It’s people like Solomon that frighten me to come out as an atheist. I don’t want to feel like I have to defend myself at parties or defend myself walking to the store or openly reading a book about atheism. As someone whose become increasingly open to the idea of labeling myself as an atheist. I don’t think I would be able to handle myself or as quickly come up with an argument against theism like you did in this post (Sometimes I feel like I’m not smart enough to be an atheist, lol).

How many arguments do you get into like this in a day?

In short, I’m happy to end it here and let others judge whether I am a chicken or you are an idiot.

The other thing you did was to convince me that you don’t have the capacity to understand the words I type. Therefore, it is useless trying to educate you. Goodbye.

You keep repeating the same message over and over and over. Your message is: “I see order in the universe”. From this, your automatic conclusion is that order must have been created by someone.

You are advocating for Intelligent Design – a concept which is scientifically vacuous. Why? Because instead of looking at the details and figuring out how and why things work the way they do – what science does – the claim ends without further exploration.

So, to answer your question directly. THERE IS MORE THAN ONE WAY TO INTERPRET THE ORDER IN THE UNIVERSE. SCIENCE HAS SHOWN THAT ORDER CAN COME FROM CHAOS. Many, many brilliant scientists are discovering the details behind how the universe works every day.

Pick a subject and go learn what the experts have to say about it.

One more point: No thinking atheist is going to say unequivocally that there absolutely is no god. What we say is that there is no evidence for a god. We also say that seeing order in the universe is not evidence for your god. We also tend not to have a problem with deism – the idea that a god/force may have set the universe in motion and then walked away to watch it unfold. The problem with deism is two-fold: 1) That there is no evidence for it, so it is a pointless god to ponder and 2) there is a huge leap between a deistic god who may have set the ground rules for the universes creation, and the personal, prayer answering, intervening god that you and billions of other believers claim exists. The chance for the latter god existing is between zero and none.

I want to tell you that your line of thinking is in NO WAY new to us. In addition, you compound my frustration by assuming we do not understand your point. WE DO. I’ve explained my position – now move along and go read some science books.
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Edit: I should also point out that you completely ignored my previous response but that’s ok because we are done with this discussion.

Solomon, I already said I don’t debate from within so-called holy books. It’s a pointless waste of my time in the same way that it would be a pointless waste of my time to debate Mother Goose stories.

That said, one claim Islam and Christianity share is that we have an eternal soul that goes to heaven when the body dies (if we live properly according to whatever religion you subscribe to).

The whole idea of a soul is anti-science. You don’t have to look far to discover a plethora of scientific inquiry showing this to be true. If there is a soul, it must be separate from the human brain. This concept, in philosophical circles, is known as dualism.

Every day, dualism is being refuted in science. We now know that, if you alter the brain, you alter the person. We now know that if you deprive the brain of some things, or stimulate it with others, you can induce a feeling god’s presence, as well as out of body experiences and other experiences paralleling near death experiences (google “The God Helmut” for an example of this type of research).

The bottom line is that your claim of a soul is in opposition to a growing body of science.

Science aside, there are literally thousands of competing religions in this world – all with their own separate, competing views on creation, and none of them can demonstrate why one is more correct than the others.

And then there’s Epicurus’ problem of evil – which no religion has ever been able to adequately answer.