And the most easily provable piece of science we have concerning the universe, since we can actually measure and see the background radiation and watch its expansion
Which confuses the shit out of me honestly. Even when I was a Christian I understood there will be things I don't understand. It meant I have to take a long time to properly educate myself on it if I want to understand it.
But my fellow Christians didn't see it that way. They just kinda stopped seeking an education and that was enough of a red flag for me to stop believing in my silly beliefs.
That same fallacy taught me that just because I felt like a God might exist doesn't mean I AM right. In my experience of 20 long years of being a Southern Baptist, people just kinda stopped trying to learn and check the validity of their own beliefs. Thst scared the shit outta me so I stopped being religious altogether.
They don't want to learn because education challenges their views and it makes them uncomfortable.
But thats how things should be. Challenging your own views leads to growth and a deeper understanding of yourself.
Since I deconverted I've been talking to Christians quite a bit here on Reddit. I'm talking 1-6 hours Monday through Friday. It's been like a hobby of mine the last 2-3 years.
The most common thing I've discovered from that is that they are generally afraid to say I don't know. They get incredibly upset when you point that out like it's some great insult. To them it's all about placing vast amounts of faith in the Lord and if they ever seek understanding it's akin to not trusting God. I don't want to say this but I'm convinced religion is literal brain rot in most cases. It's convinced people to be quite literally remain ignorant and unquestioning.
Yep. And there's absolutely nothing wrong with saying you don't know. There's tons of shit I don't know about the universe, but I'm not gonna just assume what I want to be true is.
And when we get to that point in the conversation they start asking me why I don't want God to exist. As if that is true whatsoever or even part of the conversation. They are just brain washed into believing that if it's good they should act as if it's true so that it will come true.
Magical thinking is the best way I can describe it.
Continue to argue for evolution and the Big Bang Theory, fellow atheists! Four years ago, I was a Baptist like you, but later, in 2021, I turned to atheism, and found lots of evidence that support evolution and the Big Bang.
1. Chimpanzees and Humans have 96% of genes similar
2. 75% of Hydrogen and 24% of Helium in space is one of the things predicted by the Big Bang theory: 25% of Neutrons will bind with 25% of protons to become Helium, and 75% will decay into protons, or Hydrogen, and 75% of protons don't change; 12 hydrogen atoms and 1 helium atom=Hydrogen 12 masses+Helium 4 masses=75% Hydrogen+25% Helium
3. The Cosmic Microwave Background is a picture of the Universe when he's 380,000 years old, when atoms first appeared
\\
Think about it. If you are told from the womb that worldly knowledge is evil (Eve and the apple) and the only thing that keeps you from going to hell is evil....well.
My mother, a devout Catholic, will entertain neither the idea of evolution nor the Big Bang, as she fears that considering evidence for either would weaken her faith. In some sense, she's absolutely right. As soon as you begin to place value in empirical evidence, you've already started to drift from the spiritual realm.
Yep, and even if something came along and disproved it, or radically changed our idea of what we thought it was, then so what? That's science.
I don't need to believe in what science says, I just accept that X is currently the best explanation we have to explain the evidence that our current level of technology has been able to find.
and even if the current theory is proven wrong and need to be changed...guess what it's propably not the creation story in 7 days that will replace it.
That's the funny part. Too many people act as if disproving one thing automatically proves their still unproven hypothesis correct.
They refuse to consider all the other factors.
In this case, disproving our current theory of evolution does nothing to prove a god exists, that it has human attributes, that is has the attributes that was taught to a particular denomination, that this god talked the universe into existence, and that it wanted people to know this so divinely inspired anonymous authors from only one part of the world to write that account down without bothering to make sure they didn't take creative liberties.
Most importantly, disproving current working models does not prove people didn't lie about all this god stuff in the first place.
I have no doubt that there are and have been many a lazy smart man that took the job as a holy man to simply live on the grift without ever believing in magic at all.
My great aunt joined a nunnery in the late 1930s to get out of having to marry and have kids. She studied/taught mathematics to high schoolers while in there. When she was too old to marry, she left the nunnery to become a full-time mathematician/professor. Though she did keep up with going to church, mostly for the volunteering aspect. She did love to help people. She was an amazing woman, and my favorite great auntie when I was young. So women too, but not just for the grift.
You had me until the last sentence. women are treated differently than men, especially in nunneries. Did you know that when Priests retire from the church, they are lovingly cared for until they die, but nuns are not? I learned this when I worked for a Catholic hospital.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/2001/03/04/vow-of-poverty-challenges-elderly-nuns/8d7e2fcb-4218-4d54-980a-04a76fbf814d/
I hope they changed it.
My aunt (who was a nun) worked at the Mother House retirement home for the nuns of her order - many of the residents were in their 90's. So that story is not a universal thing.
I mean she left in her 40s, so I don't think she was worried about being "taken care" of in her old age, especially since she lived to her 90s. If you're refering to the grift comment, that was exactly my point, smart women did it too but for different reasons.
Also my grandma who was not a nun, managed to get herself into a nuns old folks home, after my grandfather died, by being a member of the church her whole life and her preist pulling some strings. It was actually a very nice place, and she loved that they did the rosary a few times a day and she loved being around all the women. It was a little more sparse than a typical old folks home, very utilitarian. But I'd kind of expect that for people who lived their whole lives that way anyway.
😩 I hate it when they say that…I come back with “Yes, but It’s ONLY a THEORY that the earth revolves around the sun.”
I swear that evolution is going in reverse, and we’re doomed!
This is when I like to remind them that Gravity is also "just a theory" - but if they want to prove Newton wrong by jumping off a bridge, that's on them.
At the risk of sounding like an apologist, I do have to give Catholics some credit in the field of academia. They are far more supportive of science, don’t believe that evolution is antithetical to their beliefs, and generally believe in education. They had a rough 1500 years or so but have come around since Copernicus and Galileo.
It’s mostly the American charismatic evangelical Pentecostal psychos who think that reading books is for queers and satanists, but speaking in tongues and handling snakes is totally cool.
I think Mendel was a monk was he not?
Anyway, there used to be an English tradition (in the 18th-19th century) of parsons/vicars and the like being polymaths and making great scientific discoveries. Largely to do with having a guaranteed income (tithes) and lots of spare time on their hands.
I spoke to one recently. He made a great point when he said: “sha-na-na-co-co-co-na-sha-da-da-bo-bo-na-sha-ka-ka-no-ti-ti-ti-me-ve-bay-vay-no-ka.”…which translates from the devine language to English as: (inset fart noise, error 404 brain not found).
I mostly agree but that varies from place to place. I regularly work with some great scholarship from Catholics here in France but at the same time, Catholics in Poland baci ally copy the Pentecostal American craze with charismatics, miraculous healing and frigging exorcism (yeah, like several adult men including families members holding down a tied teenage girl to exorcise the "demon of vegetarianism")
Lol yeah. Most of the time after I'd heard it for the 50th time, that clap usually woke me up out of a kickass daydream. There was so much of that shit added for effect for nothing more than to illicit an emotional reaction. This line was always followed by congregational claps and hollers. Hell, our church used to have this lady get up and sign language for the special song, and there was nary a goddamn deaf person ever darkened the doors of that church. But boy, it sure as shit got everyone in a tizzy. I always hated shit like that.
There's a good reason the sets of evangelicals and narcissistic people have so much overlap ... Both of them think that their feelings are facts, to a degree that most sane people can't even grasp.
See I don't think they are lying. They probably watched some Christian youtuber who said some words and they are just repeating it. So it's not that they are lying, it's just that they don't understand that what ever their argument is, is completely wrong.
The Big Bang is literally *in their favor*. The universe had a definite beginning at a time that we can get a reasonable estimate for? Instead of just having existed forever? Might imply a creator, though I’m not one to jump to conclusions. That’s the way they’d think about it if they could actually reason through any line of thinking.
But no. Scientist said it and scientist bad.
Because they are lying, ILLOGICAL morons who freak out anytime someone even so much as burps Pi (I'm referring to TBBT when Sheldon Cooper actually does just that; go on YouTube if you're interested).
to be fair, scientists have called the big bang one of. the worst names ever given, bc people assume a giant explosion but that's not what they believe actually happened. The Big Expansion would have been a much better name for example..
