The number of religious 'nones' has soared, but not the number of atheists. Why?
theconversation.comI don't accept the written narrative by the people that wrote the bible. Did Jesus exist, probably, but I have a hard time with the words about what happened, given that people are... people.
But I have a harder time thinking that even over a period of billions of years DNA can suddenly exist and do what it does - let alone for the physics of it all to allow all this to happen, and allow private thinking, etc... I don't think this is designless.
One of these 'sudden existences' was reported here just a couple of weeks ago:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40101290
And you can't opt out of "something from nothing" thinking - you have to choose between "DNA from nothing" or "intelligent DNA-designer from nothing".
Evolution doesn't assume "DNA from nothing," rather that DNA itself is the result of evolutionary processes from simpler chemical precursors[0]. We know that emergent complexity exists, and it doesn't require a supernatural cause.
The problem is, people can't comprehend the complexity that can result in millions or billions of years of iterations, so they assume it must be magic, because that seems simpler and more intuitive. But nature is rarely intuitive at the scale of human understanding.
Even so, the physics of everything being amenable to life, etc... seems like just as easily none of that could have existed. Instead, we have gravity, strong nuke forces, and everything on up (temperature, water molecules) that all seem to be "pro life".
It's like everything in the universe wants existence and to be felt by something. I can't just assume coincidence because of that.
> It's like everything in the universe wants existence and to be felt by something. How so?
We have one example of life existing anywhere in the universe, our own biosphere. Everything else in the universe that we observe appears dead or hostile to life as we know it. If it's the case that "everything in the universe wants existence and to be felt by something" it seems weird that this universal cosmic need expresses itself through mostly insects and bacteria and a few primates on one planet, and everything else is mostly dark matter and gamma rays and black holes and burning gas.
> seems like just as easily none of that could have existed.
There is infinite stuff which does not exist.
Since atheists became antitheists.
I was an atheist, but had no issues with my children becoming Christians. I think today's atheists think they need to be Richard Dawkins.
I can scarcely think of a person less likely to take up arms than Richard Dawkins, and yet somehow people feel free to take his words and label him a "militant atheist".
Wiktionary's second definition of "militant":
Aggressively supporting of a political or social cause; adamant, combative. [from 17th c.]
That seems entirely apt to me. It's a metaphorical usage, rather than a literal one, but it has been used that way for centuries.
"The God Delusion is a 2006 book by British evolutionary biologist and ethologist Richard Dawkins. In The God Delusion, Dawkins contends that a supernatural creator, God, almost certainly does not exist, and that belief in a personal god qualifies as a delusion, which he defines as a persistent false belief held in the face of strong contradictory evidence."
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_God_Delusion
Not sure that matches my live and let live.
> my live and let live
There's more of that 'life and death' terminology.
"Atheist" got a bad rap. Many adjectives live on their own little euphemism treadmills.