Richard Dawkins puts a human lifespan in an alien, yet refreshing context.

6 Responses to “Even Atheists are Blessed”

1. Storey Clayton says:

   March 24, 2011 at 11:12 AM

   I *love* that even Richard Dawkins, probably the leading atheist on the planet, admits that the odds of this all happening randomly are incomprehensibly small. He can call that a tremendous stroke of luck if he wants, but he destroys his own argument by spend so much time talking about how completely improbable it all is. Occam’s Razor, kids: this was all here randomly and perfectly aligned against insurmountable odds, or there was some sort of design in play?

2. russ says:

   March 24, 2011 at 3:07 PM

   It’s here randomly and perfectly aligned, but not by chance.

   Evolution is an incredibly slow and meticulous process by which organisms adapt to the already existing environment over BILLIONS OF YEARS. And less adapted species are slaughtered/die-out by the hundreds of millions. In the words of Stephen Jay Gould, it is a hecatomb of massive proportions. There is nothing particularly elegant about that at all.

   This reminds me of one of the opening monologues in Ken Burn’s Baseball. One of the pundits notes how divine intervention must have lead to the designers of the game settling on 90 ft between bases. He notes that one foot longer or one foot shorter would have altered batting averages, plays in the hole, it would have changed the entire face of the game. What he fails to mention is that if there were 93ft between the baselines, a different but similar sport would have emerged. It wouldn’t be inherently worse or better than baseball, it would just have lower batting averages, less stolen bases, and less scoring than the game we know today. That wouldn’t make it any less of a sport, or any less artful — it would simply have evolved differently. God and Occam don’t play into it.

3. Storey Clayton says:

   March 28, 2011 at 3:19 PM

   The fact that something takes a long time is not evidence that it is not ordered or designed. It could take BILLIONS OF YEARS to design a car or a perfect society, but that doesn’t mean that it wasn’t designed.

   Also, it’s funny that your analogy is to baseball, because that was also something that was designed. Looking at the universe and its meticulously ordered laws and saying it’s random is like looking at a novel and saying nobody wrote it. One can argue that it’s POSSIBLE that words just fell on the page, but is it in any way convincing?

   The real opp to the arguments I’m presenting is that there’s actually evidence there are 2 billion other Earth-like planets in the universe, at minimum, that we can detect. But that sort of undermines the vaunted specialness that Dawkins is trying to elicit here. Of course, there are rules and order and structure on those planets as well. We just won’t see it till the next life.

4. russ says:

   March 28, 2011 at 8:19 PM

   Actually no. The whole Abner Doubleday invented baseball in upstate NY’s Elysian Fields is well known to be apocryphal. Nobody knows where it came from. What is clear is that it evolved from Rounders at some point, which evolved from Cricket. And cricket evolved from “club-ball, stool-ball, trap-ball, and stob-ball.” And they likely evolved from some dark aged knight whacking a lopped off head with a club of some sort. And that evolved from some early hominids smacking stones around with a femur bone.

   I quote the internet,

   “Right now, it is raining methane on Titan. The planet Uranus, apparently trying to live up to its name, is orbiting the sun sideways, while Venus spins backwards. There are stars exploding, black holes gorging, galaxies colliding.

   And here we sit on a planet pock-marked by collisions, rocked by earthquakes, shaken by storms. A planet doomed to be fried in radiation as its magnetic fields collapse, until finally the sun grows into a red giant and leaves nothing of the Earth but dust.

   Here we sit, glasses on our noses, inhalers in our pockets, braces on our teeth, waiting to die when our heart muscles expire, our cells decide to grow forever, or a blood vessel just pops, and sometimes in unnatural ways too.

   Here we sit. And some of us say, behold, look at the order of it all.”

5. Storey Clayton says:

   March 29, 2011 at 7:48 AM

   You seem to equate order with… boredom? Immortality? I honestly don’t get the argument here. Are you saying there are no laws, rules, or order that consistently govern the outcomes on this planet or its surrounding environs? Because the laws of physics and time would have to be literally unpredictable and random to support the kind of claim you seem to be making.

   The reality of physical laws is our clue to the fact that there are moral laws. If everything were random, why should there be laws at all?

6. russ says:

   March 29, 2011 at 11:23 AM

   “The reality of physical laws is our clue to the fact that there are moral laws. ”

   This reads as utter gobbledygook to me. Moral laws exist because humans come to consensus and create them. They are, and have always been a human construct, and are meaningless in any other context.

   “If everything were random, why should there be laws at all?”

   Because we take it upon ourselves to impose some measure of order over chaos. We categorize and compartmentalize to make sense of the world. That is how our brains work.