Yours truly is of the opinion that theist apologists are either not creative or you can only repeat the same lie enough times before it becomes tired. And for the purposes of this post, even if this does seem as beating an already dead horse, it can’t be said enough times that theists are simply wrong and no matter how much they try to comport religion and science, it simply doesn’t work in their favour.
In this post, the author presents several fallacious arguments in support of theism and I will in this post try to respond to just a few without making this post very long, so dear reader, please bear with me! I have tried to summarize most of the trope in the post but anyone with time on their hands could read it for their journey towards Judaism 2.0.
(1) If science contradicts religion, how do atheists explain the fact that most of the great scientists of the past believed in God and took the Bible seriously?
This doesn’t make the bible true. It only means that bright individuals can believe stupid things.
(2) If religion is an obstacle to science, how do atheists get round the fact that empirical science first arose in Christian Europe, three centuries before the rise of Darwinism?
Evolution isn’t the only science you dimwit!
(3) Why did the ‘founding fathers’ of modern science believe in God?
Most people believed in god and thought it was a sufficient explanation for causes they didn’t understand. Nothing special about it.
(4) Atheists commonly reject the design argument for God’s existence because of the problem of evil, arguing that a world marred by death, disease, cruelty and suffering cannot be the creation of an infinitely good and powerful Being.
No you twit! The problem of evil contradicts a benevolent god. The argument from design is rejected on its own, because it is a bad argument. There is nothing that says the designer has to be a god and two, the key word is nature appears to be designed, not that it is designed.
(5) The advance of science over the last half-century has revealed powerful new evidence that life and the universe are the product of intelligent design, especially in the fields of astrophysics and microbiology
What evidence?
6) The realms of microbiology and biochemistry provide equally compelling evidence that life in all its forms is the product of intelligent design rather than unguided natural forces.
You start with the assumption that life is designed and conclude life is designed. This is not a bad argument, it is plain stupid. Besides, all available evidence point to Nature as the source of all life, and nothing outside of it.
(7) Atheism is not only challenged by the cumulative evidence for intelligent design uncovered by the progress of science; it cannot even answer the most fundamental of all questions: why does anything exist in the first place? Is the universe self-sufficient and self-explanatory or does it require an intelligent cause?
Atheism is a lack of belief in gods, has nothing to do with ID. The question that you think is fundamental can’t be answered by positing gods and yes, if by the universe you mean nature, yes, it is a self sufficient and doesn’t require an intelligence out of it.
The cosmological argument for God’s existence addresses this vital question, and is based on the premise that something cannot come from nothing – a self-evident truth supported by logic and experience.
No, the cosmological argument goes nowhere. The simple question is what caused your god? If on the other hand s/h/it is eternal, the same is true of matter. So what would god be doing?
Given these self-evident truths, does our knowledge of the universe suggest that it is self-existent?
What truths?
If, then, God is real, what can the cosmological argument tell us about His attributes and character?
Which god and what is god?
A great deal. All we have to do, as St. Paul reminds us in Romans 1: 19-20, is look at His creation – at all that He has made.
Unfortunately this verse tells us nothing other that god is invisible, how that is something you are yet to me!
This tells us, first of all, that since the universe and all it contains is unimaginably vast and powerful in terms of its mass, extent, and energy, its Creator must be supremely powerful.
How did you get to this point of the universe requiring a creator? And yes, nature is unimaginably vast and powerful. It is the sufficient cause of all it encompasses. Am waiting for you to tell me the boundaries of nature if you can…… and am patient, very patient!
Secondly, since the universe contains living, intelligent, and personal beings, and many other hallmarks of design, its Creator must be living, intelligent, and personal.
Far from it. Attributing human characteristics of goodness, intelligence and animation to nature will not get you anywhere. Nature need not be intelligent but it allows for intelligent beings disposed in a certain manner to exist.
Thirdly, since human beings possess moral awareness and feel guilty when they do wrong, their Creator must be Goodness personified, or ‘holy’, to use the language of the Bible.
You should have been using the language of the bible all along for that is where you get such silly ideas. And no again, man acts in a certain way because that is his nature and gods, whatever they are, having nothing to do with our morals. Goodness only make sense when comparing two things, what do you mean when you say god is good? What does it mean to say his nature is goodness?
