“The theory states that the illusion of efficient causation between mundane events arises out of God’s causing of one event after another. However, there is no necessary connection between the two: it is not that the first event causes God to cause the second event: rather, God first causes one and then causes the other.”

Seriously. Why have this “reality” thing to begin with, then? They tell you atheists have nothing to live for since “it’s all arbitrary”. Surely doubling down all the way to “everything is determined where things don’t even interact as god must do pretty much everything” must be the more sinister concept here!

Ego.  Atheists are humans, just like theists.

From lack of belief.

“ Seems to me agnosticism is a much more rational position to take.”

If you’re prone to weak Pascal wagers.

That’s a feature, not a bug to them.

A Universe from Nothing

http://www.astrosociety.org/pubs/mercury/31_02/nothing.html

“Quantum theory, and specifically Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, provide a natural explanation for how that energy may have come out of nothing. Throughout the universe, particles and antiparticles spontaneously form and quickly annihilate each other without violating the law of energy conservation. These spontaneous births and deaths of so-called “virtual particle” pairs are known as “quantum fluctuations.” Indeed, laboratory experiments have proven that quantum fluctuations occur everywhere, all the time. Virtual particle pairs (such as electrons and positrons) directly affect the energy levels of atoms, and the predicted energy levels disagree with the experimentally measured levels unless quantum fluctuations are taken into account.

Perhaps many quantum fluctuations occurred before the birth of our universe. Most of them quickly disappeared. But one lived sufficiently long and had the right conditions for inflation to have been initiated. Thereafter, the original tiny volume inflated by an enormous factor, and our macroscopic universe was born. The original particle-antiparticle pair (or pairs) may have subsequently annihilated each other – but even if they didn’t, the violation of energy conservation would be minuscule, not large enough to be measurable.

If this admittedly speculative hypothesis is correct, then the answer to the ultimate question is that the universe is the ultimate free lunch! It came from nothing, and its total energy is zero, but it nevertheless has incredible structure and complexity.”

“He just appeared from nothing or has always existed” is what they’d say without realizing they could skip a step and just say that the universe appeared from nothing (quantum physics) or has always existed.  But to them, that would be “obviously ridiculous and unscientific.”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occasionalism

Which is a real philosophy, with a long history, that real people really believe in.

Because it’s obviously chicken.

English might be a second language. I can recall some vegans being horrified when they were informed that the fish or chicken in their Chinese food was “not meat”.

Plenty ain’t enough.

it isn’t the abscense of evidence against the existance of god that makes atheism the most tenable positon, it is the abscense of evidence for god.

oversimplification, but i hope it helps answers the question you pose.

While Public Libraries may be losing books and losing funding, the internet (with all of its warts and shaky truth) is still available for the curious but stifled kid. All the energy those kids are NOT devoting to schoolwork as unchallenging as this will be devoted to figuring out ways to sneak and lie to better educate themselves.

Ask me for more details!

While I do believe that de-funding of public schools and libraries is part of a general trend towards keeping a democratic populace uneducated, and while I am heart-broken at the fostering of the Stupid, I still have faith in the ingenuity of the kids who are burning to explore and learn. They will always exist.

And I think that my job as a former kid trapped in an abusive, oppressive, anti-learning environment is to nurture the curious and contribute to the availability of resources for those who want to learn.

Because in evangelical Christianist (see what I did there?) environments, adherents are spoon-fed a special diet of ‘Science Lite’ that, minus the bits about biological evolution, has just enough fact in it to discourage thorough research and fact-checking by the listeners. They quote just enough data from reputable publications to make it sound like the two viewpoints are in agreement, and due to most people’s laziness, these ‘facts’ are very seldom checked up on. A flood of pseudoscientific publications from posers with lots of letters after their names (most of which were obtained from dodgy sources or divinity schools) serves to keep the natural scientific curiosity of these folks sated just enough to make them feel knowledgeable, so they can have intellectual-sounding conversations with others in their echo-chamber. Conversations only, of course- because debate is not only frowned upon, it is actually impossible due to the depth of ignorance among the parties involved.

The general response to inquisitive students is “These are not the facts you are looking for”, and a suggestion to ingest some more Ken Ham materials.

Just for amusement’s sake, here are a few of the things I was taught during my time in Christian and home schools:

The geological timeline proves the global scope of the Genesis Flood. Geological strata, far from being laid down over millennia through well-proven processes, were instead deposited instantly during a cataclysmic upheaval of the earth’s crust, couple with the rapid release of the entire atmosphere’s water vapour.

Dinosaur bones also prove the story of the Flood, because if they’d been slowly fossilised over long periods of time, they a) would have decomposed faster that they could be buried and b) we’d find Human remains alongside them.

When God created the stars, He created them with their light already reaching Earth, despite the vast distances between them. (Before we could conclusively prove ideas like Red-shift and gaseous spectral analysis, the stars were simply pinpricks in a giant dome over the Earth.)

It is possible to prove through large-scale, Earth-based optical experimentation, that the Earth actually IS the centre of the Universe. No word of a lie, this was in the Nineties.

Chemically, the Bombardier Beetle proves the foolishness of Evolution (in the Darwinian sense of the concept). Kaboom!

Chronological organic dating methods such as C-14 are useless, because of blah blah blah and how C-14 decays, etc. Other dating methods such as tree ring correlations, sediment layering, and glacier particle entrapment are equally suspect, because they fail to take into account the devastating and immediate effects of the Flood, which we *know* happened 4,000 years ago (on a Tuesday, I think?) because of some pretty straightforward arithmetic in the Bible.

There are, of course, no intermediate fossils to prove biological evolution, particularly among Humans, who have remained unchanged since Creation. Discoveries concerning other Hominids are either mistakes (like the Piltdown Man), or utter fabrications (Lucy).

And of course, most famously: Because I said so.