When someone makes the comment that 'evolution is only a theory', I reply that God is just a hypothesis. © #atheism #nogod #atheist—
Monica (@Monicks) March 13, 2010
Only a theory.
04 Friday Nov 2011
Posted in Atheism
04 Friday Nov 2011
Posted in Atheism
Gravity, atomic structure, light, the common cold, cancer, and most everything else are theories. I very much enjoy your messages…
I don’t think the term hypothesis works particularly well for god either.
From dictionary.com:
“hypothesis: A proposition, or set of propositions, set forth as an explanation for the occurrence of some specified group of phenomena, either asserted merely as a provisional conjecture to guide investigation (working hypothesis) or accepted as highly probable in the light of established facts.”
Neither part of this definition applies to the concept of god. The proposition of a god warrants or accepts no further investigation, so the first part is out. Said proposition is also not highly likely in light of established facts, so the second part is out as well.
God is pure conjecture and speculation in absence of fact or evidence. It is a logically unsupported assertion designed to fill the gaps in our knowledge without further inquire.
It’s kind of an insult to the word hypothesis.
A hypothesis must be a provisional proposition until either well supported or supplanted in light of new evidence and facts. The god proposition fails this test.
Creationists want to return to a time when we did not have any explanation for why life had arisen, and therefore, we posited the existence of gods who created life. That time has passed; we now have a fine explanation for the existence of life which fits all of the observations.
All of their attempts to find ‘defects’ in the theory – ostensibly to bring it down – are completely missing the point.
It’s a *huge* fallacy to think that if any defect is found in the theory, then thus creationism wins — especially since its previous standing as ‘best guess’ was based entirely on a complete lack of a non-magical explanation. A given magical explanation was never any better than any other magical explanation. It is like arguing that if an unexpected deviation is found in the orbit of Pluto, then astronomers should react by going back to believing that the Earth is (a) actually flat and (b) supported in its seat beneath the heavens by — specifically –elephants and turtles.
If there is a scratch in the paint of my house, I ‘m not therefore going to abandon it and come and live in your flawless, magical soap bubble.
We cannot pretend that evolution is a optional ‘belief’, after seeing all the evidence we have, after sequencing DNA for so many animals and finding that it’s in agreement with virtually everything that was deduced indirectly from the fossil record, morphology and geographical distribution. Just as we cannot look at pictures recently taken from within the shadow of Saturn — a viewpoint that can only be reached by constructing a spacecraft and navigating it there — and then ever pretend that the Earth is flat and the sun travels over it.
The “God Hypothesis” is more of an assertion than an hypothesis.
I’m fine with people saying that evolution is a theory. It is. If they understand that the theory offers our best explanation for the variety of organisms on the planet and how they change and have changed over time then so much the better. If they don’t understand that and equate “theory” with “I think that maybe it was aliens who stole the toilet paper” then there is a problem with their understanding.
I don’t even have an issue with people who say that evolution is wrong. Presumably they are biologists who have come up with a competing theory that explains everything that evolution explains only better. I eagerly await their peer reviewed papers on the subject. If they are an ignorant religitard who doesn’t know that the cosmology isn’t related to biological evolution as a science then they have a problem.
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