It's natural that atheists proselytize, because atheism is a religion:

http://www.scribd.com/doc/6034949/Atheism-Is-Protected-As-a-Religion-says-Court-

It has its own creation story:

"Thus, a century ago, [it was] Darwinism against Christian orthodoxy. To-day the tables are turned. The modified, but still characteristically Darwinian theory has itself become an orthodoxy, preached by its adherents with religious fervour, and doubted, they feel, only by a few muddlers imperfect in scientific faith."

Grene, Marjorie [Professor Emeritus of Philosophy, University of California, Davis], "The Faith of Darwinism," Encounter, Vol. 74, November 1959, pp.48-56, p.49

with its own miracles:

"Time is, in fact, the hero of the plot... given so much time the 'impossible' becomes possible, the possible probable and the probable virtually certain. One has only to wait: time itself performs miracles."
George Wald, "The Origin of Life," Physics and Chemistry of Life, 1955, p. 12.

In which its adherants have total faith:

I have faith and belief myself... I believe that nothing beyond those natural laws is needed. I have no evidence for this. It is simply what I have faith in and what I believe.

Isaac Asimov
Counting the Eons P.10

I do not want to believe in God, therefore I choose to believe in that which I know is scientifically impossible: spontaneous generation arising to evolution

George Wald - Harvard Professor
Nobel Laureate

They believe it even in the face of contradicting evidence

Biologists must constantly keep in mind that what they see was not designed but rather evolved.

Francis Crick Nobel Laureate
What Mad Pursuit p.138 1988

Much evidence can be adduced in favor of the Theory of Evolution from Biology, Biogeography, and Paleontology, but I still think that to the unprejudiced the fossil record of plants is in favor of special creation.

EJH Cornor, Cambridge
Contemporary Botanical Thought p.61

It provides a comprehensive belief system:

Evolution is promoted by its practitioners as more than mere science. Evolution is promulgated as an ideaology, a secular religion- a full-fledged alternative to Christianity, with its meaning and morality...

Michael Ruse Florida State University
National Post 5/13/00

Atheists know they are right no matter what:

No evidence would be sufficient to create a change in mind; that it is not a commitment to evidence, but a commitment to naturalism. ...Because there are no alternatives, we would almost have to accept natural selection as the explanation of life on this planet even if there were no evidence for it.

Steven Pinker MIT
How the mind works p.182

Even if they have to suppress the truth to prove it:

"Our willingness to accept scientific claims that are against common sense is the key to an understanding of the real struggle between science and the supernatural. We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism. It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door."

Lewontin, Richard C. [Professor of Zoology and Biology, Harvard University], "Billions and Billions of Demons", Review of "The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark," by Carl Sagan, New York Review, January 9, 1997. (Emphasis in original)

"In fact the a priori reasoning is so entirely satisfactory to me that if the facts won't fit in, why so much the worse for the facts is my feeling."

Erasmus Darwin, in a letter to his brother Charles, after reading his new book, "The Origin of Species," in Darwin, F., ed., "The Life of Charles Darwin," [1902], Senate: London, 1995, reprint, p215.

They are true believers:

of all choices, atheism requires the greatest faith, as it demands that ones limited store of human knowledge is sufficient to exclude the possibility of God.

francis collins human genome project

It won't be long before there are atheists churches and street preachers handing out tracks.

When atheists argue that "God" does not exist, they are usually arguing against a specific idea of god as defined by one or another religion, which is possible to do, both with logic and physical/scientific evidence (example: the Abrahamic God that apparently made all of humanity from the incestuous offspring of two people is easily disproven, while his omnipotence is logically incompatible with his omni-benevolence).

If He is so easily disproven, it's interesting how no one in history has ever done so. What you're detailing in the supposed conflict between Gods omnipotence and omni-benevolence is the logical problem of evil. Plantigas free will defense proves that they are in fact logically compatible, so you don't have an argument here.

Let's put it this way: do you believe fairies exist? If no, prove it! You can't explain why dew drops are so neatly arranged on spider webs, or how the beautiful designs in the frost of windowpanes are made, so fairies make them. Tada!! Sure, you can be agnostic about fairies, arguing that they're manmade fiction, and explain scientifically how dew drops and frost patterns work, but that's just eliminating one definition of "fairy", there are infinitely more! A-fairyists, meanwhile, live with the evidence-based assumption that the probability of fairies existing is null, and the burden of proof lies on those who insist that some sort of fairies exist.

