Category: Uncategorized

DIY drone

This makes me think that the security forces of the world must be getting more than a little nervous. The state no longer possesses air supremacy.

As Carroll Quigley noted, the power of the aristocracy over the masses has historically depended upon how great the divide between state and individual military power is. Once someone figures out how to turn these little RC planes with speeds of up to 130 kph and 27-mile range into delivery systems, pretty much all bets are off. And there’s no reason they can’t be effectively turned into cheap drones without too much trouble.

I suppose the obvious countermeasure is adding laser turrets to all the closed-circuit cameras. But it’s not hard to see the recon-related possibilities here either.

Mailvox: the Genesis account

JC writes from the Philippines to ask about an interesting atheist argument concerning the Fall:

First of all I have to thank you for TIA. In my circle of friends and acquaintances, both online and offline, are a few atheists. I knew something was profoundly wrong with their arguments for the non-existence of God but for the most part I didnt have any data to back up my logical counter-arguments. Until TIA. You may be pleased to note that I now notice a considerable absence of the usual lame arguments for atheism/scienticism such as the ‘science will save us all’ crap and nobody invokes the ‘Flying Spaghetti Monster’ baloney anymore. The ‘Stalin’s pogrom’s had nothing to do with atheism’ hogwash still shows up every once in a while but that’s no problem. In fact, when I presented evidence, I actually got one atheist to exonerate Roman Catholicism from being a driving force for the Inquisition in his lame attempts to exonerate atheism from Stalin’s pogroms. The latest discussion with a science-fetishist atheist involved my challenge for him to prove the existence of human rights via Science and if he couldnt, renounce the existence of his rights as a silly superstition. He wasnt willing to do that and came back saying that he was willing to postulate their existence without proof. Sort of like “We hold these truths to be self-evident…” but without a Creator. For which I thanked him for being irrational.

Anyway, he presented me with an argument against the Fall against which I could only argue against by invoking some quantum physics mumbo-jumbo. It goes like this:

Assuming that the universe and therefore the Earth is billions of years old (both he and I agree that this is so) and that Man showed up only recently, that is, after the dinosaurs, how come the fall of Man affected the Earth even before Man showed up, that is, how come Man’s fall affected the past such that life on Earth underwent cataclysms such that entire species went extinct only to be replaced by more species which also went through a cataclysmic extinction event, etc? In other words, the Earth even before Man showed up showed every sign of being a fallen Creation even before Man had a chance to fall — lions werent sitting with lambs for instance. On the contrary. T. Rexes were eating Parasaurolophuses. I can only counter that by saying Man’s Fall affected the past as well. I may be missing some salient theological point but I dont recall anything in the Bible that addresses how Man’s fall affected the past. It just says Man’s fall caused Creation’s fall as well and Creation is also awaiting its transformation. Any ideas how to respond to his argument?

It’s mostly regulars around today, so why not go ahead and open up a theological can of worms? Let me begin by saying that I have never agreed with the common Christian assumption that pre-Fall animals were vegetarian and therefore there is no need to resort to logical trans-temporal gymnastics in order to balance observations of a T-Rex-eat-Parasaurolophus world with the Book of Genesis. The assumption about animal vegetarianism presumably comes from the following verses in the very first chapter:

God blessed them and said to them, “Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky and over every living creature that moves on the ground.”

Then God said, “I give you every seed-bearing plant on the face of the whole earth and every tree that has fruit with seed in it. They will be yours for food. And to all the beasts of the earth and all the birds in the sky and all the creatures that move along the ground—everything that has the breath of life in it—I give every green plant for food.” And it was so.

