[Bullet Magnet]

a mind numbingly boring alternative view that we die and that is it, fucking end of story,

If you think that that is boring, you have not been paying attention. I already know that you have missed almost everything, as evidenced by your argument.

So before I begin this reply I want you to know that I am not trying to convert you or make you see the light, I'm trying my best to hold my own and allow you respect me once again if you ever really did.

I respect honesty.

It is my belief that the Universe has infinite complexity and that it's ever changing form must be sustained by some super intelligent commanding being with enormous power, you cannot simply put the creation of the universe into the following which so many scientists feel they have proof to say, "The universe was created by the Boson particle, there was one and now the universe is enormous...red shift proves this and so it must be true!"

None say that at all. Quite apart from the way you attempt to sum up decades of physics, astronomy and cosmology into a single non-sequitur, the Higgs boson to which I assume you are referring has noting to do with the Big Bang theory at all. The Higgs boson is a type of particle predicted by the Standard Model of particle physics. These are the observed particles of the standard model:

The four in the red squares are the gauge bosons. These bosons are force carriers which mediate three of the four forces. The massless photons mediate the electromagnetic force between electromagnetically charged particles, the heavy W+, W−, and Z gauge bosons mediate the weak interaction (weak nuclear force) between all flavours of quarks and leptons, and the eight “colours” of gluons mediate (and participate in) the strong interaction (strong nuclear force, or colour force) between quarks. It is the latter than bind two Up quarks and one Down quark into the composite particle known as the proton, and one Up quark and two Down quarks into the neutron.

Part of the Standard Model is the Higgs mechanism (also Higgs field), which explains why the elementary particles have mass, in particular why the W+, W−, and Z bosons are so heavy while the photon is massless. All elementary particles, composite particles and atomic nuclei have a fundamental property known as spin, which is not what it sounds like. It is a kind of intrinsic angular momentum. Actually the bosons so not have intrinsic spin, but rather integer spin. Don’t worry about it. The point is that the Standard model predicts a massive scalar elementary particle with a spin of zero, which would make it a boson. This would be the Higgs boson, and would confirm the standard model and the Higgs mechanism. It hasn’t been observed yet because it is also predicted to require an exceptionally large amount of energy and beam luminosity to isolate and observe it within a collider. Though it may well have already been produced but not observed.

This is how the elementary particles interact with one another:

After this it all gets rather complicated.

No doubt the public confusion concerning the Higgs boson comes from the media’s ridiculous and infuriating habit of referring to the Higgs boson as “the God particle”, after the title of Leon Lederman’s book The God Particle: If the Universe Is the Answer, What Is the Question? Though it seems to have increased media and public interest in particle physics and the Large Hadron Collider, I don’t know any scientist who likes this name. From a competition to select a new popular name, a jury of physicists selected “the champagne bottle boson,” which accurately describes the immediate effect of the boson on the human race.

Well ok, fair enough but how can you explain the following, The Earth's size and corresponding gravity holds a thin layer of mostly nitrogen and oxygen gases, only extending about 50 miles above the Earth's surface. If Earth were smaller, an atmosphere would be impossible, like the planet Mercury. If Earth were larger, its atmosphere would contain free hydrogen, like Jupiter. Earth is the only known planet equipped with an atmosphere of the right mixture of gases to sustain plant, animal and human life. The Earth is located the right distance from the sun. Consider the temperature swings we encounter, roughly -30 degrees to +120 degrees. If the Earth were any further away from the sun, we would all freeze. Any closer and we would burn up. Even a fractional variance in the Earth's position to the sun would make life on Earth impossible. The Earth remains this perfect distance from the sun while it rotates around the sun at a speed of nearly 67,000 mph. It is also rotating on its axis, allowing the entire surface of the Earth to be properly warmed and cooled every day.

I personally guarantee you that every single intelligent species that has ever and will ever exist in the universe will look upon its native environment, be it planet or otherwise, hot or cold, acidic or alkali, high pressure or low, and observe: “how uncannily perfect is the world for beings such as we?” or however they might express the sentiment. The less thoughtful among them, should their minds be wired this way, would go on to conclude that it was made for them specifically. This is a conceit that many children can see through. Point out to a class of nine-year-olds that the world is made green because it is more pleasant to our eyes, and there is always be one who, without any knowledge of chlorophyll, will see that we find the colour green pleasant because the world is already green.

