Mental poison
Religions at large are toxic and objectionable. I don’t just mean organised religion. I mean deliberate inculcation of superstition in children. Look, here it is in a nutshell: no credible explanation of anything has ever worked better with God in it. Let’s deconstruct some of the more annoying bullshit.
The world is unlikely, therefore someone made it.
Everything that happens every day is vanishingly improbable. The chances that something will happen are 100%, and there are so many candidate futures that if they are randomly distributed then all of them are unspeakably implausible. Thus, the chances of realising an unbelievably implausible future are 100%. All this is modified by the fact that the world is an emergent system full of strange attractors, rendering certain outcomes close to inevitable. But that model also precludes divine intervention: given the myriad complex paths the water might take down the side of a wineglass, what are the chances that most of the water will end up in the bottom of the glass? 100%.
Chances that God did it just for me: lim x→0.
Even if we were to allow the complexity argument, adding God doesn’t solve the problem, it simply moves it. You then have to explain an even more implausible super-being that creates universes but doesn’t like being looked at and keeps hiding, despite an allegedly profound personal interest in each and every one of us: a kind of galactic snuffleupagus. Churches dodge this glaring flaw in their twaddle by telling their marks that God is ineffable. This is merely an erudite way of giving them a clip round the ear and telling them to eat their dinner.
Evolution is unlikely, therefore it doesn’t happen.
Bollocks. Apart from the fact that nearly everything is unlikely, the probability of evolution occurring is 100% because it has already been observed to take place. Nearly all mosquitoes carry the genes for tolerance of DDT. All rabbits in Australia have high resistance to myxomatosis I and II (bio-weapons tested on them by the Australian government).
You can’t breed dogs with cats, therefore it’s impossible to turn one species into another, therefore evolution can’t happen. The existence of many species is therefore an observed miracle and evidence of the existence of God.
Once again this falls apart in the first phrase. You can breed dogs with cats, you just can’t do it the old fashioned way. You can even breed fruit-flies with jellyfish, producing glow-in-the-dark fruit-flies. I hear someone even produced a cat with glow-in-the-dark fur, using the same spliced gene. Having disposed of the
You can’t coherently counter argue this because the argument is utterly specious. It’s a progression of non-sequiturs beginning with a false statement.
Evolution works like this: you buy all the lotto tickets. Not only are your chances of winning quite high, you keep last week’s winner and cash it in again. Over time it’s like sorting through a deck of cards patiently extracting high-value cards. It doesn’t take long to find yourself in possession of a genetic full-house. Unfortunately, everyone else is doing this too so you have to keep cheating like mad.
You can’t prove the non-existence of God, therefore God exists.
However much fun it may be to to flip this on its head (you can’t prove the existence of God, therefore God does not exist) both arguments are bollocks for reasons hilariously explicated by John Cleese.
However, you can formulate explanations of the world with and without, and Occam’s Razor tells us to choose the simplest reliable explanation. Reliability is measured by the utility and repeatability of prediction. Occasional pearls of actual wisdom are salted through superstition in an attempt to give it credibility prior to gulling the marks, and unfortunately many people are stupid, and even some intelligent people are so desperate for meaning in their tawdry, frustrated lives that they’ll believe any old ***.