Posted by J.H. on March 17, 1999 at 23:38:45 {MWKQmDRkic4cM}:
In Reply to: **Interesting Site posted by jimmyjames on March 17, 1999 at 22:18:00:
Hi jj,
: I'm just playing Devil's Advocate, but maybe the fellow just doesn't have a good grasp of atheist beliefs. Few theists do. An error doesn't necessarily indicate dishonesty.
That is true. There is a possible explanation that the writer of that piece, who I believe is John Clayton, is simply grossly ignorant about what atheists believe. In that case, I find it extremely questionable that he takes on himself to refute the atheist position. I consider it much more likely that he, in what is typical of a fundamentalist spirit, doesn't really care very much to get his facts straight, and that he don't want to ruin a "good argument" with inconvenient facts.
To support the idea that atheists believe that there is no beginning, he quotes from the "humanist manifesto." Well, an atheist is just someone who does not believe in any God or gods. Even though it may be true that all secular humanists are atheists/agnostics, it is certainly not true that all atheists are secular humanists. Many Buddhists, to give one example, are atheists. So are most satanists, many paganist/wiccan followers as well as some new age folks. That I'm an atheist just define what I don't believe in, and I'm of course not bound by any creed from secular humanists or others (even though I am a secular humanist).
Even so, John Clayton simply fails to understand his own quotation. When the humanist manifest says "Matter is self-existing and not created," that does not at all imply no beginning. The word "created" is usually interpreted to mean consciously designed, and this is what atheists naturally deny.
So the whole first section of the "proof" of God is moot and totally irrelevant to the debate. And since there aren't really many other "arguments" in this text, well, so much for that page.
Yet, the author makes a number of mistakes in the later sections as well. The "something cannot come from nothing" argument is mere rhetoric and has no place in a serious debate. He writes: "From empty space with no force, no matter, no energy, and no intelligence, matter would have to become existent." This just shows he doesn't understand Big Bang cosmology at all. There was of course no "empty space" before the universe, since the whole of space-time originated at this point. It did not even originate from "nothing" in the sense we normally understand "nothing". There was no time when the universe was not. This is very counter-intuitive and we even lack language for discussing it throughly. This demonstrates that slogans and fuzzy thinking has no place in an origins debate.
(On a positive note, his reference to Big Bang cosmology has to mean he is rejecting young earth creationism. If that is not true, he's inconsistent.)
The last section, which tries to argue for design, asserts: "The basic thrust of the anthropic principle is that chance is simply not a valid mechanism to explain the atom or life." Of course, he does nothing to explain what this "anthropic principle" is, which is just as well, since it must be the worst form of non-argument ever given serious consideration by people who should know better.
I have not yet addressed one serious objection to his argument about "beginning": the Bible does not at all teach Creation from nothing. The reading of Gen 1:1 widely accepted among modern Hebrew scholars is that it postulates a pre-existing earth, having mass but being without form. See the JSP translation of the Tanakh, and the NJB marginal reading.
It is true
that Jewish rabbinic sources started to teach Ex Nihilio at one stage, and that this idea was adopted by Christians, but you can't really pin this idea on the Bible. It is, however, interesting that St Augustine realized that time itself
was created alongside the universe at Creation. I have no problem agreeing that this was a quite astonishing idea to orginate in the 5th century!