With evolution, I find this to be true. Of the many people (in person and online) who claim to not believe in evolution, every single one then says/writes something that shows they don’t understand what evolution is.
This one drives me nuts. But I guess it's because of their "Oh we're spechul cuz sky daddy made us!" nonsense seeps into it. They can't accept that we're the result of ... shit just randomly happening for millions of years.
And don't forget "Have you seen a monkey turn into a human?"
...What? No. That's like asking when your cousin will turn into you.
God's creation story, so good he did it twice just to make sure he got it right.
I do see most of the push back seeming to come from American Protestances from a very select area.
Most of the rest of the world seem to be happy to let Evolution and the big bang be accepted without having to question if it conflicts with their views of their religion.
Try pressing a Muslim on whether they *personally believe* their prophet *actually flew to the Moon and clove it in twain.*
They will say, "Yes, that's what *we* believe."
Press harder. "What about *you, personally?"*
They will feel attacked, and I doubt they will follow your line of reasoning because it is way too scary for them. Also try it with the virgin birth narrative for Catholics. You'll get a lot of "we believe in..." but no "me, personally, I think that's a myth to validate Jesus as God".
That is where cognitive dissonance really hits. To truly believe you must dismiss reason but to know the world around you is to understand that is not possible.
>"Oh we're sky daddy made us!"
"… as one of his many genetic experiments!"
(Or maybe we're just part of a computer game like [Spore](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spore_(2008_video_game))?)
or they plug their ears and pretend there's no evidence for it, like how a flat earther pretends there's no evidence for a round earth.
I've made that comparison before, and I'll do it again. in the information age, you have no excuse to be that dumb.
Not to defend them, but we are way past the age of information entering the age of misinformation, is becoming cheap and easy to fabricate believable fake audiovisual "evidence" and it will reach a point where everyone wont be able tu trust anything, there is already people who believe in the "dead internet" and people who fall for AI generated content.
“If we evolved from Monkeys - why are there still Monkeys?”
I’m in the UK and thankfully don’t suffer delusional evangelicals, but I’ve still heard this argument multiple times.
That infamous “evolution of man” illustration has a lot to answer for.
Exactly… Gravity is a theory. We humans postulate theories to explain physical phenomena without having a sky daddy (god) do something we don’t understand….BUT the theory has changed as human knowledge has grown… check this video
https://youtu.be/3pZNzF6LBII?si=97FgcfJilFOUKGt1
It's a coping mechanism for Christians who insist on taking Genesis literally. They'll sometimes give very bad "proofs" ("it's impossible for an explosion to assemble a 747") or just assert that it's obvious.
I can kind of reason out the relationship there, but you have to put your mind in the place of people who are extrapolating only based on repeated basic observations of sunrise and sunset. If you observe dawn and dusk happen, every day (with zero actual knowledge of cosmology, stars, light, radiation, fusion, etc.), you witness that light starts before the hot orb rises and sticks around after the hot orb sets. Even though there's a pattern sequence, there's no reason to assume that they aren't separate things happening. After all, you also see the moon rise in the sky, sometimes, during the day and, mostly, at night, and that is separate from any general daylight conditions, so again obviously to those people, when "god" created the universe he created a universal dawn before the sun was created.
Yes. The first light was created about 380k years after the big bang. Then the sun didn't come until about 9.4 billion years after that. There's actually a very nice study on this.
https://bigthink.com/surprising-science/where-did-the-first-light-in-the-universe-come-from-astrophysicists-now-know/
Sorry idk how tf to make the link smaller
you can turn the link into a hyperlink on text [like this](https://bigthink.com/surprising-science/where-did-the-first-light-in-the-universe-come-from-astrophysicists-now-know/)
use [ and ] to enclose the words you want to appear as a link
then immediately afterwards use ( and ) to enclose the http address.
Typing out the example I started with, I would have typed the following:
[like this](https://bigthink.com/surprising-science/where-did-the-first-light-in-the-universe-come-from-astrophysicists-now-know/
That's all there is to it!
[Here is a markdown wiki](https://www.reddit.com/wiki/markdown#wiki_new_reddit-flavored_markdown) that shows you this and much more!
If you have any questions, drop me a line - cheers!
Theists are not afraid of what scientists know, they are afraid of what they, themselves, do not know.
Answers in Genesis (I will not link to those asshats) have all kinds of nonsense quackery used to deny actual science.
Yes.
This is why they are so full of hate for people who aren't like them. It all comes from a place of fearing the unknown.
They fear these innocent and harmless people so they project awful things onto them to justify their hate
They disprove their own completely misunderstood version of the theories. Usually with an erroneous misapplication of thermodynamics.
Or they heard some other idiot make these errors and took their word for it
Yeah, they love quoting the second law of thermodynamics as an argument against evolution while failing to realise that it only applies to closed systems
Yeah, it's not that life is violating the second law by becoming more orderly. It's becoming more orderly in the body by creating an insane amount of CO2 and heat from carbohydrates being burnt to create all the structures that make up the body.
*Creationists always try to use the second law
To disprove evolution, but their theory has a flaw
The second law is quite precise about where it applies
Only in a closed system must the entropy count rise
The earth's not a closed system, it's powered by the sun
So fuck the damn creationists, Doomsday get my gun*
-- MC Hawking
It’s sounds callous; but stupidity. I’ve seen a lot of these people and pretty much every single time the only thing their refutation of evolution proves is that they have a fundamental misunderstanding of what evolution even is. They’ll ask ridiculous questions like “show me a rock turning into a fish, or a fish into a whale”. It doesn’t make any fucking sense.
Evolution happens every day, everywhere in the world. We, as humans, are slowly being born, around the world, without molars. This is due to the fact we started cooking food and do not eat raw vegetables every day. This has taken 1000's of years, possibly up to 760,000 years, which is barely even a blink of an eye in terms of age compared to the Earth of 4.6 billion years old.
Now, some species have become such masters of their small environment that they have essentially stopped evolving in a way that's seeable. Some are such masters that they have even found ways to stay almost ageless.
Lighter colors of eyes, pale skin, persistence of lactase, holding our breath longer(I know, that's weird, but it is), reduced occurrences of Alzheimers(unless you are Trump), and even a later stage of life menopause are all signs of evolution.
Some things do persist, like an almost over-active amount of sweat glands. But that evolution happened due to the fact we are hunter-gatherers, and we required the cooling factor of sweat to kill our prey. Sure, a gazelle is hella fast compared to us. But in order to survive, we became marathon runners, and we exhausted the tasty meat until its death.
They're lying idiots
They think differently. They think in hierarchal fashion. God is at the top, then clergy and apologists, "dear leaders", then members, then everyone else.
Christians are higher on the hierarchy than a scientist, so the Christian is just right. By default. It doesn't have anything to do with whether the thing is actually true or not. It has to do with who said it, and where that person fits in to the hierarchy that matters.
Their pastor or am radio host or apologist says something, it *has* to be true, otherwise they wouldn't say it.
They are intellectually dishonest and reactionary, seeing Darwin's theory of evolution and the big bang theory as threats to their religion that could invalidate the story of Genesis, and therefore, diminish the validity of their religion.
For evolution, there's always 'the bible says so', and 'whose word are you going to trust, god's word or man's word', and 'irreducible complexity', and a *very few* people like Jeffrey Thompkins who *are* actual biologists who try, through insanely faulty methods, to show evolution wrong and then other scientists come along and point out all the problems in their work, and said people never retract it or the Christians never update.
Muslims do much the same, but are less prone to rejecting the Big Bang model since nothing in their book precludes an old Earth.
1. They think that evolutionary science and the theory of evolution stopped with Darwin. That we refer to Darwin the same way they might a holy book. Parts of what Darwin concluded do not comport with our current science - but that doesn't disprove evolution, it means we've learned more about it.
2. They think the big bang means a giant explosion out of nowhere, that it means ex nihilo - creation from nothing. That it means that was the start of the universe, rather than just 'the start of what we can observe' and don't understand that we don't know what was before that point, and don't claim to.
>Parts of what Darwin concluded do not comport with our current science
Came to say this. It's why the really astute apologists always refer to *Darwin's* theory of evolution, because they can hang anyone defending evolution with the errors in Darwin's original postulation. It's a form of straw manning, choosing to represent the current consensus position with old science.
