Occasionally a theist makes an argument so amusingly stupid that it would be a shame not to share it with a larger audience. This is one of those occasions.
On another thread, we’ve been discussing the unloving way in which God — supposing that he exists at all — is treating the victims of Hurricane Harvey (and the soon-to-be victims of Hurricane Irma, unfortunately). In the course of that discussion, fifthmonarchyman — a Christian — made the following, er, memorable argument:
I form the light and create darkness, I bring prosperity and create disaster; I, the LORD, do all these things.
– Isaiah 45:7
keiths:
Yes, and creating disaster for his children is exactly what every loving father sets out to do. Right, Mung?
Nothing says “I love you” like drowning someone or wiping out their possessions.
At that point fifthmonarchyman got the bright idea that he could defend God by arguing that God is not our father. He wrote:
quote:
the Originator of the heavens and the earth! How could it be that He should have a child without there ever having been a mate for Him – since it is He who has created everything, and He alone knows everything? – Sura 6:101
and
and say: “All praise is due to God, who begets no offspring, and has no partner in His dominion, and has no weakness, and therefore no need of any aid” -and [thus] extol His limitless greatness. – Sura 17:111
end quote:
That’s right, folks. Fifthmonarchyman quoted the Quran to argue against the idea that God is our father — forgetting that the latter idea comes straight from Jesus. What are the first two words of the Lord’s Prayer? Our Father.
Seeing fifth — a Christian — use the Quran to argue (unwittingly) against Jesus is one of the stupidest moves I’ve seen in a long while. I therefore renominate fifth for the title of World’s Worst Apologist.
After posting his comment, fifth belatedly realized that he had just thrown Jesus under the bus. He tried to undo the damage:
Get it keiths ?
A loving father is not the default understanding of God. Not by a long shot.
To know him as Father you need to have met his Son. Once you have met his Son you are simply not dissuaded when bad things happen.
peace
It’s a bit too late to backpedal, fifth.
This is a good time to quote Augustine again, on the topic of Christians who make fools of themselves:
…we should take all means to prevent such an embarrassing situation, in which people show up vast ignorance in a Christian and laugh it to scorn.
The inanity goes even deeper. I’ll elaborate in the comments.
fifth:
keiths:
It’s odd that fifth isn’t content to portray himself as dim, but insists on being seen as dishonest, too.
How does that fit with your supposed goal of glorifying Jesus, fifth?
My actual argument, of course, is that if you rationally consider the evidence rather than sweeping it under the rug, you will conclude that God — if he exists at all — is not the powerful, loving God that Christians (and many other theists) suppose him to be.
This is not only true, but obvious, which is why being a Christian is such a badge of intellectual shame. An embarrassment.
colewd,
Seriously, colewd? You actually believe that homoplasy is incompatible with common descent?
keiths, to Allan:
Christians, we’ve already established that your supposedly loving God shits on people in this life. Any of you care to explain why he refuses to accept converts after death?
Praise be to God, who in vjtorley’s words “loves each and every one of us with a steadfast, unshakable love which is greater than any of us can possibly imagine.” A “love” that can cause him to reject you for eternity, with no second chances.
keiths, emotionally engaged atheist. LoL. How fitting.
Mung,
You’re still sputtering on the sidelines.
Why not be brave, take a stand for Jesus, and explain to us why your “loving” God punishes people for eternity, with no second chances?
Don’t be ashamed, Mung. Stand up for Jesus.
Moved a comment to guano
I shouldn’t need to remind long-standing members that accusations of dishonesty are against the rules of this site.
not really, I just wanted folks to understand a possible background for keiths relentless tirade against the God he claims not to believe in.
There is no need to support a claim that often atheism is motivated by emotional feelings.
That one is pretty well established already.
peace
Of course that’s true from your perspective.
The problem is your prospective is limited by the fact that you have not personally experienced God’s redemptive love.
As I pointed out earlier, You are at the same emotional disadvantage that Uday Hussein would be in understanding the loving compassion of Norman Schwarzkopf.
peace
colewd,
This is just bollocks. If you can’t even see it’s a homoplasy without the overall signal being one of nested hierarchy, you can hardly fail the entire nested hierarchy on the basis of the one thing that doesn’t fit it! I know you can’t see how dumb this is, but it is, indeed, dumb.
So, if 99% of the genome accords to the nested hierarchy and 1% doesn’t – and we even expect, statistically, a proportion of molecular homoplasy … and we could not even see that 1% if we couldn’t align the rest … that 1% ‘anomaly’ is enough for us to throw away the other 99%!
I have a photocopy of an important document. Someone shot a bullet at it; it is now 1% hole. The bit that’s hole now invalidates the entire hypothesis that I hold a true photocopy by descent? Despite the fact that the hole is only a hole in the context of the surrounding document! Without the document to establish its location, where’s the hole?
