Summations Only

(1) You don't believe in any gods.

Incidentally, since you you didn't actually write this, I have to wonder how much of it you think you understand? The inane babblings about thermodynamics and "cause and effect", for example --- do they even mean anything to you? Or are you just reciting this nonsense as yet another meaningless religious ritual?

10. You pretend that atheists "blame God for all the "evils" in the world, all the natural disasters, and everything else under the sun that is wrong in modern society" even though you know that you're not telling the truth just as well as they do.9. You pretend that atheists "feel insulted and "dehumanized" when creationists say that people were created in the image and likeness of God" even though you have never heard any atheist say anything remotely like that ever, and you pretend that evolutionists "claim that we all evolved from slime by a cosmic accident" even though you have never heard any atheist say anything remotely like that ever.8. You pretend that atheists treat works of biology as though they were holy writ, because apparently the nastiest thing you can think of to say about them is that they resemble you in some way.7. You can't seem to understand the similarity between the violence done in the name of Christianity and the violence done in the name of Islam. (Hint: holy wars look exactly the same no matter which imaginary being is claimed to approve of them.)6. You claim that evolution is a "fairytale" despite the masses of evidence for it and its almost universal acceptance by scientists --- while putting your own faith in an unevidenced story with talking animals in it.5. You pretend that "scientists have calculated the odds of life forming by natural processes to be estimated less than 1 chance in 10 to the 40,ooo power" even though (a) obviously they have performed no such calculation and (b) you have, therefore, obviously never seen such a calculation.4. While your Dominionist co-religionists work towards bringing back the death penalty for premarital sex, Sabbath-breaking, and blasphemy, you complain that atheists are intolerant because sometimes they say mean (albeit completely accurate) things about theists.3. You recite witless, fatuous nonsense about thermodynamics, a subject that even you must be dimly aware that you have never studied, and apparently you never wonder why you can't find one single professor of thermodynamics anywhere in the world who agrees with you.2. You claim that "all evidence, logic and reasoning point to a Creator and absolute truth", when the amount of "evidence, logic, and reasoning" present in your posts would fit comfortably into a ladybug's shoe. You pretend that it is a weakness of the theory of evolution, a theory in biology, that it is not a theory of cosmology, something that we also have; and you pretend that evolution does not account for morality when whole books have been written explaining how it does.1. You forget that the list was titled "Top Ten Signs You're a Foolish Atheist" and just degenerate into freeform whining and nonsense.And one more as a bonus:0. You are so pitifully ignorant of science that you might as well be living under a rock; and you are so dumb that you think that reciting falsehoods to atheists about what atheists think will convince them of anything except that you are either lying, mad, or at the very least grotesquely misinformed.Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.

Well, to be precise, it's an attempt to cover up for the fact that he's been busted.This is one of the problems with trying to talk to creationists --- their arguments involve elliptical references to the fantasy world in their heads. It is only with thorough knowledge of creationist failures that one can even guess what error they are trying to refer to.This is why I asked Chuck77 if he even knows what this particular piece of nonsense was about. I do, but I don't think he does.

Two things to notice. First, since no-one claims that that's how life arose, the calculation is not germane.Secondly, even if this was relevant, it suffers from the defect of most, perhaps all, such irrelevant calculations performed by creationists --- it doesn't have the word "per" in it. They talk as though whatever it was that caused life had one shot at happening, one time, one place, and if that didn't come off it wouldn't happen at all.Any meaningful calculation has to go through a step where one calculates the likelihood of it happening per volume (e.g. per cubic meter of "primordial soup" or whatever) and per some unit of time.Of course, since we don't know what the first life was or the conditions under which it arose, it is impossible for anyone to actually do such a calculation, but if it was then this is what they would have to do.

But Hoyle didn't "calculate the odds of life forming by natural processes". His calculation has no relevance to this question, because he calculated the odds of something other than the origin of life --- and without any reference to natural processes, since proteins don't actually form by amino acids just spontaneously chaining themselves together at random.

