On Tuesday, January 30, 2007 at 2:36:13 AM UTC-8, CYBERHINWA wrote:

Why I Am An Agnostic
Clarence Darrow
An agnostic is a doubter. The word is generally applied to those who
doubt the verity of accepted religious creeds of faiths. Everyone is
an agnostic as to the beliefs or creeds they do not accept. Catholics
are agnostic to the Protestant creeds, and the Protestants are
agnostic to the Catholic creed. Any one who thinks is an agnostic
about something, otherwise he must believe that he is possessed of all knowledge. And the proper place for such a person is in the madhouse
or the home for the feeble-minded. In a popular way, in the western
world, an agnostic is one who doubts or disbelieves the main tenets of
the Christian faith.
I would say that belief in at least three tenets is necessary to the
faith of a Christian: a belief in God, a belief in immortality, and a
belief in a supernatural book. Various Christian sects require much
more, but it is difficult to imagine that one could be a Christian,
under any intelligent meaning of the word, with less. Yet there are
some people who claim to be Christians who do not accept the literal interpretation of all the Bible, and who give more credence to some
portions of the book than to others.
I am an agnostic as to the question of God. I think that it is
impossible for the human mind to believe in an object or thing unless
it can form a mental picture of such object or thing. Since man ceased
to worship openly an anthropomorphic God and talked vaguely and not intelligently about some force in the universe, higher than man, that
is responsible for the existence of man and the universe, he cannot be
said to believe in God. One cannot believe in a force excepting as a
force that pervades matter and is not an individual entity. To believe
in a thing, an image of the thing must be stamped on the mind. If one
is asked if he believes in such an animal as a camel, there
immediately arises in his mind an image of the camel. This image has
come from experience or knowledge of the animal gathered in some way
or other. No such image comes, or can come, with the idea of a God who
is described as a force.
Man has always speculated upon the origin of the universe, including
himself. I feel, with Herbert Spencer, that whether the universe had
an origin-- and if it had-- what the origin is will never be known by
man. The Christian says that the universe could not make itself; that
there must have been some higher power to call it into being.
Christians have been obsessed for many years by Paley's argument that
if a person passing through a desert should find a watch and examine
its spring, its hands, its case and its crystal, he would at once be satisfied that some intelligent being capable of design had made the
watch. No doubt this is true. No civilized man would question that
someone made the watch. The reason he would not doubt it is because he
is familiar with watches and other appliances made by man. The savage
was once unfamiliar with a watch and would have had no idea upon the
subject. There are plenty of crystals and rocks of natural formation
that are as intricate as a watch, but even to intelligent man they
carry no implication that some intelligent power must have made them.
They carry no such implication because no one has any knowledge or
experience of someone having made these natural objects which
everywhere abound.
To say that God made the universe gives us no explanation of the
beginnings of things. If we are told that God made the universe, the
question immediately arises: Who made God? Did he always exist, or was
there some power back of that? Did he create matter out of nothing, or
is his existence coextensive with matter? The problem is still there.
What is the origin of it all? If, on the other hand, one says that the universe was not made by God, that it always existed, he has the same difficulty to confront. To say that the universe was here last year,
or millions of years ago, does not explain its origin. This is still a mystery. As to the question of the origin of things, man can only
wonder and doubt and guess.
As to the existence of the soul, all people may either believe or
disbelieve. Everyone knows the origin of the human being. They know
that it came from a single cell in the body of the mother, and that
the cell was one out of ten thousand in the mother's body. Before
gestation the cell must have been fertilized by a spermatozoon from
the body of the father. This was one out of perhaps a billion
spermatozoa that was the capacity of the father. When the cell is
fertilized a chemical process begins. The cell divides and multiplies
and increases into millions of cells, and finally a child is born.
Cells die and are born during the life of the individual until they
finally drop apart, and this is death.
If there is a soul, what is it, and where did it come from, and where
does it go? Can anyone who is guided by his reason possibly imagine a
soul independent of a body, or the place of its residence, or the
character of it, or anything concerning it? If man is justified in any
belief or disbelief on any subject, he is warranted in the disbelief
in a soul. Not one scrap of evidence exists to prove any such
impossible thing.
Many Christians base the belief of a soul and God upon the Bible.
