P.S. I find it odd that your bio refers to you as a “renaissance man.” Was not the central theme of the Renaissance the rise of humanism and the demise of God?

But I just love the part about:
“(BECAUSE) SUPERNATURAL REALITY IS IN NATURAL REALITY, SUPERNATURAL REALITY CAN ALSO BE KNOWN, INVESTIGATED AND EXPERIENCED SCIENTIFICALLY”

*This is just brilliant… brilliantly moronic.*

Tell me, if supernatural reality was within natural reality, would it still be super-NATURAL? This is moronic, but it illustrates a key point about rationality that the author fails to grasp; WE CAN ONLY KNOW THAT WHICH EXISTS IN REALITY. By definition there is NO supernatural, at least none that would have any influence whatsoever on our lives. Now, the only way to know about the real world (natural reality) is through observation, measurement, and evidence… procedures used by (you guessed it) Science. So I agree that if god and psychic powers exist, we should be able to measure their effects. Unfortunately, all attempts so far yield results consistent with NOTHING THERE.

*To believe in things without evidence one must admit the Flying Spaghetti Monster into their heart at his rightful place next to Jesus.*

It is precisely because there is NO empirical evidence for god, fairies, unicorns, and bigfoot, that most thinking people accept they don’t exist (well… except for god, right?). Should we put our belief in any of them without (natural) evidence? Absolutely not!

A few words of advice for the author (from Julia Sweeny):
“The invisible and the non-existent often look very much alike.”

Or we could, you know, use a dictionary.

It turns out scientists themselves argue about what it is. However, none of their definitions include 1 and 2. In fact there are some scientists who believe we will reach a position where there is no more to learn.

As for absolute truth… science is dedicated to that! They may no have it now, but it is their goal.

There are a large number of galaxies in the universe. There are a large number of stars in each galaxy. There are at least a few planets around many stars. Some of these planets are situated in such a manner that can sustain life. Some of those planets generate life through abiogenesis and develop life through evolutionary processes. Some of those planets eventually develop intelligent life… and only intelligent life can ask the question “Why are we not like the non-living substances around us?” because the non-living substances can ask nothing at all.

["The fact that we live at the bottom of a deep gravity well, on the surface of a gas covered planet going around a nuclear fireball 90 million miles away and think this to be normal is obviously some indication of how skewed our perspective tends to be."] -Douglas Adams

And then deliciously:
“the best that simplistic atheists can do to defend themselves is to resort to ad-hominem attacks”

I am rubber, you are glue. Everything you say bounces off me and sticks on to you.

“Why is it that if I hunger for food, there just happens to be in earthly existence food to satisfy my hunger and water to quench my thirst? Why not nothing on this earth on which human beings can survive as is the case in desolate planets? Why do earthly farm crops need water and light to thrive and there just happens to be the sun to provide them light and rising water vapor that form clouds over the whole earth to provide crops and all living creatures the rain water they need?”
This is simply the anthropic principle. There are likely billions upon billions of desolate planets. They use water and light because they are here and they are useful to maintain the kind of chemical reactions to maintain life. There is nothing special about them–life could emerge at the bottom of a sea of some other liquid using energy emitted from a deep sea vent. I experience awe and wonder when pondering the types of alternate ways life and evolution could work and would love to be able to visit other planets, but sadly physical constraints will likely make this impossible.

“Why do the planets and non-living phenomena in our earth and the universe behave orderly according to “natural law”? Why is there such natural law? How and why did such law come to be? Why not chaos, instead of an orderly universe that works on the basis of “law?””
This is a tough one. There are fairly rigid laws of nature, but just do a though experience. Assume there is simply a pile of cosmic chaos, how long would that last? In any completely chaotic system there will emerge patches of order–elementary physical laws–and these may spawn small areas to themselves (if the term area even has any meaning in this context) and create universes to themselves (maybe one-dimensional, maybe with no time–who knows, but considering the possibilities fills me with wonder and awe). There is a theory by Smolin that generally states that our universe seems perfectly suited to create black holes–changing any of the cosmological constants will create fewer of them. And each black hole actually creates a universe. Therefore, it logically seems that if there was a chaos that randomly spawned an simple “proto-universe” and that universe created a black hole then it may start an entire lineage of universes. If there was some mechanism to somehow forward the properties of each universe with slight changes then the properties of a type of dynamic system we know as “evolution” would make a complex universe exactly like ours not only likely but inevitable. And indeed, evolution is the ONLY explanation we have for developing increased complexity so it seems like a good fit. You can’t really call upon an intelligent agent here because our initial parameters were chaos and so an intelligent agent would simply have to evolve first and THEN create out universe which is just an extra unnecessary step so unless there is any reason it is required we can just leave it out. Simple. I do not know if this is true but continued exploration and creative theories in this area fill me with wonder, awe, and “theistic” sentimentalities (which as a “good” atheist I must always remain on guard for).

Why the orderly workings of the human body, possessing marvelous integrated systems, healing itself through the birth of new healthy tissue and defending itself through the power of a “biological immune system”?
This is the fruits of biological evolution. There are major branches of science covering this so I won’t go into details. Visit your local library.

Why all this purpose and meaning?
Evolution spawns consciousness and consciousness imbues things with purpose and meaning. It may be ultimately a survival mechanism but it is much more versatile than that. It is so complex we still have very little control over it. Such is the power of evolution to create highly complex system given sufficient time. Pretty wondrous and awe-inspiring, isn’t it? Even for a “Spock-like” atheist like me.

Why not nothing?
Why nothing? Why is nothing a more natural ground state for the universe. Can there actually be nothing? Is that even a coherent concept? I don’t know.

Why not chaos?
Covered this already.

Is there an end to the universe?
Anything is possible.

If so, how could this “end” of the universe be conceived?
Complete entropy of the universe where energy and matter is uniformly spread throughout the whole expanse. Or physical laws unknown to us now could come into effect and our whole reality could control into a near-singularity. Who knows. It seems like things have been puttering along for a good long time already though so hopefully nothing will happen during our lifetime. Fingers crossed ;-).

Or is the universe really infinite in scope? If so, why infinity and why is space infinite and what does this mean, infer, imply or suggest? For that matter, what does all that exists on earth and the immense and awesome universe mean, infer, imply or suggest?
Wow, this question is beyond the scope to even attempt an answer. It means a lot of possible things, but one of the least likely things is a facile appeal to a non-rational sentient god who made things like this simply because of his random whims which are unknowable to us. It is completely possible. It is possible that the universe IS completely random and infinite. Your consciousness is supported by just a blob of matter that exists and will exist only for this single fraction of a second while you read this sentence. All your memories were just randomly assembled by matter organized randomly–although that is irrelevant because all possible memories will actually happen eventually given infinite time and a truly random universe. So, yeah, here’s to hoping you don’t randomly fly apart a microsecond from now. Cheers.

What can I say? This is just one string of name-calling, misrepresentations & false assumptions. Far from being an intellectual as his bio claims, Mr. Garrison is just another opinionated blowhard with nothing new to add to the conversation (certainly not substantial evidence for a god other than “just look around!”). If you skipped right to the comments section, don’t waste you time reading this tripe.

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