Now, notice something here. The fish aren’t given anything for food. Does anyone therefore conclude that fish did not eat prior to the Fall? Of course not. Therefore, the giving of the plants to animals and Man does not comprehensively determine the limits of their diets, it’s merely setting up their positions in the hierarchy of Creation. Next, in both Genesis chapters 2 and 3, a distinction is made between “livestock” and “wild animals”, prior to the Fall in the first case and right at the time of the Fall in the second. Then, in Genesis 4, it is written that Abel brought the fat portions from the firstborn of his flocks… which suggests that Adam as well as others were eating meat before the Fall. (Notice that I said “suggests”, not proves, one can seldom justify the use of conclusive terms in discussing past events.) Since the livestock obviously were not being used for clothing purposes, the reference to the “garments of skin” in Genesis 3:21 also tends to support the idea that livestock were being eaten before the Fall.

Now here is where it gets more interesting, from my perspective. After Adam and Eve are driven out of the Garden of Eden, Cain kills Abel, then is marked so that no one will kill him and goes out from the Lord’s presence into the land of Nod to the east. This indicates that there were human civilizations established well prior to the Fall. So, because there is reason to believe that both animals and humans ate meat and there was human and animal activity outside of the Lord’s presence in the Garden of Eden, there is no necessary contradiction between the Genesis account and the effects on the earth cited by JC’s atheist friend.

The key, I think, is to understand that there is at least a possible distinction between “the man he had formed” in 2:8 on the third day and the mankind that God created male and female in 1:26-28 and instructed to “Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it” on the sixth day. This is not only indicated by the text, but also by the fact that Adam and Eve lived in the Garden for an indefinite and presumably long period of time until they were evicted. The instruction to “subdue” the earth also offers some tantalizing hints regarding its lack of pre-Fall tameness outside the Garden of Eden.

Of course, this raises far more questions than it answers, the primary one being what the potential differences between Adamic man and non-Adamic man might have been, since they were obviously able to interbreed. Now, one can certainly choose to assume that the entire account is fictional, allegorical, or incestuous, but my point is that even if one takes the Genesis account to the literal extreme, one quickly reaches conclusions that are very, very different than the assumptions that most people, including literalist Christians, make regarding it. I am most certainly not attempting to argue that this is how it happened; given that people not infrequently cannot correctly understand something I have written even when I subsequently walk them through it slowly, using very small words, I am extremely dubious that anyone is capable of correctly interpreting Genesis to any significant degree of accuracy.

Prehistoric theology is an interesting subject upon which to speculate, but I stress that it is absolutely not relevant to one’s Christian faith or the lack thereof. This is why I am so relaxed about the TE(p)NS debate. Because even the demons believe in God’s existence, it is obvious that mere belief or unbelief in a particular account of His historical actions cannot possibly be considered a more significant issue where salvation is concerned. Like any good parent, God has always been much more concerned with our obedience than with our belief; He knows He exists and most certainly doesn’t need our faith to sustain Him. And like all children, we have very little understanding of why and how that obedience matters.

The high water mark

The bank industry claims the worst is over:

As the financial crisis of recent years recedes, the FDIC has been predicting that 2010 will be the high-water mark for bank implosions. “Going forward, the FDIC looks to see fewer failures,” agency spokesman Greg Hernandez said.

Some industry observers agreed. “I think we’re over the hump of the problem but far from the end,” banking consultant Bert Ely said. Gary B. Townsend, president of Hill-Townsend Capital, said the industry is not just out of the woods, “we are far beyond the woods.”

By one measure, the trouble is already abating. On average, the banks that failed this year were much smaller than those that failed last year. The banks that failed this year had assets totaling $92.1 billion, a decrease of 45.7 percent from the $169.7 billion in assets of the banks that failed in 2009.

It’s true that the average assets and deposits held by FDIC-seized banks were much smaller in 2010 (157 banks, $587 million assets, $500 million deposits) than either 2009 (140, $1.2 billion, $995 million) or 2008 (25, $14.9 billion, $9.4 billion). Average assets also declined in a similar manner. However, the number of unofficial problem banks has grown from 545 banks at the end of 2009 to 919 now. That represents about 12 percent of all the banks in the country and does not include the four giant banks that are facing enormous putback penalties thanks to the fraudulent unbacked-securities they sold during the housing bubble.