See where this is getting?

Yes, I see where you're conflating the issue. Anyone can make a claim, but that doesn't make every claim equally valid. Yes, the absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence, and you can't disprove a universal negative. Yet just because you cannot disprove the existence of God does not make the God hypothesis equal to cosmic teapots. There is no good reason to believe there are cosmic teapots, but plenty of good reasons to believe there is a God. The difference lies in the explanatory power of the claim, which is the basis for believing any theory.

You believe in the theory of abiogenesis, presumably, even though there is no actual evidence for life from non-life. So by your logic, a magic teapot could be an equally valid explanation for the origin of life. But since Abiogenesis has more explanatory power (barely) for the origin of life than a magic teapot, that makes it more probable and gives you justification for believing it.

The burden of proof lies with whomever is making a claim, for or against. Your epistemological position about uncertainty is countered by the fact that certain claims have more explanatory power than others. I cannot absolutely prove magic teapots don't exist, but that doesn't mean I don't have good reasons to believe they don't exist; since they explain precisely nothing they can safely be discarded as a valid claim.

>> ^hpqp:
@GeeSussFreeK: I do agree, however, that many atheists like to posit the position that God, indeed, does not exist. That would require some evidence as absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
@shinyblurry: Yes, they do like to posit that. When asked for that evidence however, they like to say they merely "lack belief", which is meaningless. Basically, they want to have their cake and eat it too. They want to say no to the question of whether God exists but escape the burden of proof. That is what this "lack of belief" is all about. It's not an "i don't know", it's a "no, but i dont have to provide any evidence for that".
When atheists argue that "God" does not exist, they are usually arguing against a specific idea of god as defined by one or another religion, which is possible to do, both with logic and physical/scientific evidence (example: the Abrahamic God that apparently made all of humanity from the incestuous offspring of two people is easily disproven, while his omnipotence is logically incompatible with his omni-benevolence).
I love how shiny uses the expression "want to have our cake and eat it to", which is a very rational and feasible desire (I'm a greedy atheist, I don't share my babby-cake with anyone. Mmmm, fetus fudge! <IMG class=smiley src="http://cdn.videosift.com/cdm/emoticon/smileevil.gif">).
Let's put it this way: do you believe fairies exist? If no, prove it! You can't explain why dew drops are so neatly arranged on spider webs, or how the beautiful designs in the frost of windowpanes are made, so fairies make them. Tada!! Sure, you can be agnostic about fairies, arguing that they're manmade fiction, and explain scientifically how dew drops and frost patterns work, but that's just eliminating one definition of "fairy", there are infinitely more! A-fairyists, meanwhile, live with the evidence-based assumption that the probability of fairies existing is null, and the burden of proof lies on those who insist that some sort of fairies exist.
See where this is getting?

They really are idiots. All of those questions handle origin of life a thing which evolution does not talk about at all - AT ALL.

@GenjiKilpatrick

Now you're just playing semantic games. By equating peer review--an impersonal process in which people who probably have never even met each other in real life examine a report about an experiment--with "bringing people together" you've grossly exaggerated what science is and what science does. You then go on in nearly the same breath to so narrowly define religion (as only a means of understanding the physical world) that you create a strawman that (quite conveniently for you) is ridiculously easy to knock over.

FYI, I'm sure your definitions make sense to you, but you should be aware that those definitions aren't held by--well, pretty much anyone except you.

From Wikipedia:

Science (from Latin: scientia meaning "knowledge") is a systematic enterprise that builds and organizes knowledge in the form of testable explanations and predictions about the world.

Let's look at religion (again from Wikipedia):

Religion is a cultural system that establishes symbols that relate humanity to spirituality and moral values.[1] Many religions have narratives, symbols, traditions and sacred histories that are intended to give meaning to life or to explain the origin of life or the universe. They tend to derive morality, ethics, religious laws or a preferred lifestyle from their ideas about the cosmos and human nature.

So, judging from what you've written here, when you say "science" or "religion" you are clearly talking about something completely different than what the vast majority of people understand science and religion to be. When I refer to science and religion, I am referring to the commonly held notions of them as defined, for example, on Wikipedia. I don't see how we can continue this conversation since you are apparently talking about something different than I am using these terms.

