Dear David,

I agree, nice thoughts, though you posted your last comment under the wrong article.

grateful,

Since I have some posts up my sleeve, I figure I might try to nip this in the bud. This is getting boring. You seem to have lost puff and Yuyutsu’s behaviour has just become plain bizarre. It’s interesting to witness the variety of responses to cognitive dissonance, however.

For most of my days as a theist, the internet wasn’t around, so it was easy to remain blissfully ignorant when one was surrounded by the on-tap misinformation that circulates church congregations. Fact-finding was a lot harder when one had to go to the library and trawl hundreds of books. As soon as I was exposed to facts (or “fire”, as Yuyutsu would put it) de-conversion naturally flowed from there. Nowadays, there are no excuses and it fascinates me to see the variety of defence mechanisms employed to protect the belief. It’s as though the belief takes on a life of its own and hijacks its host’s ability to process information.

Take your interpretation of the video I linked to, for example. A passing mention is made of the fact that only with an infinite number of universes could we hope to approach a probability of 1 for intelligent life evolving, and you somehow think that the problem of only having a sample size of one hinges on that passing comment made three minutes earlier in the video.

That’s gobsmacking.

I’ve watched the video multiple times since yesterday, racking my brain as to how your religious belief hijacked your cognitive processes to feed you such a strange interpretation of what was said, and I’ve come up empty-handed.

Do you actually hear different words to what is being said, I wonder?

Anyway, I hope you enjoy your testing of your no-god hypothesis. It’s a pity you didn’t test the god hypothesis before accepting Islam. You probably wouldn’t be in this mess if you had. You do statistics back-to-front in this strange industry you’re in. In every other industry, one would start with a null hypothesis to test relationships between two or more variables, not to fallaciously switch the burden of proof.

AJ: "Since I have some posts up my sleeve, I figure I might try to nip this in the bud. This is getting boring. You seem to have lost puff and Yuyutsu’s behaviour has just become plain bizarre. It’s interesting to witness the variety of responses to cognitive dissonance, however."

Yuyutsu, i think AJ is trying to exit with one last set of character assignations. The whole post is an ad hominium argument and fails to address the issue.

He knows when he's licked and he's spat the dummy in a puerile display characteristic of "New Atheists" such as Dawkins and Harris (to distinguish them from those atheist who are truly committed to following the evidence wherever it may lead). Just look at the video to see just how childish these people can be.

Bye AJ

My guess is that once AJ read my reference to "sonnet" he realised the game was up. Here is the full reference:

<<The complexity of the genetic code led Flew to believe that the origin of life required a ‘creative intelligence’.

Flew was particularly impressed with a physicist’s refutation of the idea that monkeys at typewriters would eventually produce a Shakespearean sonnet. The likelihood of getting one Shakespearean sonnet by chance is one in 10^690; to put this number in perspective, there are only 10^80 particles in the universe. Flew concludes:
‘If the theorem won’t work for a single sonnet, then of course it’s simply absurd to suggest that the more elaborate feat of the origin of life could have been achieved by chance’ (p. 78).

Flew was also critical of Dawkins’s ‘selfish gene’ idea, pointing out that ‘natural selection does not positively produce anything. It only eliminates, or tends to eliminate, whatever is not competitive’ (p. 78). He called Dawkins’s The Selfish Gene ‘a major exercise in popular mystification’, and argued that Dawkins made the critical mistake of overlooking the fact that most observable traits in organisms are the result of the coding of many genes (p. 79).>>
http://creation.com/review-there-is-a-god-by-antony-flew

Antony Flew is regarded as the 20th century’s most influential atheist thinker, Antony Flew, who announced in 2004 that he accepted the existence of a God based on the scientific evidence

cont...

cont..

This is how AJ responded to just a mention of Antony Flew's name:

<<But, yes. Poor ol’ Flew. Seems he starting losing his marbles towards the end there. He rejected the idea of an afterlife, so it’s not like he was ‘cramming for the finals’ or anything.

The guy, who was brilliant enough to coin the No True Scotsman fallacy and understand that the problem of evil means that an omniscient god cannot exist, decided that he was a Deist with no justification other than the God of the Gaps fallacy.

Very sad indeed.>>

Ad hominen, ad hominen, ad hominen through and through.

Jayb, don't waste your life mixing with such people. AJ was just as condescending to you as the rest of us...and you've been cheering him on!

As I explained earlier, grateful, my criticisms of others only ever follow a discrediting of their arguments. I don't just engage in "character assassination" for the sake of it or to divert attention or avoid addressing the arguments of others as you have on numerous occasions.

If you could point to an instance of myself employing the ad hominem fallacy, then I will gladly acknowledge it and walk away with my tail between my legs.

No? Didn't think so.

<<My guess is that once AJ read my reference to "sonnet" he realised the game was up.>>

Well that was a bad guess then, because I had no idea what you were on about. I've only heard the analogy that refers to Hamlet.

<<The complexity of the genetic code led Flew to believe that the origin of life required a ‘creative intelligence’.>>

Our genes aren't codes. It's all just chemical. We impose codes on them so that we can make sense of them.

<<Flew was particularly impressed with a physicist’s refutation of the idea that monkeys at typewriters would eventually produce a Shakespearean sonnet.>>

The problem being, of course, that our DNA didn't form by random chance like that. It was guided by natural selection and Flew should have known this. Thus my comment with regards to Flew losing his mind was justified.

<<Antony Flew is regarded as the 20th century’s most influential atheist thinker, Antony Flew, who announced in 2004 that he accepted the existence of a God based on the scientific evidence>>

Do you understand what "Argument from Authority" means?

Anyway, it's unfortunate to see you leave in a huff.

Again.

Yet another response to cognitive dissonance. Interesting to observe, but ultimately disappointing.

Perhaps another time?