Religion is a force for good. Or people do good things BECAUSE of religion.
This is a half truth. Of course people do good things because of their faith. People do good things for all sorts of reasons, some of those reason aren't good at all. The question we should ask is; Are religious reasons the best reasons for doing good things. No. Religion works from a reward standpoint. If you do good or live by certain tenants you will go to heaven or be in god's good graces. This leads, if you did not do these things you would not go to heaven or be in god's good graces. How is this the highest moral objective? Isn't doing good for its own sake better? A humanitarian will go to Africa and feed the poor not to proselytize, like all missionary services do, but because feeding people is noble unto itself. I find the real moral ideal is to do good because it is good. Not for divine reward.
Somewhat conversely we find just as many occurrences of evil and wrong done in the name of religion as good in the same. I may have just made you think of an instance on your own. One only need to pick up the news paper and read the international headlines for the latest suicide bombing or the latest mass grave uncovered. Steven Weinberg said, "Good people do good things, bad people do bad things, it takes religion for good people to do bad things." There is no other way to describe the suicide bombing cults or the female genital mutilation community (which is 100% religious) not to mention the Inquisition, heresy trials, and modern day jihad. So what we have hidden in this religious force for good is also a force for evil.
The bible is true because it says so. The bible is true because it was inspired by god.
I hear this all the time and I can't understand how people don't see the logical blunder in the first statement. Something is true because it says so?! I can say ANYTHING, especially if its ridiculous then say its true and you would believe me? I'm telling you now there is a teapot orbiting mars in an elliptical orbit and it was put there by the first people and this is a true statement. Would you believe me? What does the evidence say? There is NO evidence what so ever to accredit this statement. WE need to base our ideas on evidence and not word play and logic tricks. I can then stand in front of you and say, "prove me wrong about my teapot." Certainly we can't for technology has not gotten us to that point that we can detect any possible thing in orbit of mars but this is no argument for the veracity of my statement. In fact we can use probabilities to guess within a high degree of certainty that it is untrue. Saying it's true only because it says so is a circular argument and by definition is invalid. The onus is not on the unbeliever, it is on the statement maker.
One day I might like to travel to the Vatican and see the Sistine Chapel. After my visit I may be 'inspired' to write a book or make a painting, directly because of my visit. My creative works do not have to about the chapel or even represent it in any way. The works can be about something else entirely. My small point here is that inspiration is not enough to prove the works have a direct connection to the origins of the inspiration.
But in defense of the bible, it is said that they were inspired by god, which is to say that this is gods word. Even if we discount all the contradictions, which there are many, and all the inconsistencies, we are told that this, like the koran, is the perfect word of god. I would tell you now stop and now go read the bible and tell me, is this book perfect or could we improve upon it? I say we could easily improve on many facets of the bible from the glaring immoralities, single dimensional characters, ideas that can be interpreted in many different ways, and from what we now know, that the early christians edited the bible. Israeli researchers and archaeologists confirm this. If the bible, which is actually many books depending on your exact faith, is the perfect word of god, how can it also be edited by terrestrial beings? Besides all this, there is nothing in the bible or koran in which information is any more advanced than that of a 1st or 7th century man.
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Entropy: The universe without god violates the 2nd law of thermodynamics.
This argument usually entails arguing against the big bang model of cosmology. They make the argument that the universe's energy should be decreasing, a running down towards chaos. They say "Entropy increases as available energy decreases. In other words, the purely natural tendency of things is to move toward chaos, not order, and available energy necessary for work is lost (mostly as heat) in this process". This is true OF A CLOSED SYSTEM. They purposefully leave that out of the discussion. The universe is not a closed system. They are misleading you by giving cherry picked information combined with half truths.
Our solar system from our perspective does seem fairly closed. So lets run with this for I am attempting at an analogy. Our Earth is also a mostly closed system. Only energy waves and some very small bits of metal seem to every leave its surface. Energy waves are all that is contained in the electromagnetic spectrum. Heat, light, and radar waves all shoot out into space. But most 'stuff' remains. IF there was no sun we could imagine how the Earth would eventually cool into a lifeless rock where entropy would increase and concentrations of material in the oceans would dilute and it would become a boring place. But as the sun sends us energy some chaos occurs and this leads to life rising up, the Earths core being churned up, and weather allowing life to exist on all parts of the planet.
I hope I have made the distinction clear. That entropy is talking about closed systems and not the cosmos. Entropy also says that chaos is more probable than order. If you fling a pile of rocks out the window, they will land 'willy nilly' and not into a nice rock wall. However correct this may be in relation to gasses and dilutions of salts in water and the like, this is not an argument against life in its ordered form. Life is made possible by replicators which by definition cannot evolve towards chaos but life observes an order for it to create repeatable processes. Just like viewing a nice rock wall is not an argument against entropy, entropy is not an argument against life.