Finally, since the distance between non-existence and existence is an infinite one, a God who can create an entire universe out of nothing must be all-knowing and all-powerful.
What is infinity? Do you just use the word because you hear it? Have you considered what it means? One, you haven’t established anywhere that the universe was created, the how and why, two you have not said what god is and lastly why it is necessary for one to exist.
(9) Atheists commonly argue that Darwinian evolution provides an adequate explanation of the appearance of design in Nature, without needing to invoke God as its intelligent cause.
There is nothing about atheism that requires you to hold evolution as true. But most atheists understand the evidence for evolution and why it is both fact and theory. You on the other hand seem to me to not have read about it.
(10) Another feature of life which points to God and cannot be explained by atheist philosophers and scientists, is the phenomenon of human consciousness.
So you think positing a ghost would settle the matter! Nature has arranged atoms in some of its creatures in a certain way that they are conscious, nothing magical about it except that we don’t understand how nature structured this.
Philosophy and science both support the teaching of Christian theology that humans are spiritual as well as material beings, created by God.
This statement could only have been made by an ignoramus.
At the end of his life, France’s best-known existentialist and atheist philosopher, Jean Paul Sartre, confessed: “I do not feel that I am the product of chance, a speck of dust in the universe, but someone who was expected, prepared, prefigured. In short, a king whom only a Creator could put here; the idea of a creating hand refers to God.”
Many people have said so many things at the point of death. This unfortunately doesn’t bring your ghosts into existence.
(11) Science does not and cannot rule out supernatural events like miracles.
What is a miracle and what purpose would they serve?
Random thoughts 
I really like the Sartre quote, and your response. I’m sure the idea of feeling special is linked to desire to stay alive and low suicide rates, and therefore a useful characteristic. It’s interesting to look at all human instincts through the survival lens.
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My dear friend, sometimes one has to ask themselves if these people are really serious. One atheist at his death bed, surrounded by christian benefactors mentions god, then now god must exist, thousand other atheists die without mentioning god, that is not treated seriously!
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It’s all cherry picking, selecting those things which support your point of views, whilst ignoring all evidence against.
For this reason, among others, I would want to disappear before I die, so that no one will know my last words.
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Your last words would be safe with me :-P.
I think they are good at quote mining. They will look for a single quote where a person expresses a single doubt, mentions god and go on the rooftops screaming so and so had doubts as if there is something wrong with having and expressing doubt.
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Indeed, and it’s a problem if we want to reason with them.
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“(2) If religion is an obstacle to science, how do atheists get round the fact that empirical science first arose in Christian Europe, three centuries before the rise of Darwinism?”
Well, empirical science could only develop after the protestant reformation had demolished the monopoly on knowledge of the roman catholic church. The good thing of Luther and Calvin is that they urged people to be their own judge in religious matters. As unintended side effect, people started to question religion itself.
Empirical science flourished in countries such England and the Netherlands after they broke away from dogmatic catholicism, and put the church under state control. Science developed despite christianity, and when it developed it showed increasingly how redicule its teachings are.
Further, during the middle ages science, including empirical science, was much better developed in the muslim world than in christian europe. Other non-christian cultures such as China were also further technologically than christian europe (gunpowder, fireworks are Chinese inventions).
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:-D, maybe the apologist doesn’t know the history of science as he would want us believe
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The religious are famous for making up history.
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They make up many things my friend, even gods!
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Love this post my friend. You made me laugh with your replies to each point. I’m kind of giving up fighting against those people. They simply don’t want to understand and open their mind. They think of science as a substitute of God whereas it is not. It simply eliminates hypothesis with no scientific provable basis, based on wishful thinking and ideas of ancient books… Well you know all the stuff… But I like your combating spirit.
Keep up the good job Noel.
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Thanks Mike for the kind words.
This people are impossible to get through to their heads!
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With regards to issue number 1; that many great scientists believed in deities. That only supports that because of the environment (politics, societal climate, etc.), many scientists were forced to pay lip-service to a particular belief system in order to survive or to preserve their families. Some benevolent belief systems tortured, maimed, or worse, those in there midst who didn’t adhere to the status quo. So much for all-good and all-loving.
Much love and naked hugs, my Nairobi brother! .
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I don’t think the theist cares to research that far and besides while he mentions Sir Isaac Newton, I don’t think he has considered his theology.
