WOW! She got it EXACTLY... well, maybe not.

Although PZ Myers already posted about it, I thought I'd throw in my two cents worth.
This woman sums up what a lot of people seem to believe about atheists. Because they know us better than we know ourselves. Apparently.

There are some key factors involved in this thinking by atheists that are not usually published. (Actually, these idiots write about it all the time)

Being the hot topic of the day, any discussion of atheism, should include these 'difficult to admit' points:

Firstly, atheists claim that they themselves are god. They claim they have superior knowledge then* the rest of us by trying to say that they have better knowledge because of their own thinking. They will not acknowledge anyone else to be above them.

I have been an atheist all my life and have never once claimed to be a god or goddess, except in the kitchen and maybe once in the bedroom.** Come to think of it, I may have only used Green Goddess salad dressing in the kitchen, and may have only been called one in the bedroom.

I love PZ's response to this - Personally, I only rank myself as a lesser demon.
*Note, I refrained from correcting her misspellings, but not from making fun of them.
** If you are my father - DON'T READ ANY FURTHER!

Secondly, atheists have been hurt somewhere in their lives, can't understand suffering, and are mad at God — so it is easier to deny there is one.

Um, nope. I'm a generally happy person who has not been hurt any more than anyone else, very happy with how my life has turned out so far, very much in love with my husband, happy that my family is in fairly good health, and happy in my job (except for the potential 20% pay reduction - but at least I still have a job!). I have occasional "down" periods, but those are just part of normal cyclical ups and downs.

I'm not sure what she means by "can't understand suffering." Suffering is a normal part of life. I know many people who suffer or have suffered both physically and emotionally far more than I have, and I know I've been fairly lucky so far. Suffering actually seems to me to be an argument against the existence of any sort of "loving" god. A truly loving and omnipotent god wouldn't allow it, and would actually be an evil god if he/she/it could stop it, and yet still allowed it. However, suffering has to be explained somehow, so it seems to be a big part of the religions of many cultures.

As for being mad at God - how can you be mad at something that doesn't exist? It's like being mad at the Tooth Fairy or Santa Clause or the Loch Ness Monster. I am sometimes mad at religious idiots, but not at their imaginary friend.

Thirdly, atheists are looking for God for the same reason a thief would be looking for a police officer. They don't want to be accountable to a higher being because of the wrong things they do.

I knew someone would finally catch us on that. Bill and I will just have to stop having sex in the street* and robbing banks. We tend not to do illegal things (well, I speed a little sometimes) not because some magic book tells us not to, but because they are either illegal or morally** wrong.

*I actually had someone ask me what stopped me from having sex in the street. That would be...HELLO! cars and a healthy sense of self preservation. Oh, and not only would it be illegal, it would be WRONG! I'm an extremely private person and wouldn't do it even if it was legal.

This same person then went on to accuse me of having sex with my dog. Now I loved Charlie more than any other dog I've ever had (or possibly ever will have), and we had a very, very strong bond, but if I had wanted to do that, I wouldn't have had him NEUTERED, would I?

** Morals have been around far longer than any present day religions, and the basics (such as the taboos against murder and incest, and reciprocity (aka the Golden Rule), are most likely evolved, while many others are learned depending upon the culture in which you live. Many other animals also exhibit morality, and they certainly didn't learn it from a magic book.

Fourthly, atheists forget that when a person goes to a museum and admires a painting, that there was a painter/designer of that art piece. The art piece is absolute evidence of a painter and not caused by random nothingness.

All of the world, stars, animals, plants, oceans, and mountains are absolute proof of a divine intelligent being (beyond our human ability and thinking) who made these things.

Can the atheist make a tree? It is scientifically impossible for bees to fly (laws of physics) and yet they do. It is impossible for our eyes to see and yet they do. What more proof does an atheist need than their own heart pumping in their chest without them commanding their heart to pump each beat in perfect timing each and every second necessary?

Of course things weren't caused by random nothingness (except maybe this woman's brain). Evolution by natural selection is actually the opposite of random, and over millions and millions (sometimes billions) of years only gives the illusion that something was designed.

Complex, image forming eyes may have evolved up to 100 different times, so obviously they are a handy thing to have. Actually, if you look at the physiology of the vertebrate eye, it is not "designed" very well at all - sort of back-to-front, actually - because the light photons have to travel through all the nerves and blood vessels to get to the photoreceptors, which are pointing backward. These nerve cells and blood vessels all come together at the optic nerve, and create a blind spot. This is exactly what you would expect from something evolved, but not purposefully designed. Cephalopod eyes, on the other hand are "designed" correctly. The photoreceptors are pointing toward the light source rather than away, and there is no blind spot, as the nerves are behind the retina rather than in front of it.

Can the theist make a tree? If not, then why should an atheist be able to?
This interesting article shows it's not scientifically impossible for bees to fly and they in no way contradict the laws of physics. Obviously, SINCE THEY FLY! Duh!

Fifthly, denial is a strong coping mechanism in crisis, but does not serve anyone in the long run. Like an ostrich with its head in the sand, an atheist denies God not because God does not exist—but because the atheist doesn't want God to exist and does not want to see the truth and evidence in front of their eyes.

I would rather believe in God and make sure my life is doing what is acceptable to this Superior Being than to not believe in God and find out I will be accountable to this God for everything I've done after I die. With 84% of the world's population believing in the existence of God, I think the majority rules in this case.

Yeah, actually there is no evidence of a god. If there were, I would believe, but nobody's come up with anything at all convincing or that could only have a supernatural explanation yet. Gods were invented by man to explain the unexplainable. Over the last 1000 years or so, we've been slowly chipping away at things that previously could only be attributed to a god until we will eventually understand every one.

