Best of Non Believers Arguments And Comebacks Part 2

because of God that our neighbors believe in is essentially an invisible person is a creator deity who created the universe to have a relationship with one species of primate lucky us and and he's got he's got galaxies upon galaxies to attend to but he's especially concerned with what we do and he's especially concerned with what we do while naked he almost certainly disapproves of homosexuality and he's created this cosmos as a vast laboratory in which to test our powers of credulity and the test is this can you believe in this God on bad evidence which is to say on faith and if you can you will win an eternity of happiness after you've got and it's precisely this sort of God and this sort of scheme that you must believe in if you're going to have a any kind of future in politics in this country no matter what your gifts may be you could be you could be an unprecedented genius you could look like George Clooney you could have a billion dollars and you could have the social skills of Oprah and you are going nowhere in politics in this country unless you believe in that sort of God I do spend probably a little bit more time than I should on I'm religion and I have a certain amount of hostility to to it I think the most rational reason for it is because of the harm that I see it does we were talking about that earlier many people do simply awful things out of sincere religious belief not using religion as a cover the way Saddam Hussein may have done but really because they believe that this is what God wants them to do going all the way back to Abraham being willing to sacrifice Isaac because God told him to do that putting God ahead of humanity it's a terrible thing but they will stand up and they will ask if there is no God what stops you from raping and killing everyone you want to rape and kill what stops you from doing that and my answer is always you're absolutely right I have raped and kill every single person I want to rape and kill society because morality is more important than God and we know that because you stupid say the sentence god is good and if morality is not more important than God you don't get to say that it doesn't mean anything unless there's some good that we believe in some morality but you can't say God is good then he just say God whatever he does is OK and according to the Bible it kind of does he does everything bad the God of the gaps argument has always been used to provide a place for God the idea is that if science can't explain something then maybe we need to reintroduce God that's been historically the reason why people even talked about God God was always an explanation for the things they didn't understand now I don't claim that we understand everything but we can we can give a plausible explanation for every question of this sort rather than the gaps increasing as he was was urging I claim that the gaps that pretty much disappeared not that again we can explain everything but we have a plausible explanation and that's why I wanted to give you some detail into that that scenario for the natural origin of the universe also give you some reason this idea of how how the laws of nature it could come about so I think that the the fact that God is not needed we haven't we have a natural explanation for the universe for everything that we know in no place that we have to put put God into the picture so there's absolutely no reason to even introduce the concept of God it's a meaningless concept as though it has not only no evidence there's no basis for it and the universe looks just like it should look if there is no God in The God Delusion I made a seven point scale one is I'm totally confident there is a God seven is I'm totally confident there is not a god six is to all intents and purposes I'm an atheist I live my life as though there is no God but any scientist of any sense will not say that they positively can disprove the existence of anything I cannot disprove the existence of the Easter Bunny and so I'm agnostic about the Easter Bunny it's in the same respect that I'm agnostic about about God here's just one there are many examples of the way the Christian God has been defined which cancel themselves out for example God is defined as a being with freewill who knows everything he knows the future God not only knows the past and I'm assuming this is the kind of definition that you hold you'll correct me if I'm wrong because you haven't told us yet but God not only knows the past and the present but he also knows the future which means he also knows his own future decisions God knows what he's going to do tomorrow at 12:00 noon because he's God he knows everything but if you know what's going to happen in the future that put some limits on your power doesn't it how can you be omnipotent and unable to change what's going to happen between now and then and if you do change it then you weren't omniscient something's got to give you can't be omniscient and have freewill at the same time to have freewill whatever that means with humans and maybe we do or don't that's a different debate but certainly if God has free will it's a full libertarian free will and he can do whatever he wants because he's gone right if God has free will then he can't know the future if you know the future you can't have free will because the future is fixed there's no period of indeterminacy between now and then where you could change your mind I might decide I'm going to have coffee tonight after we go out but I could change my mind in the meantime I have the freedom to make that choice so if God is defined as a being with free will who is omniscient who knows the future then that God is a married bachelor in that God not only does not exist that God cannot exist and there are dozens of incompatible properties between God that showed that by definition mathematically logically the God you believe in cannot exist also in order for any hypothesis to be vertical meaning it can be true or false it has to be falsifiable there have to be things you can say about your hypothesis which if true would make it false if if we found a black polar bear the statement all polar bears are white would be falsified right we haven't yet which strengthens the hypothesis so I would