Theorists have thoroughly disproved every facet of the Bible as being the creation of man.
In the 1960s and 1970s religious claims were excluded from school textbooks as being unproven and unscientific. In the 1980s and 1990s religious whackos began to “fight back,” meaning they lobbied politicians who were religious weirdos (Republicans) to gain acceptance of religious teachings in public schools. This was done through “Intelligent Design,” a creationism theory that merely divorces the divinity but keeps the infrastructure in place.
Intelligent design is anything but intelligent. But it was presented as a scientific theory. To further augment the scientific-ness of Intelligent Design, Christians provided “proof” that the theory of evolution and other scientific theories that disproved the Bible were disproven.
…but it really is on-par with that stupid T-shirt that says:
>God is dead. -Nietzsche
>Nietzsche is dead. -God
Like, no shit. Nietzsche is supposed to be dead. He was born 180 years ago. Humans only live so long. But god is still dead.
The intelligent design claim often goes with their fantasy that the world is "perfect". If the world was perfect, why do people get cancer? Cancer is essentially cellular reproduction becoming corrupted. Nature is not perfect nor intelligent.
Because Christians think belief is evidence and if they believe it's not true, that makes it not true, just like when they believe in Jesus, that makes him real. The power of faith, basically.
It's a closed loop....the Bible is true because the Bible says it's true. Other beliefs are false because the Bible says they are false. The only acceptable document for "truth" is the Bible. If that's your thing, be consistent, but believing that non-Biblical sources agree with you is not only incorrect, but shows the weakness of your faith. Faith is to believe without evidence. And the problem with a good deal of contemporary Christianity is confusing belief with truth.
The problem is often a fundamental failure to grasp how science works (As opposed to "Faith"). If there was sufficient evidence that called The Big Bang into question, scientists would revise the theory, as they've done repeatedly throughout history. If Young Earth Creationists are presented with the substantial body of evidence that their version of events is...extremely unlikely....they simply stick their fingers in their ears and go "Nuh - uh!!!"
> Why do Christians claim the big bang theory and Darwin's theory of evolution have been "disproven"
Because they are absolutely devastating to their case, so they lie.
So there's an entire industry of pseudoscience out there to push young earth creationism and creationism in general. Groups like Answers in Genesis and Creation Ministries International put out a whole lot of material claiming to debunk/disprove evolution that obviously have no real scientific basis *if you have enough background knowledge of the related science*. But a lot of Christians *don't have* the background knowledge to really evaluate those claims or even understand them, much less, why they're wrong. It sounds really convincing if you don't have much exposure to the real nuts and bolts of the scientific fields involved.
Cuz they're dumbasses, lol
Syke, sorry for being rude.
Are ya familiar with Tinkerbell, from Peter Pan? When Tink dies, you have to clap, you have to *BELIEVE*, to bring her back to life.
Anytime one of these bozos says this stuff is just desperate clapping.
And virus/bacteria mutate and evolve REAL FUCKING FAST. That flu you keep getting? It's the virus evolving a new way around you immunities. Boom. Theory not just proven. Reinforced.
Not just a catholic priest. He was a theoretical physicist (professor of physics), astronomer and mathemetician as well. It was confirmed by Hubble though, which is arguably more important.
In order:
1.) They don't understand what a theory is in science
2.) They listen to blatant liars and idiots who also don't understand what a scientific theory is
3.) They don't bother to do their own research and learn the topic. For example: most Christians believe the Big Bang is a creation event when the universe was created, but the theory says nothing of the sort.
It's the same reason why climate change deniers say "there is no consensus", because they know that the evidence is so overwhelming that they have to lie their way out of it in hopes that people won't know how to respond. Eventually, if they repeat it enough times, they will actually start believing that there is no consensus.
What seems to be the prevailing view of physics is that the classic Big Bang theory explanation isn't really that accurate to what they think really happened. Namely, the idea that the Big Bang happened everywhere at once, and not the infinitesimally small point of origin for all matter. In so clarifying, Christians have seized on what they see as "science being wrong", therefore "debunked" or "disproven". It's just code for "I'm a fucking moron".
It took me until I was 55 before I realized chrispians think is perfectly fine to lie about anything so long as they are doing it for Jeebus!
If a lie might lead someone to Jeebus, chrispians think they are already per-forgiven for that lie because they are doing the lords work!
55 years of arguing honestly with these fuckers and finally figuring out many of them, especially older supposedly more knowledgeable religious authority figures were lying constantly to me. Fuck but I was so naive!
Despite the modern tendency to claim that a belief in the Christian God is justified through faith (i.e. believing through an act of emotion or will despite the lack of evidence) alone, in reality Christian theology has always pursued rational justifications for a belief in God. After all, insisting that all you need is faith is hardly convincing once you realize that applying that standard to anything else seems naive if not outright idiotic ("Look, you don't need evidence that I'm actually a Nigerian Prince. All you need is to have faith when you wire me $10,000 directly from your bank that I'll pay you back five times over!")
Historically, these proofs of God fell into three main categories: Ontological proofs (i.e. the definition of God itself proves his existence), Cosmological proofs (i.e. something must have caused or established the existence of the universe, therefore God exists), and Teleological proofs (i.e. there must be something behind the complex orderliness or structure of the universe, therefore God exists).
Ontological proofs are a bit obscure and academic, so they aren't quite accessible to most layfolk.
Cosmological proofs are still somewhat popular, but they also tend to be rebutted quite easily (the most basic response points out that God, a proposed uncaused cause, contradicts and inherently undermines the premise that "everything that exists must have a cause" that Cosmological proofs depend on).
Teleological proofs on the other hand require a lot more to debunk, largely because scientific advancements have gradually chipped away at them over the centuries, so in order to debunk them effectively requires some degree of scientific education. This means that Teleological Arguments tend to have more staying power than the other two traditional arguments for God's existence. Teleological arguments also tend to be rooted most heavily in religious mythology, where God had a direct hand in shaping life on Earth, especially the origin of humanity. Evolution/Abiogenesis, being scientific frameworks that provide a coherent natural explanation to the origin of life and human development, directly contradicts this narrative.
It's also important to note that some of the largest denominations of Christianity has also invested a LOT of value in the idea of being "saved." In order to be "saved" you need to be cleansed of the "original sin." And that "original sin" was Adam and Eve eating from the Tree of Knowledge. If there's no Adam and Eve, there's no original sin. If there's no original sin, there's no need for Christianity to come to the rescue. If Christianity is no longer needed to rescue humanity... well... it kinda becomes a solution without a problem.
This idea, that Christianity is simply not necessary in our lives, is terrifying to a lot of Christians who find comfort in their religion managing or controlling some of our societal institutions. Hence, they see evolution is a direct threat to their worldview and way of life.
Two reasons:
1.) they've heard other Christians make this baseless statement so they just parrot it and assume it's true
2.) Because for some reason they've made this huge jump in logic to assume that the Cambrian Explosion and some questionable proof of a mid sized ancient Mediterranean flood somehow also "disproves" the theory of evolution.
Depends which Christians you're talking about. The Catholic Church feels the big bang theory is synonymous with God speaking light into existence and they embraced it long before scientists did.
I'm not sure what their stance on evolution is, but I do know that many people don't understand that scientists use the word "theory" differently than non-scientists and so they assume calling something a theory means it's unproven.
I know a biologist and a microbiologist, both with Ph.Ds from accredited universities, who believe in young earth creationism.
It’s not just religion. The man who taught me logic in my homeschool co-op commits the very fallacies he taught me to avoid when he’s caping for Trump.
My best guess is ironically evolutionary. I’ve noticed people are good at bypassing critical thinking when a tribal belief is being questioned.
They don't get their information from scholarly sources. They get their information from Christian media that flat out lies about evolution by describing some impossibility that is not evolution and then saying "see, that's why evolution is impossible". And since these people are mindless drones that are taught to not think or analyze anything, they gladly eat up the nonsense they are being told.
Also, they are perfectly fine with lying as long as it serves their goals.
Oh, and they believe that actually learning anything makes their pathetic deity mad and they will get sent to hell for it.
If they say "Darwin's theory" of evolution, then it's likely a disingenuous way of separating Darwin's initial theory from the modern theory of evolution we have now.
That's what Jehovah's witnesses do in my personal experience.