We were only ever going to find ourselves on a worlds suited to our kind of life, because there is no other kind of world that our kind of life will ever find itself on. Not without very large rockets, at least. And if the world was different, a different kind of life would thrive on it. Or none at all. We are not required. Any world that would be the cradle of humanity would have been called by them “Earth”.

The numbers game for Earth-like planets has already been played by others in the thread. Could have done better, guys. But we already know that you don’t need an Earth-like planet to support life. Hell, for most of its existence, Earth hasn’t been Earth-like! We find the planet as it is only after billions of years of industrious, unthinking and thankless activity by the single-celled organisms that makes up all but the tiniest fraction of the history of life on this planet. Cyanobacteria, which produced oxygen as a waste product. Oxygen, which we rarely appreciate to be the toxic and hazardous element that it really is. Our immune system uses it to kill bacteria and infected cells! At first the oxygen, highly reactive as it is, reacted with iron and other minerals, keeping levels low. But eventually the oxygen sinks ran out, and it filled the atmosphere, poisoning and killing off the very organisms that provided it. Only later does life find a way to exploit oxygen, which is like rocket fuel for multicellular life, as only with oxygen do organisms gain access to the energy required to be multicellular. But atmospheric elemental oxygen is not a stable state. It reacts so easily that we cannot expect to find an oxygenated atmosphere uninhabited. Oxygen is not a requirement for life, it is an indicator of life. And it has to be maintained. If all the plants on Earth died, but left enough food for animal life, in just 500 years the oxygen levels in the atmosphere will have been halved.

Let us not forget that not only did life craft the world we see today, but it evolved to fit into it. We did not evolve to survive on prehistoric Mercury, we evolved to survive on present-age Earth. The peg of life becomes whatever shape the hole of its environment happens to be.

Imagine a puddle waking up one morning and thinking, 'This is an interesting world I find myself in, an interesting hole I find myself in, fits me rather neatly, doesn't it? In fact it fits me staggeringly well, must have been made to have me in it!' This is such a powerful idea that as the sun rises in the sky and the air heats up and as, gradually, the puddle gets smaller and smaller, it's still frantically hanging on to the notion that everything's going to be all right, because this world was meant to have him in it, was built to have him in it; so the moment he disappears catches him rather by surprise. I think this may be something we need to be on the watch out for.

Before I continue with this point, I have to address the facts of your last point two points. The Earth does not remain the same distance from the sun, and its orbital speed changes as it goes around.

The Earth rotates once on its axis every 23 hours, 56 minutes and 4.100 seconds. Today. It is slowing very gradually and measurably due to the tidal forces of the moon. When it was just formed it would complete one rotation in perhaps four hours, generating colossal wind speeds as a matter of course. By 400 million years ago, the Devonian (aka Age of Fish), a day was 21.6 hours and there were over 400 of them in a year. The changing Earth is an important point that I will come back to.


Yes, the Earth is very suitable and pleasant for our kind of life. But that’s only half the story! Take a closer look at the situation we find ourselves in. Of the planet we can live on, we can only survive in a very thin film of life delicately spread over its surface. We can dig and live certainly not much more than 2km down, and not for long. An atmosphere that extends some 60km up, almost all of which we cannot breathe in, and of what we can almost all of it is entirely inaccessible. We are surface dwellers, yet two thirds of the surface of the Earth is entirely inhospitable to we land-dwelling air-breathers, and in half of what’s left we will freeze and or starve to death. Some design.

The perfect warming and cooling of the Earth you praise is necessary but not perfect in the slightest. The planet’s axis is tilted, first of all. This means that for six months at a time a not insignificant portion of the planet is left in total darkness, or total light. This tilt creates seasons, which certainly makes life more interesting (particularly concerning migratory, hibernating and breeding behaviours) but is absolutely unnecessary for life. Indeed, it regularly transforms pleasant habitats into hostile wastelands that kills of most of it, and relegates the lifespan of many of Earth’s species to no more than a year. And the division of the surface into water and land, necessary for life, also prevents perfect warming and cooling. These completely different surfaces absorb and radiate heat differently, and among the outcomes are winds and the hurricanes that regularly clobber us. This is a system in which the only solution that permits life also causes deadly effects. Some design.

There’s life itself. The Bible irresponsibly teaches that we have dominion over the animals of the world, but neglects to mention that microorganisms have dominion over us. We know why, of course. Some design.

