I am going to make a bold statement. "For all practical purposes, it is always irrational to assign a supernatural cause to an event observed in the natural world." Now I am going to attempt to back up that statement. The only reason (of which I am aware) to assign a supernatural cause to a given event is the following: "I do not currently understand the details and outcome of this observation given my current state of knowledge and understanding of the natural world." Also, I suspect that many of you would prefer to add the caveat "And the details and outcome of this event are consistent with a particular supernatural belief or belief system", but that is clearly an example of circular reasoning and cannot be a valid part of this discussion. The supernatural belief or belief system is, in fact, the item in question, or to be more accurate, the observation cannot be assigned a cause which has not been demonstrated, it can only be assigned a hypo
I recently shared a link to a great little article by The Atheist Advocate on patheos.com in which Christians are challenged to wear an Atheist t-shirt for one week, in order to learn about what persecution means, due to the apparent misunderstanding which is often spread by Christians. http://www.patheos.com/blogs/friendlyatheist/2013/04/25/challenge-to-christians-wear-an-atheist-t-shirt-and-gauge-reactions/ Pretty good idea, no? Now, I know that '____ Challenge' is currently extremely cliche, but would a good name for this be 'Persecution Challenge'? Too emotive maybe? I may have found a taker, and I think it would be a really great experience, probably for both of us. You see, she's a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. I would be required to wear a Mormon t-shirt for one week, while she would be required to wear an Atheist t-shirt during the same time. If we both agree on this, how should we document everyth
There are some critical misunderstandings of evolution out there, and I’d like to help clear some of them up. Ray Comfort is offering $10,000 to the first person who provides evidence of a ‘living transitional form’, and he defines this as a species giving birth to an entirely different species, such as a squirrel giving birth to a bird, or a chicken giving birth to a snake. Now, I personally think Ray is being patently dishonest, but this raises a good point about what people seem to think evolution is all about. Let’s say that you are a paleontologist, and you have discovered fossils of a previously undocumented animal. What you are looking at is a snapshot in time, as it were. A ‘species’ is just that - it is a group of animals with particular shared characteristics, and when you look at a particular species, you are actually seeing the ‘current version’ of that genetic lineage. If you take our hypothetical fossil find, you can determine approximately when that creature was
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