Someone posted this amusing article on the Amazon atheist forums:

Click here to download the newsletter directly.

I've spent the last couple hours criticizing it, and now I need to do some homework, so figured I'd start a thread, and let anyone interested post about it.

We'll start off with the original article

Unfortunately, I was only able to read as far as the second sentence before I was blinded by the irony.

A new group of atheists has arisen in society. Called the new atheists, they are not content to keep their views to themselves.

That’s right. The door-knockin’, rabidly proselytizing cult is rebuking atheists for not keeping their views to themselves.

To counter Sam Harris they ask "Is belief in a Creator intrinsically harmful?" which brings up a much more interesting question:

How do you define god(s)?

Here, they have equated god to creator, but I, a programmer, create almost daily, and I can confidently proclaim that I am not a god. Even if we gave them their first (sentient) cause, how does its creating things lead us to call it a god? How is it any different than any other entity? Obviously it has more power, but I have more power than an ant, I can call down fire to consume them with my magnifying glass, I can flood their ant colonies with rivers from my garden hose, I can provide mana from above by crumpling saltine crackers over their colony. I am a creator, I am more powerful than other life forms, but I am not a god.

Even if we suspend intelligence and give them their creator, we have not given them their gods.

Furthermore, what definition at all could be offered for a god that is even a cohesive idea?

When the Jehovah's Witnesses say they worship "God", what definition does this object have that it could be worthy of such a title?

They have this habit, I've noticed of poor paraphrasing

Both involve faith—atheism in purposeless blind chance; theism in an intelligent First Cause.

As a determinist, I don't believe in chance.

---

As an aside, too many people are too eager to ascribe attributes to atheism. It merely means not believing in gods (negative/weak atheism), or believing there are no gods (positive/strong atheism). Everything else is up to the individual.

agreed

They try to discredit atheism by discrediting evolution and abiogenesis (they are only barely aware that these two are not the same thing), but atheism does not require abiogenesis or evolution, and even if those things were not true, that would not mean that Creationism/ID is (as pointed out by Judge Jones at the Dover trial), or that the explanation is gods (here, nothing more than a synonym for magic).

To do this, they try to quote lots of scientists who seem to oppose evolution, to imply that lots of smart people don't believe in evolution. While being made aware of specific people who support your cause might be encouraging to the Jehovah's Witnesses, this sort of anecdotal evidence masks the sheer number of scientists who profoundly disagree, for example, the 1142 scientists named Steve (at the time of this writing) who support Evolution, know that such an organization exists, and care enough to sign up for it.

My dad dated a Jehovah's (note the "h" at the end) Witness for awhile when I was in grade school. We attended a Kingdom Hall regularly for a year or so, and during that time, I was an avid reader of Awake! and the Watchtower publications. That right there should tell you a lot about the cognitive level to which they are written.

I read through the New Atheism stories in the linked issue of Awake!, and certainly wasn't impressed. That's just a lot of the usual softball material that goes into so very little detail, I have to wonder if the authors even read beyond the covers of the New Atheist books. It's all stuff that even a n00b atheist could knock down in his sleep.

They did mention Antony Flew, the atheist philosopher turned deist. That was a sordid story that I watched as it played out. Basically, Flew's cognition deteriorated in his old age to the point that he was easily fooled into becoming the exploited pawn of some slimeball apologists. Unlike most atheists at the time, I had actually heard of Flew prior to his renunciation of atheism. But I had never read any of his earlier work on theism, and I still haven't. The only thing of his that I've read is one of his books on critical thinking, which was decent, not great, even though it was written when he was still of sound mind.

That's the level to which apologists will stoop: exploiting a dying, senile old man.

When I was young, after reading lots of ancient mythologies, I came to the conclusion that things attributed to gods (gravity, lightening, the sun, moon, everything due to plate tectonics, etc) had been explained by other means. The god of the gaps has been relocated many many times through history, Every time it was due to enlightenment, usually due to science and technology, never has the god of the gaps gain ground in the light of reason. Thank goodness and reason for the judge in the Dover trial. He gave the god of the gaps, in the form of intelligent design, a punch in the face.

Don't the Jehova Witnesses believe only 144,000 will get into heaven? 12,000 from each of the 12 tribes. How do they know which tribe I am in? I'm so far removed from being in any sorta middle eastern tribe, it would be impossible to tell. If I'm not in their tribe, what does it matter to them? 12,000 is not a lot of folks by today's population, but it was about 3000 years ago. Why don't they build(and sell) a 'Tribanator' to detect your tribe, or to change your tribe to a better one, like the Scientology folks? Wow, this is really a good idea! How is anyone gonna tell when it doesn't work? I could also make a vampire and werewolf detector models.

I don't get Jehova Witnesses at my house. In fact, I'm such a godless heathen, I don't even get trick-or-treaters.

Jehovah's Witnesses do believe only 144,000 will be admitted to heaven. Their consolation prize for the other JWs is paradise on Earth. Non-believers get annihilated. That's fine by me.

I'm interested in this paradise on earth. Would I still have to work? Is the work, I will have to do, the lord's work? Strangely, I doubt this paradise will be much different then the way things are now.

Opps, forgot about the annihilated part. I guess I won't be around.

To support their beliefs (about evolution), they quote a physicist.

Cambridge Professor John Barrow says that the belief in "the evolution of life and mind' hits 'dead-ends at every stage. There are just so many ways in which life can fail to evolve in a complex and hostile environment that it would be sheer hubris to suppose that, simply given enough carbon and enough time, anything is possible."

John Barrow is talking about probabilities here, and saying that the probability is so unlikely, that no matter how many opportunities evolution has has, it is absurd to assume it can overcome this. This type of probability is a binomial distribution which we can all sit down and figure out right now.

The general formula is


Where
n is the number of opportunities for the event to occur
k is the number of times we are wanting the event to occur
p is the probability that the event will occur when given one opportunity
! is the function factorial, defined here

If life and minds can evolve one or more times, then John is wrong. So the only way he can be right is if life and minds evolve zero times (k=0). He has given us no limit to time, so we have infinitely many opportunities to evolve (n approaches infinity). He is hoping that the probability is so low that it overcomes multiple attempts (p is an extremely small positive constant).

Then our formula to determine the likelihood of John's statement being correct is:


In case its been a while since you had Calculus, on the step before 0, p is very very close to zero, so 1-p is very very close to 1 (where 1 represents 100%). But it is not quite 1, and it has an exponent that is moving towards infinity. Multiplying by a number less than 100% decreases that number (think if you had 90% of a gas tank it is less than 1 gas tank). So when we keep multiplying it by less than one, it gets smaller and smaller, approaching zero as n (time) approaches infinity, a condition conceded by John.

So the probability of John Barrow's statement being correct is 0%

Of course, his statement seems to be false on the face of it, regardless of smug math. If a mutation leads to a dead end, those creatures don't survive, and instead a different creature with a more yielding mutation gets to propagate its genes. I suppose he could say that he is talking about entire species, not individuals. That the entire species moves up a peak on Dawkins' Mt. Improbable, and can't get back down, thus can't get to a higher peak elsewhere. That would neglect, though, that environments are ever shifting and ever changing, the creatures' evolution may stagnate for time, but once the environment changes, new selection pressures are equivalent to a shifting mountain topography.

Dead ends are removed with changing environment.