A couple of haters grabbed the blogspot address that corresponds with this site address.  It's recently come to my attention that Google has suspended the account.  I'm not sure of the reason, just that it is no longer available to use.  

This address used to be owned by Christian haters. http://rationalresponders.blogspot.com/  They used the site to tell misleading and usually dishonest interpretations of RRS.  Often they came up high in google because of name similarity.  Google took action.  Nice of them.

People get away with telling lies about people online because most people aren't going to go through the costs or effort of taking it to court.  We had built up tons of evidence to take that case to court and in the end I can only assume that submitting that info to google played a role in the name being taken away from the world.  

If anyone ever sees it become available, I'll offer you a reward to let me know about it.  I'll take you out to dinner when you come by Philadelphia.

Our site goes down from time to time but we usually resolve it within an hour.  This time it was 12 hours. Sorry for any inconvenience, frustration, sadness, or depression that you dealt with as a result.  It lasted so long this time because was our amazing volunteer server admin was away from the computer.

It gives me a chance to be frank with you.  I hate doing fundraisers, as I want to believe that this site can be sustained on ad/amazon/subscriber revenue.  Many a months, it can.  RRS costs a few hundred dollars per month to operate and right now, we're not quite making that back.  Actually one of our awesome board members recently sent us our largest single donation of the year and it got us to about even.  

Another reason I haven't made a public request for donations in over 2 years is that I feel I let you down on the last public appeal for money to buy a server.  I assure you we got a new server to upgrade our sites to the next era of web utilization.  I am sorry I can't enjoy it's spoils with you quite yet.  I don't want to throw anyone under the bus, but for the most part it's delay was beyond my control.  I could have avoided it if I had 10-15k to spend on professional help. I don't work off a budget that large, we're dealing in hundreds here. 

In the 24 months since we've owned the server, it has done some work for us and been online, it hosts some things, sometimes.  We have practice sites, but it's daddy's are very busy with real life work.  From Feb-Sept I have about 8 hours a week I can spend on RRS, I work multiple jobs and still make less than 30k/yr.  My earning potential is lower now as a result of my life as an atheist activist.  I'm also a single dad of a young man about to head to college.  Right now he needs me quite a bit.  He has me in the gym with him for about 12 hours a week. I'm worried about how I'm going to afford his college.  He'll have over a 4.0 GPA but I'll still have to cover big costs over the next few years.  For example he doesn't have a car.  It's a decent life, very fulfilling, just not very financially rewarding.  

Right now things are tight.  I feel like we can go in two general directions from here...

DOWN: The site continues on a trend where I have to come out of pocket to keep it going.  It feels more cost effective to reduce or scale back in some way then to keep it thriving.  This might allow me to put the last remaining batch of my focus on a real life job.

UP: We actually have enough money to get the help we need to make our site have the cutting edge community site technology and speed we need to compete in the domain of ideas.  We become dominant again.  Everyone who has ever posted here has their views amplified in the domain of internet ideas.

I don't mean to startle you, I am fairly certain we're not going anywhere.  Freudien slip... we probably are just going to be stagnant, no up, no down.  

There are certainly tons of awesome people that care and that contribute.  Thanks to anyone that has ever donated, it's because of you that RationalResponders.com is still here.  But I've had these thoughts for a while, and thought some of you might want to know what kind of financial state RRS/I'm in.  

This site and it's donors are responsible for supporting CelebAtheists.com and Atheism United.  

We could use your help. If you would like to help point us towards "UP" please consider a one time donation.  Go big, it's a one time donation.  

You can also make a $3, $10, $25 monthly donation.

If you do decide to donate, allow me to say thanks right now.  I really appreciate it. 

If you're wealthy and you're asking yourself, "how much would it take to fix all of this and revolutionize these sites?"  The answer is $25,000 will do it.

For the last few months we were dealing with an error in which people were having a hard time posting on RationalResponders.com in browsers other than Firefox.

I am happy to report that this issue has been resolved.  Please stop by and post your scathing attacks on religion, with any browser!

