Michael Brown's Questions for Atheists

 Evangelical Christian Michael Brown recently posed several questions to atheists. These were framed as an 'honest' attempt to understand atheists.

I have provided my answers below.

Is Your Atheism Based on Study or Experience?

First, would you say that you are (or, were) an atheist based primarily on intellectual study or based on experience? Or did you never believe in God at all?

I have never believed in your deity, or any other deities. I am old enough to be exposed to the arguments for the existence of your deity, and found the answers ranging from unconvincing, to fallacious, to downright dishonest.  

 

Do You Have Purpose and Destiny?

Second, would you say that even as an atheist, you still have a sense of purpose and destiny in your life, a feeling that you were put here for a reason and that you have a mission to accomplish? Or is it primarily people of faith who feel like this, since we are simply the products of an unguided, random evolutionary process?

Your leading question with evolution in it, belies your claim to honesty. The powerful and well-researched forces of evolution are not a synonym for random. I have a purpose, and it is a product of my own worldview and my indigenous culture. For example, kaitiakitanga drives the work I do in wildlife conservation, and affirms that I share a kinship (whakapapa) with all these animals. This is part of the legacy I leave for the future. 

The Christian idea my purpose is to end up, joyfully spending an eternity kissing your deity's butt while my unsaved friends and whānau are being tortured, actually fills me with utter disgust and horror. 

Does God Exist?

Third, would you say that you are 100% sure there is no such being as God — meaning, an eternal, all-powerful, all-knowing being? Or would you say that, for all practical purposes you have concluded that this God does not exist, although it is impossible to prove such a negative with absolute certainty?

I have concluded that deities are an outgrowth of our hunter-gatherer animistic beliefs, that evolved into focus points of these, first as nature gods and in some cultures, gradually evolving into High Gods and finally, Morally High Gods. Your deity is a very recent, in human terms, species of Moralising High God. Gods don't exist. They are the fantastic creations of the ancient era.

Can Science Explain the Origin of Life?

Fourth, do you believe that science can provide answers for many of the remaining mysteries of the universe, including: how the universe began (including where matter came from and where the Big Bang derived its energy); the origin of life; and DNA coding?

That's an odd question. Research on the origin of life has advanced from showing some early chemical pathways for amino acids to form in the 1950s, to peptide chains (proteins), sugars, nucleotides, lipid membranes and protocells, and self-replicating macromolecules today. The explanation is incomplete but much more powerful than the idea a virgin-mating bloodgod did it instead.

What science gives us is the most reliable method we have for discovering how things work. It does so by setting up ruthless contests between competing hypotheses, that are resolved by seeing which are wrong (falsification). Theistic claims that knowledge can be acquired instead by revelation is patently false, and the fact you simply have no reliable way to tell if your beliefs on origins are false, rule out your alternative explanations.

Have You Questioned Your Atheism?

Fifth, have you had any experiences in life that caused you to question your atheism? Has something happened to you that seemed genuinely supernatural or otherworldly? Or have you been confronted with some information that shook your atheistic foundations, such as a scientific argument for intelligent design? If so, how have you dealt with such doubts about your atheism?

No. The longer I live, the more confident I am in my atheism and the more appalled I am at the damage generated by your religion.  And there are no scientific arguments for intelligent design. What we have instead is a litany of falsehoods about genetics, molecular biology, statistics and the fossil record concocted by a small cadre of glib zealots. They have undertaken no original research to establish ID as a science. If anything Creationists (including Intelligent Design proponents) confirm how unscrupulous, how dishonest and untrustworthy your arguments are. I don't think you appreciate how badly Creationism discredits the your religion. 

Are You Materialistic?

Sixth, are you completely materialistic in your mindset, meaning, human beings are entirely physical, human consciousness is an illusion, and there is no spiritual realm of any kind? Or are you superstitious, reading horoscopes or engaging in new age practices or the like?

That's such a list of leading questions I'm not even going to bother answering it.  

Would You Be Willing to Follow God?

Seventh, if you were convinced that God truly existed — meaning the God of the Bible, who is perfect in every way, full of justice and mercy, our Creator and our Redeemer — would that be good news or bad news? And would you be willing to follow Him and honor Him if He were truly God?

If you could convince me the Abrahamic deity existed, I would accept it existed. The god of the Bible however, gave its followers instructions for beating slaves or executing non-virgin brides, but none for using soap. It promotes collective and inherited guilt, blood sacrifices and scapegoating, thought-crimes and threatens horrific torture with no chance of rehabilitation. That's not what a perfect or just entity looks like. 

 

How improbable is it that proteins can form by "chance"?

