Now if I am correct that there is a God and a Heaven to gain and a Hell to avoid. Many of those people may go to Hell because of the hoax. Because they took it as the missing link and refused to believe God.
Uh, no. It wasn't science's fault, nor the hoax's fault, if anyone had decided to stop believing in God. It was their religion's fault. Because it was their religion that had taught them that such a "missing link" would be proof that their god didn't exist.
Case in point: D. Jon Scott. A young YEC (young-earth creationist) who was so active in the debate that he ran his own creation/evolution forum. His story is at the "What is the Inspiration for the Genesis Panthesis Website?" link of his "Genesis Panthesis" site at
No webpage found at provided URL: http://genesispanthesis.tripod.com/main.html (because of the way that the site is constructed, you have to click on the link yourself -- sorry, but tripod pops up a few extra windows). Remember that "missing link" between dinosaurs and birds that made the cover of National Geographic? Later turned out to have been wrong, two different fossils put together by the Chinese farmer who had sold them to the paleontologists. But before that information got to him, he was faced with fossil evidence that
his religion had taught him disproved his religion and he then did what his religion had taught him; he become an atheist.
Not because of anything that science taught, but rather solely because of what his religion taught.
From his own personal witness:
[quote]Then, in september of 1999, the bomb dropped. I picked up my issue of the National Geographic and saw what else on a page advertising an upcoming issue; but Sinornithosaurus millenii! It had long steak-knife-shaped teeth like a T. rex, a long, muscular tail, hyper-extendable "switchblade" claws on the hind legs like Velociraptor mongoliensis, a narrow snout that looked almost like a bill, a bird-like pubic structure, and worst of all - feathers!
I simply stared at the page for a few moments, muttered "oh shit!" to myself a few times, and got up to check the N.G.News web site. This wasn't just some artistic depiction of what a reptile/bird might look like - and it was no hoax. It was a small dromaeosaurid ("raptor") with killing claws, razor-sharp teeth, and a pair of wing-like arms complete with plumage. My heart sank, and my gut churned. This was it - the one proof of evolution I had always asked for but never thought would come to light. In my mind, I was betting that even if evolution were true, the chances of finding such a beautiful example of transition would be slim enough to be dismissed as impossible. And yet here it was - proof.
I stepped outside to compose myself, and stood there looking at the world around me.
Weeks later, I began making plans to dismantle to the Talk.Science Archive, all the while researching the Christian religion. I soon came to the conclusion that since much of the first ten or twelve chapters of genesis had been plagiarized from Chaldean fairy tales and mythos, the truthfulness of the Bible must be strictly spiritual rather than spiritual and historical.
It wasn't very long before I began to realize that since the 'historical' sections of the Bible, particularly those stolen from Chaldean mythos, were intended to influence spiritual truth - that the early Israelites must have simply been making up their own "spiritual truths", trying to make the fairy tales of their Hebrew (Chaldean) ancestors match up. I was faced with the realization that the Bible could not even be taken as spiritually true...it was/is nothing more than a book of myths and fables from a time and place in which people had no scientific knowledge, and made up these stories to explain what was going on around them (though the people making up these fables probably thought that they were coming to revelations given by their God[s]).
Then that day in 1999 came back to me. I remembered standing outside on my porch, looking at the natural world of which I had always known myself to be an integral part - albeit created as such. On that day, however, I began to look at the world in a new light.
I looked at the trees, thinking about how they worked. Photosynthesis, receiving energy from the sun, these creatures had limbs which branched out in every direction, tipped with leaves made green with chlorophyl, drawing energy from the sunlight which they captured. As they fed on the radiant light, blocking the light from the ground below, I began to think of how they might exist without God. A tiny bacterium absorbs energy from both heat and chemicals. Plants are exposed to heat, feed on chemicals, and have chemicals that allow them to feed on heat more efficiently - on a much larger scale than primitive bacterial cell strands. I thought, perhaps, that since some algae is bacterial and other is plant-life, that some bacteria might have used chlorophyl to extract nutrients from the sun. Also, perhaps from this algae, primitive coats of slime would evolve and dwell on rocks near river beds. In a few million years, you'd have moss growing on moist soil. Millions of years could come and go, and plants which harness the power of the sun and extract more nutrients from the matter around them (whether it be water or dirt) would spread more abundantly and prosper over their contemporaries.