Or if you're one of the folks who still believes in ancient fairy tales, please stop by and ask any question you can think of that will help you abandon your ridiculously ignorant beliefs!

http://www.rationalresponders.com/view/super_tracker

In Rationality,

Brian Sapient

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Funny one-liner. At least it's mathematically correct if each noun (and the adjective "blind") serves as a variable. Ray Charles certainly qualifies in some musical circles as a god. The big problem is that this argument can be used to "prove" contratictory things, like that Ray Charles, Roy Orbison and Stevie Wonder are all God.

"God is love" is used by Christians all along the spectrum, but for different reasons.

- Some fundamentalists and evangelists like Benny Hinn say God is love to establish that God is the only possible source of love, and therefore since love exists, He does too and we need Him.

- Some ultra-liberal Christians and some theologians say God is love as opposed to a bearded man in the sky. It's one way of making the concept of a god so nebulous that it's almost impossible to argue against it. They put God in poorly understood "places", such as emotions or fundamental physical laws, where it's hard to separate Him from what's real and observable. It's a defense mechanism.

- Pretty much everyone who says it is looking to give people the religious ecstasy that often comes from surrendering completely to faith. The phrase is a part of the larger message, "Come to us. Unburden yourself of all your worries and critical thoughts. Relax, let us in and God will take care of you, because from Him all good things come." Once you obey that, for better or worse, you're in the power of whoever told it to you.

"God is love" is a powerful phrase. Probably false in all respects, but powerful nonetheless.

- SmartLX

I don't think so. I don't always feel like waiting for topics to come to me before I address them, but I can't address them properly if I haven't expressed them correctly in the first place.

I do my best to avoid strawman versions of theist arguments, partly because many people like nothing better than to point these out. For questions where I take on arguments from elsewhere I try to quote them directly; I've quoted CARM, William Lane Craig, Ray Comfort and many others. When I have to paraphrase for length, I go as simple as I can to avoid muddying the issue. If people think I've excised something crucial, they're free to say so.

I'll be making fewer of my own questions in future, but for a good reason. If I have a thought which is worth sharing but isn't worth making a whole Q&A, it will now be tweeted. My personal ATA Twitter is separate from Jake's Twitter shown on the right.

Enjoy my new outlet. If you take issue with any of my tweets, bring it up back here and we'll talk about it.

- SmartLX

Not living anywhere near Houston I can't be of much help myself, but I'll do what I can starting with publishing this question. There, done.

You might be able to connect with "prominent" atheists in your area by contacting local atheist groups. Failing that, those groups would all be glad of some publicity and could each supply very knowledgeable spokespeople. Check out the Houston Freethought Alliance, whose front page has links to all other such Houston groups I was able to find.

If I were in your position, I'd do a piece on morality centred around the phrase, "You can be good without God." A lot of evangelists and other apologists argue that religion alone is holding society up with its moral guidelines, and that everything would collapse without it. This actually has no bearing on whether a god exists, but they use it anyway as an appeal to consequences. By outlining sensible secular systems of morals and ethics, you can help to dispel this idea.

YouTube has a fair few recordings of Richard Dawkins holding forth on many American radio stations. Though many of the callers are attempting to attack evolution, given that it's him, these recordings will still give you some idea of what you'll get if you take callers.

Good luck. Let us know what you do and how it goes.

- SmartLX

Much the same way you do: by bringing up the other possibilities to beat the argument from ignorance. I go into a lot more detail in this earlier answer, and I've tackled it briefly in lots of others.

The argument from design I've answered here for a start.

- SmartLX

You're talking about The God Who Wasn't There. It goes past atheism, which merely denies the resurrection as improbable without the existence of God, and examines all the documentation presented as evidence for even a historical man named Jesus.

The idea is to question all the unspoken assumptions that most Christian apologists make when arguing for the resurrection; it's easier for them to start with a real man than from scratch, but are they justified in doing so? I haven't seen the film either so I can't comment on its efficacy, but even if it falls flat it asks questions worth asking.

It's impossible to prove 100% that the deceased existed without physical evidence, human remains for example, but there are other ways to support it. Take the Roman emperors for example: their names and faces are on statues, busts and coins created during their lifetimes, and are visually consistent. Jesus has nothing like this; his only support is a set of documents, chief among them the Gospels, and the first of which were written well after his death. This is why these are so ferociously defended, but they are not above criticism and that's where the movie starts.

