Archive for February, 2010
Towards a Reformed Atheism
Religions hold that an advanced alien culture (one or more so called “gods”) had a hand in the development of the human race. Atheism (and sometimes agnosticism) disputes these claims on the grounds that they are implausible: there are no indications that our planet is an artificial structure. For that matter, there are no indications that the universe is even remotely artificial in nature. There are just too many badly designed, woefully inefficient processes in nature, that someone with access to the fabric of the universe could easily optimize. And as for biological development, there is a known process called “evolution”, which can be observed in the real world as well as in simulations, and which explains our presence on Earth to a satisfactory degree.
There are other arguments against the existence of gods, rooted in both observation and logic. I can subscribe to almost all of them, and they appear to suffice for the majority atheists. Not, however, for me. Reformed Atheism (for the lack of a better word) must go beyond probabilities and make a definite statement that no gods exist. Here is the first of many:
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