Strictly speaking, there is no such book. To make the Bible, sixty-six
books are bound into one volume. These books are written by many
people at different times, and no one knows the time or the identity
of any author. Some of the books were written by several authors at
various times. These books contain all sorts of contradictory concepts
of life and morals and the origin of things. Between the first and the
last nearly a thousand years intervened, a longer time than has passed
since the discovery of America by Columbus.
When I was a boy the theologians used to assert that the proof of the
divine inspiration of the Bible rested on miracles and prophecies. But
a miracle means a violation of a natural law, and there can be no
proof imagined that could be sufficient to show the violation of a
natural law; even though proof seemed to show violation, it would only
show that we were not acquainted with all natural laws. One believes
in the truthfulness of a man because of his long experience with the
man, and because the man has always told a consistent story. But no
man has told so consistent a story as nature.
If one should say that the sun did not rise, to use the ordinary
expression, on the day before, his hearer would not believe it, even
though he had slept all day and knew that his informant was a man of
the strictest veracity. He would not believe it because the story is inconsistent with the conduct of the sun in all the ages past.
Primitive and even civilized people have grown so accustomed to
believing in miracles that they often attribute the simplest
manifestations of nature to agencies of which they know nothing. They
do this when the belief is utterly inconsistent with knowledge and
logic. They believe in old miracles and new ones. Preachers pray for
rain, knowing full well that no such prayer was ever answered. When a politician is sick, they pray for God to cure him, and the politician
almost invariably dies. The modern clergyman who prays for rain and
for the health of the politician is no more intelligent in this matter
than the primitive man who saw a separate miracle in the rising and
setting of the sun, in the birth of an individual, in the growth of a
plant, in the stroke of lighting, in the flood, in every manifestation
of nature and life.
As to prophecies, intelligent writers gave them up long ago. In all prophecies facts are made to suit the prophecy, or the prophecy was
made after the facts, or the events have no relation to the prophecy.
Weird and strange and unreasonable interpretations are used to explain
simple statements, that a prophecy may be claimed.
Can any rational person believe that the Bible is anything but a human document? We now know pretty well where the various books came from,
and about when they were written. We know that they were written by
human beings who had no knowledge of science, little knowledge of
life, and were influenced by the barbarous morality of primitive
times, and were grossly ignorant of most things that men know today.
For instance, Genesis says that God made the earth, and he made the
sun to light the day and the moon to light the night, and in one
clause disposes of the stars by saying that "he made the stars also."
This was plainly written by someone who had no conception of the
stars. Man, by the aid of his telescope, has looked out into the
heavens and found stars whose diameter is as great as the distance
between the earth and the sun. We know that the universe is filled
with stars and suns and planets and systems. Every new telescope
looking further into the heavens only discovers more and more worlds
and suns and systems in the endless reaches of space. The men who
wrote Genesis believed, of course, that this tiny speck of mud that we
call the earth was the center of the universe, the only world in
space, and made for man, who was the only being worth considering.
These men believed that the stars were only a little way above the
earth, and were set in the firmament for man to look at, and for
nothing else. Everyone today knows that this conception is not true.
The origin of the human race is not as blind a subject as it once was.
Let alone God creating Adam out of hand, from the dust of the earth,
does anyone believe that Eve was made from Adam's rib--that the snake
walked and spoke in the Garden of Eden--that he tempted Eve to
persuade Adam to eat an apple, and that it is on that account that the
whole human race was doomed to hell--that for four thousand years
there was no chance for any human to be saved, though none of them had anything whatever to do with the temptation; and that finally men were
saved only through God's son dying for them, and that unless human
beings believed this silly, impossible and wicked story they were
doomed to hell? Can anyone with intelligence really believe that a
child born today should be doomed because the snake tempted Eve and
Eve tempted Adam? To believe that is not God-worship; it is devil-
worship.
Can anyone call this scheme of creation and damnation moral? It defies
every principle of morality, as man conceives morality. Can anyone
believe today that the whole world was destroyed by flood, save only
Noah and his family and a male and female of each species of animal
that entered the Ark? There are almost a million species of insects
alone. How did Noah match these up and make sure of getting male and
female to reproduce life in the world after the flood had spent its
force? And why should all the lower animals have been destroyed? Were
they included in the sinning of man? This is a story which could not
beguile a fairly bright child of five years of age today.