I looked at the trees again. They were large, tightly-packed groups of cells, which over millions of years grew larger and larger, growing green leaves which act as solar panels. They were cell-colonies trying to survive in an environment where new oportunities are as ample as the number of possible combinations of DNA. So here they were, beautiful, and majestic, and sitting there because of the opportunistic nature of living cells - not because God put them there. They were green because they had Chlorophyl to absorb sunlight - not because God thought that humans would think it an attractive color.
I looked down at my own hands, studying my finger prints. I pondered the reason God might have given them to me. I recalled to myself that only primates have finger prints, and that they used the blunt part of their fingers - rather than claws, to grip limbs and branches. They have traction-treds on their fingers and toes. This is probably why all primates also have flat nails.
But then why do humans have finger prints? For indentification? We've only had finger print identification for the past hundred years or so. Even if the world were only six thousand years old, that's less than a thirtieth of a percent of the time since humans were first created. Why give us this feature, why design such intricate patterns, if God knew it would be an absurdly short amount of time between the first use of finger print identification and the creation of DNA fingerprinting, which is much more accurate? And what how would this be any different from believing that the bridge of the nose were created for sunglasses, or the opposable thumb designed so that our hand could fit into gloves?
The only way these hands of mine made sense, with the gripping fingers, the traction-tredded finger tips, the flat nails, was if my distant ancestors - and the ancestors of all humans - were creatures who used their front limbs for climbing.
And why such low body hair? Wouldn't it be more effecient to not have body hair at all? We use resources to grow this hair which appearently serves no purpose. If we evolved from hairy creatures, it would make sense that we evolved to use our resources more effeciently and wasted less of our reserves on this useless feature. That way, the hair wouldn't have to be completely absent, since the industrial age - when we could produce many of our own resources from previousely unavailable sources - occured at a time which vary well might have been before we had the chance to evolve a completely bald body. Of course it must have been a bit more complex than that, but I had a feeling I was pretty much on-track with this line of reasoning.
I looked down at my hands again, and studied them for a few moments longer...
"This is it..." I spoke to myself softly, "Welcome to the real world." [/quote]
He didn't stay an atheist for long. It wasn't on that site, but after Google'ing about a bit, I found another web page of his (
No webpage found at provided URL: http://www.geocities.com/thewaysofold/corvun/). He's now an Odic Red Witch and is still strongly anti-Christian.
Because of what his Christian teachers, worshippers of "creation science", had taught him.
If I am wrong and there is no God, no Heaven, and no Hell they did not miss anything.
Lets see I have a 50 50 chance of being right so What IF?
Your numbers are way off. It might be proper to say that it's a 50/50 chance of whether the supernatural exists or not. But if it does exist, then the question becomes one of which verson of the supernatural is true? Even if we were to assume (which ia all we can do with regard to the supernatural, BTW) that all versions of the supernatural, or at least the overwhelmingly vast majority, involve the existence of gods, then the question becomes one of which god. Out of all the gods who have ever existed, they all have equal probably of actually existing. What's so special about
your god, except that it happens to be yours? How many gods have there been? Many thousands, at least. So YHWH has one chance in many thousands of being the right one. After having factored out all the scenarios that don't include gods. Low probability.
And even if you choose the right god, you then have to choose the right theology. How many different theologies are there attached to your god? And if you don't choose the right theology, then you still lose. Lowers the odds even more.
Edited by dwise1, : D. Jon Scott
™ Version 4.2
