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Published by Lisa Kansas June 17th, 2008 in "Science", Godbaggery, sharing the awesomeThis totally made my day. From PZ Myers:
I just got an email listing 50 “proofs” for the existence of a god.
You can see the whole list here; I’m just gonna reproduce my absolute favorites. With possibly a little commentary.
2. How do you explain the paranormal, such as people witnessing positive or negative sightings, like ghosts or angels? I saw a ghost with a friend of mine - I am not a liar, an attention seeker. Neither was I overtired when this happened.
Easy. You’re crazy. Next!
5. Mindless nothing cannot be responsible for complex something.
Clearly you’ve never attended a corporate project kickoff meeting.
8. Atheism is a faith in that which has not been proved. The disbelievers have not witnessed anything to not believe in, whereas the believers believe because they have witnessed.
Are you practicing for a corporate project kickoff meeting? Because that made absolutely no sense at all but did consist of many words, you know, mindless but complex, just what we’re looking for…
23. Matter cannot organise itself. An uneaten tomato will not progress on its own accord to form a perfect pineapple. It will transform into mould, into disorganisation. The laws of evolution fall flat.
I think what you’re groping toward here are actually the laws of “thermodynamics,” and matter can indeed organize itself as long as the energy expendure required for it to do so increases to the total entropy of the system. At least you better hope your matter keeps right on organizing itself or you’re going to find out in short order what happens to you when your body stops assembling simple organic substances into complex ones.
30. Many people have died for their faith. Would they be prepared to do this for a lie?!
Yeah. Given that many people have died for different faiths, clearly at least some of them already have.
31. Much of the Bible deals with eyewitness accounts, written only 40 years after Jesus died. When the books in the New Testament were first around, there would have been confusion & anger if the books were not true.
Hard to know where to start with this one…prob’ly better just leave it at, “Try actually researching the history of the New Testament before you write about it.”
40. Think about Near Death Experiences. It’s naive to believe that they all are induced by chemicals or drugs. How do we account for a blind person having this experience, coming back to describe what they had never before seen, a person telling the Doctor that there is a blue paperclip on top of the high cabinet, which they couldn’t have otherwise known, an african man being dead in his coffin for 3 days, coming back to life to tell of much the same events which took place as those of many others? We never hear of the witnesses describing “a dream”. We’re not silly - we know the difference between even the most vivid of dreams to that of reality.
Did I miss the part of the Bible where it says “and Lo, as soon as you die all paperclip locations will be knownst unto you and you will get to watch people go about their business for a few days, then I may change my mind and stuff you back into your body and by this you will know the power of the one true Lord?”
50. Jesus Christ is either who he says he is, or he is the biggest con man history has ever known.
…er, you’re making it a little too easy here.
I read these this morning. My favorite parts are when her “proofs” contradict each other. She’s not exactly doing her fellow Christians any favors here.
This reminds of a delightful book I read maybe ten years ago by Nicholas Humphrey, called Leaps of Faith. It was more generally about skepticism than Jesus; but there was a really interesting chapter where– well, he didn’t say Jesus was a con-man, since there’s no way for anybody to know much about what was going on at the time. But he pointed out that all of Jesus’s “miracles” were of the sort that street entertainers of the day could have been capable of. Much like when the Amazing Randi is able to appear to replicate the effects of a person claiming to be a psychic, it doesn’t DISPROVE the psychic’s powers, but it certainly should make anybody think twice about it.
I don’t remember many details anymore, but this is from one of the Amazon reviews of the book:
I also seem to recall something from the book about how, since some contemporary mystics deemed that Jesus was possibly the Chosen One based on the timing of his born, in some ways he might have been under pressure to be able to figure out some miraculous tricks to do.
For some reason, though, whenever I suggest to people that Jesus might just have been a glorified street magician, they hardly ever take it well.
I don’t even understand this one. I mean, say I accept that you are neither a liar, nor an attention seeker, nor crazy, and I agree that ghosts exist. How does that say anything about God? Because one supernatural thing exists, anything that pops into anyone’s head must also be true?
“You’ve seen the proof. Ghosts! Phantasms! Perceptible non-physical manifestations!”
“Yes.”
“We have to find the slayer.”
“The who?”
“Buffy. Somewhere, she needs our help. Fighting the vampires.”
“The whatnow?”
There’s a relevant way in which anything that pops into anyone’s head is true, of course. Perhaps a touch more subtly than is appreciated by, say, people who send e-mails like this one.