ag scribbled: This is awesome! I love the "none of us is as dumb as all of us". How unfortunately true.

ag scribbled: I am sorry that you had to deal with such rejection from your family. You sound like a very brave person.

ag scribbled: Did you write this? Please let me know - it's fantastic whoever wrote it.

ag scribbled: This is my favorite book. If everyone read and understood this book, the world would be a much, much better place. Everyone here should read this on Scribd and then buy 10 copies to send to their family and friends.

ag scribbled: Bill, again I apologize for any belligerence on my part. I like your work on Scribd a lot, and I look forward to hearing your responses.

ag scribbled: Maybe it should be required reading for US politicians. There would finally be information on Iraq pitched at a level they can understand.

ag scribbled: Bill, This view, or one similar to it, has been famously proposed in Stephen J. Gould's book "Rocks of Ages". He, like you, argued that science and religion do not conflict because science explains the how, and religion explains the why. This sounds like a nice idea, and it seems to neatly evade a major controversy which is brewing in our world, but I think it is wrong, and here is why. First, as you mention, religion does not always stick to the why questions. Roughly 40% of Americans believe, in short, that the tale of creation in Genesis is literally true. They believe in that six-day-creation story that happened about 4000 years ago. I think it's pretty clear why some of us have a real problem with that. But second, and more importantly, is an overlooked issue. If the bible is wrong about the "how" of our world, and I would argue that it is, in fact, dramatically wrong, why should we give it any credence in explaining the "why"? It may be that science will never be able to answer the question of why our laws of physics are the way they are. As a matter of fact, I think it can explain a lot of that already. But let's just say it can't. How does that in any way imply that religion can answer that same question? I think it's quite plain that it can't. Of course, every religion offers up its own opinion, which are mostly mutually inconsistent. But if we cannot prove any truth of the matter using science, why should we believe the opinion of one religion, and how are we to choose which religion to believe? I apologize for being so critical of this view point, which does clearly try to be reasonable and avoid conflict. But I would like very much to hear more on two provocative statements of yours, that the theory of evolution has major flaws, and that those who believe in a scientific world view ignore much in order to preserve our set of beliefs. What are the flaws in evolution?

ag scribbled: Oh I think I've heard of a couple of billion people who would disagree with the "it's hard not to be". But I'm glad there are some people on Scribd who are not among them. Maybe Scribd will turn out like Reddit!

ag scribbled: Ha! Are you a Richard Dawkins fan too?

ag scribbled: Bill, I agree with you. I'm not a Christian, and I possess very strong feelings about the separation between church and state. Nevertheless, I think that the political correctness movement has gone too far in this case. I have no problem with wishing others a Merry Christmas, even though I do not believe in the story of Christmas.

ag scribbled: Matthew, I must say I was pleasantly surprised to hear your reasonable approach to the evolutionary and astronomical arguments advanced in this ebook. It is actually rather unusual for me to run across religious Christians who have a sufficiently open mind to understand the anthropic principle and other issues in order to come to an informed opinion on the matter. Your response to my criticisms of the laws of Leviticus as seen by our 21st century ethical sensibilities are totally justified. I agree that from a moral perspective the New Testament is a huge improvement over the Old Testament, and that therefore, it is inappropriate to question a Christian's opinion of Biblical morality based on the weirdness of the Old Testament. There are still ethical issues in the New Testament one could pick on, but I will spare the trouble, as that's not really the issue. I have one question for you, though, really more out of curiosity than anything else. You said that your own belief stems from a "Pascals's Wager" sort of argument, that it is safer to believe in God. My question is this: the Christian God is not the only one supposed to exist. Over a billion people believe in Allah, the Muslim God, and I'm pretty sure that according to them, following Christian traditions definitely dooms you to an eternity in Hell. Why is it that you feel it safer to put your belief in the Christian God than the Muslim God? In any case, even though I - as I'm sure you realize - do not believe in God, I, like Richard Dawkins, have no qualms in wishing you a Merry Christmas. Take care.

