Hi, were you just surfing around the internet looking for something interesting to watch? I'm sorry you got us the nonprofits, but we do have a really funny article we want to discuss today, and the great Eli's Black is going to lead us into it. So tell us, Eli, what you got for us?
Well, this article is less of an article and more of like a PowerPoint presentation of ten things the author just doesn't understand. James Dolan makes several obviously false claims throughout his little book report here, such as sentimentality is far better explained by spirituality, and that science can't explain why humans share moral values. And I could go on, but it would take more time to explain all of the bad ideas that he has than it takes to
Terry took him apart. This story is from Savvy Dime by James Dormant on August nineteenth, twenty twenty four.
Pretty much some of it all over there. There are like ten segments here. What was the name of the article again? I got to remember it's ten mysteries that ten things sciences can't explain and attribute to God, And I thought, you know, that's a really misleading title in and of itself. Because I did not see any one scientist mentioned throughout this article contributing any of this bullshit to God. So John hunted, what did you think?
What was your oh man, of this craziness?
It was pretty stupid, actually, I mean, I'm kind of a little bit of a science nerd, but this was pretty hilarious. I recommend it for a late night I need to laugh. The day was really hard kind of reading. You know, either that or you know, you can watch Saturday Night Live or something. But I just think that it's it's really hilarious. And I'm going to go through just the first few of them here and see if I will attempt to be regimated and in my treatment
of this statement. So let's see how it goes. I'm not hopeful the origin of the universe. Science can't explain the origin of the euro Versa. We know pretty much all we can ever know about the up to a plank time or two after the inflation started, which means that it was before there was pretty much time. So since you can't test, examine, or even really prove anything that is outside of time and space, time, there's nothing
to prove. It's a ridiculous proposition and so it's not that we don't know what happened before, because we can't, but we do know what happened all the way to a couple billions of a second afterwards, so and how it evolved from that. So I'm just saying that that's you know, I suggest explanations. I'm not a cosmologist, so I expect I suggest that you read explanations by cosmologists or Sean Carroll, or not the biologist Sean Carroll, but
Sean Carol. The physicist Stephen Hawking actually has a couple of books out that aren't bad. Carl Sagan, perhaps Neil de grasse Tyson. You know, there are a lot of people who are really good at this. However, you can also watch podcasts that will teach you an awful lot about it, you know. So you know, I can recommend some. If you want to email me, I'll send you my favorite list. So anybody else have comments on this one?
Oh, I thought it was.
You know, they don't never, they don't ever actually talk about any of the science in it, you know, like, oh, science can't explain your origin in the universe, and yet we have like twenty different explanations for it. And their explanation, God did it. I mean, go ahead and I prove that one, you know, because we can't prove plank time say, but they are, but they're in this Well, God did it, So will prove that to me.
Right.
It always seems like these people are in the same place we are, but they just don't even realize it. So anybody else want to talk about that?
You know?
One thing that I wanted to point out as one of the ones that they pointed out was the meaning of life? How science can't explain that? And I thought, yeah, you know, And the truth is is that when it comes down to it, I love that question because it gives me an opportunity to remind people that, yes, okay, so you have a definition that you think you got from a book that God told you of what life means, and you're trying to muddle through this and you think
that these pre applied values mean something. Well, for me, getting out of religion and recognizing that it wasn't true allowed me to throw away that really terrible manual that's beaten into you potentially as a child, and to be able to apply your own values. And so rather than this is a negative, yes, it's great. I don't have to listen to what some books says everything should be because I can apply those myself to the life around me. So when I look at this, I'm like, Yeah, what
you're talking about is a win. No, I don't have a universal price code that everything applies to everyone, But that's a freedom that's not being bondage. Being bondage is being tied into a book that tells you what you have to think. And one other one I found very interesting is the human connection one. You know, they talked about it, and what they're talking about very poorly, is essentially empathy and altruistic behavior. You know, we see this
type of behavior in many animals, you know, rats. We even have rats demonstrating putting themselves at risk to help other rats in danger. So this is not something exclusive and this is not something just exclusive the primates. This is something we find throughout the animal kingdom. So to treat this as if this is a human connection, no, this is a social connection that they're talking.
Yeah, you can prove why people are nice, man, I'm sorry, it must be gone, you know, and.
We've got actual tons of biological evidence about why that developed. And you know, but it's it's way too long and involved a discussion to get into in this show at the moment.
Yeah, yeah, I don't. I think I'd rather talk about how this how this article is representing science, rather than try to refute some of the idiocy within it. And like, like half of the subjects that they met they touched on that science can't answer are philosophical ones. There are not anything science could even do experiments on, like like
the meaning of life, miracles was one of them. Well, first you got to prove miracles actually happened before we can start decide whether they're real or not, because we haven't proved the miracle yet. So I mean, it was just like this whole list of things that it was obviously a slanted article from the beginning, and I thought that what it was doing badly was representing science in a very very bad light. What do you think about that, do you? Elie?
