Theist Free

I spotted this bit of bullshit while driving around.

To anyone with the least bit of education can easily see where this billboard is dead wrong. It shows a picture of Charles Darwin, a man who while at Cambridge studied Paley’s Natural Theology which made an argument for divine design in nature, explaining adaptation as god acting through laws of nature. Of course his interest in natural history inspired his theory of natural selection, a theory that has proven to be correct in 200 years of research by others in such diverse fields as geology, biology and astronomy. From the age of forty he was, to use his own words, a complete dis-believer in Christianity. He professed himself an agnostic not an atheist. So if you are going pick a man to be the image of the average atheist, Darwin is a rather weak choice, Maybe Benjamin Franklin, Bertrand Russell or Thomas Jefferson would be a better choice. But Christian sure do not want to admit many of the countries founding fathers were not Christians.

And then you have the uninformed idea that evolution is an atheist belief. It ignores the fact there are many religious people out there who accept the biological reality of evolution but believe a god made evolution as a tool for designing man. Even the Pope accepts evolution. So here again Darwin is a stupid choice. Fact is one could be an atheist but not believe in evolution. True not very likely but I can imagine someone out there who thinks man is merely the product of alien experiments and our entire universe exist only in a petri disk in a giant alien laboratory.

You then have the silly idea evolution makes a statement on the issue of existence, it does not. Evolution only makes an observation of the reality that living matter changes over time and that plants and animals, including man, show unmistakable signs of evolving from similar species. The idea of something from nothing is not a biological question, but a cosmological one. Our expanding universe tends to support a Big Bang beginning but makes no statement on what came before, or if time even existed “before”. Science is honest in that regard, saying we may never be able to say what happened at the Big Bang. Religion on the other hand prefers you to buy an intellectual dead end, god did it they says, but ask what came before god and they don’t even want to think about it.

Now imaging if I were to buy a billboard saying “Pull the Plug on Christianity” or “Pull the Plug on Judaism”. I would be accused of promoting religious hatred.

davekyte Religion, Science & Technology