Unless I'm missing something, the answer to "what would randomly assemble multiple copies similar to, yet slightly different from the original" would be reproduction with variation.And after you have made nearly 9000 posts on this forum, how can you not know the answer to this question?After all this time, we should not have to point out the bleedin' obvious to you about what every scientifically literate person thinks.

Could be. I'll ask you the same question I asked Chuck. You see the putrid gibberish about thermodynamics in point (3)? Well, what do you understand by it? What do you think he's saying, and why do you think he's saying it? Can you restate his thesis in your own words? Do you think he's right when he claims that "a closed system can be defined however the observer wants"?If not, then what do you find to admire in this claim? The fact that he's telling atheists that they're wrong? Is that it? Is that the sole reason you like it, or do you think that it is a meaningful and cogent statement about thermodynamics?

Wouldn't that be an excellent reason for him to point out that science and atheism are not the same thing? What with him supporting the former but not the latter?

Yes. It is not the case that all theists do so, but it is clearly something that only a theist can do. In order to attribute causal agency to God, it is necessary to believe that he exists. "I form the light, and create darkness: I make peace, and create evil: I the LORD do all these things." --- Isaiah 45:7.

However, the person whom you plagiarized wrote: "a closed system can be defined however the observer wants".Do you agree with this? If not, why did you copy-and-paste something that you don't actually believe? Physicists disagree. But then, they're biased by knowing physics.If you could show us your calculations of how long a star could keep burning, that would be amusing, but you haven't actually made any calculations, have you?Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.

Indeed.Do you believe the Bible?

How about you answer the question?

Yes, I think you're right.When normal people talk about normal things, they have a mental model of the world and they're reporting on it. This models is intended to (though it may not) have a structure corresponding to the real world. But they have such a model, and when they talk about what they think is the case, they are describing this model to others.But fundies are not doing that. They are encouraged to live in a mental world consisting of words supported by proof texts, not consisting of models supported by their resemblance to reality. Now the result of this is strange. What he has is not a model, but a program: "If someone says W to you, then say X; but if someone says Y, then reply with Z". But there does not have to be an internal model of which both X and Z both have to be true.So, for example, a fundie approaches me in the street. He tells me:* That the Bible is all true (that would be the Bible where God is always turning up and showing off, talking out of burning bushes, talking to Moses and to Adam face to face, making those "accurate prophecies" Buzsaw's so fond of, becoming man and walking on water ... all very impressive stuff.)* But when asked why, if God wants me to believe, he couldn't just demonstrate his existence to me, he replies with thing Z: if God demonstrated his existence, this would rob us of our free will, since then we couldn't choose to disbelieve. (So, do we have a deist here or what.)* That he used to be an atheist (to imply that my own ideas would change on mature reflection).* That it is absolutely impossible for anyone to be an atheist, and no-one ever is (to imply that my views were insincere).* That the reason that no-one is an atheist is that according to his proof-text from St. Paul, God has supplied everyone with such convincing evidence for his existence that it is impossible to doubt it. (So much for my free will).All this in a space of a few minutes.Now, he's simply not reporting on his ideas of the relationship of God to man in general, or of God to me --- or even of God to himself, for if everything he said was true then he was once an atheist and always a theist.Another example: a JW tries to convince me that creationism is scientific because "most scientists are creationists".Having the internet handy, I whip out proof of what the scientific community really thinks.He then tells me that scientists are all biased because 80% of them are atheists.Now, clearly what he has in his head is not in structure like a pie chart or a Venn diagram; it's not a model of reality on which he's reporting. It is, as I say, a program: "If the guy claims this, then this is the right answer, but if he says that, then the right answer is the other" where right has nothing to do with corresponding to the mental picture of the world that he doesn't have.Bob Altermeyer reports a similar phenomenon in authoritarians: Note that this last observation isn't particularly about their core beliefs, they just have a tendency to endorse (I nearly wrote believe, but that would be an overstatement) cliches which, being cliches in effect serve as their own proof-texts. But again, what they lack is a mental model, some simple thing equivalent to a pie chart of couples they've met, or a more complicated thing like a theory of romantic attraction, that is in their heads and is the subject that they're talking about.Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.