Your argument against the Blasphemy Challenge is exactly the reason why it exists, because you've restated Pascal's Wager with its major inherent flaw intact.

Here's the core of the problem: even if atheists are wrong, Christians are not necessarily right. If there is indeed a god, out of the thousands of gods humans have worshipped and the infinite number of gods we haven't even thought of yet, the chances that the real god is the Christian god exactly as described are not just miniscule but negligible.

By throwing in with any god, including Him, one has a far greater chance of offending some other god who happens to be the real one, and being forced to explain one's worship of a popular, well-liked but still false god. Atheists wouldn't have that problem, and might even receive credit for combating belief in false gods.

Even if the probability that there is a god and a Heaven is 0.5, you must multiply that by the probability given the assumption of a god that it's your particular one. To reach that 50 percent you mention, the second bit would have to be a certainty, and it is not. If there are just two other possible gods, then by worshipping yours you have a 1 in 6 chance of Heaven and a 1 in 3 chance of Hell. In fact there are an infinite number, so you're even worse off.

Taking the Blasphemy Challenge, therefore, is not a reckless act. It publicises one's acceptance that Christianity is a poor choice, and there is nothing to fear from renouncing it in what's intended to be an irreversible way.

I'm not offended by prayer, because I think it has no effect except a psychological one, and it mostly affects the praying person anyway.

This is a site built for answering questions, so go ahead and make more questions for us. If you have responses to the above, post a comment under this one. Keep in mind that formatting doesn't work in the question field, so it pays to keep new questions short.

- SmartLX

You know you can carry on from your initial question using comments, right?

It's still silly, but let's make some sense out of it all. By substituting just a few words in these arguments you get some of the real religious arguments from design, and approaches to theodicy. The issue with the above, like the real ones, is the dearth of support for the premises themselves. Take Premise 3 in the first argument for an example; even if there were scriptural support for God's similarity to a hotpocket, which I don't think there is, how is scripture itself supported?

I'm trying to go along with your intent, Pritchard, but come clean for us. What are you getting at?

- SmartLX

I hate to say it, but I wouldn't start off with the word "atheist". Losing your faith and not being religious is one thing, but atheism currently has a special stigma among Christian zealots of all kinds.

If it's important enough to you to be fully honest with people, I would simply say to selected people that you don't believe in God (anymore, if you ever did). Don't deny atheism if you're accused of it, but don't bring it up yourself.

Once it's out there, you'll have to explain yourself. Not just yourself, but all atheists - you'll find all kinds of misconceptions about them: that they hate God, that they worship Satan, that they want to force people to give up religion or remove kids from religious parents and so on.

Besides that you'll get all the really obvious, kneejerk arguments for God, like the beauty of a flower and "where did it all come from". Your family may send you to a preacher or even a Bible camp if they don't trust their own ability to proselytise. This site and the rest of the Web provides answers to pretty much all of it. Bone up. Start by searching for my "Great Big Arguments" series.

Once you've established that you've thought this through and you can't be reconverted with simple platitudes, if your community is as religious as you say it is then you will lose friends. Sorry, but some people don't like to be around atheists, who question their lifelong assumptions by just existing.

You may also find that you become better friends with others; those who are also quietly questioning their faith. When Richard Dawkins did a lecture tour through the Bible Belt, he found big, enthusiastic audiences everyplace. The irreligious are everywhere, as paranoid Christians often warn. Hopefully you'll find some more of them.

Let us know how you go, if you go ahead with it. Good luck.

- SmartLX

Well now you're just being silly. Some of the sincere arguments appear to make about as much sense though.

- SmartLX

Atheism's answer isn't communism, for one thing.

Totalitarian communist regimes suppress religion because of one person: Karl Marx. You know the famous "opium of the masses" quote? Here's more of it:

"Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people. The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions. The criticism of religion is, therefore, in embryo, the criticism of that vale of tears of which religion is the halo."