Your refutations were (in order)

"This guy believes in evolution"

"We can never prove anything about the fossil record"

"this quote is old"

"this guy is crazy"

"this quote is old"

"this guy is a probable creationist"

Yeah, amazing refutations..which you got from a website, while calling me out on doing the same thing. Evolutionists, biologists, palentologists etc DO dispute the theory of evolution..you were right though..the ones I provided were kind of weak. You'll have an infinitely harder time refuting these:

"With the failure of these many efforts [to explain the origin of life] science was left in the somewhat embarrassing position of having to postulate theories of living origins which it could not demonstrate.

After having chided the theologian for his reliance on myth and miracle, science found itself in the unenviable position of having to create a mythology of its own: namely, the assumption that what, after long effort could not be proved to take place today, had, in truth, taken place in the primeval past."

Loren C. Eiseley,
Ph.D. Anthropology. "The Immense Journey". Random House, NY, p. 199

"We have no acceptable theory of evolution at the present time. There is none; and I cannot accept the theory that I teach to my students each year. Let me explain:

I teach the synthetic theory known as the neo-Darwinian one, for one reason only; not because it's good, we know it is bad, but because there isn't any other.

Whilst waiting to find something better you are taught something which is known to be inexact, which is a first approximation."

Professor Jerome Lejeune,
Internationally recognised geneticist at a lecture given in Paris

"Considering its historic significance and the social and moral transformation it caused in western thought, one might have hoped that Darwinian theory ... a theory of such cardinal importance, a theory that literally changed the world, would have been something more than metaphysics, something more than a myth."

Michael Denton,
Molecular Biologist. "Evolution: A Theory in Crisis". Adler and Adler, p. 358

"The fact of evolution is the backbone of biology, and biology is thus in the peculiar position of being a science founded on an unproved theory - is it then a science or a faith? Belief in the theory of evolution is thus exactly parallel to belief in special creation-both are concepts which believers know to be true but neither, up to the present, has been capable of proof."

L.Harrison Matthews,
British biologist

"[The theory of evolution] forms a satisfactory faith on which to base our interpretation of nature."


L. Harrison Matthews,
Introduction to 'Origin of Species: The Preservation of Favored Races in the Struggle for Life', p. xxii (1977 edition).


"I reject evolution because I deem it obsolete, because the knowledge, hard won since 1830, of anatomy, histology, cytology, and embryology, cannot be made to accord with its basic idea. The foundationless, fantastic edifice of the evolution doctrine would long ago have met with its long deserved fate were it not that the love of fairy tales is so deep-rooted in the hearts of man."

Dr Albert Fleischmann. Recorded in Scott M. Huse, "The Collapse of Evolution", Baker Book House: Grand Rapids (USA), 1983 p:120

"Naturalistic evolution has clear consequences that Charles Darwin understood perfectly. 1) No gods worth having exist; 2) no life after death exists; 3) no ultimate foundation for ethics exists; 4) no ultimate meaning in life exists; and 5) human free will is nonexistent."


William B. Provine,
Professor of Biological Sciences, Cornell University, 'Evolution: Free will and punishment and meaning in life', Abstract of Will Provine's 1998 Darwin Day Keynote Address.


"The origin of life by chance in a primeval soup is impossible in probability in the same way that a perpetual machine is in probability. The extremely small probabilities calculated in this chapter are not discouraging to true believers ? [however] A practical person must conclude that life didn’t happen by chance."


Hubert Yockey,
"Information Theory and Molecular Biology", Cambridge University Press, 1992, p. 257


"As I said, we shall all be embarrassed, in the fullness of time, by the naivete of our present evolutionary arguments. But some will be vastly more embarrassed than others."


Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini, Principal Research Associate of the Center for Cognitive Science at MIT, "Inevitable Illusions: How Mistakes of Reason Rule Our Minds," John Wiley & Sons: New York, 1994, p195)


"In 10 million years, a human-like species could substitute no more than 25,000 expressed neutral mutations and this is merely 0.0007% of the genome ?nowhere near enough to account for human evolution. This is the trade secret of evolutionary geneticists."

Walter James ReMine,
The Biotic Message : Evolution versus Message Theory


"Today, a hundred and twenty-eight years after it was first promulgated, the Darwinian theory of evolution stands under attack as never before. ... The fact is that in recent times there has been increasing dissent on the issue within academic and professional ranks, and that a growing number of respectable scientists are defecting from the evolutionist camp. It is interesting, moreover, that for the most part these 'experts' have abandoned Darwinism, not on the basis of religious faith or biblical persuasions, but on strictly scientific grounds, and in some instances regretfully, as one could say. We are told dogmatically that Evolution is an established fact; but we are never told who has established it, and by what means. We are told, often enough, that the doctrine is founded upon evidence, and that indeed this evidence 'is henceforward above all verification, as well as being immune from any subsequent contradiction by experience'; but we are left entirely in the dark on the crucial question wherein, precisely, this evidence consists."


