In today’s episode of The Atheist Experience, Secular Rarity, Armin Navabi, and Justin get into claims about abiogenesis, solving abortion, simulations and more!
Caleb from OH says they don’t believe that abiogenesis is possible and because of that, God must have created the universe. Even if we grant their claim that abiogenesis is not true, how do we get to God? Caleb says that information is an important component of life that it comes from a mind. Because they know that information sometimes comes from a mind, they infer that any information must be made from a mind.
Christian from the UK calls in to say that if everyone followed the Christian teachings on marriage and divorce, it would negate the need for abortion. If we lived in a world where abortion was never necessary, of course it would be great, but we live in a world where all kinds of medical procedures are necessary. We’d much rather focus on destigmatizing abortion instead of getting rid of it. Christian says that any being that has the potential to be born has the right to live. Even if we grant that, the Bible still doesn’t solve abortion. God murders children and condones the murder of children all the time.
Steve calls in from NE to talk about how dark energy is weakening and that points to the fact that we live in a simulation. The hosts point out that just because a force isn’t constant doesn’t mean that there’s an external force tweaking it. According to Occam’s Razor, it’s a lot more likely that we are advancing our understanding as we learn more about these topics, rather than the giant leap that we’re actually in a simulation.
Mike from SC asks what the difference is between atheists and a self-aware AI. If atheists don’t believe in a soul, how are we different from an AI that doesn’t have a soul? If an AI is expressing sadness, we know that it’s not going through the same experience as humans expressing sadness. There’s no way that AI can experience the world in the same way we do unless they have neurochemicals and certain biological processes, at which point they wouldn’t be AI anymore.
Chloe from MI knows that her reasons for believing aren’t good scientific evidence for God. She’s curious if any atheists have come up with studies to test for the existence of God. This question is tricky because it depends on the definition and attributes of the god. We could make tests more specific if we knew exactly what the god was. There have been tests for phenomena that are religion-adjacent such as testing for a soul and studying near death experiences. Their conclusions point to psychology rather than the supernatural.
Jackie calls from MS to discuss the Kuzari argument for Judaism. They say that because over a million people saw the revelation at Mt. Sinai, it must be true. But that’s a claim in itself that has no proof. We don’t have thousands of accounts or individual testimonies, we just have one account in a text that was written hundreds of years after the supposed event.
Thanks for joining us this week! Answer this week’s prompt in the comments below: What is a good comeback for “I didn’t come from no monkey.”?
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