ask you what kind of statements could be made which if true would prove theism false if you can't do that you don't even have not only don't you not have a coherent definition you don't even have a coherent hypothesis of this being that you are arguing for the second absence and this is probably the biggest one the second absence is the absence of evidence for a god if there were evidence for a god we would have seen it tonight it would have been on the table Jerry would have said here's the evidence for a God not evidence against evolution that's just a gap indeed I believe people when they say that they have experienced miracles I believe that they think that they have I think I'm obliged to credit them if it comes to that as long as they keep it - if you like if I can put it like this modestly as I dare to themselves if I believe that I was saved because once a baby boy was born and before mutilated I just was made the extraordinary that he escaped the female birth canal mother was a virgin or at least the her birth canal was only one way that thus I was a sorry thing by the way religions just taste for these regions don't you find and something to put you on your guard suppose I thought okay now I know that that must prove his teachings are true which it doesn't seem to me that they do but suppose I did and I'm going to be saved by it I think there was a wonderful secret it would make me happy it should make me happy doesn't make people happy they can't be happy - I believe it - my children must be taught this stuff no sir no ma'am no day no way no shape no form you keep your illusion private and I hope it does make you happy and this perhaps some reason why I would but they were told me which a week with the Pope's authority to set up say you can't have a condom comes from his ability to certify miracle the disturbance in the natural order I think it was David Hume who put it slightly fatherly this was a gain about the virgin birth I think which is more likely that the whole natural order is suspended or that a Jewish minx should tell a lie it's back in the 1600s Princess Elizabeth of Bohemia carried on a correspondence with Rene Descartes who's trying to defend mind-body dualism and elizabeth demands no how could something immaterial like the sole effect something material like the brain or the body Descartes was never able to answer that question and these days science has gone way beyond that we know a lot more about what is happening we can literally see memories being formed we can see the chemical changes in neurons so the soul is supposed to also have memories how do the memories get from the neurons to the soul we know that brains often have false memories in them do that does the soul in the afterlife carry those false memories or they somehow corrected after death we even know the laws of physics by which the atoms the electrons the elementary particles in our brains behave we know the equations that the electrons that are responsible for for chemistry obey and there's no ambiguity in these equations they could always be wrong it's always possible to say well we just don't know what is going on that's fine but what we have is the evidence of every experiment ever done telling us that these equations are correct to overcome that we would need very very strong evidence just one experiment telling us how the soul is pushing around the chemicals in our brain but we don't have that what science says is that life or consciousness it's not a substance like water or air it is a process like fire when you put out the flame on a candle the flame doesn't go anywhere it simply stops and that is what happens when we die so we're faced at the end with two scenarios one scenario says that everything we think we understand about the behavior of matter and energy is wrong in a way that has somehow escaped noticed by every experiment ever done in the history of science and instead there are unknown mechanisms that allow information in the brain to be transferred to blobs of spirit energy that persist after we die and can talk to the other blobs of spirit energy but don't talk to us except sometimes they do the other scenario says that physics is right and that people under stress sometimes have experiences that are not actually real on the basis of rationality it is not a difficult decision to choose between these two options on the basis of emotion it might be difficult but we need to have the courage to live life here in the actual world thank you thank you for caring is Lomb is not a religion of peace and I woke up to the facts on the 11th of September 2001 perhaps I should have woken up to the facts earlier but I admit that I did that then at that time talking to people of my faith Islam and my friends and discussing with them I remember all kinds of fallacious arguments but I remember one consistent thing and that was to exempt Islam from any criticism it was culture it wasn't Islam but a religion is born in a culture and if that culture is not peaceful then that religion is not peaceful I was told it's politics we've had it tonight many times it's not the religion but Islam not only has a pious dimension but it also has a political dimension a complex system of laws a political philosophy on how society should be organized and if you look at that political system it's anything but peaceful what emancipated me from the order to submit my will completely to Allah which in practice means the concentration of power in the hands of a few was to learn to think critically the Enlightenment vote against this motion and open up the flows of Islam for debate in order that Muslims those who are not yet emancipated may take charge of their own reason of their own faculty vote against the motion that Islam is a religion of peace and toss toss that fallacy into the trash can of history thank you thank you I am really a religions undermine respect for the only way of acquiring reliable information about the nature of the world religions encourage the pursuit of understanding by the contemplation of navels and the achievement of comprehension by dotting a variety of ways of stemming the flow of blood to the brain they encourage scavenging hints about the nature of reality by the close analysis of those ancient politically edited