[Occam's Razor Rash]

  According to the evolution theory, why are the (expected) countless millions of transitional fossils missing? Steve Baker Blogger at  LetsRunWithIt.com  (2013–present) Jan 4 Oh - gotta love a “Strawman” question - state a lie as a truth and then ask why it’s true! Sorry - doesn’t work! Fossils do not form easily - the VAST majority of living things that die do not form fossils. Hence fossils are VERY rare (as a percentage of all living things). Then, the odds of a fossil being found and properly recognized and cataloged are even smaller. With many known species, the only evidence we have that the species existed at all may be a single tooth or a jaw-bone or something. Given that, there will be a great number of species for which no fossil is ever found. Then, our questioner uses that dead-giveaway term: “transitional”…this is word that only a creationist would use in this context. What happens is that the creationist will ask for a “transitional” species between a ...

From Quora: Belief in a Religion or an Ideology is based on what I call faith-based reasoning. The believers think that there are certain statements about reality that are absolutely and immutably true. These statements are that particular faith's or ideology’s core-beliefs or tenets. These inform the faithful how to interpret and interact with reality.  They are the lens through which they see the world and provide the tramlines for their journey through life. So when a believer encounters objective evidence that contradicts a core-belief they only have two rational options. They have to reinterpret the evidence in such a way as to keep their tenets true. Or, they ignore the evidence altogether. If you are a Bible Literalist then you must believe the fossil evidence was placed there by the Devil to tempt the faithful. In a similar vein, when challenged about how Noah managed to save the marsupials in Australia, you would just ignore the question and hope the questioner would ju...

  Why was the Confederate States economy so mismanaged throughout the entire Civil War? For example, the high amount of inflation, the souring debt, etc. The issue was that all you have been told about the economy of the south is a lie invented by the Lost Cause movement. By 1820 even with the introduction of the cotton gin the southern economy was circling the drain at the start of the industrial revolution. The rest of the industrializing nations were using a system of what were called tariffs to in essence maintain a cold war in the realm of trade. The tariffs were not debilitating to anyone with a technology and industrial base, but could devastate the economy of a primary producing / agricultural system. At the same time math and actuarial science were making strides in accounting and economic numbers could be measured. In 1827 a new tariff system was proposed which was designed to match the European powers and balance the United States economic ship, with a goal of increasing...

  Thomas Aquinas and the Great Pumpkin Thomas Aquinas is famous for his “Five Ways” that present five logical arguments supposedly proving the existence of God (and, specifically, the God of Christianity). One notable feature of these arguments (aside from the fact that they are all unsound due to having premises that are merely  asserted  instead of actually being shown as necessarily true) is that each one ends with the assertion, “and this everybody understands to be God.” It doesn’t matter what Aquinas claims to have logically proven, whether it’s a “first cause” or a “necessary being” or “the greatest good” — in the end he just waves his magic wand and declares that this is necessarily the Christian God we are talking about here. For example, his “Argument from Contingency” can be summarized as follows: In the world we see things that are possible to be and possible not to be. In other words, perishable things. But if everything were contingent and thus capable of go...

  The Evidence for God’s Existence In a previous post (see  What Constitutes “Evidence” of God ) I discussed the different standards that atheists and theists use when determining what actually constitutes evidence when it comes to the existence of the particular god that the theists believes in. In that post, I described what standards atheists use to determine whether evidence is “good” or not (and, I should point out, the standards most  theists  actually use when it comes to anything apart from the particular god they happen to believe in), but the point of that post was primarily to point out that it’s not necessarily accurate to say that theists believe in their god without  any  evidence, since theists simply are wiling to consider some things as valid evidence that atheists would not, which is why many theists bristle when atheists claim that there is no evidence for the existence of the particular god they happen to believe in. Anyway, in that post...

  A Made-Up Solution to Made-Up Problems I realize this is a gross over-simplification, but it occurs to me that religion and a belief in various gods are, at their root, just attempts at making up solutions to deal with equally made-up problems. Or, to put it a different way, religions frequently invent problems that do not actually exist in order to be able to claim that the particular deity worshiped by that religion (and not any other deities worshiped by other religions, of course) is the only possible solution to that problem. For example, religious beliefs provide the answer to the so-called “big questions” of life, such as “Where did we come from,” Why are we here” and “What happens to us after we die.” But why do those questions actually  need  to be answered? Religions would have us believe that humans have an innate burning desire to know the answer to these questions and that “God did it” is the most obvious answer, but billions of people go through their live...

  Is America a Christian Nation Founded on Judaeo-Christian Values? Time and again, when ostensibly devout Christians here in America want to exercise their right to discriminate against those who do not share their beliefs, they trot out the well-worn nostrum that “America is a Christian nation” or “America was founded on Judaeo-Christian values” as a justification. This “foundation on Judaeo-Christian values” bit is so important, in fact, that some people even think its appropriate to put large stone monuments commemorating the Ten Commandments in courthouses. But was America or its laws actually founded on Judaeo-Christian values (to the exclusion, presumably, of all other values)? Well, to start with, we have the  First Amendment to the United States Constitution , which states in part: Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion… So, given the fact that the founders certainly  could  have specifically stated that America was a Christian na...