Show me the Evidence!

Creationists blow one's mind ... or is it that their minds are blown?

They demonstrate the long-suspected principle that religion and logic do not mix. Oh sure, religion has provoked a considerable amount of desperate philosophical imaginings, but no cogent arguments for the existence of any deity. A cogent argument provides acceptable premises and logical links to a supported conclusion. Imaginings are not acceptable premises. Only concepts can be defined into existence.

In essence, there are two chief forms of existence ... physical and conceptual. To exert a meaningful impact, such as creating a physical universe for instance, an agent must be physical. So, "proof" of such an agent would only require physical demonstration. Nobody disputes the existence of god concepts. Thousands of deities have been invented. The problem is that we have no incontrovertible evidence for the physical existence of the conceptualized potent Creator, aka God.

Evolution can be physically demonstrated. If you cannot get to a museum, you can read of the physical evidence for biological evolution.

In keeping with their fatal attraction for fallacies of logic, creationist cannot, or will not, see that they are creating a false dichotomy when they attack biological evolution. Even if the modern synthesis (scientists are way beyond Darwinism) were incorrect, this would not mean that their imagined deity exists. Look under any anti-evolutionist and you will find an argument to ignorance. Typically, you will also find a great deal of ignorance too.

To Think or Not To Think

There is an expanding body of evidence pointing to innate neurocognitive differences between liberals and conservatives. It is well known that conservatives are more likely to be religious, and liberals to be atheistic. It is also well-established that liberals and atheists tend to be better educated and to score higher on IQ tests.

Conservative religious and liberal atheists differ in their criteria for making moral judgements, and these differences parallel Kohlberg's Stages of Moral Development.

I'll start with a partial list drawn from familiar material, and I will continue to expand the information.

1. Reduced activity of the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), an area devoted to detecting discrepancies, in conservatives versus liberals. The ACC has been dubbed the "truth center":

Differences in brain activity of conservatives & liberals [ Amodio, D. M., et al. (2007). Neurocognitive correlates of liberalism and conservatism. Nat. Neurosci. doi:10.1038/nn1979. [Abstract] ]

2. Differences in personality profiles of believers versus atheists:

Personality and Religiosity

Here are a couple of pertinent videos:

YouTube is a Goldmine!

If you are looking for faulty English.

"Religious beliefs were probarly created by uncertainity, which after each retelling of the stories of it slowly vanished.

People were acceptable to the claims of it because of the vunrability of the child brain."

The poor English is rather amusing. I am so glad that the claims found people acceptable. I stayed quiet about this find because the writer is Danish, and I would not even attempt to express such a complex thought in Danish.

Don’t scoff, I have seen equally poor English from Americans.

I'd agree that uncertainties prompted the invention of religions. However, religious institutions rely upon instilling even greater fears than they help, or profess to help fears that they deliberately instilled. I know that these sound like the same thing, but they are not.

The first is, "Don't be afraid, God loves you."
The second is, "Don't be afraid of God's threatened punishments for your sins because God will love you if you worship him." That is, thou must love and obey He who threatens punishment. Negatively parental, isn't it?

The persistent vulnerability of childish brains in adults who have not outgrown fears permits institutions that sell idiotic notions in order to prosper.

Some agnostics are just as bad

I have been debating an agnostic in YouTube's frustrating 500 character chunks. An agnostic atheist, though he is almost as bad as a theist. I'll call him Azure because AzureFlameElk is a mouthful.

As an aside, where do people come up with these channel names? This one sounds like a cross between a flaming virgin and an antlered ungulate. I daresay that it has an interesting etymology.

(I'd better explain - a flaming virgin is not a tragically foolish Muslim girl (very sad thought, that) or an expletive about a girl who's clinging to her viginity. It's actually an alcoholic drink that has been ignited. Why would anyone want to burn off the alcohol?)

Back to Azure. He starts out with "Anyone rational is agnostic." This, of course implies that anyone who is not agnostic is irrational. (Matters get worse — he believes that everyone should be agnostic about everything. I'll get to that later. Azure has an unfortunate fondness for categorical statements, given his certainty that all is unknowable.)

"Anyone rational is agnostic" reveals more about his ego than the truth value of this claim. As an atheistic atheist, I am not in the least insulted by this provocative, categorical claim, largely because I think that it is incorrect.

Admittedly, we ought to be agnostic about proclaiming knowledge of anything for which there is no possible evidence. That's the broader definition of agnosticism, particularly as applied to theistic claims.

However, some claims, like Russell's Teapot and religion have clearly been invented for a purpose. Many claims are falsifiable — the metaphysical claims in the Bible, for instance. Once such claims have been falsified, honest theists retreat into "it's allegorical" excuses, while dishonest theists simply resort to denial of the falsification. There are lots of both types around, and if Azure wishes to call non-agnostic and gnostic theism "irrational", then I am in full accord.

One point about deities, whether they have been protected by an invented cloak of supernaturalism or not, is that they are not worth worshipping if they cannot manifest in the physical. Animistic deities were a personification of physical manifestations such as drought, flood, tsunamis, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, and such like. Myth inventors should have stopped there.

The second point is that it has been consistently demonstrated that all our mental and life processes are associated with the physical — including love and other emotions, such as appreciation of beauty. This monism makes it irrational to claim that we comprise dualistic body and supernatural-mind divisions. Monism denialists generally resort to ad hoc pseudoexplanations in a vain attempt to get around this huge problem.

Obviously, the dualist claim has two sources — pre-scientific difficulty with comprehending the relationship between matter and mind, and the religiously- and emotionally-motivated desire to believe in an afterlife. (If one sucks up to Jesus enough, hell is the exclusive destination of one's enemies.)

...to be continued...