- cross-posted to:
- atheistmemes@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- atheistmemes@lemmy.world
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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.
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.
round numbers are always made up. change my mind
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.
You could just ask the mice.
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.
“The devil put them there”
Satan do be metal
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.
“God works in mysterious ways” /s
You can throw as much science at them as you want. God could have just created everything in whatever state he wanted to. Same thing with the virgin mary discussion. Who cares if it makes sense scientifically, god can just make a fertilized egg appear. How lame would god be if he could not do that? This is the basis christians start from, so why even bother trying to debate that?
But could he heat up a burrito so hot that even he could not eat it?
If not, that’s pretty weak. But if so, also pretty weak.
Go away with your logic!
Could he create a rock heavy enough, that he can’t lift it?
Ah the “Last Tuesday Hypothesis”.
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
Göbekli Tepe
Literally tho
I genuinely don’t understand how uranium can exist a priori in this argument but lead not? I might be missing something.
The original post only gave half the explanation. It’s not that lead exists in general, it’s that lead exists within zircon crystals.
Under normal circumstances that would be impossible, zircon crystals strongly reject lead atoms as they form. There’s no way to stuff lead into the crystal lattice in the quantity we find them there. But uranium and zircon go together just fine, we just have to wait for it to decay into lead. The trouble is it takes ~4.5 billion years for just half of those uranium atoms to turn into lead. So any zircon crystal we find with half as much lead as uranium must be roughly that old
But that still doesn’t change the belief that a creator could have created the universe in whatever state it currently exists in. That’s why these arguments never go anywhere with hard core young earth creationists. It’s also not worth the energy arguing with them because they often believe that anyone trying to convince them otherwise is an antichrist trying to lead them astray.
If God created it in that state then they should be curious to understand that creation. They look at rainbows as the beauty of creation but not the fact that lead exists in these crystals. It’s all equally beautifully complex. So why not try to understand it.
If God made the world look like it was created billions of years ago there must be something worth learning from that, even if you believe it was snapped into existence 6000 years ago.
Tbf for your specific example, rainbows are specifically mentioned and “explained” in the Bible. After drowning all life on Earth except for Noah and a bunch of inbred animals, God sent the wainbow down as a pwomise that he would nevew do it again 👉👈
To be fair they weren’t inbred yet
They were by the time they got off the boat though.
There’s no mention of meat pies in that story, not even sandwiches.
It doesn’t. It was never the point of his post. You can still believe that if you want. His reasoning for why he doesn’t is outlined there.
It comes down to whether or not you find processes that we have researched and documented time and time again to be compelling evidence, or you want to believe it is a practical joke (while reductive, it is pretty much that argument breaks down to being).
This the explanation I’m looking for. OP didn’t make sense to me, lead could be created in supernovae and shit just like every other heavy element
Yeah, it’s not at all a compelling argument.
Isn’t it more about being able the view the whole life cycle of lead, which takes more than 4000 years.
“God put all of that there, and then made it work to ensure we had quality lead gasoline, pipes and paint to poison our brains with cause freedom.”
Is that what were doing now? Regurgitating stereotypical insults on a post where the “pro science” side dropped the ball and leaned on a ridiculously stupid misunderstanding to disprove something stupider?
You all fucking disappoint me.
Who do you think you are? No one cares. ACAB, and religion is bullshit.
the answer completely disregards the fact that people who even remotely understand how these things work wouldn’t believe stupid shit in the first place. there are so many ways for this guy to just dismiss this.
how would you even know, you can’t have studied these for billions of years
who says lead only can exist in this manner
what if this is true but god also made lead along with the earth
etc etc… this is very weak if the goal is really try to convince this guy to look into some things rather than smell your own farts.
There are many scientists who are strict belivers. They just move the act of creation to the big bang and it’s still in gods plan.
yeah the insistence that creation must mean it happens in an instant is just demonstrably pointless. we already say god created us. and we know we don’t come into existence in full adult form in an instant. we have a whole birth-baby-toddler-kid-teen-adult transformation. and before that we know there is a whole process in the womb. so when god creates a person he puts an entire process into motion. why can this not be the case for the entire universe? why not evolution? are they saying that god couldn’t have thought of a system? I find it weird.
so when god creates a person
Ok, a physicist is not a biologist.
I don’t get the connection… are you referring to god?
My farts are delicious thank you very much.
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
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.
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
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!
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.
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).
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
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?
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.
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.
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.
If it wasn’t a day then how did all the plants and trees live without sunlight?
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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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.
Can someone explain to me why lead HAS to come from another element? Why cant it just… exist?
Because it needs a…
… leader
Pazuzu@midwest.social explained above:
The original post only gave half the explanation. It’s not that lead exists in general, it’s that lead exists within zircon crystals.
Under normal circumstances that would be impossible, zircon crystals strongly reject lead atoms as they form. There’s no way to stuff lead into the crystal lattice in the quantity we find them there. But uranium and zircon go together just fine, we just have to wait for it to decay into lead. The trouble is it takes ~4.5 billion years for just half of those uranium atoms to turn into lead. So any zircon crystal we find with half as much lead as uranium must be roughly that old
A normal Star, which does not end it’s life with a supernova, can only produce elements up to Iron with normal fusion. All other elements are produced by e.g. supernovas, which tend to produce heavier elements initially (due to the forces involved) hat decay over time.
At least that is my pseudoscience knowledge about this
God made lead right after creating life
Actually He started with lead. All life comes from lead. Praise the lead. It’s not lead poisoning, it’s lead salvation! Also Led Zeppelin is Christian rock and spreading the gospel.
Some star fusion science can create radium but not lead?
unfortunately i don’t believe in uranium or numbers higher than 200, so this argument doesn’t work on me
Don’t give up, you can still change their mind.
Just from 4000 to 200.
the only problem with that is i’d need to change their mind again next year
