The Atheist's Nightmare

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ID:29211
 
Apr 5 2007, 11:02 am
To reclaim my hell-bent status from Amazon, I am forced to blaspheme. My chosen method is GodTube...

Never heard of GodTube? You heathen!

Bananas: The Atheist's Nightmare

That is a clip explaining how the perfect construction of the banana for human consumption is evidence of God's ever-guiding hand on Earth.

Wow!

I was all ready to give up my godless status, get some snakes, and start walking around in a thong (or whatever rules the local religion requires), but then that darn little devil on my shoulder suggested I should check out the facts a bit before trying to turn my handbasket around. So off to Wikipedia.

Oops.

Turns out that bananas in the wild are slightly less god-touched. In fact, you probably wouldn't want to eat them. They look like this:



Not only that, the bananas we actually eat are cultivated bananas, which are so unnatural they can't actually reproduce. In effect, we clone the trees to get them.

In the words of Wikipedia:

Cultivated bananas are parthenocarpic, which makes them sterile and unable to produce viable seeds. Lacking seeds, another form of propagation is required. This involves removing and transplanting part of the underground stem (called a corm). Usually this is done by carefully removing a sucker (a vertical shoot that develops from the base of the banana pseudostem) with some roots intact.

So the nice yellow bananas we get from the supermarket are 100% man-made and 100% godless.

Now where do I turn in my thong?
Apr 5 2007, 11:04 am
This post is made of EPIC.

Kudos!
Apr 5 2007, 12:05 pm
You may just be the next Oolon Colluphid: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Babel_fish
Apr 5 2007, 12:13 pm
Err, so you were willing to base your beliefs on the structure of a fruit? O_o'. There are better reasons to convert.
Apr 5 2007, 12:34 pm
Guy is on to something!

"I refuse to prove that I exist," says God, "for proof denies faith, and without faith I am nothing."

"But," says Man, "the Babel fish is a dead giveaway isn't it? It could not have evolved by chance. It proves that you exist, and so therefore, by your own arguments, you don't. Q.E.D."

"Oh dear," says God, "I hadn't thought of that," and promptly vanishes in a puff of logic."

"Oh, that was easy," says Man, and for an encore goes on to prove that black is white and white is black and gets himself killed on the next zebra crossing. While most leading theologians believe this argument to be a load of dingo's kidneys, that didn't stop Oolon Colluphid from using it as the central theme of his best-selling book, Well That About Wraps It Up For God.
Apr 5 2007, 1:01 pm
If the existence of something as relatively simple as a banana... or to use another common example, the giraffe's neck... or any other such example... is supposed to necessitate the existence of a more complex maker, why doesn't that maker's existence require a maker-maker?
Apr 5 2007, 1:12 pm
why doesn't that maker's existence require a maker-maker?

Maybe the rules are more flexible outside of time, matter, and causality.
Apr 5 2007, 1:22 pm
It's all infinite. I believe that as humans, we still know nothing. Que lastima :(
Apr 5 2007, 1:40 pm
Gughunter wrote:
why doesn't that maker's existence require a maker-maker?

Maybe the rules are more flexible outside of time, matter, and causality.

In other words, existence?
Apr 5 2007, 1:42 pm
I have yet to be shown the rule that actually requires a maker from within time, matter, and causality... I'm just accepting on its face the assumption that a complex object requires a more complex object maker, and following it to its logical conclusion.

I'm open to the possibility that there's a circumstance under which that's not necessarily so... but that being the case, we have eliminated the absolute need for the "watch maker."

(Which is not the same as absolutely eliminating the possibilty of such.)

Given that one of the observable rules of the universe is that, within the universe, nothing can be created or destroyed, the only case in which we absolutely require an external cause for the universe that's not bound by the rules of our physical existence is when we first take it upon ourselves to assume that there's an external cause for the universe that's not bound by the rules, etc., etc.

Which is to say... it's a matter of faith. :P And I have no problem with that... except for the large number of people of faith who go, "But if there's a watch and/or some sort of potassium-filled snack, you must assume there's a watch and/or some sort of potassium-filled snack maker." and act like they've made some great big point. I'm thinking of the banana-throwers here, not necessarily anybody commenting on this post.

As I see it, such a "logical argument" for the existence of God is like a shell game one plays with oneself. If confronting the idea that the physical universe may in fact be eternal gives oneself what phillosophers know as "the jibblies", one avoids thinking about it by pushing that idea of eternalness off onto a level a step removed.

