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Unbelief As A Thought Experiment

Just something that popped into my head a few days ago:

To be an atheist, you don’t have to grapple with questions of the Bible or the provability of the nonexistence of God. You just have to perform a simple thought experiment: What if there were no God?

In larger society, that thought experiment has been done. In fact, there’s an entire culture, a incredibly powerful shared human endeavor, based on it. It’s called Science.

Someone asked “What would things look like if there were no God? How would things work? How would they fit together?” Out of that came biology, geology, physics, real medical science, so much more. The experiment was fantastically, astonishingly fruitful in providing answers that you could not just think about, but use. Continue reading “Unbelief As A Thought Experiment”

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An Undropped Shoe

I’m not actually supposed to be writing this.

More than a year ago I signed all sorts of documents demanding strict adherence to the embargo date of the information. But since the embargo date has come and gone, and there has been no public announcement – and especially since the recent news story of the entire Vatican science team being killed in a bus crash in Argentina – I don’t feel that I should honor those agreements.

I suppose there might be some danger in this for me, either legally or via some darker threat – frankly, the bus crash worries me – but maybe that’s all the more reason I should write and post it here. If this post vanishes, or even if I vanish … well, hopefully someone will look into it. But it’s time people knew. Continue reading “An Undropped Shoe”

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Free Will … Maybe — Part 2.2

It’s the same with most every creature you know. Make up a different life-pyramid for each one and you’d find that the few unique things that make them their own specific type of creature are essentially add-ons, extremely minor alterations on top of the ponderous weight of older traits.

Evolutionary “refinement” also sometimes involves a certain amount of letting-go. The horse’s mammalian ancestors, for instance, jettisoned reptilian scales, and all mammalian lineages since then demonstrate this loss. Horses and other equines even gave up toes – plural – for the single toe represented by each hoof.

But those ancestors kept a great number of the core physiological traits of reptiles, amphibians and even fish – hearts, brains, lungs, tails, and so much more – that are evident today. Continue reading “Free Will … Maybe — Part 2.2”

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Free Will … Maybe — Part 2.1

In making the point of how much free will we don’t have, I wanted to write about a concept I came up with a few years back, something to help us understand the, well, “automaticness” of much of what goes on in our heads.

Searching for something on it, I came across this chapter of yet another of my might-be books, a half-written volume titled Earthman’s Notebook.

It’s fairly long, but it illustrates the ideas pretty well.

I’m dividing it up, so it’s going to accordion three extra sections into the middle of my intended-to-be-three-part Free Will piece. Continue reading “Free Will … Maybe — Part 2.1”

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Ghost Rider … Um … SUCKED

You have no idea what a fanboy I am when it comes to superhero movies. At 59, I’m often the oldest person in the theater at midnight openers. (Speaking of which, the Spider-Man trailer looks suweeeet! And oh yeah, I’ll be there for the midnight show.)

I went to see the second coming of Ghost Rider last night, on pins and needles and eager for the flaming spectacle.

But … dayyum. Twenty minutes in, I was already thinking about walking out. Departing the theater at the end, I said “That was easily one of the Top Ten worst movies I’ve seen in my entire life.” Continue reading “Ghost Rider … Um … SUCKED”

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7 Things Christians Can’t Prove Aren’t True

(Sorry, brain running on idle so far this morning. I swear the following has nothing to do with drugs. This is a sort of sideways answer to those who say you can’t prove there’s no God.)

1) In Heaven, everybody has delicious Thomas’s English muffins for breakfast, and they come already toasted and slathered with real butter. Plus, they’re served by obsequious angelic beings who look exactly like Rolling Stone’s Keith Richards.   Continue reading “7 Things Christians Can’t Prove Aren’t True”

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Go List for Unbelievers

Looking for reader contributions here.

Say there are two or three levels of atheism – like Level 1, Level 2, Level 3, or maybe Novice, Intermediate, Advanced. Or possibly Apprentice,  Journeyman, Master.

And say there were some things you should probably do at each level in order to qualify – in your own mind if nowhere else.

What would those things be?

Here’s my tentative list for the Novice Class: Continue reading “Go List for Unbelievers”