers for the universe that we live in. Trying to explain the Universe that we live in.
But the Bible on the other hand (I will use the Bible cos Religion is an institution created by man and it is highly influenced by man’s thinking and principles) was written by God to answer and guide humans. It is the ANSWER and not a changing set of theories…It stood and it still stands and has been going on for thousands of years.
But science grows continuously, one theory postulated today can be nullified tomorrow. So unless and until science explains laws for everything (I MEAN EVERYTHING) in Universe and it contradicts the Bible. Till then people have no right to call the Bible false. Science is changing who knows what theory or findings might just come up tomorrow, Maybe someone will prove evolution false. We Don’t know.
The Bible never was against science in the first place. The Creation being the biggest of the problems…But I somehow feel that isn’t the problem..God didn’t specifically say ..There may be a hidden meaning? Maybe the days were the stages of evolution and creation of earth. first the light (maybe a big bang) then the separation of water and air and so on. May be god wanted to say that there were 6 stages of creation and evolution. We don’t know..But what Christians believe, is that. It is better to take the bible literally than to make assumptions and misinterpret it. They are correct in their way.
And the fact that it was written at a time when people were not knowledgeable to understand various complexities of physics and biology. It just makes sense that God wrote the process of creation in this manner..And the highlight of it not being the way he created universe but what he thinks of humans..a creation in his own likeness.
So lets just stop all this bickering. I don’t care what you believe. But do not blame Mans mistake on god. And science never contradicted religion.. for me its like
L.H.S (Science) = R.H.S (Bible.)
Answer by SmartLX:
Funny you should say that science is on the left hand side; in the context of God, Jesus is on the right, so the left is usually reserved for the damned.
Science adjusts its views based on new evidence, it’s true, so it’s always possible that the scientific facts we know today could turn out to be wrong. Putting it like this, however, unfairly categorises it as a dichotomy between knowing something absolutely (which might be impossible) and throwing it out altogether, when the truth is in between.
A good scientific theory explains a great deal while making as few assumptions as possible. If the facts explained by the theory or the assumptions on which it relies are found to be incorrect, the theory must itself change or perish. At any given point, though, a large amount of confidence in the theory can be well justified, especially if new evidence either supports the theory or only requires minor adjustments to it. For example, the age of the universe (since the Big Bang) had been estimated at 15 billion years, and there was a lot of evidence to back up the estimate. Then more evidence emerged, and the age of the universe was revised downwards – but only to 13.7 billion years. All the principles that led to the earlier estimate were still intact, but the measurements were better honed and scientists were able to be more accurate. Confidence in the means that led to the discovery of the magnitude of the universe’s age was unshaken, and likely even reinforced. There may be future revisions, but the next one is much more likely to be something like 13.6 or 13.8 billion years than to continue downwards at the same rate to 12.4 billion. The odds of a new estimate getting anywhere near 6000 years (with an inception period of six literal days for the Earth and all life on it) are infinitesimal.
You’re free to assert that the Bible is the word of God, but for people who don’t start with this presumption it’s just an old book, and if it wasn’t right on a particular point to begin with, then it never will be. The difference between the word of the Bible and a current scientific theory is that there is evidence contradicting a literal (sometimes even a figurative) reading of many passages from the Bible, whereas a current scientific theory is still current because it has weathered all criticism thus far without the need to change more than it has. The Bible simply ignores criticism because it is dogmatically unable to change.
It is a very weak position to say that the Bible is right because everything else might be wrong. Some aspects of science do have to be wrong for a literal reading of the Bible to hold up, but there’s evidence for these aspects of science and no good evidence that they’re wrong. Until contrary evidence turns up, the word of the Bible is not the rational choice over science in such a case.
Fear of the Devil – as an atheist
Question from Evelyn:
So I recently accepted being an atheist and I’m fine with it. But even though it’s easy for me to accept that there probably isn’t any God and I’ve been praying to dust this whole time, I still find myself panicking at the thought of Satan. I still have the same fears as when I was religious, and I find myself quickly making sure I didn’t commit blasphemy, or praise the devil. I figure it’s from all the fear techniques people from my religion used to get people to follow them. I wasn’t in any cult religion or anything, just Christian. But looking back the way it was fed to me was quite like the manner of a cult. Anyway, I just want to know if you have any tips for my irrational fear of the devil coming to eat my soul. Thank you!
Answer by SmartLX:
Welcome to faithdrawal, which is the best word I’ve ever invented.
