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Here’s the bad faith argument:
At the moment of creation, God placed some partially decayed metals on the planet to fool the non-believers.
This is basically why the existence of dinosaur bones doesn’t bother them either – they just hand-wave it away.
Hehe bad faith
Counter handwave, any god that would do that is a jerk who doesn’t deserve worship. (Actually like 99% of the shit most faiths deities do falls into that category.)
Bad faith argument:
In the holy book, inspired by this god, he tells you he DOES deserve worship. Furthermore, were you to ignore his advice, he will punish you eternally.
Yeah, well, if that mf does actually exist, I’ll feel real vindicated as I scream in agony for eternity, for holding the opinion that a God that needs to threaten me into worshipping him is not benevolent at all !
All the cool people will be right there with you my friend. Well, almost all, anyway.
If I were god I might do all sorts of shit to test the supposed intelligence of my creations. That might include including telling them “do some pointless thing, or else”.
It might interest me to see if they’re capable of reasoning or testing to determine that the task is pointless and the threat is empty. Probably not, but its hilarious for them to think they matter to me; It’s like a videogame to me.
It only takes 6 days for me to start whole a new game. I’m probably bored of it long before now or at least well ino my hundred and somethingth play-through light-years away. I prefer keeping the dinosaurs because they’re way cooler than humans.
…But I killed the dinosaurs because I watched a brontosaurus eat its own shit
Just confess your sins to a guy who says he’s a prist. All good after that.
“The devil put them there”
Satan do be metal
“God works in mysterious ways” /s
The problem with that argument is that it falls into the Last Thursdayist problem.
It could just as well be argued that the lead was created instantly in that state, or mid-decay.
The problem with this argument from the fundamental level is that 99% of religious zealots don’t give two shits about your science or facts. There is a whole segment of the human population that has no mind for factual information and just decides to believe whatever they feel.
There is no real arguing with these people, they don’t care about evidence or science, I am quite convinced they don’t even understand things the same way as other people and don’t have an internal mind-voice that works the same way as other people. It’s just a totally different conscious experience, and despite making full use of our science and technology, they don’t exist in a world where that matters.
The hard part about this understanding is you realize there’s no resolution. They can’t be changed because they’re not unsatisfied with their world. A smart person is never satisfied and will always ask questions and even ask questions about the questions. Not these people. They actively are annoyed by questions and even see learning things as a kind of sin or spiritual crime.
So lets save our collective energy and instead focus on making classrooms better funded and knowledge available and unavoidable for the younger children growing up in this world and still developing their minds. I was pulled out at an early age simply by finding a few science books, others can be too.
I’m not siding with the 4000 year old earth argument, but that is a weak counterargument.
Lead was created by dying stars that long predate the Earth.
Where is the proof about these magic numbers? Checkmate atheist. /s
All math is a lib lie! Just look at those blasphemous arabic numerals!
Numbers are a terrorist plot confirmed.
We will not be afraid.
I typically use the fact that there are trees older than 4000 years old based on tree ring data. Or that there are stars in the sky further than 4000 light years away that we can see in the sky.
That usually makes them say something like how their God created an world that was already aged. So I usually counter with the fact that would make their God a lier and deceiver.
Some hold firm and say God did it to test faith. Others back pedal and try to blame it on Satan. That Satan scattered all this false evidence just to make us question the notion that Earth is 4000 years old to make people lose faith in God. And then I have to laugh at how stupid their argument is and how weak their God is. Naturally no amount of evidence or logic will make them change their belief.
The important thing is, you’re compelling people to examine their pre-existing beliefs. They won’t change their beliefs during your conversation, because deprogramming takes time. But the more seeds of doubt you plant, the better the chances are that some will germinate.
I find that the most effective way to encourage people to question themselves is to discuss things calmly and in good faith, through in-person conversations. Challenging people to “convert me” has been surprisingly fruitful - after all, I honestly would love to believe that a benevolent deity is looking out for us all. (As well, tons of believers would equally love to be the one who “shows [you or me] the light.”) I want them to provide compelling evidence that can change my mind.
