Originally Posted by Willravel

That's not what science has established. There are not billions and billions of coincidences at all. The development of life on earth could have happened no other way. Mutations are a fact of life, as is the process of beneficial mutations being more likely to continue on and less beneficial mutations being less likely to continue on. Once you put this into the proper context—4.7 billion years—the process isn't billions of coincidences but a very straightforward process.

Would you like me to follow through? I can show you how bacteria evolved to be more resistant to antibiotics using verifiable data showing the rates of resistance. There's a 2007 edition of Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences that demonstrates it beyond any doubt.

The problem with your axiom is that it assumes unless a person him or herself tests a thing, it cannot be known to them. This assumes systemic corruption in every science, which to me communicates massive intellectual dishonesty. But if you really do doubt something scientific, you can test it. The fact that every time I've tested something, it's been confirmed gives me good reason to trust it.

Originally Posted by Seaver

No Will, you misunderstand. I was talking about the billions of billions of ways to have us end up the way we are. The fact that our planet is the perfect distance, happened to get hit by a meteor to create a moon which prevents the large wobbles that throw the planet in to chaos and kept a very dense core to prevent our atmosphere from being stripped like on Mars... etc etc etc.

The way multiple asteroids laid the path to clear out (multiple times) all evolutionary trees until the one that spawned... us.

I see a hand guiding all of this. I'm no Intelligent Design pusher... but it's a very large/hard pill for me to swallow. Had a butterfly flapped it's wings we'd be lizards with detachable tails for example.

Originally Posted by frogza

Here is, as I see it, the fundamental flaw in these arguments. I think we can agree there is only one absolute truth. You can’t say “There is no god” and “There is a God” and be right on both counts. Either there was a Big Bang or there was a guided organization of the universe as we know it.

If I wanted to get a comprehensive and, more importantly, a perfectly accurate description of the universe, one which excludes the possibility of a god, and approached a 3rd grade science teacher to explain it to me, I would certainly be disappointed with the answer. I would easily find flaws, however I would be foolish to assume that I had been educated enough on that belief system to reach an informed opinion on it’s merits and faults. You have to talk to someone who is completely educated in all relevant sciences to get a full explanation of the universe. Which means there are, at most, a handful of people in the history or foreseeable future of the world who could even begin to explain it all.

With theism we encounter an even more problematic search for truth. Assuming that absolute truth was found in polytheism, one would have to meet with someone who knew, inside and out, the complexities, personalities, strengths, weakness and regulations for each god. Of course, depending on the number of gods, this could be impossible simply because of the time that would be required to investigate and follow each one long enough to know all about them.

Monotheism presents another unique hurdle. Assuming that there is only one god and that he is, as the Christians say, all knowing, all powerful and more importantly perfect, then there could only be one set of rules to follow him perfectly. That premise is where we find the great difficulty, since there are thousands of churches that claim that monotheism is the only truth, yet each one has a different explanation of god and the universe. Only one can be absolutely true. This makes it difficult to reach an informed conclusion on monotheism since even after one has found the religion that really is “ordained of god” that person would still be stuck trying to find a person who is fully versed on god and the universe within that church to get a comprehensive explanation.

What I’m positing is that we are not in a position to, with any real certainty, state that either theism or atheism is correct or complete using the methods of debate that are most common. In fact, I don’t think there is a wholly rational way to reach such a conclusion, since there are few, if any, people who are qualified to present either case. In the end, I think what matters is that we follow what we hold to be true while continuing to search out more of the truth. If there is a god, I can’t see him damning us for using the truth we have to make the best of ourselves. And if there is not a god, and we have applied ourselves to the truth we had, we still end up better than we would have by sitting and doing nothing.