As the historian Stephen Henry Roberts (1901-71) once said: "I contend that we are both atheists. I just believe in one fewer god than you do. When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours."

Well, I was looking forward to staying out of this, but:

I like this quote: "There is no society in human history that ever suffered because its people became too reasonable."

Maybe; it's generally other societies that suffer for our reasonableness. It was pretty reasonable for the US to develop nuclear weapons, since the Germans were working on them and might have developed them first and used them against us. And it was pretty reasonable to use them against Japan, since they hadn't yet surrendered and we needed to impress the Soviets, with whom we'd already started strategically posiitioning for the post-war world. Kinda sucked for Japan, though (at least the citizens of Nagasaki and Hiroshima).

And JIMO said,

Someone please explain to me how you are supposed to seriously engage fairy tales for adults. How do you go about analyzing a belief system that presents no evidence to analyze?

And how do you argue w/ someone who has no evidence for their counterproposal (that there is no God), but only rejects the grounds of your evidence, while at the same time not recognizing that their own entire system of beliefs rests just as much on untestable assumptions (that all things that exist have physical, measureable properties, for instance; is that a falsifiable belief? How would I prove that it's not the case, i.e., how would I measure or demonstrate it?). All attempts to prove the existence OR lack of existence of a god or gods necessary begs the question. I don't begrudge someone their lack of faith in a supernatural being or spiritual world, but it does grate a bit when atheists act like they have a monopoly on logic and reason.

Bill said:

I agree that openly antagonizing someone's beliefs is no way to win them over to your side, but Dawkins argues that the religious set have been given way too much lattitude and respect given how much basic evil their faith is responsible for.

If religious people have been responsible for more "evil" throughout history, it's only because religious people have outnumbered atheists during that timeframe. As Stalin, Hitler, Mao and Pol Pot very effectively demonstrate, religious folk have NO monopoly on evil. From the review:

Exercises in double standards also plague Dawkins's discussion of the idea that religion encourages good behavior. Dawkins cites a litany of statistics revealing that red states (with many conservative Christians) suffer higher rates of crime, including murder, burglary, and theft, than do blue states. But now consider his response to the suggestion that the atheist Stalin and his comrades committed crimes of breathtaking magnitude: "We are not in the business," he says, "of counting evils heads, compiling two rival roll calls of iniquity." We're not? We were forty-five pages ago.

Indeed, but those people didn't kill in the name of atheism.

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Palabra Jot

Indeed, but those people didn't kill in the name of atheism.

So what? What real relevance does it have to say that they didn't label their atrocities? It does't logically follow that they didn't still somehow kill, or kill as many as they did because they were atheists.

Besides, I can easily claim the same for religious people. E.g., I can lay out the following 3 hypotheses:

1. Religious people kill because they are religious
2. Religious people kill despite the fact that they are religious (i.e., that it is "unreligious" to kill but religious people have done it anyway)
3. That killing has no relation with religion

Now explain to me what would count as evidence for any of those proposals which wouldn't beg the question?

For example, you may claim that the Christian participants in the first crusade killed the inhabitants of Jerusalem because they were religious. I could then argue that no, Christianity affirms the Commandment "thou shalt not kill," hence your claim that they comitted this act because they were religious suffers from the logical fallacy of "false cause." I may, but don't have to, offer some other cause, like "it was fear of being invaded by Muslim armies that was the real cause." Some putative third person, either a Christian or an atheist, then chimes in: "No, people are inherently killers and kill regardless of whether they are religious or what their religion says about killing, and will devise a justification -- religious if they are religious, secular if they aren't -- for their actions.

Which of those views a person is persuaded by is determined by their system of beilefs, of which one of those three propositions is already a part.

Furthermore, I could advance the argument that Christianity already explicitly posits that all people are evil, and that the solution is faith in God's sacrifice of Christ which a) absolves us of guilt for our sin and b) enables us to mitigate our evil nature (imperfectly until Christ returns). I can then say, "See: Christianity is superior to atheism since atheism not only mis-locates the cause of evil as religion when it is in fact sinful human nature, and futher because atheism provides no solution."