Approaching the conversation in this fashion not only challenges the “missionary” types to think harder, but it also shifts the onus onto them to convince you. If they’ve never thought critically about their message, this kind of conversation may introduce questions that stick with them long after it’s over.
And even better because they start to come to their own thought-out conclusions. There’s less baggage in the way for them to eventually work their way through it. Especially when they’ve got to convince you - because mysteriously they always jump to all of this “proof” to show you.
It doesn’t happen immediately, and if you try to speed it up you’ll just cause them to reverse course.
I’ll sprinkle a little bit of … my own confusion into the mix? As an example, I’ll remain interested, but be like “wait, you said X but then you said Y - doesn’t that contradict X?” I’ll let them explain and not fight them on it, but send them off with a warm smile.
Not everyone will break free of the programming, but some will - and that’s all I can hope for.
round numbers are always made up. change my mind
Göbekli Tepe
Literally tho
We obviously live in a matrix/simulated world, and it can’t be older than 50 years, because before that, computers didn’t exist. Checkmate christians.
/jk
but who made the uranium?
urmoma?
To a theist, all things are the creation of god. There’s no argument that can’t be settled as “god made it that way”. The real place you gotta hit em is in the arrogance of believing that the almighty created the bible, not humanity. And if they say that a sentient entity willed it thusly, then we return to the problem of evil: if humans are capable of evil, and this is god’s will, then the benevolent god in the bible is not accurately depicted. I wonder what else the bible got wrong? Maybe their god willed the creation of a bible that got stuff wrong on purpose?
Honestly, for a dystheistic spiritualist (that is to say, one who believes that the greatest ordering forces of the universe are neither good nor bad nor have any intention for us, yet recognize the importance of spirituality in human livelihood) who is conversing with a bible thumper, this is the best you can do. Help people depart from their idols and attachments, and connect with the real human experiences of the spiritual. The less we get distracted with rules and traditions, the more we can love our world and one another.
You could just ask the mice.
Not to argue for creationism, but this argument sucks. Lead can be produced by supernova, not just through decay of heavier elements. But even that’s besides the point, since if you believe some entity created the universe, surely said entity could have created whatever ratio of lead to uranium they wanted. It’s not a falsifiable claim, there’s really no disproving it, unfortunately.
(Not so fun fact: the environmental impact of leaded gasoline was discovered by trying to estimate the age of the earth using the radio of lead to uranium in uranium deposits, but the pollution from leaded gasoline was throwing the measurements off.)
Also this doesn’t say anything about the Earth.
Plus you can give a liberal reading of the bible to be:
- god created the heaven and the earth. God created the heavenly bodies.
- God created the sky - earths atmosphere and climate
- God separates oceans - creates continental forms, and plant based life
- God creates the moon and sun and stars. This one seems out of order to me… maybe just the earth and solar system stabilize. I don’t know how plants exist without the sun, so maybe it’s microbes or something.
- God creates birds and sea creatures. Maybe birds are dinosaurs.
- God creates modern land animals, then creates man and woman. That makes sense, mankind is certainly new with only a few hundred thousand years of records before civilization starts.
That doesn’t have to imply the earth is 4000 years old. Even the original wording could be read as eon instead of day.
The Bible is a couple thousand chapters long. The creation story is the first two chapters. It’s pretty obviously only attempting to establish that God created the universe in some ambiguous way and move on with the story. That doesn’t stop people from inferring all sorts of things from what is essentially a poem.
It’s literally a poem in the original language.
So you are saying when the Bible says Jesus died for our sins, it doesn’t mean he actually died, it’s only a metaphor.
I know it’s tough to pay attention for four whole sentences but if you read them again slowly I think you’ll see that I did not use the words Jesus, sin, or metaphor in any form which should make it pretty clear that, no, I’m not saying that at all.
I cant believe you just said that Virgin Mary was an inside joke, and every one knew Mary, and like I mean knew her.
The joke is inside Virgin Mary if you get my drift
You handwaved away glaring inaccuracy in what is purported to be the word of God with “it’s just a few paragraphs before the story”.
