Most atheists will claim they don’t believe in gods, but they’re wrong. They simply don’t recognize their gods as being gods because they lack the traditional names like Jesus, Yahweh, or Allah.
The gods of atheism (and science) are Time and Luck.
Yeah, I know–not all scientists are atheists, but most atheists want to think of themselves as intellectuals and scientists, though. Consider the following paragraph found in an article from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, titled “Here’s what happened when scientists gave octopuses ecstasy:”
They (researchers from Johns Hopkins University) noted that octopuses are separated from humans by more than 500 million years of evolution and have brains that are more similar to those of snails. However, with MDMA, they were able to exhibit some of the same actions of people.
Now if you’re like me a few questions might have just popped into your head, such as: how would an octopus and a human being “share” a common ancestor? The relationship between “ancestor” and “descendant” is normally defined by sexual reproduction between two members of the same species. The two “species” in question have quite a few very obvious morphological differences, and the only person who apparently ever considered the quantitative differences between two distinctly different but allegedly related species seems to have been philosopher David Berlinski.
Because cows and whales allegedly share a common, land-based mammal ancestor that hypothetically lived approximately 160 million years ago and was only about the size of a modern shrew, we can safely assume that IF whales and cows share a common ancestor, the morphological changes that make those species unique can be estimated, and we already have a Time estimate for how long we have for those mutations to aggregate: 160 MY.
When you read the fine print about this earliest mammal ancestor, we find the following disclaimer:
An artist’s rendering of the hypothetical placental ancestor, a small, insect-eating animal with a long, furry tail. The research team reconstructed the anatomy of the animal by mapping traits onto the evolutionary tree most strongly supported by the combined phenomic (physical traits you can see) and genomic data and comparing the features in placental mammals with those seen in their closest relatives.
–Live Science website
In other words, in less than 160 MY, the gods of Time and Luck had to figure out how to successfully reconfigure DNA in order to make horses, cows, dogs, pigs, whales, dolphins, bats, bears, elephants, lions, tigers, raccoons, and of course, rats, mice, and shrews, as well as all the other mammals I didn’t bother to name. Almost every one I just named actually didn’t have 160 MY to gradually evolve, because there was a mass extinction event only 65 MY ago. If anything, Luck’s role in macroevolution is understated.
According to the “experts” in evolutionary biology, if we could somehow travel back 500 million years, we might find the ancestral species that evolved into monkeys, men, octopuses, and a whole host of other organisms with a wide variety of body types. Go back even farther in Time, you could find the common ancestor of plants and animals.
Given enough Time, literally anything becomes possible, no matter how absurd or unlikely it sounds. Obviously, Time is magic. Time has creative power. With enough of itself, Time can do just about anything. Think about what you’ve been indoctrinated to believe–if we only have enough Time, humans and oak trees share a common ancestor because of sexual reproduction and genetic mutations that added up over Time.
Just for the sake of the argument, let’s pretend for the moment that Time is a credible alternative to a supernatural Creator and answers our “how?” questions, which leaves us with “Why?” questions. That’s where Luck needs to become involved.
According to atheist and evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, the biological processes called evolution are the equivalent of a blind watchmaker, arguing that blind and stupid natural forces are responsible for the specialized features of individual organisms that create the “illusion” those unique features were intelligently designed.
If Time answers “how?”, Luck must be invoked to explain “why?”
Why is there a food chain? Why do primates have opposable thumbs, and immune systems? Why are humans conscious of the fact we have immune systems and opposable thumbs? Why does God allow good things to happen to bad people? (free will is my answer.) Why does God allow bad people to exist? (again, free will is my answer.) Why does a body want to heal itself?
The “experts” in evolutionary biology insist “environmental niches”, “beneficial mutations”, “HOX genes”, “isolation of small breeding populations”, plus a plethora of other buzzphrases explain sophisticated technology such as the echo-location navigation observed in bats and dolphins, and by that meaning rather obviously well-designed functionality cleverly borrowed by humans and mimicked to create helpful tools like sonar and radar.
Our lonesome friends of science say that people like Dr. Berlinski (and me) are ignorant liars, even though we are not questioning whether or not Time and Luck exist. We both seem to be wondering what constraints these gods have on their power. We have evidence of multiple mass extinction events in the fossil record, which would seem to compress the amount of Time we can allow for life to develop such marvelous diversity.
For some reason, asking serious questions of those “experts” professing to be authorities typically earns scorn, ridicule, slanderous accusations, and perhaps even a computer virus from one of these evangelists for evolution.
I guess that should be expected. Anyone holding a strong religious belief in something or some deity should be expected to initially have a negative reaction when their gods are challenged. I certainly had a rather powerful reaction to Richard Dawkins when he described my belief in a supernatural God as a delusion. I was strongly motivated to learn what Richard Dawkins believed because he had implied I was suffering from mental illness, and I needed to understand if my beliefs were false, where had I gone wrong?
It took a lot of reading, but I found a single paragraph in Dawkins’s book The Greatest Show on Earth: the Evidence for Evolution which said this:
Evolution is a fact. Beyond reasonable doubt, beyond serious doubt, beyond sane, informed, intelligent doubt, beyond doubt evolution is a fact. The evidence for evolution is at least as strong as the evidence for the Holocaust, even allowing for eyewitnesses to the Holocaust. It is the plain truth that we are cousins of chimpanzees, somewhat more distant cousins of monkeys, more distant cousins still of aardvarks and manatees, yet more distant cousins of bananas and turnips…continue the list as long as desired.
Frankly, I think that’s plenty far enough. The argument itself has evolved to become “anything is possible, except God.”
The reality is that everything is impossible without God, including the existence of self. When you no longer believe there is anything could be smarter than you are, you might start thinking there might be a good reason to feed MDMA to an octopus.
Time and Luck make a lousy pair of gods, because they’re both really stupid.
Speak Your Mind