Jim Henderson <nos### [at] nospamcom> wrote:
> On Mon, 10 Jan 2011 10:38:58 -0500, John VanSickle wrote:

> > This claim does not come strictly from uninformed masses.  It is also
> > made by people more knowledgeable than you and I put together.

> But in all the cases I've found, it comes from them when they reach the 
> limit of their knowledge - then they fall back on "God did it" because 
> they can't explain any further.

  While there most probably are such people in existence, I think it's
pretty rare for somebody to have the opinion "I have no idea how complex
life came into existence, but I don't think it was by natural processes"
without also believing that some kind of god or other intelligence did it
as a conscious and deliberate act. I have never heard of a hardcore atheist
proclaiming that he doesn't believe that life could have formed by natural
processes (although I'm pretty sure there a few of those as well, but as
said, the are probably are very small minority).

  Attributing unexplained phenomena to a god (much less to the Christian
God of the Bible) is one of the oldest fallacies, and one which gets
narrowed down more and more as science progresses. Nobody in their right
mind, not even the most hardcore fundamentalist believers, would claim
nowadays that eg. the flu is caused by supernatural demons or that lighting
bolts are supernatural manifestations of a god. Why? Because nowadays we
know exactly what causes them, so there's no need for a supernatural
explanation. The "God did it" explanation recesses further and further to
the more basic elements of nature. Some hundreds of years ago almost
everything was caused by some supernatural phenomenon, but nowadays the
argument has had to recess so much that there's almost nothing left. The
only couple of things left are the tired old "where did the universe come
from" and "how did life from on Earth", and that's about it. About everything
else has already been explained by science so clearly that not even the
most fundamentalist of believers can resort to them anymore.

  This is basically the "god of the gaps" argument, and it's getting pretty
flimsy.

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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