It is a little extraordinary that there are still, in the twentyfirst century, educated people who are also Creationists.

My puzzlement has nothing to do with religion, which is a social force that has been with us ever since the cavepeople started to wonder "why are we here", and speculate whether the sun was perhaps, on the evidence available, the ultimate giver-of-life.

But to insist, against all the available data, that the only plausible explanation for our existence is a specific, named supernatural being, is something else again.

To be sure, the two concepts necessarily overlap. Once you have chosen the attributes of a particular deity, and given that deity both omniscience and omnipotence, it must be important not to leave any event unexplained.

Which to the rest of us mortals represents a reversal of our normal thinking processes, which start with the effect - birds have wings - and proceed to the determination of the cause.

The events of Easter described in the article here make me start to wonder, whether we in the developed nations are about to embark upon another major re-think about religion's position in society. A Second Enlightenment, if you will, where the focus is on the conduct of religious factions, as opposed to the nature or existence of God.

While no-one (that I know) wants to prevent anyone from believing anything they like - even Creationism, Intelligent Design etc. - events like these must inevitably erode the status that organized religion occupies in our social structures.

And there will be consequences.

All along I have been addressing David Swanton’s contention that atheism’s firm foundation is a desire for evidence, not belief.

In view of that contention I have simply asked David or anyone else for the evidence that scientifically demonstrates that everything did come from nothing; that non-living matter can spontaneously produce life; that non-conscious matter can spontaneously produce consciousnes; that non-intelligent matter can spontaneously produce intelligence; that totally determined physical matter can spontaneously produce free agency.

But so far neither David nor anyone else has presented a single piece of actual evidence to show that any of these things can naturally, spontaneously occur. Therefore in the absence of any evidence, those who hold that these things have naturally occurred, must hold this position solely on the basis of faith. Not faith in God of course, but faith in the nature of nothingness, presumably, because it is generally claimed that there was nothing - no matter, no time, no space - before the big bang.

It is not unreasonable to ask atheists who claim to have evidence-based beliefs to reveal the evidence.

Atheists want to criticise theists for taking things by faith. My point is that atheists also take things by faith – and faith in nothingness seems to be a pretty weird sort of faith.

Please note that I have not once contended that the absence of evidence for a naturalistic explanation for the above things is therefore evidence for God. It is other posters on this site who have drawn that conclusion and who have then attributed that to me.

SD. You omit the fact that religion assumes that God appeared from nothing, yet feel no need to explain that.
It is much less of a stretch to assume that a mechanistic universe "is, was , and always shall be" than a supernatural, insane clockmaker spontaneously appeared.
Your "faith" in nothingness is no less than ours...you just jump to a much bigger, and frankly unreasonable conclusion.

Sorry, JP, not SD!

JP,

Your entire contention is one big strawman. Considering no one believes what you have presumed atheists to believe, why on Earth would anyone give you any evidence?

No one believes that everything came from nothing;
No one believes that non-living matter spontaneously produced life;
No one believes that consciousness spontaneously appeared from non-consciousness;
No one believes that non-intelligent matter spontaneously produced intelligence.

If you were genuinely wanting answers to these questions, then you’d do what every atheist and open-minded theist does and look them up.

But you don’t want to.

Instead, you’re quite happy wallow in your ignorance and plonk a god into the gaps of your knowledge while presuming to know what others believe based on a narrow and simplistic understanding of the world that results in you inventing the false dichotomy that if someone doesn’t want to be lazy and fill the unknowns with a magic man, then that must mean they believe it all just spontaneously happened.

Go and educate yourself, JP. There are a lot of credible answers and theories to the "unknowns" that you're filling with magic.

It all depends on whether or not you want to find them.

JP,

I think you really need to understand the difference between a belief and a hypothesis.