Stealing disqualification from the jaws of victory

Stealing disqualification from the jaws of victory

I really wish skeptics would stop insisting that religious claims cant be tested. They commonly are tested. We test the claims that God did it, with regard to things as far reaching as lightning to diseases. Saying that we cant test such things is to say that we arent winning, and we havent been winning for hundreds of years. Its to declare that the games never happened and you are not allowed to play because you arent sciencey enough. For goodness sakes they have been playing for a very long time, it just doesnt look like it because its been a massive shutout. Theyve successfully used religion to explain a total of 0 things. But they have attempted to use religion to explain just about every mystery that came down the pike ever.

Oh theres something you dont understand? God does because God is busy doing it. Um, we solved this its actually a neat previously unknown natural phenomenon. This has always been the case over thousands and millions of examples. Its saying that two horses that have raced together a million times and always, each and every time, my horse has won. And their horse has never won, and you want me to accept that the race doesnt count because their horse is blind or something. That because it isnt a fair fight and they keep getting slaughtered that I should just nullify the scores and give a wink and a nod to people endorsing the scientific equivalent of magic.

Its a strange illusion but overwhelming and utterly universal evidence looks strangely like no evidence at all. Take life after death for example. Is this some great mystery that we should continue to explore and offer platitudes about not understanding or it being ununderstandable? Well, no. Weve got massive amounts of evidence as to what consciousness is and generally how it works and its a process of neurons in the brain, neurons which rot away and stop functioning. Weve made a massive number of observations and nobody has reported something without a brain being conscious or anything that has consciousness not also having a brain. Skullfulls of neurons are overwhelmingly likely to be the way to arrive at consciousness. And even if we could design computers to have consciousness, they would do so by doing what brains do. This overwhelming web of evidence is overwhelming not non-existent. You dont get to say nobody knows when I have every observation anybody has ever made about consciousness on my side and they have jack squat to support their assertions.

One could assemble a pretty good argument just from the evidence and the claims. For example, why cant the dead conscious people who are aware and still exist within the beliefs of religion not talk to the living. I mean if a dead mother told her child that hell was real and heaven was real and dont make that mistake youre making, it would be a powerful thing. If the dead could communicate with the living pretty much everybody would accept the one true religion. Under my beliefs the reason why the dead cannot communicate is taken for granted, they are dead. Being material and having that material stop functioning right precludes communication and a meeting of minds because one of the minds no longer exists. Under religion, theres no theological reason why it shouldnt happen, in fact, it likely never occurred to many of them at all. Im sure they could make something up, but it would be made up, my understanding of the world takes it as a given. There is no direct path from when you die, your consciousness persists which precludes communication. There is a direct path from when you die, you are dead, which not only explains that but necessarily predicts it.

If a different outcome could render you wrong, you do not get any credit. If a plane crash kills everybody but one single child and youd declare that an act of God. Then when a plane crashes and kills only that one child and nobody else, you should stop and note that your religion only explains that first data set and given the second data set you must reevaluate your understanding of the universe. -- Oddly that never happens. If science is right about things, and religion is wrong about things. Dont try to declare it a draw because after all maybe some different religion could theoretically be right or at least moot and untestable. It doesnt help. They lost. And sure being unable to play and losing both score zero points, but they arent the same thing. They could have scored as many points as they earned, they just didnt earn any.

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