Wolfgang Smith,
Mathematician and Physicist. Prof. of Mathematics, Oregon State University. Former math instructor at MIT. Teilhardism and the New Religion: A Thorough Analysis of the Teachings of de Chardin. Tan Books & Publishers, pp. 1-2


"If there were a basic principle of matter which somehow drove organic systems toward life, its existence should easily be demonstrable in the laboratory. One could, for instance, take a swimming bath to represent the primordial soup. Fill it with any chemicals of a non-biological nature you please. Pump any gases over it, or through it, you please, and shine any kind of radiation on it that takes your fancy. Let the experiment proceed for a year and see how many of those 2,000 enzymes [proteins produced by living cells] have appeared in the bath. I will give the answer, and so save the time and trouble and expense of actually doing the experiment. You would find nothing at all, except possibly for a tarry sludge composed of amino acids and other simple organic chemicals.
How can I be so confident of this statement? Well, if it were otherwise, the experiment would long since have been done and would be well-known and famous throughout the world. The cost of it would be trivial compared to the cost of landing a man on the Moon.......In short there is not a shred of objective evidence to support the hypothesis that life began in an organic soup here on the Earth."


Sir Fred Hoyle,
British physicist and astronomer, The Intelligent Universe, Michael Joseph, London, pp. 20-21, 23.


"...(I)t should be apparent that the errors, overstatements and omissions that we have noted in these biology texts, all tend to enhance the plausibility of hypotheses that are presented. More importantly, the inclusion of outdated material and erroneous discussions is not trivial. The items noted mislead students and impede their acquisition of critical thinking skills. If we fail to teach students to examine data critically, looking for points both favoring and opposing hypotheses, we are selling our youth short and mortgaging the future of scientific inquiry itself."


Mills, Lancaster, Bradley,
'Origin of Life Evolution in Biology Textbooks - A Critique', The American Biology Teacher, Volume 55, No. 2, February, 1993, p. 83


"The salient fact is this: if by evolution we mean macroevolution (as we henceforth shall), then it can be said with the utmost rigor that the doctrine is totally bereft of scientific sanction. Now, to be sure, given the multitude of extravagant claims about evolution promulgated by evolutionists with an air of scientific infallibility, this may indeed sound strange. And yet the fact remains that there exists to this day not a shred of bona fide scientific evidence in support of the thesis that macroevolutionary transformations have ever occurred."


Wolfgang Smith,
Ph.D Mathematics , MS Physics Teilardism and the New Religion. Tan Books and Publishers, Inc.


"... as Darwinists and neo-Darwinists have become ever more adept at finding possible selective advantages for any trait one cares to mention, explanation in terms of the all-powerful force of natural selection has come more and more to resemble explanation in terms of the conscious design of the omnipotent Creator."


Mae-Wan Ho & Peter T. Saunders,
Biologist at The Open University, UK and Mathematician at University of London respectively


"In other words, when the assumed evolutionary processes did not match the pattern of fossils that they were supposed to have generated, the pattern was judged to be 'wrong'. A circular argument arises: interpret the fossil record in terms of a particular theory of evolution, inspect the interpretation, and note that it confirms the theory. Well, it would, wouldn't it?"


Tom S. Kemp,
'A Fresh Look at the Fossil Record', New Scientist, vol. 108, 1985, pp. 66-67


"We have proffered a collective tacit acceptance of the story of gradual adaptive change, a story that strengthened and became even more entrenched as the synthesis took hold. We paleontologists have said that the history of life supports that interpretation, all the while really knowing that it does not."


Niles Eldredge,
Chairman and Curator of Invertebrates, American Museum of Natural History, "Time Frames: The Rethinking of Darwinian Evolution and the Theory of Punctuated Equilibria," Simon & Schuster: New York NY, 1985, p144)


... by the fossil record and we are now about 120-years after Darwin and the knowledge of the fossil record has been greatly expanded. We now have a quarter of a million fossil species but the situation hasn't changed much.
The record of evolution is still surprisingly jerky and, ironically, some of the classic cases of Darwinian change in the fossil record, such as the evolution of the horse in North America, have had to be discarded or modified as a result of more detailed information."