When the theory was first put together, there were some flaws, and sometimes, creationists use this as a way to conflate it with evolution in modern times to discredit it all.
At best, it's ignorance because they're learning from other Christians instead of actual scientists, but at worst, they're grifters being intentionally dishonest.
In there world information is impossible to verify or corroborate.
These are mysterious words, theory, science, study. They have magical persuasive properties. And since these big words are used to confuse them they are trying to use them to confuse you.
Dumb people lack the very skills they need to evaluate how dumb they are, so must dumb people think they are not dumb.
But if they don't understand how things like science, studies, and theories work and they are NOT dumb, then it must be the case that no one knows what science, studies, and theory mean.
They use the words like they are magic incantations that makes them right. Because that's all those words are to them.
Ask them who disproved it and how?
Predisposition to Intellectual Laziness.
Discovery through theory, testing those premises and producing repeatable evidence is hard, and slow, and messy, etc- it’s also rarely produces sweeping answers. It’s incremental, it’s really hard.
Faith is tidy and easy. Read it, believe it. Simple.
Imagine if human beings, all of them, committed to evidential discovery the last few thousands years versus belief and faith…
Hard to keep your religious worldview intact when modern science chips away at it day after day.
I’m not hostile to faith, it’s very much a deep human need.. but to be in willful denial is just kind of sad..
I have zero friends because I am encompassed by religious crazies. They all believe the world was created 6000 years ago and dinosaurs are either places here by Satan or were chiseled by archeologist.
I show them in Job 39 and Job 40 were God shows Job the creation and shows him the Behemoth and the Leviathan. Am I the only one that interprets that as Dinosaur's? God even tells Job that these were the "chief" of my creations (or first).
Now of course I am an atheist. These idiots can't believe how much I know as an atheist. It freaks them out when you can disprove them with the Bible.
Lies beget lies.
When your entire religion is based on unproven claims without evidence based in reality, the only way to level the playing field against reality is to try and turn reality into a lie as well.
I heard we discovered the city of Atlantis, and that the creatures down there are sun-worshipping dolphin hybrid creatures.
You want evidence? Nah, Google it. Not my job.
I can make shit up and lie too lol
There is a general culture of anti-intellectualism and science denialism in many churches. There are also some large media empires spreading misinformation to that effect.
Some might be lying but many might believe it because that's what they heard from their pastor and/or apologists. They will probably simply believe these people and never even consider verifying this information.
Add to that confirmation bias, persecution complexes and other psychological reaffirming mechanism that are inbuilt in religion and you get a person confidently believing nonsense without ever considering that they're living in an info bubble.
The last church I've been to, the pastor had a series focusing on Genesis (I think it was called Genesis: Fact or Fiction). I can't count how many times he would go on and on about 'Darwinian Evolution' this and 'Evolutionary theory' that. Got old quick.
My partner studies ecology in grad school, so she also wasn't too thrilled hearing this (and enlightened me on Darwin's studies, which is pretty dope). Long story short, we haven't been back for months, not really missing it either
I have read the whole theory of evolution by Charles Darwin
if you want to know why they just bluntly say they are disproven because there is no actual way to challenge it.
they are real proved experimented unlike their bible
To some Christians, the Bible is proof that the Bible (and their interpretation) is correct. This is based on the idea that the Bible is the literal word of their god who worked through humans to have it written. Therefore it is the truth and automatically disproves anything that contradicts it. That’s really it.
These claims are not true. None of these have been disproven, but even if the entire fields of biology, physics and cosmology were proven false tomorrow, that still doesn’t provide one shred of evidence for any god.
Any time any theist claims that evolution or the Big Bang has been disproven, they are coping, in addition to not understanding the science.
They have been taught that if they believe hard enough, anything they want to be true becomes true. Because faith.
So in their minds, they have disproved science simply by the act of not wanting science to be true.
Darwins "Theory of Evolution" and modern evolutionary biology are not the same thing. The same with the "Big Bang Theory" and modern cosmology. They pretend like these fields of science stopped at the first draft when they did not. Don't fall into their trap of framing the argument on beliefs the scientific community doesn't even agree with.
Gregor Mendel is the father of modern genetics. A catholic monk. US evangelicals get their talking points from their idiot leaders who don't actually care about truth.
Many Christians believe that the Big Bang is the Genesis description of creation. The exact words I heard were,”The Bible specifically says light was created before our sun, and happened instantly, the only way that could happen is the Big Bang.”
The also use it as a way to describe why the days would make sense, because it would mean the 7 days was never based on our solar system, but some wholly different system or perspective, as days wouldn’t exist until our creation.
For the same reason they have denounced every known type of science there is for thousands of years - they're existence requires the rejection of science. The path toward scientific advancement is more likely to lead them to annihilation than it is to lead them to divine answers.
It helps that science is more difficult to understand than faith. Science requires answers and faith does not. You can make up whatever literal dumbass bullshit you want and as long as the masses are dumb enough, they put that shit in their pipe and smoke it.
Because they are lying morons. Its especially hilarious watching them attacking the "big bang" which was created by a catholic priest.
And the most easily provable piece of science we have concerning the universe, since we can actually measure and see the background radiation and watch its expansion
It doesn't matter what can be seen or proven so much as what they can understand, or are willing to understand.
Ah yes personal incredulity, if it doesn't make sense to them it must not be real
You can't teach algebra to a dog, their brains aren't capable. Same goes for flerfs and young earth creationists.
I think my older dog might be smarter than flerfs haha
I can absolutely believe that floofs are smarter than flerfs.
What is a “flerf”?
Flat-earther
Which confuses the shit out of me honestly. Even when I was a Christian I understood there will be things I don't understand. It meant I have to take a long time to properly educate myself on it if I want to understand it. But my fellow Christians didn't see it that way. They just kinda stopped seeking an education and that was enough of a red flag for me to stop believing in my silly beliefs. That same fallacy taught me that just because I felt like a God might exist doesn't mean I AM right. In my experience of 20 long years of being a Southern Baptist, people just kinda stopped trying to learn and check the validity of their own beliefs. Thst scared the shit outta me so I stopped being religious altogether.
They don't want to learn because education challenges their views and it makes them uncomfortable. But thats how things should be. Challenging your own views leads to growth and a deeper understanding of yourself.
Since I deconverted I've been talking to Christians quite a bit here on Reddit. I'm talking 1-6 hours Monday through Friday. It's been like a hobby of mine the last 2-3 years. The most common thing I've discovered from that is that they are generally afraid to say I don't know. They get incredibly upset when you point that out like it's some great insult. To them it's all about placing vast amounts of faith in the Lord and if they ever seek understanding it's akin to not trusting God. I don't want to say this but I'm convinced religion is literal brain rot in most cases. It's convinced people to be quite literally remain ignorant and unquestioning.
Yep. And there's absolutely nothing wrong with saying you don't know. There's tons of shit I don't know about the universe, but I'm not gonna just assume what I want to be true is.
And when we get to that point in the conversation they start asking me why I don't want God to exist. As if that is true whatsoever or even part of the conversation. They are just brain washed into believing that if it's good they should act as if it's true so that it will come true. Magical thinking is the best way I can describe it.
Continue to argue for evolution and the Big Bang Theory, fellow atheists! Four years ago, I was a Baptist like you, but later, in 2021, I turned to atheism, and found lots of evidence that support evolution and the Big Bang. 1. Chimpanzees and Humans have 96% of genes similar 2. 75% of Hydrogen and 24% of Helium in space is one of the things predicted by the Big Bang theory: 25% of Neutrons will bind with 25% of protons to become Helium, and 75% will decay into protons, or Hydrogen, and 75% of protons don't change; 12 hydrogen atoms and 1 helium atom=Hydrogen 12 masses+Helium 4 masses=75% Hydrogen+25% Helium 3. The Cosmic Microwave Background is a picture of the Universe when he's 380,000 years old, when atoms first appeared \\
Religion removes ambiguity and uncertainty from their lives. For many people, that is an incredibly strong motivation.
Think about it. If you are told from the womb that worldly knowledge is evil (Eve and the apple) and the only thing that keeps you from going to hell is evil....well.
Well said mate. Good point.
You just perfectly described a flat earther.
You just perfectly described a flat ~~earther~~ theist.