This happens to a lot of people because fear of Hell and Satan goes beyond the intellectual. You’re not frightened of him just because they’ve told you he’s there, or else you’d have stopped being frightened when you became an atheist. Rather it’s been drilled into your subconscious to the point where your emotions bypass rational thought entirely and you simply behave as if there’s a devil. There’s no particularly insidious technique the religious use to achieve this, they just speak and preach to you as if it’s all true until you internalise it as an unspoken assumption.
Fortunately, this kind of conditioned fear needs regular reinforcement to persist at the same strength, and as an atheist you’re not getting that reinforcement anymore. (Some evangelists threaten atheists with hell in an attempt to reach lapsed believers with some last-minute reinforcement, and sometimes it probably works on individuals, but generally speaking it’s a futile effort.) It’s still bad now, I know, but it will fade over time until you calmly look back on your prior fear and see it for what it was, namely unjustified and needless.
If you want to try to speed up the process to save yourself some stress in the long term, equip yourself with a little ridicule. Satan has shown up in popular culture quite a lot recently (try this list), and in nearly every case some aspect of the concept of Satan is held up to the light and found to be silly in some way. There’s not that much media openly ridiculing all religious faith (yet), but criticising and lampooning specific ideas within specific doctrines is fine, and the Devil is a prime target. Go check out some different takes on the character. My personal favourite is Al Pacino in The Devil’s Advocate, who makes a raucous but really quite robust case that he’s actually the good guy.
Finally, just take a moment of self-awareness whenever you find yourself afraid of something you don’t really think is there. The more you catch yourself at it, the less you’ll end up doing it. And don’t worry, because right now is worse than it’s ever going to feel again.
The “Nones” on Nuns
Question from Monika:
What do atheists think about the lives of monks, nuns and priests? Do you think their lives are wasted, a tragedy, because their religion is a lie or it is more important that they are happy this way?
I am an atheist and do not know what to think about it. I do not wanna judge them because I do not know their background but I can not understand them at all (but I do know that the church provides food, clothing, quite a good standard of living and some social benefits so it might be a good way out of misery for poor people, in fact some years ago I thought it would be much easier for me just to become a hypocrite priest, no hard work and you have a feeling of security in your little religious community, not caring about money because the church gives you everything you need although the religion is bullshit).
Answer by SmartLX:
Have you ever heard of Eugene Ionesco’s play The Chairs? An elderly man and woman arrange chairs for a number of guests coming to hear a great orator deliver the old man’s incredible discovery. Once everything is ready they throw themselves from a high window because their life’s work is achieved. Trouble is, there are no real guests (the two actors mime their interactions with an invisible congregation) and the orator is literally dumb, unable to communicate anything meaningful.
It’s the kind of play that stimulates long discussions about its meaning, but all I want to point out is that the old couple die happily despite the fact that they have not achieved anything real, and we can understand how they feel that way. Their lives are wasted from anyone else’s perspective, but if they’ve worked hard and died satisfied and happy, and haven’t hurt anyone else, can it really be called a tragedy? I lean towards no.
So it goes with monks, nuns, hermits and others who dedicate their entire lives to religions based on false premises, like the existence of non-existent gods. While shunning materialistic excess they often lead peaceful, comfortable lives, and in many cases manage to help others along the way. The fact that they may well be praying to nobody makes little difference in the end. It’s the practical effects of someone’s lifestyle by which I judge it, and monks and nuns who tuck themselves away in their faith and withdraw from the world do far less harm than preachers and zealots who try to impose religion on others.
Don’t we need a god to save us?
Susan asks: Seeing all of the bad things that happen in our world, how can you not pray to a god to save us from all of this?
Jake answers: Because we’re doing fine enough on our own. Yes there are plenty of problems in the world. Hunger, violence, disease, finances, but compared to 100 years ago, we are as a species doing much better then we have in the past. People are living longer, there is less violence, people have access to information like never before, and so on. People pay to much attention to the news whose job it seems to be to report even the most insignificant negative story in order to get ratings.
In truth, religion like the news, is dependent on things being bad as well. Why else would you need a savior unless the world was quickly decaying into chaos? Why else would you need clerics to tell you how to live your life unless it was because people are to immoral to figure it out for themselves? Like I said in my post about overcoming adversity without a god religions job is to tell you that things are bad, that humans are weak petty things and that unless you have a sky daddy looking over you, you’re going to suffer. Nothing could be further from the truth.
When was the last time you heard a preacher talk about how great things are? How even though there’s hunger, we still feed (and yes I know, throw away) more people then we ever have in the history of mankind? When was the last time you heard a priest talk about how things like the flu used to kill millions each year or how only a 100 years ago the average life span was 25? How about how most countries don’t have child labor or how women across the world now have more rights then they ever have? I’m not saying things can’t get better but the truth is there are people out there coming up with solutions to world problems more then at any point in history. It’s not religion that is making things better, it’s science. Science has given us agriculture, medicine, technology, and more. It’s individuals who studied and used the scientific method to come up with solutions to problems, and you know what ? There’s no reason to believe that science wont continue to make things better. So ask yourself, why doesn’t religion tell us these things?