David M. Raup,
Curator of Geology. Field Museum of Natural History, Chicago "Conflicts Between Darwin and Paleontology". Field Museum of Natural History. Vol. 50, No. 1, p. 25


"Thus all Darwin's premises are defective: there is no unlimited population growth in natural populations, no competition between individuals, and no new species producible by selecting for varietal differences. And if Darwin's premises are faulty, then his conclusion does not follow. This, of itself, does not mean that natural selection is false. It simply means that we cannot use Darwin's argument brilliant though it was, to establish natural selection as a means of explaining the origin of species."


Robert Augros & George Stanciu,
"The New Biology: Discovering the Wisdom in Nature", New Science Library, Shambhala: Boston, MA, 1987, p.160).







>> ^MaxWilder:
What the hell are you talking about? I refuted every one of your quotes point by point! I provided links to further information. The whole point was that your "evidence" of paleontologists speaking out against evolution was utter bullshit!
The only one where I discredited the source was from some no-name Swedish biologist that nobody takes seriously. Every other source was either out of context (meaning you are not understanding the words properly), or out of date (meaning that science has progressed a little since the '70s).
You have got your head so far up your ass that you are not even coherent now.
But you know what might change my mind? If you cut&paste some more out of context, out of date quotes. You got hendreds of 'em! </sarcasm>
>> ^shinyblurry:
So basically, you cannot provide a refutation to the information itself but instead try to discredit the source.

>> ^bmacs27:
... I would challenge you to express how the theory of evolution itself could be falsified? Here's Darwin's take from the Origin of Species: "If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed, which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down." If you take the position that all claims of irreducible complexity are simply matters of the poverty of imagination, and as such it is not demonstrable, you open evolution up to the same criticism.

Evolution could be falsified by demonstrating that a lineage of reproducing organisms cannot develop new genetic traits over time, though that would be difficult considering we have multiple examples of new traits being formed under observation.

Darwin's quote is mainly pointless because Irreducible Complexity can't be tested. There is nothing even remotely scientific about a "theory" that relies on what we don't know for evidence. We can, however, demonstrate how the genetic traits of reproducing organisms change over time, and if nothing else that gives us avenues of further research regarding the origins of life.

Strangely, this video gave me some sympathy for evolution deniers. They've clearly been taught so few facts about science, so thoroughly and deliberately mixed with misinformation, that their mental model of the world is the best they can do given these bits and pieces. For nearly all of human history we were all in the dark about the origin of life and the cosmos. And we seem nearly compelled by our innate psychology to settle for even bad answers over interminable uncertainty.

Why they're so resistant to compelling correction is a another question. But again, I think there is a good answer that has more to do with ordinary human psychology than them being unintelligent. There are concerns much more compelling than reason. And emotions that can shut down reason before it gets going.

>> ^bcglorf:

^ or perhaps, stupid lady is stupid.
Scientology gets to be treated like other religions when it starts to act like one.
As long as it continues to refuse to discuss it's beliefs publicly, it deserves no protection at all.
As long as it actively refuses to allow anyone to see their 'secret documents' without paying vast sums of money first, it deserves no protection at all.
As long as it's deepest foundational beliefs still include Hubbard's Xenu alien origin of life fantasy, it deserves ridicule.
As long as it's practices continue to include things like "Fair Game", it deserves to be fought.
Fair Game, is a declaration that an opponent of scientology is 'fair game' for any and all manner of attacks and attempts to destroy their character as are needed to destroy them and their credibility. Vicky Aznaran, a formerly very high level scientologist described the effects/actions of that policy:
Because of my position and the reports which regularly crossed my desk, I know that during my entire presidency of RTC "fair game" actions against enemies were daily routine. Apart from the legal tactics described below, the "fair game" activities included break-ins, libel, upsetting the companies of the enemy, espionage, harassment, misuse of confidential communications in the folders of community members and so forth.


How is that not like "real" religions? Catholic excommunication? Execution for apostates from Islam? Calling Scientology "stupid" then going to church is ridiculous. Scientology is a frickin case study on how a bullshit idea can become a worldwide cult. The only difference between it and "real" religions is 10 or 15 centuries.

^ or perhaps, stupid lady is stupid.

Scientology gets to be treated like other religions when it starts to act like one.

As long as it continues to refuse to discuss it's beliefs publicly, it deserves no protection at all.