compilations of folktales referred to as sacred texts if you favor self-deception then vote against the motion if you consider that society is it enhanced by honesty and by unbiased perception of for truth and vote for the motion thirdly religions undermine respect for evidence religions harm societies by disfavoring evidence in favor in favor of faith preferring mass hysteria superstition priestly Authority and the propagation of beliefs by cultural conditioning over controlled careful circumspect public unbiased inspection if you consider that introspection and submission to Authority mark the path to understanding then vote against the motion if instead you consider that truth is not arrived at by Fanning the flames of a crowds opinion but by circumspect public scrutiny then vote for the motion take it within Islam there is a procedure to alter the text according to modern society which relies on logical analogies that are drawn from the real world in a logical process that is followed to reach to conclusion end of it logical interpretations thank you all the religions pride themselves on developing analogies normally after the truth has been discovered by scientists it seems to me that those people who have their faith who believe so strongly in God if they really believe strongly their God is they believe they're right they believe that they they are they occupy the moral high ground they should be only too willing to sit down and put this not to the scientific test but to the political moral discussion test of talking about why they believe what they believe and let's talk about the main thing we want to talk about is what should we do what what's the moral course of action to take and if that is to be a reasonable discussion we have to take a few cards off the table such as the faith card we have to take the faith card off the table you point the faith got off the table I mean if I if one is a man of faith one can't take the take the gene out well you know Lucille says you're wrong you you know who Lucille is we should friend of mine she's always right I can't play that card in an argument if I this is rude of me to say you know it Lucille says you're wrong okay well who's Lucille I say well friend of mine always right but we ended the discussion but but we could funny today but people who say they know the mind of God and and I think the scripture 30 and I think the way we should deal with them is to say well that's very interesting design you've got a real problem since the rest of us don't know the mind of God we can't share your your direct line so you're going to have to do the best you can in a secular discussion about what the right thing to do is are you up to the task of explaining to the rest of us who don't have your hotline to God why you're right it's a great disappointment to the last fourteen years has been that civil society has failed that we can't do the things to the islamists that we would do as overdue to the neo-nazis you know we just we just not it seems we're not set up for it or people then have the guts and the balls for it they just you know they fear being called a name more than anything and you know the thing I've always said it will win when an Islamist who is not breaking the law but is saying horrible and hateful things is treated in the same way that Nick Griffin is treated that's when we'll win you know because we all recognize he has a right to freedom of speech and so on and so forth and if he's not breaking the law and it's a legal party and so on but you know we don't invite him to loads of places the Quakers don't host Nick Griffin you know to have Q&A sessions you know the Methodist Church doesn't celebrate the political forked of Nick Griffin you know that the Anglican Church doesn't have him sheets that promote things that Nick Griffin things of course not we know what to do with those types of fascists but societally we've totally failed to understand to even recognize and then to deal with this type of fascism it's it's a magnificently terrible failure and we're reaping the rewards that we have to wake up to this human civilization began by putting purpose and an intelligent purpose behind God's associate with the Sun the Moon the planets the wind the earth the oceans there it's been by one estimate over a thousand different gods throughout human history Mars got a war beside and Thor all the rest and the really important thing is that all of you or almost all of you probably are now atheists regarding those gods just the only difference is it's just one that we may disagree about but 999 we all agree have been thrown out and the reason they've been thrown out is they've been buried by the rise of our physical understanding science works and the fact that science works has buried the gods of the wind and the Sun and the moon farmers now as I was just saying when it when it doesn't rain they don't pray for rain anymore they go see a meteorologist and that's what thing in the process the human condition has improved immensely and it will continue to improve as science continues to bury the one remaining God now this one God is supposedly left we might ask a priori or in advance how likely is advanced that that all those another 999 gods were false but this one's true well you might argue if you had a flat prior that is probably pretty small likelihood but it doesn't really matter the point is that our current understanding of nature has changed we've learned things it's changed and develop since the claims were made by Iron Age peasants who didn't even know the earth orbited the Sun and therefore it's natural that science is inconsistent with those claims based on ignorance and we shouldn't revere those ancient claims as sacred they're ignorant there's still many open questions I'll try my one by 10 seconds of humility the only time tonight there's a lot we don't know about the universe a lot more we don't know than we do that's the wonder of science that's why I'm a scientist but it is intellectually lazy to just stop asking questions and stop looking for physical explanations and just say God did it there were a number of things that really bothered them number one they were ticked off that I kept saying I don't know they have this mindset that programmed them as to what