Part of that article was based on a study of undergraduates about past feelings about God and feelings about a specific hypothetical God .
Schwarzkopf had no interest in demonstrating his love towards Uday.
More word salad. You really have to take more care when you write stuff. No random genetic changes don’t push anything. It’s selection that pushes. Two populations with almost identical eyes are almost certainly that way because they are related, not through convergence. I’m not sure which two populations you’re thinking of. Until the feature is selectable there is no selection. Speaking of eyes, it’s enough to start with a small, flat patch of photosensitive cells; or you could go back further and talk about a patch of cells developing photosensitivity. Yes, random mutation plus selection seem sufficient for both of those things.
I don’t propose that any single DNA sequence builds a complex adaptation. That would seem to take lots of DNA sequences, most of which start out doing something else. And infinite sequence space seems quite full of functions of various sorts.
How is any of that a response to what I said?
Hi keiths,
You’re making three assumptions here, all of which may be mistaken:
(i) that death comes suddenly and unexpectedly upon certain people, so that they have no time to repent;
(ii) that after death, it is still possible for a person to change their mind; and
(iii) that people who choose to go to Hell do so without having any firsthand knowledge of what it’s like to be in Hell.
People, in their dying moments, may have an extended sense of time, if the reports of NDE experiencers are anything to go by. What appears to us to be an instantaneous death (e.g. decapitation by guillotine) may feel like a prolonged period to the person undergoing it. During that time, the individual may have an out-of-body experience and a life review, making a final decision to love or defiantly oppose God, just prior to the separation of soul and body.
After having had such an experience and an encounter with God, there may be no further possibility of repentance for the individual concerned, simply because there is nothing else that could possibly sway the individual’s mind. After all, if even an encounter with God at the point of death doesn’t induce a person to repent, then what possibly could?
Finally, the prodigal son came to his senses only after experiencing hunger and poverty. If the NDE also includes a foretaste of Hell for those who have lived selfish lives, then it could truly be said that those who go to Hell are making a fully informed choice, from which they could not possibly repent.
vjtorley,
Only one way to find out, eh? 🙂
LoL! Which nested hierarchy?
But God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.
– Romans 5:8
keiths too. If he wants to experience God’s love he certainly can.
Nonsense. Evolutionists will believe anything, no matter how silly.
What an unloving father he must have had.
Allan Miller,
How would you expect 1% homoplasy? I would expect almost 0% chance that any complex adaption could evolve once yet alone twice with similar features based on reproduction alone.
Think about it. You’re trying to find a DNA blueprint for an eye in almost infinite sequential space through random change. Now your claiming this serendipity occurred several times. The data is contradicting the theory.
He wasn’t talking about complex adaptations. He was talking about individual sequence differences. Given random mutations and only 4 possibilities for a base at an site, one expects a certain number of what are called “multiple hits”, i.e. that same base at the same site, independently arrived at. Nobody expects identical eyes, much less identical eye-building genes, to arise independently. And in fact we don’t find that happening. Eyes that, according to the tree, arose independently also have fundamental differences of structure and genetics. There are some commonalities: the use of Pax-6 homologs to determine the site of eye placement, for example. But those few commonalities are not convergent; Pax-6 was present in the common ancestor. Other commonalities are related to the limited number of physical solutions to sight and do not share genetic bases. And “trying to find a DNA blueprint for an eye in almost infinite sequential space through random change” is just word salad.
John Harshman,
In this case it is not word salad, it is a concept you don’t understand. The above paragraph is beyond nonsense because of your lack of understanding of the problem.
No Bill. There is nothing trying to find eye-blueprints in some space, whether infinite or not. It really is just complete blather you spew.
Then why don’t all evolutionists believe in, for example, the RNA world hypothesis?
Why is there still lots of debate about the relative contributions of drift and natural selection to the diversity and adaptations we see in life?
So now you’re back to no longer accepting common descent?
Rumraket,
Let’s assume for argument that 300k nucleotides are required to build an eye during embryo development. There are 4^300000 ways to arrange this. How many arrangements result in an eye? Next we can talk about echo location evolving twice. How do you support the claim random genetic change built an eye even once?
Are you also going to appeal to the light sensitive spot ” just so” story?
Where do you get this number from?
Even if that number is correct, those 300.000 nucleotides came about by being copied from a highly similar template. And that template itself was copied from one almost exactly like it. And that one was itself copied from another one almost exactly like it. And so on and so forth back to the origin of the very first genetic material.
You’re looking at the result of a trillion copying events with mutations, of course it’s going to look unlikely. So will ALL results of a trillion copying events with mutations.
What’s the problem?
Rumraket,
It’s an estimate just for the sake of argument.