ag scribbled: I agree that, unfortunately, changing people's minds is often a slow and painstaking process. You mention that one reason can be "brainwashing", and I think that this actually the most common reason, and that more can be said of it. In our world, there are really two kinds of disagreements. There are some disagreements that occur when the existing evidence is not sufficient to decide the issue, but which are nevertheless based on evidence. You can tell these sorts of disagreements, because they tend to move forward over time. At one point, the nature of light, whether it was wavelike or particlelike, was hotly contested. Now this no longer so - additional evidence came to light, and there is no longer any disagreement. The other kind of disagreement is unfortunately not based on evidence, but tends to occur when a group of people have been "brainwashed" to believe something, despite overwhelming evidence contradicting it. Brainwashing of this sort almost always happens in childhood. It is well known that children tend to believe what they are told by their parents, especially if their parents believe it themselves. This makes a lot of sense from an evolutionary perspective: children who believed their parents not to eat untested red berries or swim in the crocodile infested river tended to survive better, and therefore as a species we are stuck with the unfortunate tendency of children to believe whatever comes out of their parents' mouthes. Beliefs formed in this way are unfortunately extremely hard to change, as our brains change fundamentally after childhood, crystallizing our view of the world at that time. I obviously don't believe the solution to this is to go around knocking people out. Actually, I question who in the modern world does. But I do believe that this aspect of the human mind is immensely troubling and an impediment to the peace, harmony, and advancement of our world.

ag scribbled: This article is too long and convoluted for me to bother to disprove its every point, one at a time. I shall restrict myself, given limited time, to what I see as its most egregious excesses. The article spends two full pages proving that Earth is an extremely unusual planet, and that planets that could even theoretically support life are probably exceedingly rare. This is absolutely true, and no scientist denies it. However, this provides absolutely no support, even in a statistical sense, for the idea that the earth was designed by some creator. The reason is a simple fact called the "anthropic principle", which christians seem to have a great of difficulty understanding. The anthropic principle says the following: Since we are here talking about how common earth-like planets are, it must be the case that we are on an earth-like planet to begin with. Therefore, even though earth-like planets are very unusual, it should come as no surprise to us that we happen to find ourselves on one, since otherwise, we would not be able to notice the fact. The same simple counter-argument applies to the common "knob-twiddler-theory" advanced on page 4. According to this theory, the settings of the fundamental constants seem perfectly tuned to produce a universe capable of life; therefore, they must have been so tuned by some god. This theory again falls to the anthropic principle. Since we are here talking about the settings of our physical constants, it implies that they must be set in such a way that life is possible. In other universes, no one would be there to notice that they were set in that way. It annoys me - though I have come to expect it - to see him misquote Stephen Hawking yet again. Hawking unfortunately ended one of his books with the sentence "for then we would know the mind of God". Christians anxious to adopt such a great thinker as their own have widely interpreted this to mean that Hawking believes in God. However, on numerous occasions, Hawking has stated very clearly that he does not and never has believed in any sort of higher power, and that in this unfortunate sentence, by "God" he meant only something like "the structure of the universe" or "the laws of physics" or some such thing. The worst part, really, is that even if some of the pseudo-scientific theories advanced in the article are true - for example, the knob-twiddler theory, that really wouldn't do much at all to advance the underlying claim. Obviously, the author does not care to argue that some arbitrary higher being created the universe - as opposed only to the atheist's view that life evolved on its own. The point of the article is to prove that the particular Christian god advanced in the New Testament is the one that did all this. It is quite impossible to leap from some theory about quantum mechanics to saying that clearly, it must be the Christian God responsible for the tuning of the quantum parameters, as opposed to Allah, Zeus, Thor, Wotan, Baal, or the Flying Spaghetti Monster. The primary evidence advanced in favor of this extraordinary leap is - as always - "The Bible says it is so". The circularity is of course appalling. Those who do not believe in God do not believe in the bible either, and so quoting scripture at them is quite like an evolutionary biologist trying to prove evolution by saying "Darwin said it was so". Interestingly enough, evolutionary biologists never say things like that; instead they argue based on direct evidence. In the final page, the article abandons its initial question, "Does God Exist?" and switches instead to a very different question "Would it be a nice thing for the world if God existed?". I find this question also interesting, but it is important to realize that the answer to the latter question has no bearing on the answer to the former. Even if - and this is not in any way the case - not believing in God would cause people to commit moral atrocities and bring our civilization to an end, that would still not cause God to exist. I was pleasantly surprised to see that the essays does cover the alternative humanistic theories of morality, instead of simply assuming, as so many Christians do, that without a belief in God, we would all run around killing and raping each other. Nevertheless, I wonder when the author then asserts that the world would be better if we set aside humanism and instead obeyed the biblical laws as our source of morality, whether he has really read Leviticus. What does he make, I wonder, of the fact that in the Old Testament, what his God was really concerned with was not whether people were nice to each other, but rather about how many goats and sheep were sacrificed to him, and in precisely what manner. In wonder what the author thinks of the fact that is says quite clearly in the bible that the penalty for adultery, or being rude to one's parents, or picking up sticks on the sabbath is death, usually by public stoning. Probably he