In other words, according to Marx, oppressed people use religion to make their oppression bearable. If you remove their religion they will truly feel the suffering of their situation, and be spurred to rise up and revolt. Once socialism is in place and the people are no longer oppressed, they will no longer need religion.

Communist dictatorships have of course done little to alleviate the suffering of the people living in them. They see the persistence of religion as an outward sign of this, and thus pretending that the populace is happily irreligious by forcibly ousting religion becomes an ongoing requirement for international PR.

Marx may or may not be right about religion, but he could have told the Communists that forcing people to change, hide or cease their religious activities has little effect on their actual beliefs. (Incidentally, compare the terrible coercion by Communists to the peaceful activism which is now frivolously labeled "militant atheism". Compare that to "militant Islam" while you're at it.)

Communism's self-declared incompatibility with religion does not imply that atheism is responsible for the atrocities committed in the name of communism, even less than anti-Semitic atrocities can be laid at the feet of Christianity. This is because there are no atheistic commandments, no creed, no dogma, no central authority and certainly no "apostles". Nowhere does it say, "There are no gods, therefore do this and this." Communism declares that there are no gods while separately giving its followers commands, but does not link the two.

Atheism is a simple position on the existence of gods, a single conclusion and nothing more. It does not presume to contain answers to today's or any other era's problems. By precluding absolute trust in religious doctrine, however, it leaves one open to secular philosophies and moral systems, which provide earthly, tangible, verifiable rationales for their guidance. Those only interested in "power, wealth and materialistic pleasure" are not following these philosophies any more than they're following Christian morality.

On another topic, to Ruse's list of five "blots" on Christianity I would add three more:
- The continuing attacks on science and scientists in the interest of preserving the plausibility of Christian dogma, from Galileo to Darwin.
- The Thirty Years' War of the 17th century, fought between Christians with the singular goal of spreading people's own idea of God's Word.
- The continuing death of thousands in the Third and First Worlds as a result of intrinsically ineffective abstinence-only education and the defamation of condom use.

- SmartLX

Infinity/eternity is frightening to anyone who really thinks about it. It can be especially troubling to the recently ex-religious, because they've lost their particular assurances of perfect eternal happiness. Compared to that superficial idea, the prospect of simple unending persistence is much harder to shake, because we all have a tough time imagining ourselves not existing.

Your boyfriend's on the right track intellectually, because he accepts that there probably won't be a him after he dies. We just need to address that small probability that there will, and settle his emotions a bit.

Right then, what if he IS wrong? Anything is possible. The odds of any particular afterlife story being the real deal, including whichever version he may have grown up with, is almost zero. That's because there are an infinite number of possible afterlifes: the thousands imagined by humans in the last few thousand years, plus the countless ones we haven't thought of yet.

You haven't said what he specifically fears about living forever. Maybe he hasn't really told you. He might fear torture in hell, or a post-life sentence as a ghost watching everything he knows crumble away, or imprisonment in his own disembodied mind deprived of all senses, going mad in darkness and silence. That last one sure gives me the willies.

If anything is possible, all of the above are. Is any one of them at all likely? No, because they're swimming in an endless sea of alternatives. Put simply, whatever he's afraid his ultimate fate will be if he doesn't end at death, he's almost certainly wrong.

The only death scenario for which there is any solid physical support is oblivion. The mind, the ego, the identity, the memory and everything else that comprises "you" is contained and operated in a physical, bio-electrical brain. After death, that brain first shuts down and then disintegrates. It's a materialist view, I know, but arguments against it centre on things the physical brain supposedly can't do, and without exhaustive analysis are arguments from ignorance.

So take your boyfriend's most troubling scenario and work out the chances: the probability of an identity outliving the human brain outside of all detection, multiplied by the probability of that scenario being the one real one out of infinity. It's like the chances of finding a particular blade of grass if you don't know which country it's in.

That's the thrust of my recommended reassurance. To sum up, if there's an afterlife, you can be confident that it's different from and therefore less scary than his idea of it.

- SmartLX

A certain amount of the energy that makes a human being function will certainly end up in other humans after he/she dies. A lot of it is recycled chemically in the soil that claims our bodies, for a start.

