CJ Morgan – you say there is insufficient evidence for God to have done those things but you fail to provide any evidence that proves how they naturally occurred. That is because no scientifically valid explanation for them has been produced. So, despite your protestations, you do believe in miracles, in the sense of believing that incredible things have happened without being able to give any explanation for how they could have happened.

Kenny – you acknowledge that atheists have no explanation for how these things can happen, yet you are certain that they all did happen purely spontaneously. You have remarkable faith in molecules.

LizG – you put words in my mouth that I did not say. I am simply pointing out to atheists, and for all you know, I may be an atheist too, that the atheist holds their position by faith just as much as does the theist. Indeed, the atheist has to have more faith than the theist. The theist at least claims that something greater than nature is responsible for all these remarkable things whereas the atheist has to say that literally nothing is responsible for everything. That is a faith claim.

You also acknowledge you have no scientific evidence for your beliefs: you simply hope that some day the evidence will be forthcoming. It hardly seems reasonable for you to knock theists for having faith when you do too.

JP
You are using religious analogy to try and explain what atheists do or do not believe.

"The theist at least claims that something greater than nature is responsible for all these remarkable things whereas the atheist has to say that literally nothing is responsible for everything. That is a faith claim."

Why would you say "at least" as though that in itself is good enough. What if the theist is wrong?

The atheist does not say that "literally nothing is responsible for everything". The difference is the atheist just does not make stuff up just for the convenience of an explanation.

Why is nature not good enough an explanation. Using your reasoning the theist must still be forever asking who made God? And then who made the thing that made God...and so it goes on.

The atheist is merely denying the existence of any supernatural entity without evidence and won't take anything purely on faith.

If faith was the only guage of truth then anyone could just make up a story about being created by aliens or finding God's word in a book discovered in a forest and start an all-powerful sect but...hang on someone else has already beaten us to it.

JP,

Science is closing on these questions you pose. If everyone simply assumed that if because there was no explanation yet for something that god did it, there would no scientific inquiry.

Atheists have no need to ascribe everything that is not understood yet to a super natural event.

The comments made by Pell, et al, at Easter are as abhorrent as they are unwarranted. Such claims about any other group of people be they black, white, male, female, Buddhist, Jewish or African or European - whatever group, would have been met with massive protest and media outcry. Apparently vilification is acceptable if the people being discriminated against do not believe in a religion - particularly if the religion is Christian.

So much for tolerance, acceptance and inclusiveness - not a part of Christianity. Well I stopped believing in this most hypocritical dogma when I was ten years old - probably the wisest decision I ever made in my entire life. I am definitely a more compassionate, caring person than when I was younger - must be due to taking responsibility for myself, my actions, my own well-being and that of others.

Did indeed Peter Jensen and George Pell speak less favourably about atheists when celebrating THEIR event, Easter 2010, than Richard Dawkins about Christians when “celebrating” HIS event, The 2010 Global Atheist Convention in Melbourne?

All three were first of all addressing THEIR congregations - in spite of the publicity given to their speaches - and so does apparently also David Swanton.

Pelican – I said “at least” because the theist is putting forward a proposal – the existence of a being that is greater than nature - that is theoretically capable of creating the natural world with all these attributes, whereas the atheist has to rely on nothing to bring about these things. And with the big bang theory being generally accepted as a correct account for the origin of the universe, the atheist does say that "literally nothing is responsible for everything". According to that theory there was nothing prior to the big bang.

Shadow Minister – I do not agree with you that “Science is closing on these questions”. We have zero idea how to make something from nothing. We have not come close to generating life from non-life. We don’t have a clue as to how to make non-conscious matter conscious or non-intelligent matter intelligent. And we certainly have no ideas about how to make genuine free agents.

Research into AI, far from producing the fantastic promises of intelligent, conscious robots that are free agents, only confirms the above. An interview in New Scientist, 29 August 2009, with Noel Sharkey, Professor of Artificial Intelligence and Robotics at the University of Sheffield supports this. He stated that “there is no evidence that machines will ever overtake us or gain sentience.”

But even if scientists were able to create life, that would not prove that life had ever arisen spontaneously from the slime. Rather it would only go to show that high–level intelligence was needed to create life – something that was completely absent from the primeval soup.