In other words, color me very skeptical.

Dogs are not people

Tucker Carlson goes flying wildly off the rails:

“I’m a Christian, I’ve made mistakes myself, I believe fervently in second chances,” Carlson said. “But Michael Vick killed dogs, and he did in a heartless and cruel way. And I think, personally, he should’ve been executed for that. He wasn’t, but the idea that the President of the United States would be getting behind someone who murdered dogs?”

Killing dogs is not called “homicide” for a reason. It’s not murder anymore than killing a cow for its beef is murder. Now, I love dogs considerably more than most people do – Spacebunny laughs at how I carry the Viszla puppy around the house with me and he watched the entire Vikings game on my lap – but I didn’t even think Vick merited the legal punishment he received.

(That being said, Vick probably needed the slap to the head that the bankruptcy and jail sentence provided him.)

Now, I would no sooner want to be around a person who mistreats a dog than one who is prone to defecating in public. But if Vick deserves execution for killing his own dogs, then the people at the Humane Society are clearly worse than the Nazis and Soviets combined. And should the police investigate every suspicious canine death? Tucker clearly needs to take control his emotions on the subject; he is normally sharper than this.

An out-of-date evolutionist

David Sloan Wilson not only presents a fallacious and remarkably self-serving analogy for our edification, he also demonstrates why most scientists should probably stay very far away from logic, rhetoric, and philosophy. In the process of launching an inept attack on the potential legitimacy of creationism, he shows that he is neither up on the present state of science nor able to reach a correct logical conclusion from the facts on hand:

Imagine playing chess with someone who insists on continuing after his king has been taken. Or imagine a basketball game where the losing team insists on continuing after the final buzzer has sounded. These vignettes are so absurd that if they actually happened we would regard the protesters as insane. Yet something comparable happens all time when creationists protest that it is unfair for them to be ignored–including some recent comments on my blog.

The idea that it is unfair to be declared a loser and to be made to retire from the field profoundly misunderstands the nature of fairness in all contest situations. Science is a contest situation, no less than chess or basketball. In the ideal scientific contest, alternative hypotheses make different predictions that can be tested with empirical observations. When the predictions of a hypothesis are not confirmed, it is declared a loser and is made to retire from the field. New hypotheses are always welcome to enter the competition, including modified versions of rejected hypotheses, but science without losers would be as pointless as chess without checkmate and basketball without the final buzzer….

Nevertheless, the scientific contest does result in the accumulation of durable knowledge. The earth is extremely old. Continents do drift. Species are descended from other species. Those who claim otherwise and demand that it is only fair to be heard are either deluded or cynically making a manipulative argument, a point to which I will return below.

Now, Mr. Wilson is certainly free to respond or not respond to whomever he likes on his blog and I have little doubt that he is tired of shooting down the same arguments from fourth-rate, ankle-biting creationists over and over again. I certainly get bored with hearing the same ignorant and illogical arguments put forth in such a tiresome manner by the fourth-rate evolutionists who infest the Internet. But that does not justify Mr. Wilson’s attempt to claim that he is acting fairly when he is not or his pretense that science is something it quite clearly is not.

If you actually know what you’re doing, it’s no problem shooting down the invalid arguments presented by the clueless and the uninformed. When they’re presented again, as they surely will be, simply point them to the previous smackdown. But if you really don’t, well, you’re not fooling anyone by claiming that you’re too busy, important, or credentialed to deny them taking their best shot, hapless as it might be.