A common trait of scientists who work on the origins of life, is not to attempt to estimate the probability macromolecules (like peptide chains) will form. A common trait of creationists who don't, is estimating such probabilities.  This typically produces astronomical odds against such macromolecules forming.

For instance, suppose we are told there is a 50:50 chance that two amino acids will bond.  A peptide-chain (protein) 150 amino-acids long, will thus have the probability of (0.5)*(0.5)^2*(0.5^3)*...(0.5)^150.  This gives a cumulative probability of well, a really really big number against (1 in 10⁴⁵ IIRC).  Thus the number of trials needed to make this peptide seem up there in many billions of trillions.

The problem above is simple. It ignores the fact that macro-molecules form in a modular fashion. (There's also some assumptions about the chemistry also, but we'll put those aside).  Macromolecules don't form one molecule at a time, in one go.  If we just add one correction to the calculation above- that the peptide chains form in a modular way, it takes just 5 trials to make a chain 150 amino-acids long.  That's right. Just 5.  The Creationist result above are entirely produced by unrealistic assumptions.

Let me demonstrate.  We start with a large pool of amino-acids.  There's a 50:50 chance in the first round, they bond to another amino acids (using SIPF chemistry, dipeptides are found within a week).  This is merely the assumption from the creationist maths above.

So after trial 1:
Half the amino-acids have formed dipeptides (a chain of 2 amino acids)
Half the amino acids are still unpaired to anything.

We then carry these into trial 2:
Some of the amino acids will still not have bonded.  Some will form dipeptides.
Some of the dipeptides will bond to one other single amino acids (making a tripeptide)
Some of them will bond to another bipeptide, or to two single amino acids.  (Bonding can occur at either end of the chain, it doesn't have to be at just one end).  That's an oligopeptide 4 amino-acids long.
Importantly, some of the dipeptides will bond to two other dipeptides.  After two trials, we will find peptide chains 6 amino-acids long.

On to trial 3:
Some of the peptide chains 6 amino-acids long, will bond to two other 6 amino-acid peptides.  Some of the peptide chains are now 18 amino-acids long.  The distribution of peptide chains in the pool will range from 1 to 18 amino-acids long.

On to trial 4:
Some of the 18 amino-acid chains will bond to two other 18 amino acids.  We will find in the sample, anything between 1 amino acid to chains 54 amino-acids long.  

On to trail 5:
If 3 peptide chains that are 50-54 amino-acids long bond, then we've got our 150 amino-acid peptide chain.  We didn't need trillions of trials. It's that simple.

Ok.  This is a gross simplification.  The chemistry of peptide formation is a lot more complex than just two molecules randomly bonding.  That's why people who actually work in this topic, don't try to calculate probabilities.  There are too many variables and too many permutations to make any estimate meaningful.  The point is to show how utterly devious and dishonest it is, to drop the modular assumption of macro-molecule formation.  And why you actually need to use a Markov probability function, not an IID.  What happens in each trial is not independent of previous trials. The reason creationists use an IID is because it's the one function everyone knows, and it wildly inflates the improbability of anything happening.

The Dilemma with "Kinds"

@Atheistic_1 Sep 27 (Twitter)

Kent Hovind breaks down "kinds": "Everyone knows birds are different than fish." 

Anyone familiar with creationists know that they generally eschew scientific classification of organisms. Rather, they try to reclassify life into what is they term kinds.  It doesn't take long to work out they can't actually define kinds.  They'll throw out what they think are examples of kinds, but they cannot specify the criteria to separate kinds.

So why not simply treat kinds as a synonym for species?  The answer is the Ark.  The idea that all of this planet's terrestrial animal species could fit on the Ark (and let's face it, this is supposed to include extinct taxa like dinosaurs also), is impossible.  So by using larger groups, the cramming task is made less difficult.  Perhaps there is only one cat-kind. Thus all Noah needed was this single pair, rather than representatives of all extant Felidae.

Kinds need a broad definition to fit everything into the Ark

So kinds have to be defined in a broad way, to cluster lots of species together.

But kinds have to be narrowly defined to separate us from apes

This creates the dilemma. The dilemma is us- humans.  Genetically we are more closely related to chimpanzees, than chimpanzees are to gorillas (and other great apes).  So if the point of using kinds is to 'cluster' animal species into groups, we'd be a kind of chimpanzee (or even an ape).  This conflicts with a special creation of humans out of dirt.  We are according to creationists, distinct from all the other animals. This means kinds has to be now revised to mean something incredibly narrow.  It has to be so narrow it can separate us from all other ape species.


The requirement for kinds to be both a way of broadly defining life, and at the same time, even narrower than scientific classification systems, is impossible to pull off.  And for that reason, kinds cannot ever be supplied with an actual definition.  They can only flounder in their futile attempt to meet their two goals.