Do intelligent people believe that the various languages spoken by man
on earth came from the confusion of tongues at the Tower of Babel,
some four thousand years ago? Human languages were dispersed all over
the face of the earth long before that time. Evidences of
civilizations are in existence now that were old long before the date
that romancers fix for the building of the Tower, and even before the
date claimed for the flood.
Do Christians believe that Joshua made the sun stand still, so that
the day could be lengthened, that a battle might be finished? What
kind of person wrote that story, and what did he know about astronomy?
It is perfectly plain that the author thought that the earth was the
center of the universe and stood still in the heavens, and that the
sun either went around it or was pulled across its path each day, and
that the stopping of the sun would lengthen the day. We know now that
had the sun stopped when Joshua commanded it, and had it stood still
until now, it would not have lengthened the day. We know that the day
is determined by the rotation of the earth upon its axis, and not by
the movement of the sun. Everyone knows that this story simply is not
true, and not many even pretend to believe the childish fable.
What of the tale of Balaam's ass speaking to him, probably in Hebrew?
Is it true, or is it a fable? Many asses have spoken, and doubtless
some in Hebrew, but they have not been that breed of asses. Is
salvation to depend on a belief in a monstrosity like this?
Above all the rest, would any human being today believe that a child
was born without a father? Yet this story was not at all unreasonable
in the ancient world; at least three or four miraculous births are
recorded in the Bible, including John the Baptist and Samson.
Immaculate conceptions were common in the Roman world at the time and
at the place where Christianity really had its nativity. Women were
taken to the temples to be inoculated of God so that their sons might
be heroes, which meant, generally, wholesale butchers. Julius Caesar
was a miraculous conception--indeed, they were common all over the
world. How many miraculous-birth stories is a Christian now expected
to believe?
In the days of the formation of the Christian religion, disease meant
the possession of human beings by devils. Christ cured a sick man by
casting out the devils, who ran into the swine, and the swine ran into
the sea. Is there any question but what that was simply the attitude
and belief of a primitive people? Does anyone believe that sickness
means the possession of the body by devils, and that the devils must
be cast out of the human being that he may be cured? Does anyone
believe that a dead person can come to life? The miracles recorded in
the Bible are not the only instances of dead men coming to life. All
over the world one finds testimony of such miracles: miracles which no
person is expected to believe, unless it is his kind of a miracle.
Still at Lourdes today, and all over the present world, from New York
to Los Angeles and up and down the lands, people believe in miraculous occurrences, and even in the return of the dead. Superstition is
everywhere prevalent in the world. It has been so from the beginning,
and most likely will be so unto the end.
The reasons for agnosticism are abundant and compelling. Fantastic and foolish and impossible consequences are freely claimed for the belief
in religion. All the civilization of any period is put down as a
result of religion. All the cruelty and error and ignorance of the
period has no relation to religion.
The truth is that the origin of what we call civilization is not due
to religion but to skepticism. So long as men accepted miracles
without question, so long as they believed in original sin and the
road to salvation, so long as they believed in a hell where man would
be kept for eternity on account of Eve, there was no reason whatever
for civilization: life was short, and eternity was long, and the
business of life was preparation for eternity.
When every event was a miracle, when there was no order or system or
law, there was no occasion for studying any subject, or being
interested in anything excepting a religion which took care of the
soul. As man doubted the primitive conceptions about religion, and no
longer accepted the literal, miraculous teachings of ancient books, he
set himself to understand nature. We no longer cure disease by casting
out devils. Since that time, men have studied the human body, have
built hospitals and treated illness in a scientific way. Science is responsible for the building of railroads and bridges, of steamships,
of telegraph lines, of cities, towns, large buildings and small,
plumbing and sanitation, of the food supply, and the countless
thousands of useful things that we now deem necessary to life. Without skepticism and doubt, none of these things could have been given to
the world.
The fear of God is not the beginning of wisdom. The fear of God is the
death of wisdom. Skepticism and doubt lead to study and investigation,
and investigation is the beginning of wisdom.
The modern world is the child of doubt and inquiry, as the ancient
world was the child of fear and faith.

https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2021/04/harvard-scientists-determine-early-earth-may-have-been-a-water-world/#:~:text=According%20to%20a%20new%2C%20Harvard,covered%20the%20planet's%20entire%20surface.

We are just finding this out. How is it that a desert people 4000 years ago figured out that the earth was originally completely covered with water?
Wow! Maybe Someone who created it told them!

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
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