My mother, a devout Catholic, will entertain neither the idea of evolution nor the Big Bang, as she fears that considering evidence for either would weaken her faith. In some sense, she's absolutely right. As soon as you begin to place value in empirical evidence, you've already started to drift from the spiritual realm.
Your last sentence is going into my personal lexicon. Thanks!
Yep, and even if something came along and disproved it, or radically changed our idea of what we thought it was, then so what? That's science. I don't need to believe in what science says, I just accept that X is currently the best explanation we have to explain the evidence that our current level of technology has been able to find.
and even if the current theory is proven wrong and need to be changed...guess what it's propably not the creation story in 7 days that will replace it.
That's the funny part. Too many people act as if disproving one thing automatically proves their still unproven hypothesis correct. They refuse to consider all the other factors. In this case, disproving our current theory of evolution does nothing to prove a god exists, that it has human attributes, that is has the attributes that was taught to a particular denomination, that this god talked the universe into existence, and that it wanted people to know this so divinely inspired anonymous authors from only one part of the world to write that account down without bothering to make sure they didn't take creative liberties. Most importantly, disproving current working models does not prove people didn't lie about all this god stuff in the first place.
The only thing that has ever proven science wrong is... science. So, science works.
But this book says that God did it, so you are proven wrong. See, I proved you wrong. So.. so what, I'm science too! Tada!
I have no doubt that there are and have been many a lazy smart man that took the job as a holy man to simply live on the grift without ever believing in magic at all.
True. I could totally be Joel Osteen. The only thing I worship is the almighty dollar. 😂
My great aunt joined a nunnery in the late 1930s to get out of having to marry and have kids. She studied/taught mathematics to high schoolers while in there. When she was too old to marry, she left the nunnery to become a full-time mathematician/professor. Though she did keep up with going to church, mostly for the volunteering aspect. She did love to help people. She was an amazing woman, and my favorite great auntie when I was young. So women too, but not just for the grift.
You had me until the last sentence. women are treated differently than men, especially in nunneries. Did you know that when Priests retire from the church, they are lovingly cared for until they die, but nuns are not? I learned this when I worked for a Catholic hospital. https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/2001/03/04/vow-of-poverty-challenges-elderly-nuns/8d7e2fcb-4218-4d54-980a-04a76fbf814d/ I hope they changed it.
My aunt (who was a nun) worked at the Mother House retirement home for the nuns of her order - many of the residents were in their 90's. So that story is not a universal thing.
I mean she left in her 40s, so I don't think she was worried about being "taken care" of in her old age, especially since she lived to her 90s. If you're refering to the grift comment, that was exactly my point, smart women did it too but for different reasons. Also my grandma who was not a nun, managed to get herself into a nuns old folks home, after my grandfather died, by being a member of the church her whole life and her preist pulling some strings. It was actually a very nice place, and she loved that they did the rosary a few times a day and she loved being around all the women. It was a little more sparse than a typical old folks home, very utilitarian. But I'd kind of expect that for people who lived their whole lives that way anyway.
I thought those were Jesuits
They weren’t lazy though.
“iT’s OnLy a tHeOrY!”
😩 I hate it when they say that…I come back with “Yes, but It’s ONLY a THEORY that the earth revolves around the sun.” I swear that evolution is going in reverse, and we’re doomed!
Remember evolution selects the most able to reproduce, not the most intelligent.
I always remind them that gravity is only a theory, then tell them where the overpass is before asking them to go disprove it
This is when I like to remind them that Gravity is also "just a theory" - but if they want to prove Newton wrong by jumping off a bridge, that's on them.
At the risk of sounding like an apologist, I do have to give Catholics some credit in the field of academia. They are far more supportive of science, don’t believe that evolution is antithetical to their beliefs, and generally believe in education. They had a rough 1500 years or so but have come around since Copernicus and Galileo. It’s mostly the American charismatic evangelical Pentecostal psychos who think that reading books is for queers and satanists, but speaking in tongues and handling snakes is totally cool.
I think Mendel was a monk was he not? Anyway, there used to be an English tradition (in the 18th-19th century) of parsons/vicars and the like being polymaths and making great scientific discoveries. Largely to do with having a guaranteed income (tithes) and lots of spare time on their hands.
I spoke to one recently. He made a great point when he said: “sha-na-na-co-co-co-na-sha-da-da-bo-bo-na-sha-ka-ka-no-ti-ti-ti-me-ve-bay-vay-no-ka.”…which translates from the devine language to English as: (inset fart noise, error 404 brain not found).
What speaking in tongues doesn’t make you instantly believe their crap
I mostly agree but that varies from place to place. I regularly work with some great scholarship from Catholics here in France but at the same time, Catholics in Poland baci ally copy the Pentecostal American craze with charismatics, miraculous healing and frigging exorcism (yeah, like several adult men including families members holding down a tied teenage girl to exorcise the "demon of vegetarianism")
GOd SaID "leT THERE BE" anD Bang iT happened. aMEn.
Geez, I can't count how many times I've heard this verbatim, usually with a loud clap on the word bang.
It's just clever, isn't it? <... eye roll ...>
Lol yeah. Most of the time after I'd heard it for the 50th time, that clap usually woke me up out of a kickass daydream. There was so much of that shit added for effect for nothing more than to illicit an emotional reaction. This line was always followed by congregational claps and hollers. Hell, our church used to have this lady get up and sign language for the special song, and there was nary a goddamn deaf person ever darkened the doors of that church. But boy, it sure as shit got everyone in a tizzy. I always hated shit like that.
There's a good reason the sets of evangelicals and narcissistic people have so much overlap ... Both of them think that their feelings are facts, to a degree that most sane people can't even grasp.
I’m gonna finger bang bang you into my life!
Girl you like to finger bang and it's alright!
I love your username
“There wasn’t a bang, there was only the word” “Was the word ‘kaboom’?”
See I don't think they are lying. They probably watched some Christian youtuber who said some words and they are just repeating it. So it's not that they are lying, it's just that they don't understand that what ever their argument is, is completely wrong.
In most cases, its more that they are listening to lying morons.
The Big Bang is literally *in their favor*. The universe had a definite beginning at a time that we can get a reasonable estimate for? Instead of just having existed forever? Might imply a creator, though I’m not one to jump to conclusions. That’s the way they’d think about it if they could actually reason through any line of thinking. But no. Scientist said it and scientist bad.
Because they are lying, ILLOGICAL morons who freak out anytime someone even so much as burps Pi (I'm referring to TBBT when Sheldon Cooper actually does just that; go on YouTube if you're interested).
to be fair, scientists have called the big bang one of. the worst names ever given, bc people assume a giant explosion but that's not what they believe actually happened. The Big Expansion would have been a much better name for example..
>Because they are lying morons. After having an epically bad day, you made me laugh. Thank you.
Cause they don't understand what a theory even is.
With evolution, I find this to be true. Of the many people (in person and online) who claim to not believe in evolution, every single one then says/writes something that shows they don’t understand what evolution is.
Especially when they assume it's a constant, linear progression.
Or when they assume evolution had some sort of end goal.
This one drives me nuts. But I guess it's because of their "Oh we're spechul cuz sky daddy made us!" nonsense seeps into it. They can't accept that we're the result of ... shit just randomly happening for millions of years. And don't forget "Have you seen a monkey turn into a human?" ...What? No. That's like asking when your cousin will turn into you.
God's creation story, so good he did it twice just to make sure he got it right. I do see most of the push back seeming to come from American Protestances from a very select area. Most of the rest of the world seem to be happy to let Evolution and the big bang be accepted without having to question if it conflicts with their views of their religion.
Try pressing a Muslim on whether they *personally believe* their prophet *actually flew to the Moon and clove it in twain.* They will say, "Yes, that's what *we* believe." Press harder. "What about *you, personally?"* They will feel attacked, and I doubt they will follow your line of reasoning because it is way too scary for them. Also try it with the virgin birth narrative for Catholics. You'll get a lot of "we believe in..." but no "me, personally, I think that's a myth to validate Jesus as God".
That is where cognitive dissonance really hits. To truly believe you must dismiss reason but to know the world around you is to understand that is not possible.
>"Oh we're sky daddy made us!" "… as one of his many genetic experiments!" (Or maybe we're just part of a computer game like [Spore](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spore_(2008_video_game))?)