Now, Wilson’s imagined sporting vignettes are indeed absurd, but they are not legitimately comparable. Let’s first consider the accuracy of his analogy. Most sports and games have clear-cut rules to which both sides are equally subject, a definite authority, more or less impartial referees, and are based primarily upon ability rather than credentials. Sporting competitions end when the clock runs out or a specific and predetermined event happens. Science, on the other hand, has no rules, no definite authority, extremely partial referees to the extent that “peer review” can even be considered refereeing rather than gatekeeping, and operates on a hierarchical, credential-based paradigm that makes no allowances for talent and would exclude most of the great uncredentialed scientists of the past. Not only do scientific “competitions” never end, logic dictates they cannot possibly end insofar as science is supposedly dedicated to “the accumulation of durable knowledge” and the possibility of new information exists.

In other words, science is observably so intrinsically unfair to those both inside and outside the profession that it makes the old Jordan Rules look like a paragon of fair competition. To claim that scientific contests, ideal or sub-optimal, are in any way comparable to a basketball game or a chess match is so demonstrably false that it requires either willful stupidity, careless error, or the cynical manufacture of a manipulative and invalid argument. Which would it be, Mr. Wilson?

Wilson somehow manages to not only commit Daniel Dennett’s error in his Doctrine of Transitive Doxasticism, but goes Dennett one better by appealing to scientage (the knowledge base of science) rather than one specific disciplinary application of scientody (quantum electrodynamics). Following a classic Dawkinsian bait-and-switch in which he brings up “the ideal scientific contest” in which “alternative hypotheses make different predictions that can be tested with empirical observations” in order to defend his quasi-scientific discipline wherein inferences take the place of testable predictions and empirical observations, Wilson then commits a logical blunder of Harrisian proportions when he cites the historical dismissal of group selection without realizing that it makes precisely the opposite case from the one that he is attempting to make.

Sloan states that the evolutionary revival of the concept of group selection, which was considered to be as much of a scientific loser as the phlogiston and Lamarckism for nearly 50 years, is evidence that the scientific playing field is fair even if it can become, in Wilson’s own words, “highly uneven”. However, the group selection example completely undercuts the original argument that a scientific contest is comparable to a sporting contest by demonstrating that there is no buzzer in science. Are we to conclude that there is a 50-year post-buzzer grace period and that Creationism has missed the scientific statute of limitations? Apparently not, as Wilson goes on to admit that there is no final buzzer. But since there is not, then what is the logical basis for Wilson’s division between the legitimate revival of group selection and the illegitimate revival of Creationism?

Wilson confesses that there are perfectly good scientific hypotheses that can be derived from the concept of an intervening creator god. What he fails to admit is that the concept has provided scientific successes as well as failures; the defeat of the “steady-state universe” by Georges Lemaître’s “Big Bang theory” as the standard cosmological model was a huge victory for the Creationists, whose concept of a universal beginning was once dismissed by Wilson’s predecessors in the way that Wilson now dismisses other, less necessary aspects of the God hypothesis.

More importantly, Wilson reveals himself to be out-of-date with regards to the latest scientific evidence on the unreliability of science itself. His “uneven playing field” does not even begin to take into account scientific fraud, the decline effect, publication bias, selective reporting, and the long, sordid history of scientific facts that have been disproven over time by scientists and non-scientists alike. In fact, the more that even the hardest sciences are examined with the same skeptical lens that the likes of Dawkins would prefer to keep focused only on religion, the more it becomes obvious that his faith in it is badly misplaced.

For example, Wilson states that “The earth is extremely old. Continents do drift. Species are descended from other species.” And yet, the scientific evidence for these statements is much weaker, scientifically speaking, than the evidence for medical science that is not experimentally disadvantaged due to the daunting challenges of replicating historical events. So, the fact that “80 percent of non-randomized studies turn out to be wrong, as do 25 percent of supposedly gold-standard randomized trials” means that it is not only possible, but downright probable, that his statements will eventually turn out to be wrong.