Pascal's wager (better to believe than not just in case there is a god and he gets mad at you) has been done to death. An omniscient god would be able to tell you were only believing in him because you were afraid not to. I would ask her how she knows for sure she's worshiping the correct god? There are so many. What if the Hindus or followers of Shinto are actually right? Maybe the ancient Greeks were. What if she's following the wrong type of Christianity? There are numerous Christian sects. Maybe the Amish or the Mormons are right.

At one time far more than 84% of the world's population believed that the Earth was the center of the universe. Did majority rule make that correct? Up until the latter part of the last century, most people believed that the continents were static and had always been in their present positions. Did majority rule make that correct? And 84% may believe in gods, but does she believe that Mohammad was the true prophet and flew up to heaven on a winged horse? I doubt it. And to which version of Christianity (I'm assuming she's one of the many Christian sects) does she adhere? There were numerous Ecumenical councils where church leaders got together and decided what biblical canon to keep and what to throw out.

Some things never change

I just saw this National Geographic article from back in March, and my first thought was, "A hundred million years, and things haven't changed a bit."

The title? Ancient Flying Reptiles Likely Had Sex As Youths.

Tower of Time

Maybe all is not lost in this country. We were listening to NPR's All Things Considered on the way home from work yesterday, and Robert Siegel was interviewing a 5th grader from Michigan who found a 27 year old mistake regarding the name of the Precambrian Era Supereon on the Tower of Time at Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History.

Listen to the interview here.

Robert Siegel is very condescending, considering this 11 year old is probably more intelligent than 90% of the people in this country. He's eleven. Not five. Here's a photo of the future of this country and a little more on the story.

Bill and I were in the Natural History Museum in January of last year, and I don't even remember the Tower of Time. I was more interested in this: I have always loved Irish Elk. Why? I don't know.

and this: I also love Triceratops(es?). Who doesn't?

Beelzebufo

Illustration by Luci Betti-Nash / Associated Press
I love that name. Really cool name for the worlds largest known toad. Unfortunately it's extinct, because I agree with PZ Meyers, I want one as a pet. Probably just as well. Fang, Attack Rabbit is probably just the right size for a nice snack. The females got up to 10 lbs and 16 inches long. They are related to the currently popular Pac-Man frog, and Kenneth Chang of the New York Times quoted discoverer Dr. David Krause as saying that the female Beelzebufos were “lady Pac-Man frogs, on steroids.”

I read several articles about it, but this quote from a story in the Los Angeles Times caught my eye:

“Krause, along with Susan Evans and Marc Jones of the research department of cell and developmental biology at University College in London, painstakingly removed Beelzebufo's fossilized parts, like an ancient jigsaw puzzle, from deep sediment that dates to the late Cretaceous period, 65 million to 70 million years ago.

That was the time of the dinosaurs, and Earth was a young -- and very different -- place.”

The Earth was young?? The Earth is about 4.54 billion years old plus or minus 1%. Seventy million years ago, it was still ~4,470,000,000 ± 45,000,000. In other words, the Earth is about 4.5 billion years old now, and 70 million years ago, the Earth was about...4.5 billion years old. Sixty-five or 70 million years is a drop in the bucket, geologically speaking. I’ll give them “very different.”

As one of my coworkers said when I pointed this out, "Another confirmation that our science education in the US sucks..."

This blog post was continually interrupted by a total eclipse of the moon! I had to run outside every five minutes. Unfortunately, I don't own a camera that could take a picture of it.

Chinese giant salamander

National Geographic photo.

I may not have much of an imagination, but I can imagine this crawling out of a swamp 160 million years ago. It is considered a living fossil, gets up to 5 feet long, and of course it is critically endangered. It happens to be a delicacy. Why am I not surprised?

Click the box below to see one in motion.

Chinese giant salamander moving along stream

© BBC Natural History Unit

National Geographic has a 2003 story about finding the fossils of its ancestors.

I've been fascinated with "living fossils" ever since I was a kid (many many moons ago) and read about the 1938 discovery of the Coelacanth. I still act like a kid if I see one. I have squealed with delight and run over to gaze with reverent awe at pickled coelacanth specimens in Natural History Museums in both San Francisco and London.

More fascinating amphibian photos on the National Geographic website can be found here.

Geologic time scale

I'm not sure that a lot of people understand the incredible amount of time available for the process of natural selection (especially those that think that the Earth is only 6000 years old). The Earth is around 4.5 billion years old, and life began roughly 3.6 billion years ago. That is billion with a 'B.' Ten to the power of 9 (at least here in the US). One thousand million. The fact that the current US national debt is 9 trillion probably doesn't help the general comprehension level. Here is what one billion pennies would look like. I got this from the MegaPenny Project website:










It would take up the space of 5 school buses. Life has been around for at least 18 school buses.

This gives natural selection--the non-random selection of random mutations--an enormous amount of time to occur. If a mutation only has the extremely small one-in-a-million chance of happening in any one year, given a million years it is a virtual certainty. Alternately, if it has a one-in-a-million chance of occurring in any one individual, given a population of a million individuals it is bound to occur in at least one (thanks to Richard Dawkins and E.O. Wilson for those examples). Mutation rates can be much, much faster than that. Beneficial mutations tend to be passed on to offspring, and disadvantageous mutations tend to be weeded out.

Creationists insist that evolution is all chance, and that nothing as complex as X (where X=eye, hand, feather, etc.) could evolve by chance. Natural selection is the opposite of chance. The mutations are chance; the selection is not. The cumulative effects of the non-random selection over this huge amount of time allows the gradual (and sometimes not so gradual) increase in complexity eventually evolving such things as eyes.

As Linus Pauling said, "Science is the search for truth." Unfortunately, he then went on to write rubbish about the benefits of Vitamin C for preventing colds, but that's another blog entry. He was right about science being the search for truth, though.