This cartoon appears in a Creationist post on Facebook. What’s wrong with this cartoon? Let’s see …
Three of those examples have observed designers, all of the same kind: humans INSIDE this universe, … even, ONLY on this planet.
Religions ASSERT that an entirely different kind of entity, ‘God’, OUTSIDE this universe, created space, time, the material matter of this universe, and the processes that not only went on to create the waterfall scene, but also the creatures, the humans, that made the items in the other images.
If you can’t see the difference in the evidence required to support the knowledge of the creators of the three man-made items, as opposed to knowledge about the creation of the the natural one, you know little enough about logic, reason, evidence, to be religous – your assertions damn you with your own stupidity. To suppose that the creation of man-made objects is carried out by humans, is not at all in the same category of the cause of the existence of the natural universe.
You get this difference if posed in a different way. You have evidence that a human created any car you come across, but this in itself is not evidence that some car might have been created by an ant, just because you didn’t see who created that particular car. Even though we have evidence ants exist as well as humans, we would not conclude, without evidence, that cars can be created by ants – we’d expect to see evidence of ants creating cars.
But, according to the religious, gods are very different entities to humans, and ants. Gods are not even supposed to be in the same realm. So, if you want to prove something created the natural world, you need to provide evidence – and we have NONE! You need to provide evidence of a god BEFORE then claiming that god did ANYTHING.
Let me compare those once more:
- 1: We have evidence of the existance of ants and humans. 2: We have evidence of humans creating cars. 3: We would not conclude that an ant created a specific car we did not see produced, BASED ON seeing humans creating cars.
- 1: We have evidence of humans, but not of gods. 2: We have evidence of humans creating cars. 3: We SHOULD NOT conclude “God did it” (created cars indirectly by creating the universe and the humans that create cars), when we don’t even have evidence of gods, let alone gods doing anything.
Your CONCLUSION of ‘Intelligent Design’, based on seeing human design, is a massive category error, AND comits the Begging the Question fallacy:
The fallacy of begging the question occurs when an argument’s premises assume the truth of the conclusion, instead of supporting it. In other words, you assume without proof the stand/position, or a significant part of the stand, that is in question. Begging the question is also called arguing in a circle.
We have evidence that GIVEN we find ourselves in this universe, there appear to be natural laws that describe how things work. And we have discovered evidence that explains how life works, and how there are different species of life – Evolution. This is all consistent, AND predictive:
The most important prediction was that there must be a mechanism for organisms to generate variations in body structure and pass them along to their offspring. At the time Darwin formulated his theory, there was no direct evidence for such a mechanism. The prediction was not confirmed until DNA was discovered and its way of working was revealed.
What we don’t have are:
- Specific evidence of abiogenisis – how the first replicators were formed from complex but naturally occurring organic compounds. But we do have good evidence to form hypotheses about the process.
- Knowledge of the origins of the universe – the space-time system we find ourselves in, and the ‘laws’ that describe how it works. Even the Big Bang tells only about certain phases the universe went through, based on the evidence we have so far.
These limitations apply to all of us – they are not opportunities for ‘God of the Gaps’ to be inserted.
Some crackpot ancient prophets from the Middle East have LESS going for them with their assertions than parts of Scientology – at least the idea of aliens in Scientology is consistent with this universe, given we exist.
Yes, Scientology has some crazy ideas (Thetans, and the specific of Xenu above), but even they don’t compare with the religious claims that there’s a teleological entity that not only created the universe, but has a special interest in us humans.
Creationists are obviously not in a position to appreaciate the irony of giving the cartoon what is intended to be a sarcistic title, “Atheist Logic”. Logic isn’t their strong point.
Knowing Less Than Atheists
This was a comment on another post:
So you’re admitting that you don’t know, so you don’t know that God exists or not. So why argue about something you don’t know about. Now, what DO you know? And how can theists no less if you don’t know anything? Where’s YOUR data and evidence of how everything came into existence?
NOBODY knows ANYTHING about the creation of the universe.
Atheist are a-theists, simply denying the assertions of theists when they assert they have evidence, or worse, proof, of the existance of gods … because theists have ZERO evidence or proof.
But, theists do know less:
- Theists and atheists know the same about the creation of the universe: NOTHING.
- But, theists know far less about evidence, logic, reason, because they misuse them, abuse them, …or don’t even use them at all (when they resort to faith).
So, overall, theists do know less. Instead they use the ‘God of the Gaps’ move – any gap in scientific knowledge is evidence that it required a God. The problem is, theists have ZERO evidence to support their claims that there is a god … there assertions are ALL GAP!
Ramblings 