The same basic question of "But how can something possibly exist that had no beginning and end?" is still there, but by pushing it to a point we imagine is outside the arena of time, matter, and causality, we no longer have to deal with it as strenuously.
Apr 5 2007, 2:29 pm
Yellow bananas are the result of us deciding which bananas to breed. When the colonists came to America, the bananas were only edible when cooked, (ever heard of plantains?). We started breeding the best tasting ones until we got the tasty versions we have now. Was it Intelligent design? Yes intelligent humans did it.
I still think it is pointless to argue for or against the existence of a god. A being that is omnipotent et cetera, would have power to make himself seem not to exist. Therefore, no one will be able to disprove the existence of a god figure. Even if you disprove it on this dimension or what not, the whole idea that the god would be all-powerful would suggest that the god could exist on another dimension. It is like proving the universe is infinitely large. You could prove the universe ends if you find an end, or even if it bends back on itself. If it is infinitely large, we will never know because it could end just past the point that we know about. Only one side of the argument can be proven for the god debate, and unfortunately, it is not the side scientists are on. Nevertheless, even if a god came and said, hey look at me I am god, that would not prove the existence of god either, only of another form of life.
Apr 5 2007, 2:33 pm
As we approach these ethereal concepts of a god -- more or less, Deism -- in which this being is outside of known existence and, usually, doesn't impact current existence directly, we at least get to a belief more compatible with rational observation of the universe around us. There are even major skeptics who are deists (such as Martin Gardner, though he describes himself as a theist, and I'm not totally clear on whether there's a difference).

Some modern cosmology posits universes popping in and out of existence, so presumably it's not impossible that we could eventually get to a technological point where we could intentionally cause the creation of a universe, and therefore it may not be out of the realm of possibility that our universe was created in such a manner.

Interesting stuff to think about. Of course, it's an incredible leap from these currently untestable theories of universe creation to this bearded white guy who knows all, cares a whole lot about your personal grooming habits, and dabbles here and there in human affairs. Even more so to the god who cares about the outcome of the local football game, or causes a phone call so your souffle will fall flat and you'll order out and thereby meet the delivery boy of your dreams.

And the bastard wouldn't even let us have corn, bananas, potatoes, or tomatoes until we genitically engineered them ourselves...
Apr 5 2007, 2:45 pm
Gughunter wrote:
why doesn't that maker's existence require a maker-maker?

Maybe the rules are more flexible outside of time, matter, and causality.

That's special pleading, Gug, and you should be ashamed of yourself for doing that. >:(
Apr 5 2007, 2:47 pm
Not to mention life spans past 30 years without science.
Apr 5 2007, 2:51 pm
"Barring some sort of miracle...?"
[looks up to the heavens enthusiastically]
"[in annoyance] ...All right, we'll help ourselves. Yet again." --Rev. Lovejoy
Apr 5 2007, 3:36 pm
I know NOTHING, unlike most of you who THINK you know something, but really dont!

Question: 1 + 1 = ___

Me : uhh, i dont know

You: oh, pssh, thats easy, its 11
Apr 5 2007, 4:31 pm
That's special pleading, Gug, and you should be ashamed of yourself for doing that. >:(

Of course it's special, because I wrote it! Yay for me!

So, special pleading is a logical fallacy. Fair enough, but to the extent that faith is irrational, it doesn't deny the worth of reason, but only asserts that reason can be insufficient in potentially important situations. If Godel's theories aren't enough to demonstrate that, a BYOND programmer can easily establish it by considering whether a /mob could ever truly "prove" the existence of his programmer, even if the programmer is continually messing around with him.

The relationship between reason and faith is kind of like the relationship between math and music -- they are tied together at a fundamental level. You can look at a piece of music and identify mathematical relationships in the patterns and frequencies of the notes, or look at a mathematical phenomenon and sense that it embodies something beautiful and transcendent; but most of the time, math can't tell you whether your music is good, and music can't tell you whether your math is correct.

[Edit: To get back to Douglas Adams for a moment, Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency relies heavily on the notion that man can more or less bridge the divide between math and music, and make symphonies out of spreadsheets. I guess I'll believe it when I see it...]
Apr 5 2007, 4:44 pm
Those look more like Plantains than bananas, though.
Apr 5 2007, 7:21 pm
Well, it's a silly thing to begin with to waste time trying to prove or disprove "God" in the first place. Faith is exactly what it means, right? You can either choose to believe in something you can't prove, or you can not believe in something because there's no proof to support it.

We live maybe 40-50 years of good life (well, if we're lucky). I see no reason why people shouldn't choose something to believe in. It's actually rather admirable that someone can devote one's self to fully to something (No matter how bizarre, and of course excluding Scientology). Right?

We could all spend our time better, worrying less about someone else's beliefs and more about how much megatons of destructive force Captain Falcon's Falcon Punch, really has.
Apr 5 2007, 7:33 pm
Or wondering why they made Ganondorf a cheap copy of him.
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