It is a conservative number that estimates the number of nucleotides required to code for the spliceosome.
This number would include all the regulation required to build an eye and the proteins that make up the eye and its connection to the brain. If you don’t think this is a conservative number then make a counter proposal for argument and I will accept your number.
Focus, Rumraket.
The idea that there is one single nested hierarchy, of either morphological or molecular characters, is ludicrous. It follows that it is even more ludicrous to claim there is a “twin nested hierarchy,” as if the morphological and molecular data form one tree apiece and they always match up.
It’s templates all the way down. 🙂
What common ancestor? Did it have eyes?
Rumraket,
The problem is unless the DNA blueprint for an eye is common in sequence space then random change will drift away from it.
I know you understand how ridiculously large 4^300 is let alone 4^300000. The genetic code to build an eye requires knowledge of that code. Serendipity through a random walk is not an explanation.
I know the design argument is limited and probably a philosophical argument due to the difficulty in testing it but it appears to be the only logical conclusion based on the facts here.
Right, and God feels the same way about those who reject him,
quote;
because you have ignored all my counsel
and would have none of my reproof,
I also will laugh at your calamity;
I will mock when terror strikes you,
when terror strikes you like a storm
and your calamity comes like a whirlwind,
when distress and anguish come upon you.
Then they will call upon me, but I will not answer;
they will seek me diligently but will not find me.
Because they hated knowledge
and did not choose the fear of the LORD,
would have none of my counsel
and despised all my reproof,
therefore they shall eat the fruit of their way,
and have their fill of their own devices.
Pro 1:25-31
end quote
peace
Moved a comment to guano. Please discuss moderation decisions in the appropriate thread.
fifth,
From the passage in Proverbs that you just quoted:
He will not answer. And not just now, but forever, if you died before converting.
Please explain to the readers how these…
are the words of a loving God to his precious creatures. Is that what the father said to the prodigal son?
And please, none of this “you’d understand if you were a Christian” crap. If one person said that to another, you would not be praising him for showing Christian love and charity toward his brother.
You are the World’s Worst Apologist.
colewd,
You’re confused. 4^300000 is not the size of the sequence space. It’s the number of times we’ve explained this to you without you understanding a word of what we’re saying.
Allan, to colewd:
Mind-bogglingly dumb.
I wish there were more people just like keiths posting here. =p
Moved a comment to guano. Moderation complaints should be made in the appropriate thread.
keiths:
What’s interesting is most Christians’ odd insistence that if you convert after death, it’s too late. You’re gonna burn.
Why in heaven’s name (so to speak) would God take such an uncompromising, unloving stance? It’s the opposite of the attitude the father takes in the parable of the prodigal son.
vjtorley:
If you’re killed instantly by a bomb explosion or a shotgun blast to the head, you don’t have time to even think about repenting.
Why would a person’s beliefs and attitudes fossilize at the instant of death?
You don’t have to choose to go to Hell. Simply die in unbelief, and God will send you there, like it or not.
vjtorley:
Do you see how ad hoc this is, Vincent?
You’re starting with your desired conclusion — that God is loving — and reasoning backward from it to the necessary assumptions.
The evidence shows that God is unloving, so what do you do? Propose some assumptions, out of the blue, to rescue your assumed conclusion.
You don’t want the truth; you want Jesus. (And I say that with some sympathy. I remember feeling the same way at the beginning of my apostasy.)
Vincent,
Particularly telling is your suggestion that our beliefs and attitudes are fixed by death and cannot change afterward.
There is no evidence for that, whatsoever. Its sole purpose is to rescue the notion that Jesus is loving.
Like me, you can see how appallingly unloving it is for God to consign unbelievers mercilessly to hell, forever, with no chance to change their minds. It is so appalling to you that you simply can’t accept it.
There is only one way to reconcile this with your assumed conclusion that God is loving: shift the blame to the unbeliever. So that’s what you do.
According to you, God would allow those in Hell to change their minds and come to Heaven. It’s just that they never do. They’re all suffering unspeakably, and they’re all saying to God “I want this to continue. I don’t want any relief.”
Does that really make sense to you?
Moved a comment to guano.
Moved a comment to guano.
Complaints go here.
Mung,
People who say ‘lol’ a lot tend not to be very funny, ironically. I notice you don’t ask Bill ‘which convergence?’.
Rumraket,
SSDD from Mung. All evolutionists believe anything, but no two can agree. I can only wonder at the cognitive dissonance. “Hi, I’m Mung, I accept mutation, natural selection, drift, common descent, LGT. It’s just evolution I have a problem with”.
colewd,
None of this is in any way an argument that the evolution of a similar complex feature twice violates the nested hierarchy.
Mung,
They get pretty damned close.