to expect in this debate we're claiming God exists and God did it and this is the answer and you're here to say that that's false and there's some other answer and if ever they asked things like do you have an explanation for consciousness no you don't well tell me how this happened I don't know I'm not convinced any of us know you're the one claiming to have an answer would you like to provide the evidence and the argument to support your actual answer and if your if I find it compelling then I'll agree with you but my lack of an answer doesn't make your answer correct this is the mindset of the creationists that go through and try to poke holes in evolution and even if they poked holes so much that evolution cease to be a concrete theory they're not one step closer to proving creationism is true man they got mad by the third night I think Israel the gentleman I was debating said well every time we ask Matt a question he just says I don't know which is a bit of an exaggeration because there were a lot of things that I did provide my answers for and the main preacher came up to me at one point and said doesn't it bother you doesn't it Bob are you happy going to your grave not knowing the answers to these questions no I'm not none of us are we are all uncomfortable with this idea of not knowing and that's why we have science that's why we go out and try to find what the actual damned answer is I it's not that uncomfortable not knowing it's that I'm more uncomfortable pretending that I know as a back-of-the-envelope calculation within an order of magnitude accuracy we can safely conclude that over the last 10,000 years of history there's been about 10,000 different religions and roughly about a thousand different gods again the house question for you which route side of the room you leave on tonight what is the probability that Yahweh is the one true God in alman raw Aphrodite Apollo Baal Brahman Ganesha Isis Mithras Osiris Shiva Thor vishnu' wanton Zeus and the other 986 gods are all false gods you guys are atheist just like me of all the gods I just rattled off some of us just go one God further and so what concerns me now is even if you're as brilliant as Newton you reach a point where you start basking in the majesty of God and then your discovery stops it just stops you're kind of no good anymore for advancing that frontier waiting for somebody else to come behind you who doesn't have God on the brain and who says that's a really cool problem I want to solve it they come in and solve it but look at the time delay this was a hundred year time delay and the math that's in perturbation theory is like crumbs for Newton he could have come up with that the guy invented calculus just on a dare practically when someone asked him what what you know you know Ike how come planets orbit in ellipses and not some other shape and he couldn't answer that he goes home for two months comes back out comes integral differential calculus because he needed that to answer that court to answer that question and so so this is this is the kind of mind we were dealing with with Newton he could have gone there but he didn't he didn't his religiosity stopped him and so we're left with the realization of course that intelligent design while real in the history of science while real in the presence of sort of philosophical drivers is nonetheless a philosophy of ignorance and so regardless of what our political agendas all you have to say is science is a philosophy of discovery intelligent is eyes a philosophy of ignorance that's all I don't need to see well I don't need have you discovered anything lately if not get out of the science classroom but I'm not going to say don't teach this because if it's real it happened so I don't want people to sweep it under the rug because if you do you're neglecting something fundamental that's going on in people's minds when they confront things they don't understand and it happens to the greatest of the minds as it happens to everyone else many if not most other people in the public you all know who this girl is look at how is this the face of the demon or is this the look of a skeptic who's not buying your the problem is it's the same glare either way and that's why we're lumped in together this is the way we look when we realize we're being lied to when you realize that all of the fables in the Bible began as began in the hearts of superstitious primitives who just made it up it's man-made mythology and there is no truth in it there's no heaven no hell no Eden either and there is no devil he was invented by Persians adapted by Jews and embellished by Christians he was never the serpent nor a fallen angel and he can't steal your soul because we don't have souls exorcism isn't real because demons aren't real because magic isn't real we are not cursed we are not fallen we have arisen and we don't need salvation because God literally doesn't give a damn what happens after you die because then neither of you exists there is no god damned devil because there is no god damn you just died and that's it you're not immortal you're not eternal and to believe otherwise is to diminish everything that you really have life is precious because it is short and there's nothing after it there's no destiny and there's no purpose beyond what you give it yourself if you want your life to mean something try making someone else's life meaningful thank you because regardless whatever else you believe history will be our judge and stop waiting and wondering about some posthumous promise or divine damnation and learn to live and love life

Channel: Agatan Foundation

Views: 575,256

Rating: 4.8450847 out of 5

Keywords: best, of, nonbelievers, nonbeliever, arguments, argument, comebacks, comeback, part, one, Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris (Author), Daniel Dennett (Author), Ayaan Hirsi Ali (Author), Dan Barker, Douglas Murray, Lawrence M. Krauss, Atheism, Neil DeGrasse Tyson, Michael Shermer, Matt Dillahunty, atheist, Agnosticism, science, logic, Philosophy, religion, Islam, Christianity, Judaism, agatan, AronRa, Peter Atkins, Sean Carroll, Penn Jillette, Victor Stenger, Steven Weinberg, Christopher Hitchens

Id: eBBoGAHCJ-8

Length: 30min 10sec (1810 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 09 2015