John Verderame #fundie

John Verderame #fundie answersingenesis.org

In our day, secular scientists have grown ever more arrogant in their pronunciations about who we are, or better, are not, and where everything came from in the beginning. The late Carl Sagan described us as specks living on a “pale blue dot” floating in the universe. The pope of evolution, Stephen Jay Gould, tells us we are a “lucky accident,” and that things just “happened” to work out right for the development of life on earth. Others write books with titles like, “The Universe Explained,” or “A Brief History of Time,” which push the big bang theory that we resulted from an explosion.

Have these scientists ever asked themselves, “Why should anyone listen to me?” That is a logical question if they really believe what they say. Because, if we really are nothings living on a speck of nothingness floating aimlessly toward destruction, and there are 6 billion of us, then they are one six-billionth of nothing and we should just ignore them completely because what they have to say is worthless!
[…]
What we really should do is ask them, “Why should I listen to you?” “How do you know what you are saying is true?”, or better, in Pilate’s words to Christ (John 18:38), “What is truth?” If we are nobodies, the products of chance forces beyond our control, and we live a purposeless existence wandering aimlessly in a purposeless universe, then nothing any scientist can say should even be worth listening to.
[…]
Satan demonstrated his understanding of man’s desires from the beginning when he told Adam and Eve, “Ye shall be as gods …” if they would just listen to him and ignore the Word of God. The evolutionary apostles of our day are doing the same thing. They are saying to us, “Listen to me. I know better than God.” They are their own “gods.”
[…]
Whom are we going to believe? An evolutionist who has seen a few years of life on earth, and can only guess about the past, or God Almighty who was there from the beginning?

7 comments

“Have these scientists ever asked themselves, “Why should anyone listen to me?””
Absolutely. They think about this because everything they know was explained to them by someone saying ‘…and the reason you should listen to me is…’

“Because, if we really are nothings living on a speck of nothingness floating aimlessly toward destruction, and there are 6 billion of us, then they are one six-billionth of nothing and we should just ignore them completely because what they have to say is worthless!”
So, you’re going to base your opinion on a statement that you’re going to reject…because of the statement. “I’m ignoring you by taking your truth as a given!” A little psychotic, really.

“What we really should do is ask them, “Why should I listen to you?””
Okay, but will you listen to the answer this time? Since you think ‘big bang’ is the same as a dynamite explosion, i doubt it.

““How do you know what you are saying is true?”,”
See, even that betrays your lack of understanding. ‘Truth’ is a concept for philsophy, religion, or navigation.
They’ll say what the facts are, and what the best conclusions they’ve seen to explain those facts. Then it’s in your hands.

"If we are nobodies, the products of chance forces beyond our control, and we live a purposeless existence wandering aimlessly in a purposeless universe, then nothing any scientist can say should even be worth listening to.”
And they’ve waited 4000 years for anyone who disagrees to produce the purpose they insist is out there. Somewhere.
Frankly if you think you have NO purpose unless a divine power is sponsoring one, you’re not worth listening to, either.

You're seriously asking me to choose between an actual human being and a figment of mythology?

A Conservative Christian who can prove you wrong.

Why shouldn't we listen to Dr. Buzz Aldrin, OP...?!

Whom are we going to believe? An evolutionist who has seen a few years of life on earth, and can only guess about the past, or God Almighty who
was there from the beginning?

Well, the former is known for a fact to exist. All evidence there ever is for the existence of the latter is someone like JV going “Either we were created by an Almighty God and have a special place in His creation or we’re nobodies!! And I don’t wanna be a nobody!! So GOD! EXISTS!”

Have these scientists ever asked themselves, “Why should anyone listen to me?”

Yes, which is why scientists tend to have titles and credentials and such and tend to back up their claims with EVIDENCE.

The better question is, have creationists ever asked themselves, “Why should anyone listen to me?”

Whom are we going to believe? An evolutionist who has seen a few years of life on earth, and can only guess about the past, or God Almighty who was there from the beginning?

