Here is a wall of text that you're welcome to read or ignore as you please. It's a response to Phukyanks and his terrifying insanity about god, so if you're not into the argument then go into the kitchen, get a spoon, and eat a whole bowl of dicks.

I've spent the past several days struggling with an intellectual response to the recent blog tirade from Phukyanks. Upon reading it for the first time my gut reaction was to dispute everything (s)he said, to offer counterpoint and riposte citing whatever sources I felt necessary to make the case that god isn't real. I wanted to deliver a response to the posted three reasons to believe in god that heady and intellectual, full of fact and scientific theory. I wanted, in short, to attack him(her? I don't know. For future reference I'm just going to refer to Phukyanks in the masculine. Correct me if I'm wrong, please). I toyed around with it during some free time at work for a few days, doing what research I could, and crafted what I felt was an appropriate outline awaiting completion.

The important point in there is that it took me days just to outline a good response.

Why had it taken so long? It suddenly occurred to me that the entire exercise was fraught with long bouts of distant thought and wandering speculation. I kept getting off track. I was delaying myself. The ease with which I was able to find relevant data to support my argument wasn't any harder than it would have been to open a bible and make the original case, so it wasn't that. The information was there but the motivation to present it wasn't. I realized that I didn't actually want to deliver a response in that fashion. It would be less well-informed, but ultimately more heartfelt to respond with a personal missive. A cerebral assault would have been too sterile for this environment. This is heated and emotional stuff and it deserves at least one response that carries only the faint flavor of a disagreement based in cold science.

Its true that there are no concrete ideas as to just how the universe came into being. The big bang exists as the progenitor of physical law, not creation. The actual act in question is still something of a mystery. There are mathematical postulations in the quantum explanations that are so complex that they border on total incomprehensibility to their own authors. The math begins to break down the closer you get to point zero. We just don't know enough. Either we merely lack the knowledge, or our neurological structure isn't capable of encompassing it, we just don't yet know. This leaves humanity in a tricky situation, wherein we struggle to explain an existence we don't comprehend.

This has led me to wonder why the deist school of spirituality isn't more popular. Why not ascribe the act of creation to an unimaginably strange and powerful entity and accept the blame, ourselves, for everything going on today? It seems easy. God triggered the big bang and left, presumably on business of his own and hasn't been seen since. A lot cleaner than a god who spent days making one planet and its inhabitants and created the remaining countless trillion stars as an afterthought. Its slightly less ridiculous, right?

It isn't the god of the deists were arguing over, though. Its pretty clear that this is all about the judeo-christian god. The god of the bible. One god, among many, that I do not believe in.

So why did Phukyanks and his three good reasons fail to convince me? As previously stated, I was moved by his effort. I appreciate his formatting and grammatical prowess. The tenor of the message was pleasant but the words were not. I may still be upset over having been called a Hitler supporter, murderer of babies, and a satanist. In fact, I AM still a little pissed about that. Aside from my very personal dislike of the man I tried to give his message objective thought. He clearly feels strongly about it and the least that I can do is give it some of my time. So I did. I thought about it a lot. I came to some different conclusions than he did, based off of the evidence he provided.

In his first argument he uses the aforementioned uncertainty regarding creation as evidence for god. The focal point of this specific avenue of persuasion is that, "The only potential answer, is that it must have been caused by something transcendent, something eternal, something uncaused, of unfathomable power, personal, and outside of space and time. This fact is undisputed by Scientists, they will not allude to the fact that this describes God, but it describes the Christian God perfectly." This is erroneous and is negated in whole by simply treating it as an equation and rearranging it. The Christian god is perfectly described by our lack of knowledge. See how that works, now? Of course not because it doesn't. Lets not go into the glaring possibility that there are myriad potential causes for the universe, god included. I also get a huge kick out of how he just makes statements and says this is a fact, or all scientists agree, or atheists have long maintained. I can do that, too: Atheists have long maintained that all scientists agree that Phukyanks is a sheep awaiting the ministrations of a non-existent shepherd. This is a fact.

He then goes on with a teleological approach. For those of you who don't know, teleology is a philosophical viewpoint which essentially states that the structured design that humanity applies to itself also occurs throughout nature. Or in this case, the universe. Teleology is often used as an argument for intelligent design in this respect, which is a tremendously apparent example of the Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy. The teleological evidence for creation is nothing more than grand scale cluster illusion, where the human cognition is to find patterns in everything, even when there are none to be found. It falls apart at the base quantum level of existence, in the foam layer, where everything is in a state of incomprehensible chaos. The laws of time and space as we know them break apart down there. From this chaos comes order, but only because of the chaos can the order exist. It provides the universe with an infinite amount of probability that rationality will exist. Taking the many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics into account, its reasonable to hypothesize that many of the other universes failed to hit the same jackpot we did. Here we are. We are the culmination of chance and circumstance, not god. Personally, I'm fine with that. The desire for man to find a greater cause for his being is nothing more than ego.

His moral argument is that our conscience comes from god. That's about all he says. He takes a long time to say it, but that's still about it. He attacks the evolutionary ideas regarding morality with a clever obfuscation. By stating that those who are not able to care for themselves and can in no meaningful way contribute to society should be subject to death under evolutionary law. They are a burden to society. So why do we care for them? DUH, CUZ JEEBUS. No. We care for them because, thanks to evolution, we have a sentient and well established self-awareness. We are able to empathize because of it. That little voice in your head that says, "that person needs help" isn't god. Its a part of you imagining what it would be like to actually be that poor bastard. You would want some help. That's why sociopaths are repulsive to us. We see in them someone who can not empathize. It disgusts us, and for good reason. That's why I find most christians repellant, actually. They wholeheartedly admit that without the intercession of a book they read about god and whatnot they would rape, murder, and steal all they wanted. That's frightening.

I'm good without god.