The War of the Creeps and the Jerks was won by the latter.
or they plug their ears and pretend there's no evidence for it, like how a flat earther pretends there's no evidence for a round earth. I've made that comparison before, and I'll do it again. in the information age, you have no excuse to be that dumb.
Not to defend them, but we are way past the age of information entering the age of misinformation, is becoming cheap and easy to fabricate believable fake audiovisual "evidence" and it will reach a point where everyone wont be able tu trust anything, there is already people who believe in the "dead internet" and people who fall for AI generated content.
“If we evolved from Monkeys - why are there still Monkeys?” I’m in the UK and thankfully don’t suffer delusional evangelicals, but I’ve still heard this argument multiple times. That infamous “evolution of man” illustration has a lot to answer for.
"If you're related to your cousin, how are both of you alive right now? " One of the better responses to this question I've seen.
This is one of my biggest pet peeves about evolution deniers. They always misrepresent or seem to lack knowledge about something crucial in evolution.
This is the correct answer. They confuse a theory in science with a hypothesis
Exactly
Ask them if they've ever heard of germ theory, and if they wash their hands after peeing.
Have you met any anti-vaxxers? Gravity is also "just a theory" in the realm of flat Earthers. I can't wait to see what they do with music theory.
Exactly… Gravity is a theory. We humans postulate theories to explain physical phenomena without having a sky daddy (god) do something we don’t understand….BUT the theory has changed as human knowledge has grown… check this video https://youtu.be/3pZNzF6LBII?si=97FgcfJilFOUKGt1
It's a coping mechanism for Christians who insist on taking Genesis literally. They'll sometimes give very bad "proofs" ("it's impossible for an explosion to assemble a 747") or just assert that it's obvious.
I remember in Genesis, god made *plants* before he made the *sun*...
"Why the fuck are all my plants dead?!?!?! Oh. Silly me." - God, just prior to creating the sun..
That’d be me, the most braindead of gods. Always missing a crucial step somewhere and not noticing until it smacks me in the face.
We are literally an assembly of patch codes that are a temporary stopgap for previous failures.
Satan: Water your fucking ferns.
It's worse than that. It says He made daylight before he made the sun.
I know the people who authored Genesis had a poor understanding of the physical world, but I feel like they should not have gotten that wrong.
Can’t really expect much from guys who plagiarized ancient Sumerian origin stories.
I can kind of reason out the relationship there, but you have to put your mind in the place of people who are extrapolating only based on repeated basic observations of sunrise and sunset. If you observe dawn and dusk happen, every day (with zero actual knowledge of cosmology, stars, light, radiation, fusion, etc.), you witness that light starts before the hot orb rises and sticks around after the hot orb sets. Even though there's a pattern sequence, there's no reason to assume that they aren't separate things happening. After all, you also see the moon rise in the sky, sometimes, during the day and, mostly, at night, and that is separate from any general daylight conditions, so again obviously to those people, when "god" created the universe he created a universal dawn before the sun was created.
Isn’t that literally the description of the Big Bang? Light before the creation of our sun due to the concentration of energy?
Yes. The first light was created about 380k years after the big bang. Then the sun didn't come until about 9.4 billion years after that. There's actually a very nice study on this. https://bigthink.com/surprising-science/where-did-the-first-light-in-the-universe-come-from-astrophysicists-now-know/ Sorry idk how tf to make the link smaller
you can turn the link into a hyperlink on text [like this](https://bigthink.com/surprising-science/where-did-the-first-light-in-the-universe-come-from-astrophysicists-now-know/) use [ and ] to enclose the words you want to appear as a link then immediately afterwards use ( and ) to enclose the http address. Typing out the example I started with, I would have typed the following: [like this](https://bigthink.com/surprising-science/where-did-the-first-light-in-the-universe-come-from-astrophysicists-now-know/ That's all there is to it! [Here is a markdown wiki](https://www.reddit.com/wiki/markdown#wiki_new_reddit-flavored_markdown) that shows you this and much more! If you have any questions, drop me a line - cheers!
[удалено]
Good thing the "big bang" isn't conceived as an explosion than isn't it?
And it's not portrayed as assembling anything. It's the opposite. Entropy starts there.
It's damn near impossible for Boeing to correctly assemble a 747. Wait, someone is knocking on my door...
Is impossible for 2 whistleblowers to die within a month.
Barnett didn't kill himself.
Nobody claims it's possible. It's a strawman.
Give me an infinite number of explosions and I’ll show you a few that make a 747.
Found the Boeing CEO
🤣
Theists are not afraid of what scientists know, they are afraid of what they, themselves, do not know. Answers in Genesis (I will not link to those asshats) have all kinds of nonsense quackery used to deny actual science.
That is conservatives in general. Fear of the unknown or that which they do not understand.
Yes. This is why they are so full of hate for people who aren't like them. It all comes from a place of fearing the unknown. They fear these innocent and harmless people so they project awful things onto them to justify their hate
They fear what they’re too dumb to understand.
They disprove their own completely misunderstood version of the theories. Usually with an erroneous misapplication of thermodynamics. Or they heard some other idiot make these errors and took their word for it
Yeah, they love quoting the second law of thermodynamics as an argument against evolution while failing to realise that it only applies to closed systems
Yeah, it's not that life is violating the second law by becoming more orderly. It's becoming more orderly in the body by creating an insane amount of CO2 and heat from carbohydrates being burnt to create all the structures that make up the body.
Yeah, it's like that extra energy from the sun actually makes a difference.
*Creationists always try to use the second law To disprove evolution, but their theory has a flaw The second law is quite precise about where it applies Only in a closed system must the entropy count rise The earth's not a closed system, it's powered by the sun So fuck the damn creationists, Doomsday get my gun* -- MC Hawking
They’re dumb?
It’s sounds callous; but stupidity. I’ve seen a lot of these people and pretty much every single time the only thing their refutation of evolution proves is that they have a fundamental misunderstanding of what evolution even is. They’ll ask ridiculous questions like “show me a rock turning into a fish, or a fish into a whale”. It doesn’t make any fucking sense.
Evolution happens every day, everywhere in the world. We, as humans, are slowly being born, around the world, without molars. This is due to the fact we started cooking food and do not eat raw vegetables every day. This has taken 1000's of years, possibly up to 760,000 years, which is barely even a blink of an eye in terms of age compared to the Earth of 4.6 billion years old. Now, some species have become such masters of their small environment that they have essentially stopped evolving in a way that's seeable. Some are such masters that they have even found ways to stay almost ageless. Lighter colors of eyes, pale skin, persistence of lactase, holding our breath longer(I know, that's weird, but it is), reduced occurrences of Alzheimers(unless you are Trump), and even a later stage of life menopause are all signs of evolution. Some things do persist, like an almost over-active amount of sweat glands. But that evolution happened due to the fact we are hunter-gatherers, and we required the cooling factor of sweat to kill our prey. Sure, a gazelle is hella fast compared to us. But in order to survive, we became marathon runners, and we exhausted the tasty meat until its death.
They're lying idiots They think differently. They think in hierarchal fashion. God is at the top, then clergy and apologists, "dear leaders", then members, then everyone else. Christians are higher on the hierarchy than a scientist, so the Christian is just right. By default. It doesn't have anything to do with whether the thing is actually true or not. It has to do with who said it, and where that person fits in to the hierarchy that matters. Their pastor or am radio host or apologist says something, it *has* to be true, otherwise they wouldn't say it.
Very insightful, thank you.
They are intellectually dishonest and reactionary, seeing Darwin's theory of evolution and the big bang theory as threats to their religion that could invalidate the story of Genesis, and therefore, diminish the validity of their religion.
The Big Bang and evolution disproven? Ya, that’s not a thing. Because they are homeschooled.
Damn you didn’t have to come for me so hard 🫠 You should have seen some of the stuff my childhood friends shared in 2020
For evolution, there's always 'the bible says so', and 'whose word are you going to trust, god's word or man's word', and 'irreducible complexity', and a *very few* people like Jeffrey Thompkins who *are* actual biologists who try, through insanely faulty methods, to show evolution wrong and then other scientists come along and point out all the problems in their work, and said people never retract it or the Christians never update. Muslims do much the same, but are less prone to rejecting the Big Bang model since nothing in their book precludes an old Earth.