Does that count as reincarnation, though? Once that energy leaves your body, it has no memory of who or even what you were. It does not carry any part of what you would think of as your identity (you might suppose it does so invisibly, but then you're getting into the realms of fantasy).Those who come into contact with it will not be contacting "you".

It is a nice thought that our physical remains continue on as part of our larger legacy, and I've actually used that thought to comfort the bereaved. The energy we've used, while it is out there, will not produce any long-term echoes of us that anyone will ever identify. Our memories and identities are much better preserved in photo albums.

- SmartLX

Welcome WolfFable. Yeah, I ended up writing a mountain of stuff on NDEs when Maroun took it upon himself to defend them as evidence for God.

The boy you're referring to is James Leininger, who according to the story remembered details of the life of WW2 pilot James Huston, killed over Iwo Jima.

It seems to have become a flagship case for reincarnation, and in the case of the above link the religious are using it to support the existence of God. This is interesting, because reincarnation is not an accepted part of many mainstream religions. The impetus, I sadly suspect, is the New Age industry based around helping people "remember" their past lives.

Here is an excellent skeptical analysis of the case. Highlights:
- The first and only counsellor who saw the poor kid was a believer in reincarnation, who went about recovering the old memories on the immediate assumption that they were there.
- Most versions of the story fail to mention that the boy had been to the Kavanaugh Flight Museum in Dallas a few months before it all started.
- Little James talked about a Corsair, among the more distinctive planes featured at the museum. After investigation, it turned out James Huston was killed in a FM2 Wildcat.

There are other elements of the story which cannot be attacked so readily, but see how much less credible it is when just a few omitted facts are re-integrated into the story? Unfortunately parts of this story will probably get harder to pin down as time goes on, but there's enough so far to suggest that little James Leininger had plenty of earthly inspiration for his initial fixation.

Generally, reincarnation depends on the existence of souls, so you've got to establish those before you can talk about them moving between bodies. There are atheists out there who believe in ghosts, so a few atheists might well buy this concept too. I don't.

- SmartLX

"Pious fraud" is a more general term for any act of deception by a religious person or group which uses the rationale that it increases belief in a supposedly real deity. A modern Christian-centric term for it is "lying for Jesus".

Nietzsche argued that the historical claims of Christianity had been debunked, for example briefly in his 1862 essay Fate and History. (It's only four pages, so check it out.)

Elsewhere he lumped Christianity in with other religions as being based on a lie. In The Antichrist (much longer), he is eventually direct, referring to the 'lie of the "risen" Jesus'. He directly accuses Paul of lying in the same passage. Your answer is yes, Nietzsche really did think what you think he thought.

If there was no actual resurrection, and disregarding for a moment the possibility of hallucinations, someone had to be guilty of fraud, pious or not. (The chroniclers themselves are included in the list of suspects.) Arguing against this based on the character and moral fibre of those well-known characters involved does no good, for it simply implies that they were not the perpetrators.

Say for example that someone unknown impersonated Jesus so well that his friends and very old (for the period) mother believed he had returned. To achieve this he didn't have to look or sound exactly as he did, as he'd supposedly been through a lot. He just had to make the point that he was back, and disappear again. This scenario exonerates Jesus, the apostles and anyone else named in the Bible of any deception, while still letting deception happen. If you don't like that idea, come up with your own clever scheme.

Personally, the idea of Jesus' teachings fading away seems frightening enough to his followers that they would be willing to manufacture a miracle to keep them going, thus breaking a Commandment and possibly sacrificing their own souls for the cause. Clever schemes don't appeal to me as much as the infinite capacity of the human mind for rationalisation.

- SmartLX

You dismiss a lot of what I wrote to your last question, without actually addressing most of my answers. I hope you realise that you can reply directly to my answers by commenting.

The founders of modern science were deeply committed Christians because almost the entire populations of their countries were. They approached everything from a premise of Christian faith, including science.

Their scientific endeavours, however, did not utilise the catch-all explanation that a god provides. Then as now, they searched for natural explanations for physical phenomena. THEN they credited God. They did not simply say, "God did it." They said, "God caused it to happen like this." If they couldn't work something out, they said, "We don't yet know how God does this." They still had gaps in their understanding, and filling them with God didn't stop them from wanting to close them.