If you get to pick and choose what is truth, then anyone else can do it too.
No one is having a comprehensive theological discussion with you jackass. We were talking about a very specific thing. Stop being obnoxious.
It’s science memes. It’s not serious. I can reply with whatever I want.
Funny how you think only your posts are appropriate.
Even the original wording could be read as eon instead of day.
Most people don’t know that the Hebrew word “yom” (day) can be and is used to denote wildly different lengths of time.
If anyone is interested you can read a fine destruction of the stupid “Young Earth” argument at the link I provided.
The “Young Earth” people, both Christian and Jew, are trying to shoe horn something into the Bible that doesn’t fit and doesn’t need to exist. It’s nothing more than a desperate attempt to hold onto an old, wrong headed, and man-made theory.
Thanks for that
I don’t see why God must be incompatible with evolution or the Big Bang or really any of science. God created us to be clever, surely that includes using logic and science to learn about the world.
Personally I’m agnostic and I try not to judge people. I do judge people who dismiss science and decide faith alone is better.
God created us to be clever, surely that includes using logic and science to learn about the world.
The argument can be made that since God created humanity in their image that we’re all just fledgling gods with the big difference being our lack of immortality. We’re just not long lived enough as individuals to reach God’s level of power and insight. We are who God created us to be, logic and science included so If we don’t kill ourselves off we may eventually reach a collective godhood, or something akin to it, as a species.
I’m not saying I believe that argument, I’m just pointing out that it’s there because it supports your point.
I skimmed that link and it’s pretty interesting, I’ll have to spend more time on it. I definitely liked the part at the end about God being the observer in this context, so what’s a day to him.
deleted by creator
The excuse that the Hebrew word for day could mean an extremely long period of time doesn’t work because plants and trees were created before the Sun and insects (pollinators).
Simple answers for simple minds
The original wording can’t be read as eon instead of a day because plants and trees could’t last for an eon before the sun was created.
These are perfect plants that do reverse photosynthesis, make sense now?
This is why you can never disprove creationism sufficiently to convince a young Earth creationist. The hypothesis is unfalsifiable.
The obvious solution is to make a science that is unfalsifable. Then argue about who would win, like superman vs goku.
Also I’m amazed by how people don’t seem to understand what half-life is. It’s not the time it takes for an atom to decay. It’s the time it takes for half of the atoms to decay, meaning there will be some U-238 that decay into Ra-226 in just a couple of seconds.
So even if the Earth was created 4000 years ago with uranium but not lead (for some weird reason), some of that lead would have decayed into lead by now.
Yes but this is a 16 year who watched a YouTube and owns noobs
Well there’s also no way to disprove that everything was created last Tuesday including the memories of things/events happening before last Tuesday.
The weirdest part to me is thinking the timeless omnipotent god that the Bible explicitly says considers a thousand years less than nothing actually literally meant that he created everything in what we’d perceive as 7 days when talking to whatever arbitrary scribe wrote down the creation myth for him.
So it’s more like God appears to this guy named Abraham and tells him the story and then his great! Great! Great! Great! Great! Great! Great! Great! Great! Great! Great! Great! Great! Great! Great! Great! Great! Great! Great! Great! Great! Great! Great! Great! Great, great great grandchildren wrote it down. But in the original Hebrew it doesn’t use a word that means day they use a word that means unit of time.
That still doesn’t work because plants and trees are created before the sun. Not to mention the lack of pollinators because God hadn’t yet created insects.
Clearly you’ve never played telephone.
I’m just amazed that the ancient israelis got it as close as they did to our modern understanding of the process of the formation of the universe through only oral tradition and not from any hard sources of science.
Personally I’m in the camp that says trust the science and realize that ancient Israeli tribals weren’t the best at keeping 100% accurate records.
I’m also partial to the simulation theory variant where we are the sims on Gods PC.
Got it close? It’s wrong in almost every way possible. Earth before Sun. Plants before the sun. No insect pollinators until after the sun and birds before land animals.
It’s completely random.
It blows my mind that there are atheists who read the Bible literally.