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Followed your link and found this gem:
(4) The reason God cannot make 2 plus 2 equal 5, or a round square, is because such actions would be logically contradictory and therefore meaningless. To point this out, consequently, is not to limit God’s power in any meaningful way, but simply to say that nonsense remains nonsense even when it is talked about God!
nonsense remains nonsense… he said it!
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I think he lacked the courage to go the extra mile and say even talk of god is all meaningless, without sense
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RE:how do atheists explain the fact that most of the great scientists of the past believed in God and took the Bible seriously?” – Does that include these scientists?
“A man’s ethical behavior should be based effectually on sympathy, education, and social ties; no religious basis is necessary. Man would indeed be in a poor way if he had to be restrained by fear of punishment and hope of reward after death.”
— Albert Einstein —
“One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. it is simply too painful to acknowledge – even to ourselves – we’ve been so credulous.“
— Carl Sagan —
astronomer, astrophysicist, cosmologist
“God is an ever-receding pocket of scientific ignorance, that gets smaller and smaller as time goes on.”
— Neil Degrasse Tyson —
astrophysicist
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He had Isaac Newton, Blaise Pascal and Mendel among others. How this he hopes is proof for his good, we will have to wait for an explanation
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Newton spent his entire life as a virgin, believing that women were nasty, proving (scientific accomplishments aside), that religion and crazy are next-door neighbors. His calculations, extended, explained most of the planetary motions, but there was room for them to slowly edge off-mark – there are natural, gravitational corrections in place that over time, resolve those issues, but these were unknown to Newton at the time, so he decided that comets were actually angels, sent down to make minor corrections to the planetary motions, in order to keep the clockwork running smoothly.
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Why christians use him as an example as a scientist who believed in god, to justify belief, is still beyond me. Is it that they don’t know a thing about his theology or do they just repeat what had been written elsewhere?
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I suspect they parrot what they hear.
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for the idiotic claim that since early scientists believed in a god there is a god, I would say that they may have believed in a god but that still got them persecuted because it was the wrong version of this god. What many Christians (and other theists) forget is that their version of their religion is not the original no matter how hard they try to pretend it is. Christians in particular do love to accept science as long as it supports their comfort but then get all offended if it shows their religion to be nonsense. Poor religion, always playing catch-up, insisting that its myths are true! true! until science shows them wrong and then saying “well, we knew that all along.” The usual deceit and nonsense as always.
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The christian argues that his religious book tells the ultimate truth about the universe and all other religions are not frauds, uses science when it fits their worldview and complain the moment it challenges their beliefs
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There is no contradiction in Religion and Science; as both are modes of human virtual travel into the unseen realm in a sense; the later in the physical and secular realm only while the earlier goes deep in the meaning, purpose, characteristics, attributes, morals and spiritual. They are complementary and not contradictory. One is the Word of the one true God while the other is the Work of Him. Both created by Him. If we fall short of at times understanding the Work of God, the same way we may misunderstand the other; the fault is always on our side as to err is human, and to shift it on the side of the one true God would be naturally inhuman.
What is the cure to this scenario? Just to improve our understanding with the available appropriate tools in the relative realm. With more experiments and experiences we could improve and photo-finish our understanding.
Maybe what we consider as a scientific reality as laymen, is not a scientific reality in the eye of science in real terms. it is an idea, an opinion, a hypothesis, or a theory not yet ripe enough to be a law on merit; so naturally it should not correspond with the Word of the one true God.
Human error could play havoc with the Word also. A priest, the fake one of course, may not and must not be able to understand the Word of the one true God correctly so it would not and must not match with the science at a point in time, resulting into an apparent ambiguity, which is not there in reality, it is our own personal or collective illusion for the most part.
Religion and science work in different realm; like sun, moon and earth move in different orbits never colliding with one another.
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You were asked by my friend archy if you’d be a muslim had you been born to a family of Hindoo or Christian leaning and would you believe their god to be the true god?
The statement religion and science covers different realms has been addressed so many times. Here is some article you may find useful.
The rest of your comment, which is religious ramble, I think I have covered elsewhere.
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It is a hypothetical question.
Many Hindus, Christians, Sikhs Etc get converted to Islam.
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Science is verifiable, religion is not.
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