As long as it actively refuses to allow anyone to see their 'secret documents' without paying vast sums of money first, it deserves no protection at all.

As long as it's deepest foundational beliefs still include Hubbard's Xenu alien origin of life fantasy, it deserves ridicule.

As long as it's practices continue to include things like "Fair Game", it deserves to be fought.

Fair Game, is a declaration that an opponent of scientology is 'fair game' for any and all manner of attacks and attempts to destroy their character as are needed to destroy them and their credibility. Vicky Aznaran, a formerly very high level scientologist described the effects/actions of that policy:

Because of my position and the reports which regularly crossed my desk, I know that during my entire presidency of RTC "fair game" actions against enemies were daily routine. Apart from the legal tactics described below, the "fair game" activities included break-ins, libel, upsetting the companies of the enemy, espionage, harassment, misuse of confidential communications in the folders of community members and so forth.

>> ^bluecliff:

the only problem with evolution (and I have no problem with IT)is that you substitute it, as this video implies, with a theory for the origin of life.
And the only problem I see is that people use the term evolution to mean a proces of change which has a direction - i.e. more and more complex forms of life.
Etymology and historical meaning
The word stems from the Latin term evolutio meaning "unfolding" and prior to the late 1800s was confined to referring to goal-directed, pre-programmed processes such as embryological development. A pre-programmed task, as in a military maneuver, using this definition, may be termed an "evolution." By the 20th century, the dominant concept associated with the word "evolution" was biological evolution, which had originally been known as "transmutation."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution_%28term%29#_note-devolving

So humans could theoretically "evolve" into "lower forms" of life.




That is happening as we speak.

There are gradations each respective side of the debate refuse to acknowledge. Vid Chick epitomizes the 'religious people are idiots' side. Persons of such stripe refuse to discuss creationism as religious philosophy, instead recasting the matter as an unyielding test of evidenciary proofs. They probably do this because they feel goaded or vexed by 'certain' Creationists who try to recast religion as science (a fruitless endeavor). Ultimately both sides reject each other's basic premises and treat each other with insults, disrespect, mockery, and boorishness.

For a creationist, the origin of life is a matter of faith. If you are a believer, then it would seem eminantly possible that God would have to be a very intelligent fellow. Such a being would likely use or influence natural laws in ways not currently understood.

Could such a being, if existant, 'create' life? According to evolutionary theory, sure! Scientists in labs today can put primordial soup into electrical currents and plasma to 'create' amino acids. From that perspective, isn't evolutionary theory no more than the most basic, rudimentary, stumbling first step of humanity's attempt to grasp this God guy's far more advanced methodology?

But, there is no scientific evidence for that position because it starts with a faith-based premise that God exists. Accepting such a premise isn't in the cards for people like Vid Chick. It involves apriori thinking of a philosophical nature which goes into areas Vid-Chick would rather not. So it gets ignored in favor of far easier to wrangle strawmen.

Some creationists do the same thing the other way around and refuse to give any scientific evidence the time of day. The problem isn't one sided. Both sides refuse to acknowledge that they are coming from completely different viewpoints, and so both end up looking like intolerant bigots.

Your video, The Origin of Life made easy, has made it into your personal Highest Rated Videos listing. Congratulations on a job well done. For you contribution you have been awarded 1 Power Point.

I don't think he was arguing against the need for atheists, matter of fact I'm pretty sure he wasn't He's the author of a 29 part (so far) series called "Why do people laugh at creationists?" We've got a couple of them posted here I'm pretty sure.

http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=AC3481305829426D

I think the effort was more in reducing the power of the label, it's used as a weapon too often. As EDD mentioned above it has a "negative connotation" in most places. It might be useful to explore ways to defuse that and turn it around on them, I think that's more what he was getting at. We'll never be able to "prove" God doesn't exist but as Potholer54 closed his origin of life made easy video with if we've got natural explanations for how things could have happened then when where or why would anything else have needed to step in? In the end it's not a matter of faith, it's a detective trail.

If any videogame can truly be a "timeless" classic, it's the original Half-Life.

OH YEAH!

I had forgotten anyone was trying to do this. But this looks superb. Will tide me over until Episode 3 I would imagine.

I tried playing the original half life again a while back, but it was a case of not being able to really get into it due to the poor graphics and lack of any physics.

I think the lack of physics was the big killer, it's amazing how you start taking things like that for granted.