Good will to all men? Not from the grumpy atheists! (Thank God not all atheists are grumpy but there sure seems to be a lot of them)
Why is it that so many in the atheist community cannot bring themselves to get past their anger whenever they engage in discussions? The language of many of their contributions in public debate is laced with invective and dripping with sarcasm and bile. There are exceptions of course, but they tend to fall more into the category of being the 'exception that proves the rule' when compared to the hostility of many of today's atheist posters. Comment offered by the theists in the public square is often depicted as being 'malicious' or 'venomous' and intended to enslave the 'feeble minded and weak' by those who post. Nothing could be further from the truth. Venom is something that is oriented to death. Christians are oriented in a 180 degree different direction. We speak not to the culture of death that grips our world but rather for the culture of life and light which ends with the gift of eternal life. For example, the Catholic Church in its hum...
Quantum events are random. All measurements taken over the last 100 years with increasing accurate precision lead to the conclusion that events from radioactive decay are probabilistic, having a specific probability of occurring with a period of time (hence the half life) and not influenced by outside or internal causes. Now the word cause here was used in the conventional and scientific sense of the efficient cause of Aristotle. And that's how people start off considering the first cause argument, looking at the efficient creative cause that brought the universe into being. But the author changes the cause mid way through the argument and invokes the material cause (in this case the quantum vacuum) in attributing an initial condition to the decay or a a teleological cause by saying uranium always decays into lead and not rabbits. While such linguistic sleight of hand may be acceptable in philosophical arguments, it doesn't hold much water in scientific circles.
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