alt atheism faq frequently asked questions archive name atheism faq alt atheism archive name faq last modified april version alt atheism frequently asked questions this file contains responses to articles which occur repeatedly in alt atheism points covered here are ones which are not covered in the introduction to atheism you are advised to read that article as well before posting these answers are not intended to be exhaustive or definitive the purpose of the periodic faq postings is not to stifle debate but to raise its level if you have something to say concerning one of these questions and which isn t covered by the answer given please feel free to make your point overview of contents what is the purpose of this newsgroup hitler was an atheist the bible proves it pascal s wager what is occam s razor why it s good to believe in jesus why i know that god exists einstein and god does not play dice everyone worships something why there must be a causeless cause the universe is so complex it must have been designed independent evidence that the bible is true godel s incompleteness theorem george bush on atheism and patriotism i know where hell is biblical contradictions wanted the usa is a christian nation the usa is not a christian nation subject what is the purpose of this newsgroup typical posting why have a newsgroup about atheism why do atheists organize in groups what is there to discuss response many things are discussed here including whether it is reasonable to feign theism in order to avoid upsetting one s family prayer in schools discrimination against atheists sunday trading laws the satanic child abuse myth whether one should be an overt atheist or stay in the closet how religious societies prey sic on new college students how to get rid of unwanted proselytizers whether religion is a danger to society and or the individual why people become atheists of course inevitably alt atheism tends to attract evangelical christians looking for someone to convert most readers of the newsgroup don t want to be preached to although a few seem to derive perverse pleasure from tearing apart particularly ill considered or uninformed postings subject hitler was an atheist typical posting hitler was an atheist and look at what he did response adolf hitler was emphatically not an atheist as he said himself the folkish minded man in particular has the sacred duty each in his own denomination of making people stop just talking superficially of god s will and actually fulfill god s will and not let god s word be desecrated orig ital for god s will gave men their form their essence and their abilities anyone who destroys his work is declaring war on the lord s creation the divine will therefore let every man be active each in his own denomination if you please and let every man take it as his first and most sacred duty to oppose anyone who in his activity by word or deed steps outside the confines of his religious community and tries to butt into the other hence today i believe that i am acting in accordance with the will of the almighty creator by defending myself against the jew i am fighting for the work of the lord orig ital adolf hitler from mein kampf trans ralph mannheim of course someone bad believing something does not make that belief wrong it s also entirely possible that hitler was lying when he claimed to believe in god we certainly can t conclude that he s an atheist though subject the bible proves it typical posting in the bible it says that response most of the readers of alt atheism feel that the bible is of questionable accuracy as it was written thousands of years ago by many authors who were recording oral tradition that existed many years before thus any claimed truth in it is of questionable legitimacy this isn t to say that the bible has no truth in it simply that any truth must be examined before being accepted many of the readers of this group also feel that because any passage is subject to interpretation any claim that a passage means one thing and one thing only is not legitimate note that this feeling tends to extend to other books it is also remarkable to many atheists that theists tend to ignore other equally plausible religious books in favour of those of their own religion subject pascal s wager typical posting if you believe in god and turn out to be incorrect you have lost nothing but if you don t believe in god and turn out to be incorrect you will go to hell therefore it is foolish to be an atheist response this argument is known as pascal s wager it has several flaws firstly it does not indicate which religion to follow indeed there are many mutually exclusive and contradictory religions out there this is often described as the avoiding the wrong hell problem if a person is a follower of religion x he may end up in religion y s version of hell secondly the statement that if you believe in god and turn out to be incorrect you have lost nothing is not true suppose you re believing in the wrong god the true god might punish you for your foolishness consider also the deaths that have resulted from people rejecting medicine in favour of prayer another flaw in the argument is that it is based on the assumption that the two possibilities are equally likely or at least that they are of comparable likelihood if in fact the possibility of there being a god is close to zero the argument becomes much less persuasive so sadly the argument is only likely to convince those who believe already also many feel that for intellectually honest people belief is based on evidence with some amount of intuition it is not a matter of will or cost benefit analysis formally speaking the argument consists of four statements one does not know whether god exists not believing in god is bad for one s eternal soul if god does exist believing in god is of no consequence if god does not exist therefore it is in one s interest to believe in god there are two approaches to the argument the first is to view as an assumption and as a consequence of it one problem with this approach in the abstract is that it creates information from no information this is considered invalid in information theory statement indicates one has no information about god but statement indicates that beneficial information can be gained from the absolute lack of information about god this violates information entropy information has been extracted from no information at no cost the alternative approach is to claim that and are both assumptions the problem with this is that is then basically an assumption which states the christian position and only a christian will agree with that assumption the argument thus collapses to if you are a christian it is in your interests to believe in god a rather vacuous tautology and not the