Answering Barbara Smoker, Part II

1) somewhere else : Answering Barbara Smoker's Path from Rome, 2) Assorted retorts from yahoo boards and elsewhere : ... to Bart D. Ehrman, 3) somewhere else : Answering Barbara Smoker, Part II

Commenting on

thefreethinker : “My Path from Rome”
My Atheism
Barbara Smoker | Fri 24 Jul 2015 / Atheism
http://freethinker.co.uk/2015/07/24/my-path-from-rome/

Read the rest and am commenting on main further points now.

Barbara Smoker

In fact, all the evidence is against personal survival of death. It just doesn’t make sense. How could anything that survived the death of the body be the same person?

Hans Georg Lundahl

Because the soul which survives the body is what was the form of the living body while it lived and was constituting a person with it.

And because that body is meant to be raised with the soul, either for glory or for damnation.

Barbara Smoker

As for the idea that the universe was deliberately created, which is intended to explain existence, it manifestly fails to do so – for one is still left with the question of God’s existence. It is less complicated to suppose that particles of matter and waves of energy have always existed than to suppose they were made out of nothing by a resourceful being that has always existed.

Hans Georg Lundahl

It might be if there was no such thing as a mind or even sentience.

That minds or even sentience should arise as by products of particles of matter and waves of energy is manifestly absurd.

Also, atheists are usually also science believers, Barbara's argument is for a steady state eternal materialistic universe, and this is not what scientific (or so called such) recostructions about "history of the universe" usually offer - but maybe she isn't quite into these? I don't know.

Barbara Smoker

Besides, the idea of deliberate creation raises the moral problem of all the suffering there is in life, for so many people – and also for animals. I am ashamed, in retrospect, that I ever found it possible to worship the supposed creator of over-reproduction, sentient food, disease, and natural disasters. If I still believed in an omnipotent creator, I would have to heap curses on him – or her, or it. But if there is one thing to be said for this creator-god, it is his evidence non-existence.

Hans Georg Lundahl

Let us take the problems one by one. She is ashamed, in retrospect, that she ever found it possible to worship the supposed creator of ...

Barbara Smoker

over-reproduction

Hans Georg Lundahl

which is a myth. Perhaps it would not be if there were no monks or nuns. So, Barbara Smoker might reconsider her attitude to Story of a Soul.

Barbara Smoker

sentient food

Hans Georg Lundahl

Sentient, but not endowed with a real mind.

Also, this only happened after the fall. It is meant to punish man. Loving as he is to livestock (usually!), it is heartwrenching to slaughter the beasts one has cherished. To the beasts themselves, the "tragedy" is usually a brief trauma and nothing after a few minutes.

Barbara Smoker

disease, and natural disasters.

Hans Georg Lundahl

Evils of a physical nature and therefore less evil than the moral evils in man they help to punish.

Of course, I am here presuming "modern science" is wrong on universe and even life on earth being millions of years older than man. But that is a question for my Creationist blog. I am also exploring on my Philological blog the consequences of YEC view of Carbon 14 buildup (my scenario is not quite the standard one) for archaeology.