Mr. “Life, the Universe, and Everything” makes some good points.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PjvSX4Y8C1o[/youtube]
Douglas Adams: Radical Atheist
- Post author:Dan Klarmann
- Post published:April 10, 2007
- Post category:Communication / Culture / Religion
- Post comments:5 Comments
Dan Klarmann
A convoluted mind behind a curly face. A regular traveler, a science buff, and first generation American. Graying of hair, yet still verdant of mind. Lives in South St. Louis City. See his personal website for (too much) more.
So, does he believe in God or not? Chuckle
Actually, I have expressed the same opinion (that I know that God does not exist) on occasion and been ridiculed. The reasoning given is that "nobody can be sure of anything" or "you can never know for sure" etc. This is a brave, great video. Oddly enough, my impression of Adams (not sure where I got it) before seeing this clip was that he was the same wishy-washy Agnostic he describes. Maybe he had been the victim of some Creationist slander like Einstein and Hawking and he wants to clear his name.
Here is Adams' take on The Origin of God
If there is no God, how was the universe created? And don't say the Big Bang, because what created the energy behind the Big Bang? The universe is virtually endless and you atheists are trying to convince me that is just happened out of thin air?
Also, are you trying to tell me that the perfection and complexity of life on our planet was a random act of mutation? Give me the statistical probablility of this happening in even a trillion years? Let me give you a little hint…the numbers don't fit on a standard calculator. It's impossible!
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Gaucho: If you are convinced that there must be a God because everything must have a cause, then what was the cause of God? If not everything had to have a cause, there is no need for a God. We could in the latter case assume that the universe (or some succession of universes) always existed.
Do you really think that life on earth is perfect? I don't agree. Life appears to be crafted by a tinkerer. Consider the many vestiges and atavisms found in life forms at this talk.origins article: http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/comdesc/section2…..
I'm not suggesting that life is meaningless or awful. I love my life. What I'm suggesting is that life on earth is obviously a work-in-progress, not something designed by any sort of Perfect Creator.
Gaucho does bring up a good point: Schools do an inadequate job of teaching about cause and effect. Take a large number of random sequential events in an environment that selects in some way. Eventually, the results of random changes will tend toward a perfect match for the selector: Order.
For example: Surf grinds rocks (coral, etc) together and breaks off pieces in random sizes. The average intensity of the surf and the frequency of severe events (like storms) are a selector for the size of pieces that remain at the surf line, the beach. In some places, fine sand. In others, pebble beaches. Yet others have coarse sand beaches. The size of the grains is very uniform at a given beach. But they were all selected from completely random sizes by observable natural processes.
One could argue that God painstakingly selected each grain to create such perfection. But a simple natural explanation suffices.
One could argue that God must have created the mechanism that evolved such beaches. But a simple natural explanation suffices.
Or that God created the weather and hydrological mechanisms that evolved to the beach-forming mechanism. But a simple natural explanation suffices.
Or that God created the gravitational and elemental environment that evolved to modern weather conditions. But a simple natural explanation suffices.
And so on back to the primal cause. Is there a primal cause? If so, was it some God resembling the Christian interpretation of what God must be? If so, who created her?