The surface of this world to which we so desperately cling to is only the sold crust. The world has not yet cooled, and is liquid below (where the pressure permits), upon which the cracked segments of crust float and grind and overlap. And a good thing too! Without the still-molten core there would be no plate tectonics, and without tectonic activity the carbon cycle would grind to a halt as all the carbon of which we are made makes its way into the rocks and the seabed, permanently. The only solution to a world with the oceans and marine microorganisms necessary for life, but look at the other outcomes: earthquakes, which shatter our meagre cities and cause untold suffering, and volcanoes, essential to the carbon cycle but which bury our lands in ash, and every so often threaten our very existence. 60,000 years ago, before we have even left the continent of our birth, the Toba supervolcano erupted and caused grand climactic upheaval that reduced our species to between 1000 and 10,000 breeding pairs. The brink of extinction, and ever since has left our species genetically impoverished by comparison to other species, making us vulnerable as a species to plagues and disease. This is the solution to the carbon cycle! Some design.

Tsunamis, as well. Over half of the human population and civilisation is on the coast, where it is extremely vulnerable to tsunamis. They are caused by earthquakes somewhere beneath the two-thirds of the planet’s surface covered in water, where most do, related to the above point, but by asteroid impacts too. The inner solar system is a shooting gallery by geological time scales. There’s one being tracked now, appropriately named “Apophis,” that runs the risk of sandblasting every Pacific coastline. Some Design.

Now, temperature: 2.4 billion years ago we had the Oxygen Catastrophe. All the oxygen being produced by the cyanobacteria for over a billion years had already oxidised the metals and minerals of the crust, and was now spilling into the atmosphere. At this stage the atmosphere was rich in, among other gasses, methane. As we know, methane is a very potent greenhouse gas. As the highly reactive free oxygen poured into the atmosphere it began oxydising the methane into water and the less potent greenhouse gas carbon dioxide. This catastrophic loss of greenhouse gasses cooled the Earth phenomenally, and caused a glaciation, written indelibly into the rocks, reaching all the way down and up to the equator, putting the pathetic ice age of modern times and its glaciated periods to shame. I’m talking, full blown, maximum Hoth, Snowball Earth.

Some Design.

It lasted for 300 million years. That’s half again longer than the age of mammals and the age of dinosaurs put together. This was not the only time this has happened in the Earth’s history. The most recent was sometime before 650 million years ago, just before the Cambrian and the rise of multicellular life. You want to talk about how if the Earth wasn’t perfect, we’d all freeze? Dude, its, not, and it’s happened before. Life continues. We cut it pretty close, but we’re still here. Earth was not Earth-like. The solution to oxygenating the atmosphere into a state in which multicellular organisms could exist, it turns out, almost wiped life out altogether. Some design.

The mind-expanding exercise of considering Earth in different periods of its history applies to the other planets, too. Once upon a time Venus, Earth’s sister and twin, is thought to have been pleasant and balmy, without horrific pressures and temperatures. Mars had running water and a thick and proper atmosphere. There was Hell on Earth. But as time ticked away the little differences in size and solar distance made themselves known and they became the hells they are today. Earth has become what it is, but the clock of this grandest of experiments has not yet run full. Earth is “perfect” for life, so far, but we still have to see how that works out in the long run. The thing about stars like our sun is that they grow brighter as they age, even before they go red giant. The habitable “Goldilocks” zone around a star, in which Venus once sat, steadily expands. Sooner or later Earth will drop off the inside edge, and Snowball Earth will be out of the question. But Well Done Or Extra Crispy Earth, now there’s an eon to get behind. Some Design.

Is it truly any surprise that, off all the ages of the Earth, we find ourselves in the one between these extremes? No divine providence is necessary for that.

Look at the sheer volume of the universe, including the Earth, in which you can't live. A universe in which our galactic orbit may occasionally bring us in range of a supernova, the radiation from which will strip our ozone layer and sterilise the surface of the planet. What I'm saying is, this universe should not make you praise your god, it should make you question the competence of the designer. Or at the very least, give you pause to cast off the madly egotistical conceit that it was made with you in mind. If there is one thing we can be certain of, it is the the universe does not care that we exist, will not notice when we are gone, and will carelessly exterminate us at a moment's notice. Some design.

Do I need to explain the gravatic effect of the moon, I doubt it, you seem to know a lot about astrology.

I really hope that that was an honest and simple error on your part.

How can that be chance, or luck or universal accident or anything else but a divine being, Steven Weinberg, a Nobel laureate in Physics, said at the moment of this massive explosion, "the universe was about a hundred thousands million degrees centigrade...and the universe was filled with light."