Scientists today can be atheists, Christians or anything else. Modern science itself is not atheistic, it is rather agnostic. It is completely divorced from theology, and does not normally take any position on the existence of gods. It looks for natural explanations as always. Once those explanations exist, the religious are free to suppose that God is responsible. If you want to establish God's necessity however, you have to undermine the natural explanation and thus attack science.

Importantly, scientists of all religions HAVE found many explanations for phenomena for which there were none. The theory of gravity has explained not just the movements of planets but the means of their formation. Germ theory has explained diseases so well that we can now fight them directly.

This does not necessarily imply that all mysterious phenomena have natural explanations. It does mean that just because something doesn't have a natural explanation now doesn't mean that it never will. So scientists keep looking, not out of faith but from prior experience that the mysterious does not always remain so.

Scientists are under no illusions that they will understand the universe and everything in it in natural terms within a year, or even a century. The gaps, though shrinking, will probably always be there. If you want to say they're gaps in our understanding of God, go ahead. They're still gaps, and they always were.

Smaller points:

- Do not misrepresent an opposing position, I'm sure you know what a straw man argument is. Nothing in existence can have created itself, and no one thinks life did. It likely didn't evolve into existence either, because evolution requires self-replication which only life has achieved. It emerged as a result of the countless chemical reactions caused by the huge variety of elements being thrown together constantly on and beneath Earth's surface. As I said before, with recent developments abiogenesis research is getting MUCH closer to a full explanation.

- Infinity is not mathematically nonsensical. It is perfectly acceptable to suppose that matter and energy, which as far as we know cannot be destroyed, will last forever into the future. Matter having lasted forever into the past is no different.

- The Big Bang was indeed a singularity, but as the religious are fond of saying, where did that singularity come from? It may have been a transient phase of an ongoing cyclical universe, or the offspring of another. There are other theories which do suppose that it emerged from what one might reasonably call "nothing", but the important thing is that those theories explain exactly how.

- You've more or less ignored my basic explanation of the origin of mind. Perhaps if I point you to animals in which its precursors have appeared: self-awareness in birds, emotions in elephants, culture in dolphins, all of the above in chimpanzees...if it helps creatures survive and procreate, which it does, then it is strengthened with each new generation.

- You've also ignored my distinction between objective morality and absolute morality. The object on which a moral or ethic is based does not need to be a universal absolute (we cannot determine whether anything is) in order to be valid; it simply needs to be common to all those who apply that morality.

- Science is not concerned with Jesus because there is no scientific evidence for him or his supposed miracles. That's not to say he didn't exist, or even that they didn't happen. There is simply nothing in the subject for science to do right now.

- Darwinian evolution is not the foundation of atheism, because there were atheists thousands of years before Darwin. It's generally accepted by atheists today, because the only real reasons to reject it are religious. Your bottom line is that because evolution contradicts the Bible, it must not be true. That premise leads you to believe that ANY existing criticism of evolution is valid, so you use them all, even the long-refuted ones like irreducible complexity. Don't.

- SmartLX

Atheists can deny gods, but we can't "negate" them. If there's a god here somewhere, it's there, and all the disbelief in the world won't destroy it. If there aren't any gods, however, all the belief in the world won't create one.

I've addressed a lot of your numbered points before if you want to have a look in Recent Posts, but I'll summarise for you.

1. The Big Bang wasn't necessarily something coming from nothing. It might have been, sure, but nothing prevents the existence of a natural precursor: say, another universe. In that case, the implication is an infinite series of universes, or a stable external universe producing unstable internal universes like this one.

Your solution to the same problem is that God created the universe, and he existed forever before that. If you can simply declare this, isn't it simpler to cut out the extra entity and suppose that the universe itself has always existed in some form? God explanations always look so clean and simple, until you then have to explain the god.

2. Name one actually irreducibly complex system. Those presented in public so far have been hypothetically reduced, and in most or all cases already had been when they were presented as irreducibly complex. If you have a favourite example, we can go through it here.

