Sunday, April 10, 2011

The Stupid! It Burns! (shrewd, skeptical edition)

the stupid! it burns! On Atheists, Part 2
I'm a shrewd, skeptical person by nature [who believes that] the parts of my body are infinitely more complex than the computer in front of me ... Somehow this organized, coherent, useful data in my DNA exists in a world that supposedly has no direction or intelligence. Does information spring out of mindlessness? Does life spring from inanimate material? Organized information is evidence of intelligence (e.g. SETI). ...

I ask that you'll fairly consider both sides with an open mind. What if there is a God who created this somehow and can assign value to you as a living being? What if he has expectations?!

If you're like most of us, this doesn't really come down evidence and arguments and philosophical debates. The real reason we don't believe in God is this: we don't want to.
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3 comments:

  1. Dan4/12/11, 3:56 AM

    So, he's a shewd, skeptical person who believes his body is infinitely more complex than his computer?

    And apparently in vitalism? (Correct me if I'm wrong, but these days it's common knowledge that life is a complicated collection of 'inanimate matter'. Maybe I'm taking "spring" too disingenuously, though.)

    And of course, biologists have spent almost a couple hundred years refining the theory of how exactly the 'information' he's talking about is assembled mindlessly (not that it's difficult to see how it works), but I'm sure his uninformed incredulity is enough to overturn that work.

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  2. btchakir4/17/11, 5:31 AM

    The real reason we don't believe in god is because it is unproveable.

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  3. Jonathan4/24/11, 11:10 PM

    Simplicity is a mark of artificial design. Complexity is a sign of natural processes. As per information theory, an entropic decay generates more information. That is to say, as a system proceeds to disorder, it gains more information. Thus, any system that has significant entropic decay will have significant complexity as a natural result. Artificial systems tend to have the complexity removed from them for more efficient operation. Static has a lot of information in it; a television signal has relatively little.

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