Many thanks for the opening compliment. Allow me to reiterate what I meant.

It goes without saying that sooner or later the planet will be over-ran with humans. Further, it is also highly likely that before we even reach the “over-ran” stage we (the human race) will surely all die of starvation. Sooner or later the ratio between resources:humans will be largely skewed in the ‘human’ area. This means that despite our best efforts, we just wouldn’t be able to feed everyone.

At some stage or another it is undoubtedly true that we will need somewhere else to live, somewhere else to house these excess humans. Alas, no such place exists nearby and it is highly unlikely that we will find such a place to live before the demise of mankind. I guess our only real hope is that many many humans need to die to keep the equilibrium between resources:humans. But then this comes back to my whole premise that the deity that forces this cannot be called a “caring” deity. How can the destruction of a few billion people be considered a ‘good’ thing (other then biologically speaking)?

Finally, I should point out that such flaws are not ‘proof’ of a deity’s non-existence, merely that it makes it more and more unlikely. You can not prove a negative.

Cheers

P.S. I understand that you were well meaning in your final remark “i wish you well on your journey…”, but to me it was just an insult. Yes, I understand that ‘belief’ in your opinion is the greatest thing on Earth, but I do not. Please don’t do this as, although you meant well, just irritated me.

this is the type of reasoning that makes many folks like me -a christian evangelical with a masters degree and someone who voted for obama- shutter. please consider investigating some arguments found in “the privileged planet” lectures.

the arguments presented will help explain that it might not the god of abraham, isaac and jacob but there is a logical conclusion one can draw -by looking at the evidence- that a force far greater than luck and good timing was at play 4.5 billion years ago.

i wish you well on your journey from healthy skepticism to healthy belief.

As much as it is our responsibility to achieve a certain level of stewardship and planning/maintenance, there’s only so much you can do with population levels that strain the very resources of a planet (a planet that is largely inhospitable to begin with).

It’s not only the issue of resources that needs to be addressed when it comes to massive population levels, we also have to consider where all these people will go. Surely nearby, hospitable planets would be an excellent solution to this problem, alas no such planets exist.

It goes without saying that if it was a deity’s goal to be “loving/forgiving/etc” they would allow for realistic solutions to this problem. I won’t exclude the possibility that we are created as some sort of experiment, or something similar to that effect, to see how we die in the end though. But I won’t accept that hypothesis either, until such a hypothesis is proven (you guessed my stance at the start, no doubt, it doesn’t mean I’m not open minded though).

This isn’t an attack, merely an investigation into why such conditions exist.

Cheers

I admit that I don’t know the full context of the quote (a dangerous thing in itself), so I’ll suspend judgment on whether or not Wilson is really being fair, but keep in mind that this post is also tagged “Humor” – part of my reason for posting it is that Wilson’s response is somewhat amusing, even if incomplete.

I do think, however, that a response is in order to your final claim that any competent deity would have provided some neighboring planet that we could zoom off to once our population grew too much. What confuses me in this statement is the idea that the lack of such a planet nearby really constitutes any sort of evidence against God’s existence when the reasons for inhabiting other planets seem to be rather unfavorable – irresponsibility, for instance. Clearly, it doesn’t seem to me that incompetence or lack of foreknowledge is necessarily the problem; it could have been an intentional move not to make neighboring planets habitable so that humans (who are at some level responsible for taking care of the earth) would learn how to be good stewards of the earth rather than simply destroying it through negligence and willful acts. However, I can’t say that I’m necessarily convinced that the lack of other habitable planets is really any sort of evidence for God, anyway.

If you actually *read* what Hitchens wrote, you would notice that he is talking about the design of, not only the universe, but also Earth itself.

In fact Wilson got it horribly wrong, we don’t live on a planet “well suited for us”, indeed most of the planet is inhabitable. And his anecdote about the toaster is so very irrelevant.

To take this point further, we are finding ourselves with an ever increasing world-wide population which threatens to overrun us in the very near future. A god who could see the future, who knew everything that would happen to us, and who *cared* for us would leave one or two planets nearby that we could inhabit. But no, no such conditions exist because the universe is very very poorly ‘designed’.