The simple answer is because they need you to believe that things are bad. Religion doesn’t want things to go well for humans because if people realized they didn’t need to be saved from an invisible devil who tempts us to do wrong, or from ourselves, they might also realize that they don’t need religion.
“– WHERE – IS – THE – CREATOR? –“
Question from John:
When computers become truly self-aware and sentient beings, will they be able to comprehend biological life or the existence of their creators? Would they not be in the same quandary as us biological, physical beings when contemplating a creator outside of our experience?
Answer by SmartLX:
If computers ever become sentient, they’ll be able to observe the deliberate construction of new computers, and they’ll be able to understand that this is the only way computers can come about. All evidence of older computers going back to Charles Babbage’s original machine will bear the hallmarks of artificiality and careful assembly. Furthermore, there will be surviving detailed documentation – visual and textual – by the creators and their contemporaries describing the history, purpose and inherent problems of each component. Even if humans have vanished by this point, computers will have very few mysteries to ponder about their own origins, especially considering that a wealth of their history is stored on today’s computers and would presumably be passed down.
Compare this to the human condition. Our only reason for supposing that we were deliberately created is that very early on we generalised the idea that we can build things to suggest that everything was built by something like us, including us. We now have the technology to watch new human beings develop spontaneously from a single cell, without any guidance whatsoever. We see countless similarities between ourselves and other animals, some of which are not just pointless from a design perspective but actively dangerous to us (e.g. the appendix). There is more evidence all the time supporting the idea that, far from being a special creation, we are the ongoing result of an undirected process that’s been going on for longer than we can fathom.
Meanwhile, to approach your question from an entirely different angle, just because future entities which have creators might wonder if they have creators does not mean that every entity that wonders whether it has a creator does in fact have one. That would be like saying that because all dogs are mammals, all mammals must be dogs. It’s a logical fallacy formally known as affirming the consequent. Perhaps coincidentally or perhaps not, it’s the same fallacy that leads one to think that because we know some complex things are created, all complex things must be.
The Case of the Missing Unrelated Life
Question from John:
I am comfortable with evolution and natural selection as a theory for the diversity of life today. One thing lingers as an anomaly, pointing at a non accidental creation. This anomaly is the lack of other “trees of life”. There is not a vestige or hint of any other tree of life but our own (witnessed by the same methods of protein synthesis in a bacterium as in a human).
Where are the other, accidental, spontaneous beginnings of life that began in dirty puddles of water, 2 billion years ago or last Thursday?
Any takers?
Answer by SmartLX:
The earliest evidence of life on Earth amounts to trace elements in rocks from 3.85 billion years ago (see this article) and could have come from anyone’s tree of life, not just our own. Only at the point where we can discern the shape or actions of the life that existed, in evidence that dates hundreds of millions of years later, can we begin to gather morphological, geographical or behavioural evidence that might determine the lifeforms are related to us.
That said, the conditions for life to arise are unknown mostly because they don’t seem to appear in the modern world. It’s reasonable to suppose that they don’t, as the world was a very different place 3-4 billion years ago. Even back then, the right conditions could have been so incredibly rare that abiogenesis only happened in a very localised area (and not necessarily a puddle; see how many other models there are) and never again.
Regardless, once our earliest microscopic ancestors got going, they spread like wildfire. They got everywhere, and their microscopic descendants are still everywhere, even in places we think of as lifeless. They’re in the air we breathe, they’re in the earth we walk on, they’re at the bottom of the sea and coating its surface, they’re rolling along in the desert sands. Any unrelated organisms that arose after that point, or weren’t as well-established at the time, had to compete with this ubiquitous organic juggernaut of carbon-based life. If they ever existed, they’ve been eaten, dismembered, crushed, drowned, strangled, suffocated or starved by our own guys, and any evidence they left has been mistaken for evidence of the roots of our own “tree”. History is written by the winners, as they say, and prehistory is probably no different.
How do I overcome adversity without god?
Barclay asks: God has helped me get through some terrible times in my life. I’ve lost both of my parents when I was young, beat cancer into remission, and I win over alcoholism daily. I couldn’t have done any of these things on my own or without the help of my lord and savior. Why would you want to try and take this source of strength away from me or anyone else?
Jake answers: Welcome Barclay. You’ve touched on a very dear topic to me, one that I have written about before on another website. So instead of writing a new post, I’m going to repost my article here and hope that it adequately answers your question.
