More on the same subject (is the horse dead yet?)

   Wow! Eighty comments so far on the last three entries. I can't keep up. I'd love to respond to everybody, but I'd be typing for a week solid, and somehow I can't see Mr. and Mrs. Ho letting me take a week off to blog. I do want to cherry pick some comments to address, though.

Krissy,
   Thank you for the comment. The questions you ask are ones that I have never really addressed in detail, but should have. You are correct in stating that it is impossible for either of us to know for sure if God truly exists or not. The skeptical viewpoint is one of asking for evidence to support what seem like extraordinary or highly unlikely claims.
   Consider this example: You are walking along the street and come across a twenty dollar gold coin lying on the sidewalk outside a bank. "I wonder how that got here?" you ask out loud. Two people offer you possible explanations. The first says, "I work in the bank, and I know we recently received some of those coins that a customer had specially ordered in. I don't know if that customer has been here today, but it is possible that they were, and accidentally dropped one of the coins on their way out."
   The second person says, "well, it's common knowledge that leprechauns carry around gold coins, that they get from the pots they hide at the end of the rainbow. Obviously, a leprechaun has passed this way, and dropped the coin. If I were you, I'd put it back down, before he comes back looking for it. He might be mad."
   Now, without doing any further investigation, it is impossible to say for sure which one of those scenarios is true. Personally, I don't believe in leprechauns, but I don't *know* for sure that they do not exist. However, I can examine the available evidence. I have a credible source telling me that the coin resembles those made by the US mint, and that several of those coins are know to have been in the bank. On the other hand, no one, anywhere in the world has ever presented any compelling evidence suggesting that leprechauns really exist. No, I can't know that the second person is wrong, but unless that person can produce some actual evidence, does it make sense for me to believe option number one, or number two?
   In the eyes of an atheist, the likelihood that God exists is about the same as the likelihood that a leprechaun exists. I cannot discount the possiblity, but absent any actual evidence, I have to stand on the "nay" side. I am willing to examine any evidence presented, but to date, no one has been able to do so.

(Simon,
   That answer to Krissy also touches on a comment of yours. My position is one of skepticism. That position has me defaulting to a naturalistic world view, and requiring evidence from anyone who claims to espouse a supernatural world view. I gotta say, though, that whichever early religious thinker came up with the whole 'faith is required, God will not be tested' schtick, he was a genius. He gave the perfect out to every single believer in God to follow. Evidence will not be forthcoming. That's just not the way God rolls.)

   I always get a chuckle when someone asks how human bodies could be so perfectly formed without a God. Because they really aren't very well formed at all. There are several things about the human body that work poorly, or could easily be improved upon. The human knee, for example, is suprisingly poorly designed for the task it has to do. Engineers could improve on it easily. And the appendix. What's up with that? Let me ask you a question. If you were God, designing your ultimate creation, would you put in an organ that doesn't actually do anything, that your creation could live without and never miss, and that is likely to explode and kill him completely at random? Does that sound like good design to you?
   These things do, however, make perfect sense in the light of evolutionary theory. Our knees are exactly what one would expect to see in a biped who had only recently evolved above quadropedal locomotion. And our appendix strongly resembles an organ in the gastro-intestinal tract of ruminants, that helps them digest all the grass they eat. As humans no longer eat a diet of primarily cellulose, we no longer need to use that organ, and so it has atrophied and become vestigal.
   Can all this just be chance occurence? Well, no. It can't. But evolution is not a random process. It is directed by the pressure of "natural selection." It is, in fact, very strongly non-random.

   I kind of lost you when you started your second comment, Krissy. I don't consider Jesus to have been a BIG LIAR. In fact, it was always my understanding of scripture that he never actually came out and called himself the son of God.He alwayscalled himself "the son of Man." As for how he could have affected so many lives, and how his impact could still be felt so many years later, one might ask the same questions about many historical figures. How about Hitler? How about Mohammed? Surely, as a Catholic, you do not believe Mohammed was a true prophet of God, yet he took an established religion (Islaam) and competely overhauled it to the point that it no longer even remotely resembles what it began as. Jesus did no more or less.
   Why would twelve men - indeed thousands more since - be willing to be tortured and killed for one man? I don't know.Why would 19 men be willing to kill themselves and thousands of others for one man on September 11, 2001? I still don't know. But it happens.

   After that, you just got preachy. All that stuff about a God shaped hole in my heart? Sorry, Krissy, but there isn't anything like that there. My heart is full, of my son and my wife, of my family and my friends. It is the perfect shape for that. I feel no emptiness or need for a God. You must have been talking about yourself.

     ~~**~~     ~~**~~     ~~**~~     ~~**~~     ~~**~~     ~~**~~     ~~**~~    

Jenny,
 You’ve picked up on the Noah's Ark debate with Alec and Brent. Yes, there have been some people who have done some work that they claim shows a feasible ark design. The best known of these is John Woodmorappe (A.K.A. Jan Peczkis, an Illinois high school teacher). Woodmorappe claimed that the ark, as described in The Bible, could have held the animals it was claimed to. There are, however, some problems with his work.
   First of all, his interpretation of the biblical description of the animals as being "two of every kind" is questionable. You may know that animals are classified by science in a ladder format, the last three (or most specific) rungs being 'family,' 'genus,' and 'species.'  Most people, when they think of the biblical ark story naturally assume that the "kinds" of animals that were housed in pairs onboard were all the different species of animals on Earth. Not so, says Woodmorappe. There are too many species, and a boat big enough to hold them all could not physically be built. It would not float. However, he reasoned, if one were to count only the different genera of animals, it might work. So the "kinds" were not species but genera, and the calculations show that the ark, once packed with all the animals, and all the food they'd need, would be about 90% full. Which is all well and good, providing nobody moves, or has to go to the bathroom.
   Oh, wait. When questioned further, Woodmorappe admitted that his calculations depended on most of the larger animals (bigger than say, twenty pounds) being juvenile species. OK. Sure. But what about this "kind" thing? I mean, there are four or five different species of Ibex. I can see that maybe Noah took just one example. How about the Markhor, or the Caucasian Tur? The common goat? Well, all the above named animals are of the genera capra, so only one pair from among them all would be on the ark.
   Certainly, the ark contained a horse. And a donkey. Probably a zebra, too. But wait. All three of those belong to the same group. Pick one to go on the ark. The others two weren't there. There was a pair of foxes, a pair of coyotes, a pair of wolves. Did Noah have a dog? But those four are all of the genus canis, so three of them have to be left off according to Woodmorappe. Does that make any sense to you?
   So what we have is Noah, with a boatload of baby animals representing about one third of all the animal species in the world. That's not how I remember the story. And there's more. Woodmorappe completely ignored the invertebrate kingdom of animals. A group that includes over 97% of all the world's animal species. If Woodmorappe were right, there wouldn't be any insects of any kind today. They'd have all died in the flood, for there was not room for them on the ark.

   Now, as if all that wasn't bad enough...the guy got his math wrong. He made a fundamental error in his calculations of the volume of the ark taken up by animals. Even with his tight restrictions, it would have been completely impossible to fit the animals on the ark, if it was the size that was described in The Bible.

   I have included the above arguments because you were already discussing them. However, they are not the most compelling arguments against the flood story being literally true. Not even close. The biggest problem facing ark supporters is thefact that science can demonstrate, pretty darn conclusively, that there was never a universal flood. There has never been a time - at least in the last several million years - when the entire surface of the Earth was covered with water. It never happened. It's just a story.
   It's a good story. A rip-roaring tale. But a story none the less.

Tags: skepticism, religion, atheism, holy debate forum Batman!