I'm sure I've posted this before regarding your low blows at Dubya, but I'll say it again. Intellectualism does not equal good leadership. There is no correlation between the two. Countless parodies of the results of an intellectual coup aside, my humanities teacher's home country in Africa went through that transformation as I'm sure many other countries have done in the past. The result was the same: abysmal failure.

I've spoken to the brick wall that is your spiritual side regarding religion at length already so I'll just say this. At this juncture, there is just as much physical evidence of the existence of God as there is of a "order from disorder" creation. Given what you said of pre-1870 atheists, I find it comical that you so readily dismiss anybody who believes that there is more to the universe than a long-ago exploded black hole (so to speak).

 

I agreed that intellectualism doesn't necessarily help, and in fact said that it probably wouldn't, by citing the intellectualism of Bush's closest advisers. However, I don't think that's an argument for the benefits of having a president who is fond of openly admitting his complete lack of curiosity and interest in actually learning about the events of the world. I'm fine with the clerk at the supermarket not reading the news or having an informed opinion on world events, but I think it's fairly obvious that such traits should be mandatory for a world leader. In a way I'd be happier with Cheney as president, since at least then we'd have somewhere certain to assign responsibility for US policy. Bush famously proclaimed himself "the decider," and I'll take him at his word on that, but the fact that he'd deciding about things he's largely ignorant of is kind of worrisome, no?

On point 2, I'm surprised to hear that, since you have previously proclaimed your (Bush like?) intentional ignorance of the scientific and theological arguments in question. To quote you from a previous comment: "I am a Christian insofar as I believe Jesus Christ died for our sins, etc. Beyond that, I intentionally detach myself from thought and study on the subject because, really, anything anybody says could be right."

Wrong. Anything anybody says can't be right, if they're talking about something more fact-based than their favorite flavor of ice cream. The scientific and historical facts of the world aren't an opinion, like chocolate vs. vanilla. They're based on real, ascertainable, verifiable, provable or falsifiable points, and it's simply a fact that the creation myths of every religion are clearly that; myths. They didn't happen. The events, dates, times, etc do not in any way reflect actual historical events.

Saying that "there's just as much physical evidence of the existence of God" is simply incorrect, because there is no scientific evidence for the existence of God, Gods, the tooth fairy, the tea pot orbiting the sun, etc. People can (and many do) decide to keep believing in things that aren't based in any physical evidence, but the barricades against reason are continually backing into a corner.

Religion used to be literally true and explained everything. Now the faithful are reduced to, "Well, we don't know exactly what happened at the instant of the Big Bang." Which is currently true, and we may never know how to fully describe such an anomalous event, but 1) astronomical knowledge progresses tremendously every year, so give it time, 2) that doesn't mean "God did it with His magical powers" is an acceptable answer, and 3) we do know, for an absolute fact, that everything in the creation myths of every religion, including those in "the infallible word of God" Bible, are not true. That has to, it seems to me, take quite a bit of shine off of any arguments made with that book as their source.

I'll give you credit for admitting that you don't know anything about the issue, but that's not an excuse. The information is freely available, I've posted links to numerous religion vs. atheism debates, reviews of scientific books, arguments from evidence and historical data, etc. I encourage everyone to learn more about the issue; knowledge is at the heart of science. Ignorance is at the heart of faith. In fact, that's the very definition of faith; it's a belief in something that isn't backed up by evidence.

Personally, I lost my last bits of superstition when I took astronomy and world religion courses in college when I was 19. I didn't have a strong faith going in, but I lacked explanations for how things functioned in the world. Once I learned more facts, of the age/size/order of the universe, and of how every culture created a religion that reflected its values, I didn't need magical thinking any longer. I wish the rest of you the best of luck in repeating my fortunate ascension.

 

Sorry, homes, I was talking about applying scientific study to the religious side of things in that quote. For example, I don't search for the ark or try to prove Jesus Christ was born by taking blood samples from the ruins of an ancient barn (thankfully I haven't seen any attempts to do that, yet, but give it time). I'm in fact very interested in astronomy and the workings of the universe; it is just that every speck of information regarding our astronomical past is just as theoretical as, "God did it." Sure, we can circuitously discover that the universe is expanding and apply that to the theory of the big bang, but we can't observe and thus confirm anything regarding something so nebulous, even if we DO generate mathematical equations that seem to govern it all properly. There's a missing link, so to speak, that we'll probably never be able to convincingly fill with empirical information.

That said, the belief in God is completely detached from that thinking. Even when all the questions are answered, we'll still be able to say that God did it.

 

Funny you should pick on the big bang theory as not being very solid.

The accidental discovery of the uniformity of the microwave background radiation is hailed as one of the best predictions ever made in physics. It was first prediced in 1948 and confirmed by accident in 1969. It was of such interest that NASA sent up several special missions, beginning in 1990/1992, to find out more information about it. Each subsequent mission has only confirmed and given further detail on the theory of the big bang.

I guess you can say that that is all a coincidence, though.

That seems to be a sticking point with creationist types - they can't accept that scentific observation has decided that things happened in one way but not another - to a creationist (who hasn't read the 1000's of jounral articles and lived decades of their life in the field) it seems completely arbitrary why it should be one way and not another - why couldn't it just has easily have been god who did it, for example? So they can then look at this one scientific theory and say "that all seems rather implausible and silly, so it musn't really be true", simply because they haven't actually invested all the time and effort that the experts have that is required to fully understand the subtle raesons why theories A, B, C, D and E are close but slightly off, and why it is theory W that is really the best one so far. If you follow the link I posted in the Expelled! comments you can watch many rebuttals to clueless creationists that cherrypick and badly misinterpret small scientific facts in an attempt to discredit the overall theories, with generally abysmal results.