Wilson’s attitude and his attempt to sound a buzzer that does not exist in order to declare the game over are both profoundly unscientific. It is not only more unscientific than the behavior of the creationists that he decries, it is actually dogmatic anti-science. The ironic thing is that Wilson isn’t even doing science when he engages in his customary evolutionary speculation, but rather fiction and philosophy because there is virtually no scientific evidence for natural selection, as leading researchers in the field such as Masatoshi Nei of Penn State readily admit.

(The idea that natural selection is the cause of evolution is a perfectly reasonable logical argument, but that’s all it is to date. Despite the oft-heard explanation that polar bears are white due to natural selection, no scientist has ever gone out there and painted polar bears pink, red, and yellow in order to produce evidence that colored polar bears are any less fit than white ones. It’s taken evolutionists more than 150 years to realize this, but now even Richard Dawkins is referring to a theory of evolution by (probably) natural selection and evolutionary researchers like Nei are attempting to retroactively find the evidence that they errantly took for granted all along.)

In fact, the one thing that we can predict with a high degree of certainty about Wilson’s field based upon its past record is that its “durable knowledge” will prove incorrect. Biology is arguably the only science that is more reliably off-base than economics; just last week the discovery of homo sapiens fossils in Israel appears to have once more upended the state of evolutionary scientage. And note that simply calling the consistent unreliability of science “self-correcting” does not turn the bug into a feature, especially since a good part of the “self”-correction comes from outside the scientific community.

A more accurate analogy would have been for Wilson to describe science as a collection of annoying fat kids who declare themselves the world champions of Foosketball, then refuse to define the rules or let anyone else play lest they be exposed, pinned down, and defeated. Despite their academic credentials, scientists are no more to be permitted special pleading than priests. Mr. Wilson’s inability to reach correct logical conclusions coupled with his stated refusal to entertain alternative hypotheses does not speak well for his scientific perspective, so it’s probably just as well for everyone that he works in a field where no actual use of the scientific method is required.

Update: Amy Alkon also posted on Wilson’s post. I left a comment there which I imagine a few of you will find more amusing than she does as the woman is in well over her head and makes what we have all come to recognize as the expected atheist errors. Seriously, what is with atheists and their inability to understand or utilize common word definitions? Not reading the Bible or other religious texts I understand, but what do they have against dictionaries?

Mailvox: let me explain how this works

Modernguy objects to my kicking around a few angst-ridden atheist teenagers:

You’re treating them as arbiters of the best arguments for atheism so you’re doing battle with them. And acting like you just spiked the ball in their endzone is comical considering they’re probably just a bunch of teenagers. In any case they are philosophically unsophisticated, so I would think below your weight class as internet superintelligence.

First, if I only limited myself to those of my intellectual weight class, I’d have to ignore nearly everyone. Second, it has always been my philosophy to take on all comers and give everyone at least one shot. So, if an atheist Neo-Keynesian with Down’s Syndrome wants to take his best shot, he’s welcome to do it. It’s not like his chances are going to be significantly worse than anyone else’s. And third, who is spiking the ball? I’m not celebrating, being from the Emmitt Smith school of having been there before and expecting to be there again soon; it is an unusual defense that cannot be run over with ease. What I find annoying about Modernguy’s protest is that for every atheist who wonders why I am bothering to kick around the ineffectual opposition, there are 10 clueless atheists who genuinely believe the kickees are making really good points and doing rather well.

The underlying problem isn’t that the atheist teenagers of Reddit are philosophically unsophisticated – and since we’re talking about internet atheists, the chances are good that they are not actually teenagers, it’s just that their intellectual and social development makes them appear to be – it is that self-anointed atheist champions such as Dawkins, Harris, Hitchens, and Myers are no more philosophically sophisticated than the teenagers and make pretty much the same arguments. Dennett and Onfray do somewhat better, but they’re still not in my class as their arguments are riddled with obvious errors big enough to drive fleets of trucks through. But don’t take my word for it, read TIA and make up your own mind. No one – and I mean absolutely no one despite tens of thousands of readers – has successfully argued that my critiques of the various arguments presented by these godless gentlemen are incorrect in any way. Few have even attempted to do so because the facts upon which I draw are so conclusive and easily confirmed. Whether it is the Courtier’s Reply or the Red State argument, the Extinction Equation, the Ultimate 747, One Less God, Extraordinary Claims, the Lancet Fluke, or the Epic Self-Evisceration of Christopher Hitchens, I have shown how their arguments to be both inept and invalid.

