Calling Darth Wong or anybody really. Need help.

[Surlethe]

It seems like such a waste of time to be talking about God and science at the same time. Doesn't everyone know that science can't have anything to say about God whatsoever*?

Why ever not? The goal of science is to develop and refine a comprehensive model of the universe; if God exists, he belongs in that model.

[CaptJodan]

As far as contending why God is superfluous. . .why is God necessary to explain anything? Explanations for everything else work just fine without any kind of God, so why is the creation of the universe any different?

I think it's a fundamental desire to know everything, or at least know that someone knows everything. Human explanations don't account for everything (and they never will). It goes back to this desire to be special. To be alive when we know everything, or if we don't know everything, to know that God knows everything, and thus we will know everything once we die and go to heaven.

[Darth Wong]

As far as contending why God is superfluous. . .why is God necessary to explain anything? Explanations for everything else work just fine without any kind of God, so why is the creation of the universe any different?

That's a very vulnerable argument, because it requires that "explanations for everything else work just fine". This is precisely the argument that creationists are conditioned to expect and attack, by trying to undermine confidence in those explanations with their shitstorm of lies, fallacies, misleading statements, and appeals to ignorance.

The more correct way to explain this is to show that even when we have no explanation whatsoever, God is still superfluous because God is not an explanation. It is just a name.

[General Zod]

That's a very vulnerable argument, because it requires that "explanations for everything else work just fine". This is precisely the argument that creationists are conditioned to expect and attack, by trying to undermine confidence in those explanations with their shitstorm of lies, fallacies, misleading statements, and appeals to ignorance.

The more correct way to explain this is to show that even when we have no explanation whatsoever, God is still superfluous because God is not an explanation. It is just a name.

Good point. I was trying to think of other ways to phrase it, but everything else seemed a bit too open to attack. Unfortunately too many creationists like dicking around with semantics than actually addressing the point.

[Kitsune]

Found a new "Defect"

All mammals except humans have an enzyme called uricase that breaks down purines so they can be easily removed from the body.

http://health.howstuffworks.com/gout-in-depth.htm

[JBG]

Kitsune, ouch. I have had a brief touch of gout ( if you wake up and think that one or both of your big toes feels broken, though it is not, then think gout ) but another "defect" if I understand the argument is that only Humans and Chimps of the higher primates cannot produce their own ascorbic acid.

On the same theme, as a Sydney-sider, a bite from a funnel-web spider will kill most humans without recourse to the anti-venom. No such problems for cats or dogs, for instance, mainly humans. What's worse, they can put their fangs through your thumb nail! I realise that the "suffering of innocent children" is a starting argument against a "benevolent" god but it is getting ridiculous with funnel-webs

Jonathan

[darthbob88]

Food allergies, anyone? No benevolent designer would leave one of his creations vulnerable to poisoning by otherwise healthy food. Thus, intelligent, benevolent design may be disproved. Alternatively, we may accept that humanity and its brother creations were the work of an intelligent creator, and that Adam and Eve were both free of food allergies as were their descendants for a few generations. Since food allergies exist now, and they did not then, something must have changed in the past few millennia, a change called evolution.