Mr. Kauffman

If the always enlightening opinions of various colorful characters on R&S have any merit, atheism is actually a religion! How a lack of belief in God can be considered a belief system in itself, I'm not so sure. But apparently, some people actually think this is true.

That having been said, let's have ourselves a little challenge. If people who say this think we have a belief system, they should have no problem briefly summarizing what our belief system states.

So, what. . .exactly. . .do they think our belief system is? Just humor me here.

You see, the teleological argument goes something like this: in the universe, there's some sort of design in place. And if there is a design to the universe, there must by implication be a designer.

And we call this designer. . .Gary. Gary is a giant computer (a bit faster than Windows 8, for what it's worth), and he created us all on his hard drive.

Ball's in your court, atheists.

Things exist. The universe exists, and we exist and there seems to be some sort of design behind it all. But we know that something can just come from nothing. And all things must have a cause, including and especially the universe. So there must be a first cause.

And we call this first cause. . .Gary. Gary is a superintelligent computer who created the universe. You see, the universe as we know it is just a video game stored on Gary's hard drive, amongst many other files. And his program designed that video game, which is where we get the intelligent design all around us from.

There is proof of Gary in the material world (though it's not THAT material, because it's actually a video game). Where do you think Bill Gates got his inspiration? He was divinely inspired when Gary appeared to him in a dream. This happened, and I know it happened because I said so. And we have Microsoft products. Therefore, Gary exists.

Now, you atheists might ask: why do you conflate your belief in Gary with the origin of the universe? Isn't saying that "Gary did it" an unwarranted assumption, where I've reached the conclusion before I even ask the question? Where is my evidence that the first cause was, in fact, a superintelligent machine named Gary?

My answer to that is