Monday, May 31, 2010

The Rules Are Quite Simple

And it's heads, atheists win, tails, theists lose.

It's all amusingly laid out here, by someone who's been involved enough in the arena to have them pretty well nailed.

One of the commenters added this one:

The Law of Unprovable Miracles. We know that the miraculous events, like the Resurrection, described in the Bible aren't true because miracles are impossible. We know miracles are impossible because there is no proof of them. I mean, if someone was really raised from the dead, you'd think someone would write it down or tell people about it or something.

Yeah, and you'd also think God would hold off on it until the era of ubiquitous Flip video cameras. Because screw everyone else who came before: atheist skeptics are more important.

4 comments:

Ilíon said...

I like (liked?) Heddle, but I stopped reading him years ago because I decided that he is as unfair toward ID as the typical Homo atheos internetensis is toward "religion." It seems to me that Heddle's attitude toward 'Science!' is pretty much indistinguishable from that of the typical DarwinDefender.

Matteo said...

Agreed. Heddle's is a strange viewpoint. It seems to me that there is a certain personality type that always needs to be disagreeing with something reasonable as a mark of intellectual distinction/sophistication. Theists are not immune from this (obviously, otherwise why all the clever heresies down through the ages?).

Ilíon said...

"It seems to me that there is a certain personality type that always needs to be disagreeing with something reasonable as a mark of intellectual distinction/sophistication."

That may be it; and no, theists aren't immune to the temptation.

Captain Mike said...

I don't think it's reasonable to call Heddle's viewpoint strange because he doesn't think ID is reasonable. It's not reasonable, not is it supported in any way by facts.

It seems to me that ID merely pushes God into smaller and smaller gaps, saying "And here's where He did this..." Part of the problem is that those gaps will, judging from the history of science, eventually disappear.

In the interest of full disclosure, I myself am an atheist.