It’s fine if you don’t read the Bible literally. As long as you also accept that Jesus didn’t actually die and resurrect. You didn’t read it literally, did you?
Isn’t it weird how God manifests himself in different ways depending where your physical location on earth is. It’s almost like if each culture puts its own spin on religion because there is no continuity between a people that existed thousands of years ago and the people of today.
Just a little fun fact about the abrahamic religions.
It’s explicitly stated that there are other gods. It’s just that the abrahamic one does not like them and wants to be the god of everything.
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If it wasn’t a day then how did all the plants and trees live without sunlight?
I thought carbon dating of fossils was our best argument against the 4000 years myth.
God could have put the fossils there with the right carbon isotopes.
You can’t use logic to disprove belief in magic.
There’s a fun belief in physics regarding this “superdeterminism”.
It essentially states that two entangled particles exhibit entanglement not because of any property between them but because they share the same cause origin point (the big bang) and that their respective spin states correlate more with the big bang than each other. Essentially the spin experiments will always appear to show entanglement, but it’s actually a byproduct of the big bang.
Which, as we can all maybe agree, is fucking weak by order of being disprovable
Also, we could be way off on the age because we just don’t know. Sure, we can collect data and extrapolate for billions of years and assume that all elements have always decayed at the same rate, but short of living through it and accurately measuring it with modern instruments, molecules-to-man “macro” evolution can’t actually be proven.
This is why, using the Scientific Method, it is still a theory. A theory accepted by most scientists, but still. There’s a certain arrogance in declaring solved something we can’t actually know for 100% certainty.
Pretty sure the point of creationism is that everything was put on the earth when it was created, including fossils etc. You can’t argue this with logic. My favorite spin off of this is Last Thursdayism where the earth was created last Thursday (regardless of what day it’s now) which basically uses the same argument.
That does explain why I can never get the hang of Thursdays
What, were you born today or something!
We all were! Oh wait, that’s This Thursdayism.
Hence the first and only commandment of Last Thursdayism: Don’t Panic.
And the fun scientific counterpart of the Boltzmann brain. The idea that in an infinite universe (at least in a couple of the spatial dimensions if not also a time dimension) random fluctuations could combine to form your brain. Including all of your memories, thoughts, hopes and dreams. You think you have had an entire life, but in reality your brain was just formed moments ago. And it may possibly stop existing in a few more moments, this moment being the only one the brain has actually experienced.
When taken to its natural conclusion, the entire Earth of even the solar system or galaxy might have just been created by random chance. The perfect storm of randomness. It may have been created longer ago or just nanoseconds before now. There is no way of telling.
Thermodynamics has been used to counter and strengthen this idea. And with infinity on the table anything goes.
I always found the idea of stable Boltzmann brains fascinating. The idea that on an infinite enough universe, there must exist self-sustaining minds that function on an entirely circumstantial set of rules and logic based on whatever the quantum soup spit up.
You think you have had an entire life, but in reality your brain was just formed moments ago. And it may possibly stop existing in a few more moments, this moment being the only one the brain has actually experienced.
A moment in which I sit on the toilet and read philosophy on my fondleslab and perhaps make this comment. Really a wild thought
“God did it to trick you” is pretty hard to disprove
It’s also hard to argue while also claiming your god is moral, which is why creationists usually scapegoat the task of planting fossils to Satan.
“It Is Useless To Attempt To Reason A Man Out Of A Thing He Was Never Reasoned Into.” - Jonathan Swift
It’s an ad hoc argument. You can’t argue against any ad hoc arguments with logic
this argument isn’t going to work on someone who believes god created said lead… and also, pretty sure not all lead was created from nuclear decay.
i get dunk on people feels satisfying, but this is just bad science communication through and through
Some lead might have been created from supernova fusion, probably. I’m not actually sure if it’s the right isotope or if lead even has radioactive isotopes that we know of
Anything can be radioactive if you add enough neutrons
I had a conversation with a woman who strongly believed God put the dinosaur bones there to test our faith.
what an idiot, clearly god put the bones in the ground because dinosaurs were his favourite creation and he wanted us to know about them. Had he not put them there we’d have no idea, and he’d be very sad.