way pascal intended the argument to be viewed the biggest reason why pascal s wager is a failure is that if god is omniscient he will certainly know who really believes and who believes as a wager he will spurn the latter assuming he actually cares at all whether people believe in him subject what is occam s razor typical posting people keep talking about occam s razor what is it response william of occam formulated a principle which has become known as occam s razor in its original form it said do not multiply entities unnecessarily that is if you can explain something without supposing the existence of some entity then do so nowadays when people refer to occam s razor they generally express it more generally for example as take the simplest solution the relevance to atheism is that we can look at two possible explanations for what we see around us there is an incredibly intricate and complex universe out there which came into being as a result of natural processes there is an incredibly intricate and complex universe out there and there is also a god who created the universe clearly this god must be of non zero complexity given that both explanations fit the facts occam s razor might suggest that we should take the simpler of the two solution number one unfortunately some argue that there is a third even more simple solution there isn t an incredibly intricate and complex universe out there we just imagine that there is this third option leads us logically towards solipsism which many people find unacceptable subject why it s good to believe in jesus typical posting i want to tell people about the virtues and benefits of my religion response preaching is not appreciated feel free to talk about your religion but please do not write postings that are on a conversion theme such postings do not belong on alt atheism and will be rejected from alt atheism moderated try the newsgroup talk religion misc you would doubtless not welcome postings from atheists to your favourite newsgroup in an attempt to convert you please do unto others as you would have them do unto you often theists make their basic claims about god in the form of lengthy analogies or parables be aware that atheists have heard of god and know the basic claims about him if the sole purpose of your parable is to tell atheists that god exists and brings salvation you may as well not post it since it tells us nothing we have not been told before subject why i know that god exists typical posting i know from personal experience and prayer that god exists response just as many theists have personal evidence that the being they worship exists so many atheists have personal evidence that such beings do not exist that evidence varies from person to person furthermore without wishing to dismiss your evidence out of hand many people have claimed all kinds of unlikely things that they have been abducted by ufos visited by the ghost of elvis and so on subject einstein and god does not play dice typical posting albert einstein believed in god do you think you re cleverer than him response einstein did once comment that god does not play dice with the universe this quotation is commonly mentioned to show that einstein believed in the christian god used this way it is out of context it refers to einstein s refusal to accept the uncertainties indicated by quantum theory furthermore einstein s religious background was jewish rather than christian a better quotation showing what einstein thought about god is the following i believe in spinoza s god who reveals himself in the orderly harmony of what exists not in a god who concerns himself with fates and actions of human beings einstein was unable to accept quantum theory because of his belief in an objective orderly reality a reality which would not be subject to random events and which would not be dependent upon the observer he believed that qm was incomplete and that a better theory would have no need for statistical interpretations so far no such better theory has been found and much evidence suggests that it never will be a longer quote from einstein appears in science philosophy and religion a symposium published by the conference on science philosophy and religion in their relation to the democratic way of life inc new york in it he says the more a man is imbued with the ordered regularity of all events the firmer becomes his conviction that there is no room left by the side of this ordered regularity for causes of a different nature for him neither the rule of human nor the rule of divine will exists as an independent cause of natural events to be sure the doctrine of a personal god interfering with natural events could never be refuted italics his in the real sense by science for this doctrine can always take refuge in those domains in which scientific knowledge has not yet been able to set foot but i am convinced that such behavior on the part of representatives of religion would not only be unworthy but also fatal for a doctrine which is to maintain itself not in clear light but only in the dark will of necessity lose its effect on mankind with incalculable harm to human progress in their struggle for the ethical good teachers of religion must have the stature to give up the doctrine of a personal god that is give up that source of fear and hope which in the past placed such vast power in the hands of priests in their labors they will have to avail themselves of those forces which are capable of cultivating the good the true and the beautiful in humanity itself this is to be sure a more difficult but an incomparably more worthy task einstein has also said it was of course a lie what you read about my religous convictions a lie which is being systematically repeated i do not believe in a personal god and i have never denied this but have expressed it clearly if something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it the latter quote is from albert einstein the human side edited by helen dukas and banesh hoffman and published by princeton university press also from the same book i do not believe in immortality of the individual and i consider ethics to be an exclusively human concern with no superhuman authority behind it of course the fact that einstein chose not to believe in christianity does not in itself imply that christianity is false subject everyone worships something typical posting everyone worships something whether it s money power or god response if that is true everyone is a polytheist theists care just as much about those things that atheists care about if the atheists reactions to for example their families amount to worship then so do the theists subject why there must be a causeless cause typical posting sets of integers that have a lower bound each have a