Well, I was about to give him some credit because he does say, and this is the slide called when science meets faith. He does say science is fundamentally the pursuit of answers just because science cannot explain something yet. And this is where he starts to go off the rails. That doesn't mean that scientists relent and accept something as inexplicable as an explicable. Now, that is true, but he goes on to.
The next sentence.
Yeah, by the time, by the same token, the fact that science cannot explain something cannot be taken or no, sorry, can be taken as proof that the explanation lies beyond the realm of science and exists in the spiritual And that is bullshit, because that's not proof of anything other than we don't have the answer yet. Not having the answer is proof that we don't have the answer.
And that's it.
And it's really just evidence that we don't have the answer. It's not even proof if you want to get technical about it.
Yeah, but I want me give an example of that. Right in seventeen forty six, you couldn't say there wasn't there had to be a God because we hadn't invented light yet Man made light. And that's exactly what this is saying, Right, science hasn't done something yet, so obviously, right God.
So that's proof that it can't. Right, that is what he says.
And so the other one, and as you mentioned, a lot of these are philosophical questions, not scientific ones. And we did talk about like human connection and apathy, and one of them was morality, and that's really not even all that long of an explanation to get into. We learned that if we cooperate with other people, we have a better chance of surviving, and if we act like a dick, people don't want to cooperate with us, and we don't have as good a chance of surviving. That's
what social animals are. And we don't just see morality in humans like you said earlier, Infidel, and.
Not just in rats.
Ants that get infected with like a disease or a poison or something that will spread to the other rest of the colonies, they will volunteer themselves for euth in asia so they don't infect the rest of the colony. That's moral behavior and insects or I don't know the ants counts insects, I'm pretty sure, but yeah, so some
of the some some bugs surprise me sometimes. But the point being these there are perfectly logical scientific explanations for it, as we've already established, and they really don't take very much time at all. For It's like anybody who who starts to learn about these things. These are some of the first things you learn.
Yeah, it was, it was. It kind of surprised me when I started looking at all of the ten things, right, and one of them was the teleological argument everything fits perfect. We have the perfectly designed world. Science can't explain that, you know, it was yeah, well yeah, can you know? Showing that it's not a perfectly designed world. If it was, then the pit of the avocado wouldn't be so big, right.
But I I have another argument for that, which I like to tell people about the Goldilocks universe. It's a form of the watchmaker argument, but it's a little different. The rub is that the chances of all that coming together has a probability of one. In other words, it's a certainty. After all, it happened. We know that, right. Therefore, it's not improbable at all because it actually happened. That
means it's not only probable it happened. So any combination of those forces maybe could have had intelligent life appear as the rules would be different, and we don't understand how they would be different. It's very complex, but we only have one example. So we have one sample our universe, right, and that tells us nothing about what it would be
like to have any one of the four major forces. Well, actually I call it three forces, and a gravity isn't a force, so anyway, yeah, so anyway, that's it, you know, I just you know, it's just the probability is one. Get over it. You're in the one universe. If you want to.
Think about it that way, I would say that it's not quite one. But because as you said, we only have one example, we don't know how many times a universe has attempted to or successfully begun or ended existing, So we don't We would need to know the full
amount to know what sample size we have. The point of the matter is that it doesn't matter because it did happen, just like you said, So if it happened any other way, we don't know whether that life couldn't have existed in any other instantiation of the universe, or that it could have, And we may never have answers like that because that may not even make sense.
We don't really know that.
I don't think the question makes sense actually exactly.
Yeah, we don't at the point where we know if that question does make sense. So the probability of the universe happening is kind of a point to even I think discussed because here it is, let's just.
Talk about how it did.
Yeah exactly, I know I could see it down Infidel down there chomping, wanting to talk about one another.
One had these ten things. What do you have of cour us? Well, actually I wanted to build a little bit on that odds. You know, we talked about what are the odds of something happening? Because oftentimes we'll hear that when Christians are talking about something that has to be a miracle, because what are the odds of this happening? And I was reminded of a book that I read as a teenager, and I picked it up almost offhandedly, and it was about nine people who survived a Roshima
and then Nagasaki. These people survived the nuclear bomb atomic bomb, went to Nagasaki and then survived another one. Now, your odds are pretty bad all about, and you know, and I went to started to break down how do we even break down those odds? You know, you have logistics, you have or are you well enough to make the trip?
You know, all these other things because you're surviving in an atomic you know situation that nobody knows what's going on, and when you start thinking about things like this, the odds are pretty long. But once again, just like our universe, it did happen, and so one in a million things, one in ten million things happened every day. So just because something's a long shot to give it a veneer of a miracle, it's just so odd to me. Because
also you mentioned the Goldilocks universe. I'm sure that more than a few of us are familiar with Douglas Adams with the puddle, and everything just seems so finally, this whole is just perfectly tuned for me. This to exists inside this puddle, and it completely ignores that everything around it is bred for this world. So yes, they tried to tie in God to pretty much everything on here.
And the truth is the way they did it was saying, oh, science doesn't have an exclamation, so therefore God did it.