Also, the half life is when half of it decays. Some of it is constantly decaying. We don’t need to wait for the half life to see any of it. The ratios would be totally off if there was enough of it to get the amount of lead we have right now, but some would exist. When the math is that complex, it’s not going to change anyone’s mind who believes what a magic book (written by regular humans) says. Nothing will, be if you want a chance it has to be something simple and obvious.
There are exactly 1.6 x 10^18 kilograms of lead on earth but every three minutes or so a brand new gram is welcomed into existence due to the radioactive decay of uranium.
Calculate that flat earthers!
Technically this could all be true even if the universe were created 4000 years ago. As somebody says in Robert Heinlein’s novel Job: A Comedy of Justice, “Yes, the universe is billions of years old, but it was created 4000 years ago. It was created old.” (approximate quote from memory)
I absolutely agree with science, but strictly speaking we can’t know for sure the universe isn’t the creation of some superbeing operating outside of it - or it could even be a simulation.
We can’t prove that the world we live in wasn’t created last Thursday, with our memories, the growth rings in trees, and so on created by a (near) omnipotent trickster to deceive us. But science and rationality give us tools for determining what’s worth taking seriously, and sorting out the reasonable, but unconfirmed, claims from the unverifiable hogwash.
Actually the universe was created on Jan 1st 1970. That’s why computers sometimes have errors with pre-1970 dates, it’s the universal simulation glitching due to the high clock rate of computers compared to the universe’s. Anyone who claims to have been born before 1970/01/01 is a simulation that’s lying to you, and anyone born after is real, hence why now that its more player characters than NPCs things are going off the rails politically and socially!
Also, did you ever get a sense of dejavu?
QED.
Pffff. Look at this conspiracy bullshit.
Everyone knows that the universe will actually be created tomorrow. What you are experiencing now is a flashback from tomorrow of what you did yesterday. Prove me wrong.
You believe in existence? Please.
I don’t yet, but tomorrow is the day for sure.
You’ve been saying that for a 1000 years.
You’re in a loop. Reality is never going to exist.
See you tomorrow for the same discussion.
I don’t yet, but tomorrow is the day for sure.
What a tricky god to even implant memories of me imagining all of creation happening only a few seconds ago every time I read about this particular anecdote in the false past.
And yet simulation theory has a very reasonable merit.
And if it were to turn out true, you’d also have to admit that OOPs argument was hogwash. Actually, it is either way.
If you can’t logic better than religious people, then you’re the problem.
It’s got as much merit as any other faith based theory of existence.
We see things that don’t seem to make any intuitive sense in science, and simulation theory is one explanation, but without any evidence (and really, there can’t be evidence against, because it faces the same response of “any evidence against is explicitly put there by the simulation”).
Simulation theory is essentially science-themed religious theory rather than directly evidence based theory.
I’ll admit it’s a fun “why” as to the weirdness of quantum mechanics and relativity, but ultimately the hard science folks I respect confess they are just finding models that predict stuff accurately, and the various extrapolations to intuitive neat things people make up in that context are beyond the realm of “science” (simulation theory and many-worlds interpretation of quantum physics are the biggest ones I can think of).
We can’t know anything with 100% certainty. We can always imagine some razzle-dazzle, imagined scenario to counter the rational explanation if we like.
The point of the scientific method and logical reasoning is to pick the explanation with the most evidence.
The existence of a god is something that can’t be disproven. You can always find gaps in knowledge and explain the gap by saying a god / multiple gods did that. As gaps narrow with more knowledge, you can always just say that the holy books were just a metaphor in this one case, but the rest of it is literally true.
It gets even more complicated when you run into people who refuse to believe in any science, or anything outside their own personal experience.
Personally, I believe the Earth is a sphere. I’ve been to Australia, Europe, Africa, Asia and North America. The time the flights took and the routes the in-flight maps showed make sense for a spherical earth. So did the scenes visible out the windows, and the day/night cycle. The mere existence of time zones and seasons strongly suggests the Earth is a rotating sphere tilted slightly off vertical. But, it could be that I’m living in a Truman Show world, where everything is a lie designed to make me believe something that isn’t true. I haven’t personally done all the math, all the experiments, etc. to prove the Earth is a sphere. And, if this were a Truman Show world, the producers of the show could mess with my experiments anyhow.
