Ah yes. Atheists seethe.

A recent commenter wrote:

Atheists fairly seeth with contempt for theism and manifest rabid hatred of all ideas that differ with your own, as well as of the people who hold them.

You also set yourselves forth as objective, impartial judges of scientific truth.

Choose one. Because you can't have both.

I don't have the good fortune of knowing anonymous, but we hear the charge from time to time that we are contemptuous of theists and that we hold ourselves as objective judges of scientific facts. The commenter no-doubt found reason to object to my previous post on bulls*** hitting New Zealand.

There is no doubt about this. It's bullshit. It's crap. It's utter nonsense and garbage. It's a way of trying to use a shellac of science to uphold medieval and ancient doctrines. There is no scientific evidence whatever that the universe was specially created by a divine being with us in mind. To teach children that it is a recognized scientific conclusion constitutes bad science. To teach children that science upholds the doctrine of special creation, geocentrism, the flood, transsubstantiation, or most any religious doctrine is to LIE which makes for bad religion and bad science. Both say that they thrive on honesty.

In this case, the creationist propaganda machine that sent out The Privileged Planet CD and the booklets is using narrow theological interpretations of science - the "anthropic principle" and galactic habitable zones in particular - to put forward an argument that God created our little special place in the universe just for us. Where is the divine fingerprint? Where is the evidence? How did God do this? How do we know that s/he/it did this? Why not make the whole universe habitable and give us real God-like powers like the ability to teleport anywhere in the universe, see in the full electromagnetic spectrum, hear in a vacuum, fly, breathe underwater, and bud?

Why not just clearly come down to modern Earth and show us why and how? That would solve the whole thing. Instead we have bad arguments from people about privileged planets (no kidding it's privileged...look at how cool it is to live here!) and no good arguments for God's existence. It's all an inferences to wish-thinking, revelation, and authority all of which have great rhetorical power but which amount to...sorry...crap. Bullshit. Nonsense. Zero. Fluff. Nothing.

Atheists don't pretend to have the explanations for many many things. But creationism explains nothing and screws up good explanations where they are available. I'm reminded of Bertrand Russell who said that "it is undesirable to believe in a proposition when there is no ground whatever for supposing it is true." Creationism cannot fit this any more neatly. To call it crap is to recognize it for what it is.

And one needn't be an atheist to see that. Go read some Ken Miller or Dobzhansky.