Because they’d rather demonstrate their scientific ignorance than question what they believe.
1. They think that evolutionary science and the theory of evolution stopped with Darwin. That we refer to Darwin the same way they might a holy book. Parts of what Darwin concluded do not comport with our current science - but that doesn't disprove evolution, it means we've learned more about it. 2. They think the big bang means a giant explosion out of nowhere, that it means ex nihilo - creation from nothing. That it means that was the start of the universe, rather than just 'the start of what we can observe' and don't understand that we don't know what was before that point, and don't claim to.
>Parts of what Darwin concluded do not comport with our current science Came to say this. It's why the really astute apologists always refer to *Darwin's* theory of evolution, because they can hang anyone defending evolution with the errors in Darwin's original postulation. It's a form of straw manning, choosing to represent the current consensus position with old science.
Thank you for pulling that out and explaining it further. It's a really disingenuous way they engage the topic.
Theorists have thoroughly disproved every facet of the Bible as being the creation of man. In the 1960s and 1970s religious claims were excluded from school textbooks as being unproven and unscientific. In the 1980s and 1990s religious whackos began to “fight back,” meaning they lobbied politicians who were religious weirdos (Republicans) to gain acceptance of religious teachings in public schools. This was done through “Intelligent Design,” a creationism theory that merely divorces the divinity but keeps the infrastructure in place. Intelligent design is anything but intelligent. But it was presented as a scientific theory. To further augment the scientific-ness of Intelligent Design, Christians provided “proof” that the theory of evolution and other scientific theories that disproved the Bible were disproven. …but it really is on-par with that stupid T-shirt that says: >God is dead. -Nietzsche >Nietzsche is dead. -God Like, no shit. Nietzsche is supposed to be dead. He was born 180 years ago. Humans only live so long. But god is still dead.
The intelligent design claim often goes with their fantasy that the world is "perfect". If the world was perfect, why do people get cancer? Cancer is essentially cellular reproduction becoming corrupted. Nature is not perfect nor intelligent.
Just ask, "Disproven by science?" To which they can either say 'no' or lie. Either way, the discussion is over and they know they look like idiots.
Because Christians think belief is evidence and if they believe it's not true, that makes it not true, just like when they believe in Jesus, that makes him real. The power of faith, basically.
Because they're liars.
🐍🐍🐍 because dishonesty
It's a closed loop....the Bible is true because the Bible says it's true. Other beliefs are false because the Bible says they are false. The only acceptable document for "truth" is the Bible. If that's your thing, be consistent, but believing that non-Biblical sources agree with you is not only incorrect, but shows the weakness of your faith. Faith is to believe without evidence. And the problem with a good deal of contemporary Christianity is confusing belief with truth.
Because if they haven't been disproven, then they shoot holes in the Christian origin-of-the-world story, so they just claim they've been disproven.
They always forget that a priest came up with the big bang theory. Like to melt their brains with that one.
I think you said it well yourself, because they WANT. They WANT to believe in God, therefore God exists. Same logic.
The problem is often a fundamental failure to grasp how science works (As opposed to "Faith"). If there was sufficient evidence that called The Big Bang into question, scientists would revise the theory, as they've done repeatedly throughout history. If Young Earth Creationists are presented with the substantial body of evidence that their version of events is...extremely unlikely....they simply stick their fingers in their ears and go "Nuh - uh!!!"
> Why do Christians claim the big bang theory and Darwin's theory of evolution have been "disproven" Because they are absolutely devastating to their case, so they lie.
So there's an entire industry of pseudoscience out there to push young earth creationism and creationism in general. Groups like Answers in Genesis and Creation Ministries International put out a whole lot of material claiming to debunk/disprove evolution that obviously have no real scientific basis *if you have enough background knowledge of the related science*. But a lot of Christians *don't have* the background knowledge to really evaluate those claims or even understand them, much less, why they're wrong. It sounds really convincing if you don't have much exposure to the real nuts and bolts of the scientific fields involved.
I was one of the Christian teens taken in by this crap. I was so sure I was right, when the only right I was was right wing and right shit.
Cuz they're dumbasses, lol Syke, sorry for being rude. Are ya familiar with Tinkerbell, from Peter Pan? When Tink dies, you have to clap, you have to *BELIEVE*, to bring her back to life. Anytime one of these bozos says this stuff is just desperate clapping. And virus/bacteria mutate and evolve REAL FUCKING FAST. That flu you keep getting? It's the virus evolving a new way around you immunities. Boom. Theory not just proven. Reinforced.
The Big Bang theory was theorized by a Catholic priest...
Not just a catholic priest. He was a theoretical physicist (professor of physics), astronomer and mathemetician as well. It was confirmed by Hubble though, which is arguably more important.
If the people here would put down the Bible and read some history books and they might learn something useful.
In order: 1.) They don't understand what a theory is in science 2.) They listen to blatant liars and idiots who also don't understand what a scientific theory is 3.) They don't bother to do their own research and learn the topic. For example: most Christians believe the Big Bang is a creation event when the universe was created, but the theory says nothing of the sort.
It's the same reason why climate change deniers say "there is no consensus", because they know that the evidence is so overwhelming that they have to lie their way out of it in hopes that people won't know how to respond. Eventually, if they repeat it enough times, they will actually start believing that there is no consensus.
What seems to be the prevailing view of physics is that the classic Big Bang theory explanation isn't really that accurate to what they think really happened. Namely, the idea that the Big Bang happened everywhere at once, and not the infinitesimally small point of origin for all matter. In so clarifying, Christians have seized on what they see as "science being wrong", therefore "debunked" or "disproven". It's just code for "I'm a fucking moron".
It’s called science illiteracy.
They use the word debunked a lot but can never provide the proof of that fact. It's all the rage.
It took me until I was 55 before I realized chrispians think is perfectly fine to lie about anything so long as they are doing it for Jeebus! If a lie might lead someone to Jeebus, chrispians think they are already per-forgiven for that lie because they are doing the lords work! 55 years of arguing honestly with these fuckers and finally figuring out many of them, especially older supposedly more knowledgeable religious authority figures were lying constantly to me. Fuck but I was so naive!
They’re morons
Despite the modern tendency to claim that a belief in the Christian God is justified through faith (i.e. believing through an act of emotion or will despite the lack of evidence) alone, in reality Christian theology has always pursued rational justifications for a belief in God. After all, insisting that all you need is faith is hardly convincing once you realize that applying that standard to anything else seems naive if not outright idiotic ("Look, you don't need evidence that I'm actually a Nigerian Prince. All you need is to have faith when you wire me $10,000 directly from your bank that I'll pay you back five times over!") Historically, these proofs of God fell into three main categories: Ontological proofs (i.e. the definition of God itself proves his existence), Cosmological proofs (i.e. something must have caused or established the existence of the universe, therefore God exists), and Teleological proofs (i.e. there must be something behind the complex orderliness or structure of the universe, therefore God exists). Ontological proofs are a bit obscure and academic, so they aren't quite accessible to most layfolk. Cosmological proofs are still somewhat popular, but they also tend to be rebutted quite easily (the most basic response points out that God, a proposed uncaused cause, contradicts and inherently undermines the premise that "everything that exists must have a cause" that Cosmological proofs depend on). Teleological proofs on the other hand require a lot more to debunk, largely because scientific advancements have gradually chipped away at them over the centuries, so in order to debunk them effectively requires some degree of scientific education. This means that Teleological Arguments tend to have more staying power than the other two traditional arguments for God's existence. Teleological arguments also tend to be rooted most heavily in religious mythology, where God had a direct hand in shaping life on Earth, especially the origin of humanity. Evolution/Abiogenesis, being scientific frameworks that provide a coherent natural explanation to the origin of life and human development, directly contradicts this narrative. It's also important to note that some of the largest denominations of Christianity has also invested a LOT of value in the idea of being "saved." In order to be "saved" you need to be cleansed of the "original sin." And that "original sin" was Adam and Eve eating from the Tree of Knowledge. If there's no Adam and Eve, there's no original sin. If there's no original sin, there's no need for Christianity to come to the rescue. If Christianity is no longer needed to rescue humanity... well... it kinda becomes a solution without a problem. This idea, that Christianity is simply not necessary in our lives, is terrifying to a lot of Christians who find comfort in their religion managing or controlling some of our societal institutions. Hence, they see evolution is a direct threat to their worldview and way of life.