For someone who doesn’t want to believe, there’s really nothing you can do to make them believe. The world really relies on trust and believing Occam’s Razor.
If we assume that god, by definition, must be omniscient, there is actually a way to disprove the possibility with the following paradox:
This sentence is not known to be true by any omniscient being.
There are also more traditional arguments like the problem of evil
Theists roll their eyes at that, because nobody really thinks their god is omniscient or omnipotent. They may say so, either to deceive the nonbelievers, or out of ignorance of what omnimax really means, but every religion I can think of has had a fallible god, sometimes very fallible. There are the notoriously arrogant Greek gods, the stupidly belligerant Norse gods, the Jewish/Christian god foiled by iron chariots, and deceptive serpents, even Buddhists with their infallible smug asshole of a god have as a saying “If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him.”
Fact of the matter is no god is omni-anything, since that would prove they don’t exist, and cannot be believed. Gods don’t have to be omniscient. They only have to be way more knowledgable and aware than anyone else. They don’t have to be all powerful, only way more powerful than anything mere mortals could muster. So saying “Aha! But your god can’t possibly be all powerful, because then he could make a stone that he couldn’t lift! Checkmate, theists!” falls flat, in the face of (outside of boasting) doctrine basically saying that their god makes mistakes and can’t do everything.
This sentence is not known to be true by any omniscient being.
I don’t understand how this disproves the existence of an omniscient being. What if I said “This sentence is not known to be true by any logical being.” Is my existence disproven now?
Being logical doesn’t imply knowing every true sentence.
Also, see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knower_paradox
Logical meaning having the ability to follow logical rules to determine whether or not any statement is true or false. I’ve followed that train of logic and determined that the sentence you provided is neither true nor false. I’ve determined that it is paradoxical. Why would an omniscient being be unable to know that this is a paradox?
If we assume that god, by definition, must be omniscient
Why must that be true by definition? Many of the Greek gods were clearly not omniscient, because the stories about them all involve intrigues and hiding things from each-other.
Also, you can’t disprove a god’s existence by making a logic puzzle that’s hard for you to puzzle out. Just because it’s a toughie for you doesn’t mean that it disproves the existence of gods.
That isn’t even a particularly difficult logic puzzle.
Self-referential paradoxes are at the heart of limitative results in mathematical logic on what is provable, so it seems plausible a similar self-referential statement rules out omniscience.
Greek gods are gods in a different sense than the monotheistic conception of god that is omniscient, omnipotent and omnibenevolent. Sure, so the argument I give only applies to the latter sense.
That’s not a paradox though, it’s a silly logic puzzle that isn’t hard to solve. It doesn’t prove or disprove anything about omniscience or gods.
It is a paradox if you believe there are omniscient beings. If there are no omniscient beings, there is no paradox. The sentence is either true or false. If the sentence is true, we have an omniscient being that lacks knowledge about a true statement. Contradiction. If it is false, there is an omniscient being that knows it to be true. This means that the statement is true, but the statement itself says that no omniscient being knows it to be true. Contradiction.
It’s not a paradox, it’s a dumb logic puzzle. It’s no different than saying something nonsensical like “This sentence contains 2 words”.
If it is false, there is an omniscient being that knows it to be true
No, if it is false, then it is simply wrong. A wrong sentence doesn’t imply something else is right, it’s just wrong.
Man I don’t know if I’ll ever get over seeing Mastodon toots on Lemmy and all of the other wild cross-fediverse fun the Fediverse enables
I didn’t notice until you said something. Wild.
How did the matter that constitutes the universe come into being? What was the single point that signifies the beginning of time? What set time in motion? Will time continue after the death of the universe?
None of it is worth trying to wrap our tiny little monkey brains around as far as I’m concerned. Go have a pint and listen to music that makes you happy.