3. The mathematical refutations of abiogenesis (life from non-life) have themselves been refuted, starting with Hoyle's famous Boeing 747 argument. In brief, although the chances were small, the opportunities were many and the possible forms early life could have taken were almost infinite. Most impossible-looking probabilities suppose that only a particular protein or enzyme must be formed.

4. Quote-mining Dawkins, of all people, will get you nowhere. The Cambrian "explosion" was if anything a very slow explosion, occurring over several million of the 15 million years of the Cambrian period. It was indeed a period of great change and many new variations, but since it's around the period when animals themselves first appeared, one would expect this. Nobody said evolution had to proceed at the same rate throughout its 3.5 billion year history.

5. The incomplete fossil record is hardly a secret. A given plant or animal has an incredibly small chance of becoming a fossil at all, and we'll never find most of them anyway, so it's inconceivable that the record will ever be "complete".

Those fossils we have found, however, paint a sparse but consistent impression of branching descent from a common ancestor. What would really throw evolutionary theory off is not missing fossils, but fossils in the wrong period. The famous hypothetical example is rabbits in the pre-Cambrian.

6. The anthropic principle is often very atheistic in nature. It counters the sense of privilege we might feel in having a planet which is perfect for our needs, by saying that we could only have emerged on such a planet, wherever it was.

What you really mean is the fine-tuning argument, which states that if the conditions of the universe were even slightly different, we could not exist. In the hypothetical context of a multiverse the above applies again; out of the many different universes we could only have emerged in one which suits our needs.

There are other objections which do not require this model, for example: perhaps to achieve a different but life-friendly universe, the conditions of the universe need to be wrenched rather than tweaked, and other equilibria exist far away from the current "settings". All possible arrangements have not been tested, only those near ours.

7. The mind can be easily explained, at least in broad strokes, by evolution. The mind is beneficial. Those animals including primates which developed rudimentary versions of the brain functions we think of as "mind" had a tremendous mental advantage over those which didn't. Later, any deadly contest of will or wits was won by whoever had the better mind. Natural selection favours the clever, all other things being equal.

8. Darwin was in no doubt that an undirected system had in fact produced the brain. It may not in fact be capable of determining ultimate truth, whatever that is, but it is perfectly capable of making reasoned decisions based on the evidence before it.

9. Perhaps nothing is intrinsically "right" or "wrong". We can never know. Therefore we adopt a heuristic approach to morality: that which is beneficial is usually right, and that which is harmful is usually wrong. If it works, we keep it. If it doesn't, we change it.

Without something transcendent to ourselves there is probably no absolute morality, but there is plenty of objective morality. The objects used can be simple and straightforward, like a comparison of relative benefit and harm, or they can be tried and tested, like the ancient ethic of reciprocity (the Golden Rule), or they can be complex and careful, like the law.

These objects can certainly be challenged, but in the absence of any infallible authority we actually know exists, we use the most solid things we have, such as logic, mathematics, group consensus and our common human empathy.

Tom, I notice something about your perspective, based on your nine issues. It is not science that points to God, it is rather the perceived failings of science. You point in every case to what science supposedly can't explain (though in most of these cases it's well on the way), instead of what it can. Yours seems to be a god of the gaps.

Those gaps are getting smaller. Just this year, for instance, scientists discovered a method by which RNA (a precursor to DNA) can form, and elsewhere they synthesised rudimentary self-replicators. There is now less we don't know about the natural emergence of life from non-life than there was a year ago. God is a necessary part of that process to fewer people. The nature of gods of the gaps, Tom, is that they shrink.

If you want to keep believing, you're better off embracing the world as it really is, rather than denying things like evolution for which the evidence is overwhelming. God can always fit around science if you want Him to. Just accept that things are as they are, and say God made them that way.

- SmartLX

Your co-worker took what you said too literally. As you say, "bless you" in this context is actually short for "God bless you" which is a request for God to do the blessing rather than a blessing in and of itself. Perhaps if you reinserted "God" the next time someone sneezes around this guy...

The tradition of acknowledging a sneeze is spread worldwide, but not all of the international sayings are religious. The most famous secular response, and the one I use, is the German version "gesundheit". It literally wishes the sneezer "good health".

- SmartLX