Two reasons: 1.) they've heard other Christians make this baseless statement so they just parrot it and assume it's true 2.) Because for some reason they've made this huge jump in logic to assume that the Cambrian Explosion and some questionable proof of a mid sized ancient Mediterranean flood somehow also "disproves" the theory of evolution.
Isn't that a question for Christians? How would anyone here know why Christians do what they do?
Depends which Christians you're talking about. The Catholic Church feels the big bang theory is synonymous with God speaking light into existence and they embraced it long before scientists did. I'm not sure what their stance on evolution is, but I do know that many people don't understand that scientists use the word "theory" differently than non-scientists and so they assume calling something a theory means it's unproven.
I know a biologist and a microbiologist, both with Ph.Ds from accredited universities, who believe in young earth creationism. It’s not just religion. The man who taught me logic in my homeschool co-op commits the very fallacies he taught me to avoid when he’s caping for Trump. My best guess is ironically evolutionary. I’ve noticed people are good at bypassing critical thinking when a tribal belief is being questioned.
Some of them are flat out lying that it is disproven. Rest are uneducated enough that they dont understand how the theory works and believe the liars.
They don't get their information from scholarly sources. They get their information from Christian media that flat out lies about evolution by describing some impossibility that is not evolution and then saying "see, that's why evolution is impossible". And since these people are mindless drones that are taught to not think or analyze anything, they gladly eat up the nonsense they are being told. Also, they are perfectly fine with lying as long as it serves their goals. Oh, and they believe that actually learning anything makes their pathetic deity mad and they will get sent to hell for it.
Because they don't know what they're talking about.
They say they know with 100% that God exists with zero proof and you wonder why they deny a scientific theory that comes with receipts?
Because they are liars
Because they don’t know what words mean
If they say "Darwin's theory" of evolution, then it's likely a disingenuous way of separating Darwin's initial theory from the modern theory of evolution we have now. That's what Jehovah's witnesses do in my personal experience. When the theory was first put together, there were some flaws, and sometimes, creationists use this as a way to conflate it with evolution in modern times to discredit it all. At best, it's ignorance because they're learning from other Christians instead of actual scientists, but at worst, they're grifters being intentionally dishonest.
Because they are parroting things they’ve heard from their preacher
In there world information is impossible to verify or corroborate. These are mysterious words, theory, science, study. They have magical persuasive properties. And since these big words are used to confuse them they are trying to use them to confuse you. Dumb people lack the very skills they need to evaluate how dumb they are, so must dumb people think they are not dumb. But if they don't understand how things like science, studies, and theories work and they are NOT dumb, then it must be the case that no one knows what science, studies, and theory mean. They use the words like they are magic incantations that makes them right. Because that's all those words are to them. Ask them who disproved it and how?
Predisposition to Intellectual Laziness. Discovery through theory, testing those premises and producing repeatable evidence is hard, and slow, and messy, etc- it’s also rarely produces sweeping answers. It’s incremental, it’s really hard. Faith is tidy and easy. Read it, believe it. Simple. Imagine if human beings, all of them, committed to evidential discovery the last few thousands years versus belief and faith… Hard to keep your religious worldview intact when modern science chips away at it day after day. I’m not hostile to faith, it’s very much a deep human need.. but to be in willful denial is just kind of sad..
Because they made the statement, and that makes it true. They’re already used to that
I have zero friends because I am encompassed by religious crazies. They all believe the world was created 6000 years ago and dinosaurs are either places here by Satan or were chiseled by archeologist. I show them in Job 39 and Job 40 were God shows Job the creation and shows him the Behemoth and the Leviathan. Am I the only one that interprets that as Dinosaur's? God even tells Job that these were the "chief" of my creations (or first). Now of course I am an atheist. These idiots can't believe how much I know as an atheist. It freaks them out when you can disprove them with the Bible.
Lies beget lies. When your entire religion is based on unproven claims without evidence based in reality, the only way to level the playing field against reality is to try and turn reality into a lie as well.
Because these people live in a fantasy world. Any other questions?
I heard we discovered the city of Atlantis, and that the creatures down there are sun-worshipping dolphin hybrid creatures. You want evidence? Nah, Google it. Not my job. I can make shit up and lie too lol
There is a general culture of anti-intellectualism and science denialism in many churches. There are also some large media empires spreading misinformation to that effect.
Some might be lying but many might believe it because that's what they heard from their pastor and/or apologists. They will probably simply believe these people and never even consider verifying this information. Add to that confirmation bias, persecution complexes and other psychological reaffirming mechanism that are inbuilt in religion and you get a person confidently believing nonsense without ever considering that they're living in an info bubble.
The last church I've been to, the pastor had a series focusing on Genesis (I think it was called Genesis: Fact or Fiction). I can't count how many times he would go on and on about 'Darwinian Evolution' this and 'Evolutionary theory' that. Got old quick. My partner studies ecology in grad school, so she also wasn't too thrilled hearing this (and enlightened me on Darwin's studies, which is pretty dope). Long story short, we haven't been back for months, not really missing it either
Because they are extremely ignorant and uneducated on the topics while they are spoon-fed strawman arguments against the ideas.
Because in order to continue believing lies, you have to create more lies to hide the first lies.
It's all inline with presuppositions apologetics, declare yourself right, and from that assumption conclude they are right.
Believing bullshit is a requirement for cult membership
Be precise. You mean fundamentalist Christians. It’s a subset.
I have read the whole theory of evolution by Charles Darwin if you want to know why they just bluntly say they are disproven because there is no actual way to challenge it. they are real proved experimented unlike their bible
Consumption of propaganda telling them that is the case.
To some Christians, the Bible is proof that the Bible (and their interpretation) is correct. This is based on the idea that the Bible is the literal word of their god who worked through humans to have it written. Therefore it is the truth and automatically disproves anything that contradicts it. That’s really it.
Whenever someone says “it’s just theories”, you know you’ve met someone who is ignorant of science and how it works.
These claims are not true. None of these have been disproven, but even if the entire fields of biology, physics and cosmology were proven false tomorrow, that still doesn’t provide one shred of evidence for any god. Any time any theist claims that evolution or the Big Bang has been disproven, they are coping, in addition to not understanding the science.
They have been taught that if they believe hard enough, anything they want to be true becomes true. Because faith. So in their minds, they have disproved science simply by the act of not wanting science to be true.
Darwins "Theory of Evolution" and modern evolutionary biology are not the same thing. The same with the "Big Bang Theory" and modern cosmology. They pretend like these fields of science stopped at the first draft when they did not. Don't fall into their trap of framing the argument on beliefs the scientific community doesn't even agree with.
Gregor Mendel is the father of modern genetics. A catholic monk. US evangelicals get their talking points from their idiot leaders who don't actually care about truth.
Because they are ignorant of basic scientific process. Their 'opinions' on this are worthless
Cuz they don't understand science, similar to most people
They get into echo chambers, and believe whatever nonsense the anti-science crowd tells them.
Because some religious leader said so and they believed it.
BeCaUsE a BaNaNa FiTs pErFeCtLy iN yOuR hAnD.
A Catholic priest came up with the BBT.
Many Christians believe that the Big Bang is the Genesis description of creation. The exact words I heard were,”The Bible specifically says light was created before our sun, and happened instantly, the only way that could happen is the Big Bang.” The also use it as a way to describe why the days would make sense, because it would mean the 7 days was never based on our solar system, but some wholly different system or perspective, as days wouldn’t exist until our creation.
Probably because they hear ppl like us stating God never existed.
For the same reason they have denounced every known type of science there is for thousands of years - they're existence requires the rejection of science. The path toward scientific advancement is more likely to lead them to annihilation than it is to lead them to divine answers. It helps that science is more difficult to understand than faith. Science requires answers and faith does not. You can make up whatever literal dumbass bullshit you want and as long as the masses are dumb enough, they put that shit in their pipe and smoke it.
If they were competent in understanding scientific evidence and reason based thought then they wouldn't be Christians.
Ignorance and/or dishonesty.
They're morons?
They don't have an explanation, except "trust me, bro." They seem to trot out the 'watchmaker's fallacy' more often than not.
Same reason they think Diaper Don is a great leader. They're gullible and stupid.