So, as I and various others have told Modernguy, if you think there is anything better out there, if you think there are any atheists arguments against religion, Christianity or God that are stronger or more valid, then by all means send it to me. I’ll post it here in its unedited entirety before picking it apart. And in the meantime, I’ll finish my post for later today explaining why a scientist who is apparently rather well-regarded in the field of evolutionary science simply does not know what he’s talking about when he prematurely proclaims a particular triumph of so-called science.

Okay, unexpected

Chris Mathews, he of the famously tingling leg, is beginning to dabble in birtherism:

On Monday night’s edition of “Hardball,” host Chris Matthews talked about putting the birth certificate controversy surrounding President Obama to rest. “Why has the president himself not demanded they put out the original documents?” Matthews wonders. “If it exists, why not put it out?” Chris Matthews asks.

Occam’s Razor suggests that his reason for not putting it out is somehow related to his qualification for the office he presently holds. I note with some amusement that the ludicrous notion Obama is cunningly holding it back to “embarrass his critics” appears to have finally faded away.

The failure of empiricism

Ironically, even as the atheistic cult of science fetishism vehemently insists that only science is capable of determining truth and now even morality, genuine scientists are gradually coming to realize that the scientific method is not only incapable of being the sole arbiter of truth, it isn’t even capable of dependably producing consistent scientific evidence when it is properly utilized:

The premise of replicability is that the scientific community can correct for these flaws. But now all sorts of well-established, multiply confirmed findings have started to look increasingly uncertain. It’s as if our facts were losing their truth: claims that have been enshrined in textbooks are suddenly unprovable. This phenomenon doesn’t yet have an official name, but it’s occurring across a wide range of fields, from psychology to ecology. In the field of medicine, the phenomenon seems extremely widespread, affecting not only antipsychotics but also therapies ranging from cardiac stents to Vitamin E and antidepressants: Davis has a forthcoming analysis demonstrating that the efficacy of antidepressants has gone down as much as threefold in recent decades.

For many scientists, the effect is especially troubling because of what it exposes about the scientific process. If replication is what separates the rigor of science from the squishiness of pseudoscience, where do we put all these rigorously validated findings that can no longer be proved? Which results should we believe? Francis Bacon, the early-modern philosopher and pioneer of the scientific method, once declared that experiments were essential, because they allowed us to “put nature to the question.” But it appears that nature often gives us different answers….

The disturbing implication of the Crabbe study is that a lot of extraordinary scientific data are nothing but noise.

Murray Rothbard was an agnostic who repeatedly made the conclusive logical case against empiricism. It applied not only to economics and the Samuelsonian empiricism that presently serves as the basis for modern mainstream economics, but the basic concept of empiricism in general. Yet despite the decades-old Rothbardian case, the science cult continues to ignorantly insist that the only reason anyone could ever possibly doubt empiricism is religious dogmatism, thereby proving Rothbard’s point. Between scientific fraud, the decline effect, publication bias, selective reporting, and the long, verifiable history of disproven scientific assertions, it is astonishing that anyone would still attempt to argue that science is a reliable arbiter of anything outside a very narrow range of applied hard disciplines, let alone the only one that merits use.

And some still doubt that God has a sense of humor.