I can see that the argument from personal ignorance is going to become a theme, but I must cry foul at your quote mining. I have no doubt at all that Weinberg said that, since it is a poetically accurate description of what our theories predict, however I can find no example anywhere besides Christian propaganda websites. What you won’t have heard is that the universe (smaller than a person at this stage) was filled with will light and was perfectly dark, on account of being opaque. Lots of light, but it couldn’t go anywhere without colliding with a particle.

Besides, Weinberg is one of ours, and I can summon quotes with the best of them. “Religion is an insult to human dignity.” –Steven Weinberg.

The universe has not always existed. It had a start...what caused that? Scientists have no explanation for the sudden explosion of light and matter.

Actually Stephen Hawking has proposed one, though it hasn’t filtered down to me yet. Besides, should there be no explanation, I am perfectly comfortable with an “I don’t know... yet.” Science is progress, and mystery its stock in trade. Science doesn’t know everything, and it knows it doesn’t know everything, otherwise it would stop. But it doesn’t mean you can fill in the gaps with whatever fairytale that most appeals to you. You will get burned when science comes along to fill the gap with discovery, as it always has. Religion retreats further and further into the most distant and aloof reaches of mystery, but the tentacles of discovery continue to rape its every orifice with unbridled delight.

Historically, few people have been content to reject nonsense when there is no sensible alternative. One of the earliest few was David Hume, who lived some decades before Darwin, and saw fit to reject religious creationism as an evidently and objectively bad explanation for life. He had no alternative, but you don’t need one to recognize a bad idea.

All instruction, all teaching, all training comes with intent. Someone who writes an instruction manual does so with purpose. So is DNA not an enormous instruction manual? DNA is a three-billion-lettered manuak telling the cell to act in a certain way, that could not have formed from some isolated pool of amino acids, it could not have become emobided in a ceulluar object and it could not have survived without constant nurturing to slowly evolve and expand it's range of control over the Earth. That is impossible, all attempts to try and recreate such a phenomenon in a lab has failed.

Personal ignorance again. The exact origin of life remains unknown but a mystery that is actively being studied rather than ignored and put down to the glory of god. Science is a philosophy of discovery, intelligent design is a philosophy of ignorance. The reason no one has recreated abiogenesis in the lab yet is due to a combination of current ignorance and the lack of a lab with sufficient scope, or indeed scientists with sufficient lifespan.

There are a number of interesting hypotheses about the origin of life. This one I find the most compelling, and the individual aspects of which are all demonstrated:

As for DNA, it is well documented, observed, proven and explained how information can be generated and preserved through purely natural processes. I am not going to relate grade-school science or even university-level science, especially not at this point. However, these videos and those they link to cover it quite well.

Does God exist? We know God exists because he pursues us. He is constantly initiating and seeking for us to come to him. God is always pressing the issue. So then you have come to find out that God wants to be known. He created us with the intention that we would know him. He has surrounded us with evidence of himself and he keeps the question of his existence always upon us, always!

Baseless assertion. Why is it that that so-called “evidence” is only ever evidence of the god one already believes in, yet is always evidence of something much more amazing and much less petty and human when examined with fresh eyes with the intent to solve it?

Many atheists find the issue of people believing in God bothers them greatly. What is it about atheists that we would spend so much time, attention, and energy refuting something that they don't believe even exists?! What causes them/you to do that?

It’s a common criticism that I encounter, but an intrinsically silly one. Can you with all honesty think of a single example of something that anyone spends any time, attention or energy at all to refute something that they don’t think is untrue? Wings of Fire is peculiar and doesn’t count.
Personally I have many motivations, but chief among them is that it is fun. Others include living in a world where the majority of the population appears, on the face of it, to be mad. A world where people seek to impose their questionable moral values on me, a world where people seek to replace education and discovery with their own brand of stifling ignorance. A world where parents, educators and self-described priests and holy men commit the unforgivable crime of extinguishing the unbridled curiosity of children, threaten them with hellfire and willingly install a slave mentality that actually wants the ridiculous aspects of religious dogma to be true. A world where religious institutions are unquestionably awarded charitable status even though their works frequently include proselytising, preaching and preventing the one thing proven to lift people out of poverty; while organisations seeking charitable status that promote reason and science are asked “It is not clear how the advancement of science tends towards the mental and moral improvement of the public. Please provide us with evidence of this or explain how it is linked to the advancement of humanism and rationalism.”

Above all else, I live in a world in which faith is considered, of all things, a fucking virtue.

I am not an idiot, I hide behind childish tendencies but this is my final argument.

Oh dear. I haven’t even gone on the offensive yet. I was just getting into first gear for the last one.