Originally Posted by bhutocracy

Two issues I suppose. Most atheists think life is an emergent property of the universe. Although we could have had life seeded here by an asteroid/meteorite there are many pathways to life forming of it's own accord just based on physics and an abundance of time. It's why people give the Drake equation a fair chance of being roughly correct and that it's highly likely life exists elsewhere. So calling the thing that created life here god to a lot of people is simply calling the standard model of physics "god" which is useless as it already has a name that describes it's function much better.
This leads into the second point that goes into what Dirty is trying to say very inelegantly. We have a tendency to say Side A says this, Side B says that, so it's split.. a 50/50 toss up between the two and it's even. But it's not really like that and people know it deep down. Think about the obvious complaint about liife as an emergent property of the universe, the theist will say "you can't prove that" and think they have made a great point - "I can't prove my God you can't prove your theory so it's a stalemate". But it's not like that both in theory and in reality. What Dirty is trying to say with his unicorn talk is to show roughly where god as an explanatory force sits on a scale of "proof". On one hand we have solid scientific theory and testable hypothesis. We have made the fundamental building blocks of life in the laboratory by simulating the early "primordial ooze". We have proven that ribonucleotides can be created naturally and that the ingredients to make them are common in the universe. So on one hand we have magic sky gods and on the other we have scientists making the first stages of life and showing there is nothing really that amazing about it from a physics and organic chemistry perspective (except that y'know it's amazing to our ape brains). Think of it this way, solid proof is a pound of lead on a scale. On one side we have nothing but air and on the other we have an eighth. When I "weigh up" what to believe in I look at the scales and rationally think about what is the most likely scenario given all we know about nature. All options aren't equally valid. If a talking unicorn is a one in a trillion chance, why take it seriously? Why even think about it? Is a talking burning bush one in a trillion as well? What about Thor? What about Thetans? A non-interventionist god would have to make more sense - one in a billion? a million? Just because it's an unknown doesn't mean it's valid or likely, it's just one of trillions of things we could make up on the spot.

At a certain point there is no point in continuing to give "chances" to outlandish suggestions like personal gods. We don't give chances to unicorns but because of out societal conditioning some people allow that maybe far off in the future in a billion years we'll find that unicorn or god. Other people as I mentioned earlier understand this at a certain level and reduce a god to an initial spark of life, or call energy god or some such other waffle that takes away a good descriptive name "energy" and rather uselessly adds another word "god" to it as though that changes anything other than satisfying themselves that they've left room for someone unknown.
We humans believed in thunder gods and bear gods and multiple armed gods. Are they all as likely as each other? Are they less likely than the Christian god? Why?

And why descend into the god of the gaps? That god is the answer to the parts we don't know about or people are personally ignorant about. Even though we've made the building blocks of life in the laboratory people still want to claim god as the "spark" as though that somehow makes things better. As though degrading god from someone who frowns while you masturbate to little more than the "guy" who set the controls for the standard model of physics and then disappeared isn't telling themselves something: Every time science explains something god gets smaller. It ignores the inexorable path god has taken from being the one behind thunder to being some amorphous causal agent that predates all the things we explain, and then as we explain them, causing the things before them.

It all of course ignores the stupidity of using a god to explain a first cause, ie infinite regress. You can't use something that is more complex than the system you are trying to explain to explain how it came about, then you have to explain what created this god that was more complex than the universe.

Anyways, I'm sure most of that will be ignored. I don't really get annoyed by religious stuff at xmas. I treat it like everyone does, a time to gather with family and appreciate what you have with pagan things like xmas trees decorating the place at a pagan time of the year. The thing that does annoy me though is Huckabee or whatever bloviating about prayer being taken out of school or godlessness causing school shootings, as though America isn't the most religous first world country there is by a massive and wide margin and all the "godless socialist" countries are the ones with mass shootings every month...
Idiots.