Thing is, it’s NOT “god almighty” who claims that. It’s YOU who claims to speak FOR “god almighty” with no proof that you are actually an oracle or prophet. So who are we going to believe? A scientist with decades of work behind them, or a lying charlatan full of hubris?

John, why should anyone listen to you? The people you denounce spent their “few years of life” studying how the universe works. You? You had one book of Bronze Age fairy tales read to you by someone who was only the most recent link in a millenia-long chain of critical-thinking-adverse superstitious ignoramii. We're not ignoring “God,” we're ignoring the marketing team. If your god wants to deliver a message, he should eschew the faulty middlemen he's been employing all these many long years, and give it to us himself, unfiltered, unabridged, and literally from the talking donkey's mouth.

What is truth? Who the fuck knows. As an evolutionary biologist that is not what I want to find out. Strange huh? Are scientists not searching for objective truth? No, because we, as a species, are utterly unable to find it. Our senses are limited, our reach is limited, and we can never rule out that in the next few moments the entire universe turns into cheese cake. What we as scientists want to find is empirical truth, trying to create models and theories that best explain our observations. I also admit that we make assumptions in doing so (for example “physical reality doesn’t spontaneously change and turn everything into cheese cake”), but if these were challenged we would try to adapt our theories and models to it.

The thing is, our explanations and models and theories may be flawed, are certainly not “true reality” etc, but they have value. They allow us to get a better, if somewhat indirect and imperfect understanding of our universe that can then be used for further analysis. That this works is already obvious considering that we have used science to develop technologies and medicine that are mostly reliable (which we wouldn’t expect if we were too far off) and in the fact that science makes testable predictions that often have turned out to be true (for example the orbit of Mercury, which both Newtonian mechanics and General relativity predicted to be a certain way, with GR turning out to be “more correct”). If science is wrong, the error usually manifests itself quickly and causes us to change our models and theories accordingly, but that usually means that previous theories are not entirely invalidated, often it turns out that they are just special cases of the newer theories (Newtonian mechanics for example being a special case of GR). And so our theories often have merit even after they have been “falsified”.

Religion makes truth statements without them being testable. That’s fine as long as it doesn’t contradict blatantly obvious observations. After all, a god MIGHT exist. The supernatural is not part of science since it obviously goes beyond our ability to test and measure. Scientists usually don’t make any statements about it whatsoever. The “worst” science can say about religion is that there are thousands of different, contradicting religious and supernatural truth statements, and that this means that stochastically speaking, it is unlikely for any one of them (and in fact any of them in general) to be the ACTUAL truth.
If you say “Listen to God” I can say without any logical problem “Which one? How?”. Truth statements without evidence have to be believed. If I don’t believe, there is no further merit to them, that is the problem with morality based on authoritarian, supernatural sources. Ultimately, what you are describing here OP is your fear of your own believed worldview to be wrong, nothing more.

Humanity has always lived as specks of dust, yet most of our beliefs center around us being special, chosen people by God/Gods/other supernatural enities who ultimately are the most important beings in the universe. Some of us fear not being given special treatment and others (sometimes rightfully) can’t help but hope that there is something out there taking care of them in an otherwise often hostile world. I get that. But ultimately I think that the scientific removal of humanity from its self-placed pedestal of being the center of the universe will help us find the humanity in each other, make us come closer together, since we are all that we have. This is not something to despair over. The universe is vast and most likely utterly indifferent towards us. But you could also see us as the part of the universe which DOES care. And science as our method to find out at least somewhat more about us, rather than insisting on already knowing everything.

In conclusion: “Why should I listen to you?” “How do you know what you are saying is true?” Those are important questions, but you yourself are trying to special plead yourself out of them by stating that God is exempt from them and that you know all there is to know about his will. That’s at best highly arrogant and presumptuous. I know that what we scientists say is not “This is the truth” but “This theory has been tested a lot and explains our observations best”. And that certainly is more worthy of listening to.