Finally, all of this sidesteps the distinctions between whether what we are arguing is that religion is true or that it is harmful. It could be false but beneficial, e.g. if it turns out that human beings, in order to follow moral rules, require the threat of punishment and that the threat of everlasting damnation provides more effective coersion than mere temporal punishment or death in which case the major monotheistic religions could all be both false and superior to atheism.

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There's always gotta be a reason for something.

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There's always gotta be a reason for something.

The evidence that nature operates all on it own, with chemical and physical processes requiring no supernatural assistance, is slowly but surely mounting and becoming irresistible.

Please provide me with any concrete example of such evidence.

Sure, there are many gaps, such as "how did the universe 'start'?" and all that jazz,

Well, "all that jazz" is sort of the heart of the matter, isn't it? That the physical universe operates according to certain rules (whether or not those rules are classically deterministic or probabilistic and leave room for extra-natural influence) is not really currently debated: among e.g. Christians, even evolution is accepted by a vast majority of them (like all Catholics who accept the authority of the pope, and most Protestants from the "established" or "mainstream" denominations). I've seen nothing that you would call evidence that pertains in any way to what happened before the Big Bang or what will come after, or explains why the Big Bang happened, and you would not accept religious arguments as evidence.

but the athiestic argument does have some scientific evidence, as opposed to religion, which has none.

There is no "evidence" that there is no God. There is evidence that complex forms of life can arise out of simple lifeforms through mutation and natural selection, which removes the necessity of God as an explanation for the diversity of life (one might argue that it removes the possiblity of a literal interpretation of the Biblical passages that have God creating all of the creatures, and that other scientific evidence -- geological, etc. removes similar interpretations of the Genesis account of e.g., the earth's formation). There is not one shred of scientific evidence that some thing other than God created nature and its laws and processes. Even Dawkins says that it's possible there is a God, but says it's one of infinitely many propositions that cannot be disproven, and he doesn't take them seriously. Fine, he nor you have to take them seriously, but don't kid yourself into thinking you have evidence or get on some epistemological high horse and insinuate that religious people are idiots.

Atheists lean on science for their arguments

Some atheists lean on science for some of their arguments.

and science is the purest, most trustworthy system of reason and discovering truths about the universe Man has been able to create. If we say science does not have the greatest claim to ownership of logic and reason, then we are saying Man has failed miserably in his attempts at logic and reason. Science is the best we've been able to achieve, and it's pretty damn good.

Science is not the same thing as logic or reason. Science is a method of investigation of natural phenomena which is very good at devising hypotheses about things which can be measured and quantified. It is less good at telling us things about things which can't be easily measured or quantified (what is beautiful, what is "right"). There are all kinds of reasonable, logical ethical arguments for example but they don't have much to do with science; neither must they have anything to do with religion. Science has a greater claim to logic and reason than the practice of law does? I don't think so, and neither do I think it's a failure of mankind.

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There's always gotta be a reason for something.

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There's always gotta be a reason for something.

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There's always gotta be a reason for something.

all of which prove there are physical and chemical processes that act on their own

None of those examples prove that physical or chemical processes "act on their own," if that phrase has any meaning (do you mean began on their own, or simply that they don't require the constant attention of some intelligent force? I'll grant you the latter while asserting that it says nothing about whether God exists).

You surrounded the statement that there in fact is evidence that nature operates on its own, with two statements that contradict that statement, and seem to suggest we need to believe in a God that stands around and watches as processes he need not affect take place.

No I did not; natural selection and the existence of God are not contradictions. One is a convincing theory about what causes organisms to change over time, and the other is a theory (not scientific and apparently hence not convincing to you) about why there is such a thing as time! And I don't, for the record, insist that anyone needs to believe in God.

As for the "moment of creation", no, science has not explained that yet, but science couldn't explain many things however many years back it can now explain today.

Well, given what I know now about science and the physical universe, I'm pretty sceptical that science will ever be able to tell us about what happened prior to the moment of creation. But hey, what do I know, I guess I'm just one of those religious idiots with a weak grasp of logic and reason...

Yes, infinitely so. Law is not a delving into truths about the physical world. It's a set of rules to maintain an objective idea of order in human societies.

The practice of law is all about using logic and reason to interpret and apply those rules.

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There's always gotta be a reason for something.