And besides, science is not a thing, so you can't talk about it like it's a thing. It's a method, you know, So they need to educate themselves a little bit too.
Also, the body of work that's been discovered through that method too, so it's not just the method, but it's also what we've been able to discover from it from that method. So I think that's important to remember.
But that and to your point, Infidel, kind of like you said, one in a million things happen so often, and kellyus is something that you and I talked about during the back cross. If a thing happens to you once every second, a million seconds is like eleven.
And a half days. Pretty So I just did the math. I just did. I just looked it up.
Actually it was what it was. It was thirty four days. If you're awake and alert for eight hours a day.
Okay, yeah, so if you're awake for being awake for a million seconds, is being awake? Is thirty four days worth of time? One in a million things happens every thirty four days.
That it's I agree it. People will bring in perfectly round balls into rocks into my store all the time and I think they found a cannonball, and I have to explain to them that we don't ever have rocks been used as cannon balls in North America ever, you know, And they always want to know how it got so perfectly around, and that's what I always said, Well, what do you think the chances of that happening one in
a million. Yeah, probably about that. Okay, Now think how many rocks are in the twenty mile radius of the store. Probably ten million. There's still nine more out there, go look for.
I like that make a wish.
Yeah, yeah, that would be something.
So again, like, one of the things that really bothered me was the choice of topics that this person decided science couldn't explain because he picked so many topics that again the science, there's no way science can explain them because they aren't topics of anything physical. It was mostly, like I said, philosophical things that we have that we've been arguing about for millennia and still haven't found the answer to.
So yeah, and they strong and they even made they made a lot of errors in this, you know, just the whole the whole idea that because you know, uh, science states that everything in existence must be conserved, so our souls. Did you see that one life after death? I'm like, I just like science doesn't say that at all. Nowhere to science.
They were talking about energy.
You know, you can't you can't just you can't destroy energy or information.
I do hear that from TS a lot that that well, your soul has to go somewhere because the energy can't be destroyed. And now it's like no, but you know, there are batteries and the earth is a battery, big battery too. So when you die, the energy that once was used to move your body around is now disappointed and dissipated through the soil where it's picked up by the plants for more energy. See, our energy isn't destroyed, It just moves on, and people don't you.
Can, you can transform energy into other things. The matter itself is just a different form of energy.
And it doesn't have to go somewhere right away. Like I said, like there is a giant battery. Our energy is stored within the earth until the plants needed, and then stored within the plants until the animals that eat the plants needed, and then stored in those animals until them.
So I've got to say that I found the article quite interesting in the fact that they were able to write so much and say so little, because at the end of the day, you know, they made all these claims and all these grandiose gestures, but truthfully, at the end of the day, it was like, yeah, I don't understand something so God did it. And that really boiled down to because, as Kelly said, a lot of these issues aren't things that there's a way for them to
be addressed through science. Science has no methodology to address some of these because they're well, frankly just pretty much pulled out of somebody's ass. So when you have something like that, yeah, science can't answer it. You know, science can't answer a lot of things because you're not asking
a question that science is designed to answer. And the truth is that science is more about, as Kelly, you mentioned the gathering of knowledge and that process in which knowledge is gathered, and but it's not about making truth claims. The I don't think science is ever going to say the absolute way that this is and throw something out there, because if science makes a claim, it's going to be had to be pretty certain of it. That's why we call it the theory of gravity. You know, we don't
call it the rule. But let's go and see on the top of a building unless the out consistent that this is. And that's pretty much what they're doing here, just smoking smoking ashes, just trying to distract its smoking mirrors.
I would say add one thing though, a few of these questions can be answered by science, it's just not the typical three sciences. There are a couple of these questions that can be answered by sociology, maybe three or four, And there's psychology answers to a lot of these sorts of you know, questions like why and also why you ask these questions, So, you know, sociology anthropology can also explain how we get to that position to where we need to know what is consciousness. Well, there's a lot
of ways to approach that. Consciousness is an emergent property of very complex organic systems at the moment. Eventually we'll see if we can make a machine, but that's all that is. And any organism with a sufficiently complex brain is going to have a consciousness. So we know that, and we can show that in the history and development of intelligence throughout the human species as well as great apes, and then going to other species as well. Pigs are
known to be extremely intelligent. They're more intelligent than dogs. Dogs are way more intelligent than a lot of other animals. So these things, consciousness, intelligence, they've all been pretty much sussed out for the basics. So read a book, take a class.
You know, I wonder if if this is one of those things where, like, you know, how, if you want to get the right answer to something, all you got to do is post the wrong answer online and somebody will correct you faster than if you ask the question. But what drives algorithms and gets views is comments. So what this guy is doing is like, I'm going to say a bunch of wrong shit all at once, and I'm going to.
Get so many fucking comments.
Man point.
Maybe that's what this is me.
It could be, it could be. You know, we just had the back Crewise. All four of us were at the ACA Back Cruise. It's an annual event. We had a lot of fun, and the ACA does a lot of other cool events besides the back Cruiser. You can find out what some of those events are by going to Atheist Typingcommunity dot org.
Visit the website there.