Ok, I'm going to try to cut through the pretense of 145 pages of condescension and moral indignation and try a different approach to this.
We, us secular atheist non-believer folks, we don't know how the hell the universe happened. We have absolutely no idea. We really don't. I'm not being sarcastic or smarmy or anything right now. I'm being honest. We are completely at a loss as to how all of this came to be.
That's all we're trying to say. That's all we're trying to convey in 145 pages of boring, pseudo-intellectual rhetoric on a 1999-era emulated EverQuest server's Rants & Flames forum.
Forget evolution for a minute. Forget creationism for a minute. I mean, really. Just stop for a second and take a few breaths, and relax. Okay.
Now, here's where we're at. Creationists, and please correct me if I'm misrepresenting creationism here, think it's absurd that the universe came into being by sheer, unadulterated random chance. And you know what? That's totally fine. I have absolutely no problems with that.
However, I get this feeling that this is what the perceived atheistic worldview entails. I get the feeling that this is what creationists think us atheists believe about the origins of the universe - that it's random chance. This isn't what we believe! We are not saying the universe came into existence by sheer, random chance!
We are saying we have absolutely no idea how the thing came into existence! That's all we're saying! We don't know! We really, truly, inescapably do not know!
Us saying we don't know does not mean we think it was random chance. It just means we don't know. That's what science and evolutionary theory is predicated on. Not knowing anything for certain. All we're doing, in essence, is not knowing things. This is why scientists go out and conduct experiments, and find evidence, and develop hypotheses, and theorize about things. Because we don't know. Because we don't know and we really, truly want to know.
Because we can't simply accept that since it might not have been random chance, that it must have been a creator! We don't know that either! A creator being the explanation makes the exact same amount of sense to us as random chance does. That's all we're trying to say. We don't know! We seriously have no clue.
Was it a creator? Was it random chance? We don't know! But being an "atheist" doesn't mean siding with or against either one of these things. It really, truly doesn't. Atheism is just a word that describes unbelief in deity or deities. That's all it is. It's nothing more, nothing less.
Please accept this as an honest explanation of at least one atheist's worldview.
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