From: "Findus"
Subject: Jesus Christ

Do you know why there is a God, Because you can't create one breath or one heartbeat, You have to start with something, from dust I came and dust I will return, but the soul of man never dies. Oh they say we have created life such as clones or a test tube baby but that is a lie, like I said in the beginning you can't create one heartbeat or one breath.

You know, this really doesn’t make much sense. God exists because we humans can’t create a breath or a heartbeat? That’s an incredible non-sequitur. Perhaps Findus actually means that it is sensible to believe in God because we can’t create a breath or a heartbeat. That’s a bit of a non-sequitur, too, but at least it's not incoherent.

Now, does our ability to do something really provide a rational, reasonable basis for believing either: 1) there is a supernatural being identical to the “God” of traditional, philosophical theism, or 2) simply that there exists some unknown being who is capable of performing this action that we cannot do?

No. There is no logical connection between the premise (we can’t do X) and either of those conclusions. We can’t fly, but that alone isn’t a sufficient basis for believing that some creature out there can fly. We can’t breathe methane, but that isn’t a sufficient reason to believe that there is some creature out there who can breathe methane. Note that in the first example such creatures do exist and, in the second, the existence of such creatures is at least logically possible. It’s simply that our inability to do these things doesn’t qualify as any sort of sound reason to believe them.

Even if we were to allow that this argument is sound, do the theists who use it really want to rely on the possibility that scientists will never be able to create a living creature from scratch? Perhaps they won’t... but then again, perhaps they will. If they do, this argument will obliviously become irrelevant. If someone relies upon this argument to justify their theism, will they become an atheist once life is created in the lab?

One day you will stand before God himself and answer for everthing you promote and you will laugh or role your eyes at this but I promise you one day you will remember, But for now Jesus still loves you and wants your heart.

I have absolutely no apprehension or anxiety over the possibility of having to “answer for” promoting things like skepticism, doubt, rationality, logic, science, etc. If any sort of god exists, and this god actually disapproves of such principles, then it is hardly worthy of even minimal respect, much less worship. People who themselves worship such a being are also not really worthy of respect — and I have to say that the only half-way reasonable basis for even considering the worship of such a being would be the purely selfish desire to avoid being harmed by it. Frankly, there is little ethical difference between worshipping such a god in order to avoid hell and saluting Hitler in order to avoid the SS.

More selections from the Agnosticism / Atheism Mailbag...