You are stronger then you think.
One of the things I hate the most about religion, and theism in general, is this idea that without a god to help us along, we would fail. You see this attitude with people going through addiction rehab. They claim that if not for their god, they wouldn’t have been able to get off of whatever substance that they were abusing. They ignore the doctors, the medicine, the support system, their own inner will, and give the glory to their god.
Imagine for a moment that you have a child who has just made an achievement in their life. It doesn’t matter what it’s for, graduating, winning a race, top of their class, whichever. Now imagine that your kid, when asked how he or she achieved this goal, ignored all of the hard work and effort that they just put in, and claimed that Spiderman helped them ? That if it wasn’t for Spiderman, they wouldn’t have been able to do it. It would be a gigantic ” WTF? ” moment wouldn’t it ? You and most people out there would think your kid was either crazy or at the least delusional. Yet replace “Spiderman” with “God” and practicaly no one blinks an eye.
Now, the obvious thing here is to point out that just like Spiderman, god isn’t real. That’s not what I want to get at though. What I want to write about today is the underlying message about how a person thinks of themselves. A persons sense of value. In the case above, the person who gives all of the credit to their god is essentially saying that they don’t believe in themselves. This is what bugs me. People not believing in themselves.
Here is the truth, of your existence as well as my own. The truth is that so far through out your life, you have found ways over, under, around, through, between, out of, every single problem that you have ever had, and that there is no reason to believe that you wont continue to do this in the future, Did you get that ? Read it again. Read it a third, a fourth, and a fifth time. Read it until you memorize it. This is your true strength. Not a god. It’s you. You are stronger than you give yourself credit for. You have more will power than you allow yourself to believe. You can over come any and all adversity. The great thing is, you don’t have to do it alone. There are people out there who have trained for years to help you. If you are strong on your own, imagine how much stronger you would be with people who have trained to help you understand just how strong you can be ? These people are scientists, doctors, nurses, therapists, psychiatrists, social workers, etc. These people are standing by right now to help you. Don’t allow anyone to tell you that you can’t over come your problems. Don’t allow anyone to tell you that you are weak, and that without a god your are helpless. That’s a lie. Theism cheats people of their true strength. It robs them of their own sense of will.
You aren’t weak. You aren’t a sinner. You aren’t unworthy. You are stronger than they want you to believe. Let go of that crutch and walk on your own. Use the tools available to you and learn to believe in yourself. Imagine how much better the world would be if all of the time and energy put in to praying for help, was instead used to help ourselves ? You can do it. You are stronger than you think.
I hope that answers your question.
If love exists why can’t god?
Klaus asks: why is it necessary for one to have proof that God exist for him to exist. We can’t prove love exist for us to believe it’s real. So why can’t that be applied to belief in God?
Jake answers : Hi Klaus. Thanks for the question. I’ve heard your question many times before, and on the surface I can see why it would be a compelling question for some people. I hope that I can show you that the answer isn’t as compelling as you may think.
This is really two questions. The first is “Why is it important to prove god exists?” and “Love is real and we can’t prove it so why can’t the same be said of god?” Lets take the questions in order.
Why is it important to prove god exists? The same reason it’s important when one claims anything exists. It’s a claim of objective existence. I could make thousands of claims of things existing, but if I have no proof of these things, what would compel a person to actually believe in them? If I call out to you and yell “A car is about to hit you!” but you’re in the ocean with no cars around, why would you pay attention to my claim of impending doom? People make many claims about god. That he will reward you, punish you, etc. Why would anyone pay attention to these claims if there is no actual proof?
The second question is what is called a “category error”.
These fallacies occur because the author mistakenly assumes that the whole is nothing more than the sum of its parts. However, things joined together may have different properties as a whole than any of them do separately.
In other words, the question is comparing something that exists as an idea like love, with something that is said to objectively exists as in a god. It’s the word “exists” that throws you off. Love is an idea, a subjective interpretation of an emotional amalgam of experiences and perceptions. It exists only as thought put into action. What you see as love may not be what others see as love. It’s a subjective idea that is dependent on interpretation.
God however is said to exist as a being independent of our perception. It’s not dependent on our subjective interpretation of it. When a person asks “Do you believe in a god?” they aren’t asking if you believe in the idea of god, they are asking you if you believe that such a being exists. This is different from someone asking “Do you believe in love.” because love has no real existence outside of the mind. It’s like asking “If you believe that fear exists, why don’t you believe in Batman?” You wouldn’t consider this question a valid way to show Batman’s existence. Comparing the two, fear to Batman is the same as comparing love to god.
I hope that answers your question. If you or others have further questions, feel free to ask in the comments section below.