God's pass mark - 11%
I guess someone will knock this down as an old argument... but here goes anyway.
Forty years of space probes have established that so far there is no sign of a possibility of life on the other planets in our solar system. There's some evidence that conditions on moons of Jupiter and Saturn could be suitable for some form of life - at least that able to survive in extreme conditions in water, as many life forms on Earth do - but not a smidgeon of a hint that any other planet or body in the solar system is likely to support anything as complex as an earthworm, let alone intelligent life.
Seems to me there are two possibilities for the evolution of the solar system resulting in the planet with a warm, oxygen-rich atmosphere, carbon cycle, liquid water and everything else essential to our existence.
1) God set the mechanisms or directed the rocks to clump together, or materialised the earth, the other eight or nine planets and the galaxies beyond out of nothing on the first day or;
2) The whole lot is a result of stellar evolution at the end of a 13 billion year cycle of star birth and death, consistent with all current observations of astronomy.
The thought I think is interesting about answer 1 is that it requires you to believe that an omniscient God could plan or design nine or ten planets with the presumption that the Creator wanted conditions suitable for life... AND FAIL EIGHT OR NINE TIMES OUT OF NINE OR TEN. That's around 11% success. Not a pass mark for any exam I've ever heard of.
Of course people like Michael Bronson have a good counter to this. Apparently life not only does not exist elsewhere in our solar system, it also does not exist anywhere around the billions of stars in our galaxy nor in the billion billion or so stars in the rest of the universe. Neatly getting round the argument that God is a failure.
Of course the guy also believes the life-span of the Universe is 8000 years, with the Earth formed 6000 years ago and just 1007 years to go once all the Christians are removed by God...
I don't pretend to know that I'm right. Maybe there is an intelligence organising everything that we see. But in science, in all walks of life, isn't the simple answer usually the right one?
4.5 billion years of chemical, then biological evolution is hard to comprehend, and even harder to track precisely through the fossil record. But isn't it easier to accept there are countless pieces of contemporary, documented evidence for natural selection, and not a single shred of evidence for a Christian God except for a few stories written decades after the events described could have taken place?
Whether I'm right or wrong, Christians - and Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs, Ba-hai, Scientologists or whatever floats your boat - I want my children educated to understand that science is evidence based and religious belief is something different. Something that must be separated from science and not misleadingly presented as proven fact.
Forty years of space probes have established that so far there is no sign of a possibility of life on the other planets in our solar system. There's some evidence that conditions on moons of Jupiter and Saturn could be suitable for some form of life - at least that able to survive in extreme conditions in water, as many life forms on Earth do - but not a smidgeon of a hint that any other planet or body in the solar system is likely to support anything as complex as an earthworm, let alone intelligent life.
Seems to me there are two possibilities for the evolution of the solar system resulting in the planet with a warm, oxygen-rich atmosphere, carbon cycle, liquid water and everything else essential to our existence.
1) God set the mechanisms or directed the rocks to clump together, or materialised the earth, the other eight or nine planets and the galaxies beyond out of nothing on the first day or;
2) The whole lot is a result of stellar evolution at the end of a 13 billion year cycle of star birth and death, consistent with all current observations of astronomy.
The thought I think is interesting about answer 1 is that it requires you to believe that an omniscient God could plan or design nine or ten planets with the presumption that the Creator wanted conditions suitable for life... AND FAIL EIGHT OR NINE TIMES OUT OF NINE OR TEN. That's around 11% success. Not a pass mark for any exam I've ever heard of.
Of course people like Michael Bronson have a good counter to this. Apparently life not only does not exist elsewhere in our solar system, it also does not exist anywhere around the billions of stars in our galaxy nor in the billion billion or so stars in the rest of the universe. Neatly getting round the argument that God is a failure.
Of course the guy also believes the life-span of the Universe is 8000 years, with the Earth formed 6000 years ago and just 1007 years to go once all the Christians are removed by God...
I don't pretend to know that I'm right. Maybe there is an intelligence organising everything that we see. But in science, in all walks of life, isn't the simple answer usually the right one?
4.5 billion years of chemical, then biological evolution is hard to comprehend, and even harder to track precisely through the fossil record. But isn't it easier to accept there are countless pieces of contemporary, documented evidence for natural selection, and not a single shred of evidence for a Christian God except for a few stories written decades after the events described could have taken place?
Whether I'm right or wrong, Christians - and Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs, Ba-hai, Scientologists or whatever floats your boat - I want my children educated to understand that science is evidence based and religious belief is something different. Something that must be separated from science and not misleadingly presented as proven fact.