smallest member so chains of causes must all have a first element a causeless cause response the set of real numbers greater than zero has a definite lower bound but has no smallest member further even if it is true that there must be a causeless cause that does not imply that that cause must be a conscious supernatural entity and especially not that any such entity must match the description favoured by any particular religion subject the universe is so complex it must have been designed typical posting the presence of design in the universe proves there is a god surely you don t think all this appeared here just by chance response this is known as the argument from design it is a matter of dispute whether there is any element of design in the universe those who believe that the complexity and diversity of living creatures on the earth is evidence of a creator are best advised to read the newsgroup talk origins for a while there is insufficient space to summarize both sides of that debate here however the conclusion is that there is no scientific evidence in favour of so called scientific creationism furthermore there is much evidence observation and theory that can explain many of the complexities of the universe and life on earth the origin of the argument by design is a feeling that the existence of something as incredibly intricate as say a human is so improbable that surely it can t have come about by chance that surely there must be some external intelligence directing things so that humans come from the chaos deliberately but if human intelligence is so improbable surely the existence of a mind capable of fashioning an entire universe complete with conscious beings must be immeasurably more unlikely the approach used to argue in favour of the existence of a creator can be turned around and applied to the creationist position this leads us to the familiar theme of if a creator created the universe what created the creator but with the addition of spiralling improbability the only way out is to declare that the creator was not created and just is or was from here we might as well ask what is wrong with saying that the universe just is without introducing a creator indeed stephen hawking in his book a brief history of time explains his theory that the universe is closed and finite in extent with no beginning or end the argument from design is often stated by analogy in the so called watchmaker argument one is asked to imagine that one has found a watch on the beach does one assume that it was created by a watchmaker or that it evolved naturally of course one assumes a watchmaker yet like the watch the universe is intricate and complex so the argument goes the universe too must have a creator the watchmaker analogy suffers from three particular flaws over and above those common to all arguments by design firstly a watchmaker creates watches from pre existing materials whereas god is claimed to have created the universe from nothing these two sorts of creation are clearly fundamentally different and the analogy is therefore rather weak secondly a watchmaker makes watches but there are many other things in the world if we walked further along the beach and found a nuclear reactor we wouldn t assume it was created by the watchmaker the argument would therefore suggest a multitude of creators each responsible for a different part of creation finally in the first part of the watchmaker argument we conclude that the watch is not part of nature because it is ordered and therefore stands out from the randomness of nature yet in the second part of the argument we start from the position that the universe is obviously not random but shows elements of order the watchmaker argument is thus internally inconsistent subject independent evidence that the bible is true typical posting the events of the new testament are confirmed by independent documentary evidence for example response the writings of josephus are often mentioned as independent documentary evidence early versions of josephus s work are thought not to have mentioned jesus or james the extant version discusses john in a non christian context many scholars believe that the original mentioned jesus and james in passing but that this was expanded by christian copyists several reconstructions of the original text have been published to this effect much information appears in the ecclesiastical history of eusebius about c e it is worthless as historical material because of the deliberate falsification of the wily eusebius who is generally acknowledged as the first thoroughly dishonest historian of antiquity it is eusebius who is generally given the title of authorship for this material aside from the new testament the biographical information about jesus is more well documented for further information please consult the frequently asked questions file for the newsgroup soc religion christian subject godel s incompleteness theorem typical posting godel s incompleteness theorem demonstrates that it is impossible for the bible to be both true and complete response godel s first incompleteness theorem says that in any consistent formal system which is sufficiently expressive that it can model ordinary arithmetic one can formulate expressions which can never be proven to be valid or invalid true or false within that formal system technically speaking the system must also be recursive that is there must be a decision procedure for determining whether a given string is an axiom within the formal system essentially all such systems can formulate what is known as a liar paradox the classic liar paradox sentence in ordinary english is this sentence is false note that if a proposition is undecidable the formal system cannot even deduce that it is undecidable the logic used in theological discussions is rarely well defined so claims that godel s incompleteness theorem demonstrates that it is impossible to prove or disprove the existence of god are worthless in isolation one can trivially define a formal system in which it is possible to prove the existence of god simply by having the existence of god stated as an axiom this is unlikely to be viewed by atheists as a convincing proof however it may be possible to succeed in producing a formal system built on axioms that both atheists and theists agree with it may then be possible to show that godel s incompleteness theorem holds for that system however that would still not demonstrate that it is impossible to prove that god exists within the system furthermore it certainly wouldn t tell us anything about whether it is possible to prove the existence of god generally note also that all of these hypothetical formal systems tell us nothing about the actual existence of god the formal systems are just abstractions