The WSJ discovers a banking problem

It’s only three years into the crisis. They’re clearly on the cutting edge of business journalism with their groundbreaking news of a growing number of failing banks. At this rate, they’ll discover the Great Depression 2.0 towards the end of 2013:

Nearly 100 U.S. banks that got bailout funds from the federal government show signs they are in jeopardy of failing. The total, based on an analysis of third-quarter financial results by The Wall Street Journal, is up from 86 in the second quarter, reflecting eroding capital levels, a pileup of bad loans and warnings from regulators. The 98 banks in shaky condition got more than $4.2 billion in infusions from the Treasury Department under the Troubled Asset Relief Program….

Seven TARP recipients have already failed, resulting in more than $2.7 billion in lost TARP funds. Most of the troubled TARP recipients are small, plagued by wayward lending programs from which they might not recover. The median size of the 98 banks was $439 million in assets as of Sept. 30.

This little table shows the real problem at hand. It’s from the spreadsheet of bank failures that I’ve maintained for the last two years and shows the number of failed banks along with the number of problem banks with a high risk of failure published by Calculated Risk. These “problem banks” are an unofficial tally, but the list tends to precede the official FDIC list of problem banks with a fair degree of accuracy.

2007: 76 problem banks, 0 failed banks
2008: 252 problem banks, 25 failed banks (33%)
2009: 545 problem banks, 140 failed banks (56%)
2010: 919 problem banks, 157 failed banks (29%)

This is why I expected more than 200 failed banks in 2010. I didn’t expect a seizure rate of 56%, but I did assume it would be over 40% given the continuously rising number of problem banks. However, the percentage of problem banks that were seized by the FDIC fell from 56% to only 29% this year. However, the number of problem banks continued to rise, so even if the percentage of problem banks seized by the FDIC remains around 30% in 2011, that would indicate 276 bank failures in 2011. And at the 2010 average of 262 million in bad assets per bank failure, there would be $72.3 billion in bad bank assets going up in smoke and $130 billion+ in deposits, nearly 2% of total deposits, put in jeopardy.

In other words, don’t trust the recovery crowd. Temporarily papering over a problem is not the same thing as fixing it.

The best they’ve got

In case you’re still not convinced of the moral and intellectual bankruptcy of atheism, consider this list of what atheists believe to be “the big guns” of the best atheist quotes.

Needless to say, I was deeply unimpressed. It was amusing to see that the thread’s creator actually cited the illogical and theologically ignorant “One Less God” quote from Stephen Roberts that Ricky Gervais plagiarized in his recent article: “I contend that we are both atheists. I just believe in one fewer god than you do. When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours.”

Three errors in just three sentences.

1. No, we are not both atheists.
2. No, you are confusing God with gods. If you simply take the First Commandment into account, you will know that this is incorrect. Few atheists understand that monotheism concerns the worship of one supreme Creator God, not belief in the existence of only one supernatural being that demands worship.
3. Unless an atheist dismisses the Christian God because they believe Him to be an evil supernatural being falsely posing as a deity worthy of worship, he is not doing so for the same reason that Christians dismiss the pagan gods.

There are the expected appearances of Dawkins and Harris, Galileo’s fictional quote, and the concocted quote that David Hume falsely attributed to Epicurus. It is so eminently fitting that atheists should rely upon fake quotes to argue in support of their supposed dedication to reality.

But let us be fair. Whether you are a believer or an unbeliever, select whichever quote you consider to be either the least nonsensical or most effective in support of the atheist case. Mine is the following, which is absolutely true:

“A casual stroll through the lunatic asylum shows that faith does not prove anything.” – Friedrich Nietzsche

Nietsche is correct in that faith doesn’t prove anything. The problem, of course, is that it isn’t supposed to, by literal definition. Paul writes in Hebrews: “Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things unseen. The very fact that we have faith, is evidence that what we hope for is real.”

Of course, the common atheist confusion concerning the matter notwithstanding, “evidence” should not be mistaken for “proof”. Again, this should be completely obvious, as it is why linguistic concepts such as “competing evidence” and “weighing the evidence” are utilized.