another frequent claim is that godel s incompleteness theorem demonstrates that a religious text the bible the book of mormon or whatever cannot be both consistent and universally applicable religious texts are not formal systems so such claims are nonsense subject george bush on atheism and patriotism typical posting did george bush really say that atheists should not be considered citizens response the following exchange took place at the chicago airport between robert i sherman of american atheist press and george bush on august sherman is a fully accredited reporter and was present by invitation as a member of the press corps the republican presidential nominee was there to announce federal disaster relief for illinois the discussion turned to the presidential primary rs what will you do to win the votes of americans who are atheists gb i guess i m pretty weak in the atheist community faith in god is important to me rs surely you recognize the equal citizenship and patriotism of americans who are atheists gb no i don t know that atheists should be considered as citizens nor should they be considered patriots this is one nation under god rs do you support as a sound constitutional principle the separation of state and church gb yes i support the separation of church and state i m just not very high on atheists upi reported on may that various atheist organizations were still angry over the remarks the exchange appeared in the boulder daily camera on monday february it can also be found in free enquiry magazine fall issue volume number page on october mr sherman had a confrontation with ed murnane cochairman of the bush quayle illinois campaign this concerned a lawsuit mr sherman had filed to stop the community consolidated school district chicago illinois from forcing his first grade atheist son to pledge allegiance to the flag of the united states as one nation under god bush s phrase the following conversation took place rs american atheists filed the pledge of allegiance lawsuit yesterday does the bush campaign have an official response to this filing em it s bullshit rs what is bullshit em everything that american atheists does rob is bullshit rs thank you for telling me what the official position of the bush campaign is on this issue em you re welcome after bush s election american atheists wrote to bush asking him to retract his statement on february st c boyden gray counsel to the president replied on white house stationery that bush substantively stood by his original statement and wrote as you are aware the president is a religious man who neither supports atheism nor believes that atheism should be unnecessarily encouraged or supported by the government for further information contact american atheist veterans at the american atheist press s cameron road address subject i know where hell is typical posting i know where hell is hell is in norway response there are several towns called hell in various countries around the world including norway and the usa whilst this information is mildly amusing the first time one hears it readers of alt atheism are now getting pretty fed up with hearing it every week subject biblical contradictions wanted typical posting does anyone have a list of biblical contradictions response american atheist press publish an atheist s handbook detailing biblical contradictions see the accompanying posting on atheist resources for details there is a file containing some biblical contradictions available from the archive server mantis co uk see the contacts file for more information subject the usa is a christian nation typical posting because of the religious beliefs of the founding fathers shouldn t the united states be considered a christian nation response based upon the writings of several important founding fathers it is clear that they never intended the us to be a christian nation here are some quotes there are many more what influence in fact have ecclesiastical establishments had on society in some instances they have been seen to erect a spiritual tyranny on the ruins of the civil authority on many instances they have been seen upholding the thrones of political tyranny in no instance have they been the guardians of the liberties of the people rulers who wish to subvert the public liberty may have found an established clergy convenient auxiliaries a just government instituted to secure and perpetuate it needs them not james madison a memorial and remonstrance i almost shudder at the thought of alluding to the most fatal example of the abuses of grief which the history of mankind has preserved the cross consider what calamities that engine of grief has produced john adams in a letter to thomas jefferson history i believe furnishes no example of a priest ridden people maintaining a free civil government this marks the lowest grade of ignorance of which their political as well as religious leaders will always avail themselves for their own purpose thomas jefferson to baron von humboldt i cannot conceive otherwise than that he the infinite father expects or requires no worship or praise from us but that he is even infinitely above it benjamin franklin from articles of belief and acts of religion nov subject the usa is not a christian nation typical posting is it true that george washington said that the united states is not in any sense founded upon the christian religion response no the quotation often given is in fact from article xi of the treaty of tripoli stat treaty series article as the government of the united states of america is not in any sense founded on the christian religion as it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws religion or tranquility of musselmen and as the said states never have entered into any war or act of hostility against any mehomitan nation it is declared by the parties that no pretext arising from religious opinions shall ever produce an interruption of the harmony existing between the two countries the text may be found in the congressional record or in treaty collections such as charles bevans treaties and other international agreements of the united states of america vol pp the english text of the treaty of tripoli was approved by the u s senate on june and ratified by president john adams on june it was recently discovered that the arabic version of the treaty not only lacks the quotation it lacks article xi altogether the person who translated the arabic to english was joel barlow consul general at algiers a close friend of thomas paine and an opponent of christianity it is possible that barlow made up article xi but since there is no arabic version of that article to be found it s hard to say in a new treaty of tripoli was ratified which no longer contained the quotation end of faq digest
