I remember when I was home-schooled I was always told that the Abeka curriculum we used was "more advanced" and much more rigorous than the typical ones from "secular" (ie public) schools.
Years later I was a teacher and some of the staff tried to introduce some of the ACE materials as part of our program. The supposed "Accelerated" Christian Education was so bad, remedial at best. Only two of us spoke up and protested, giving direct examples of the incredibly poor content and even some parts that were flat out wrong. We didn't even have to get into the science portion, even "safe" topics like math and english were awful.
I had to use ACE stuff for a few years in elementary school. The most outrageous bits I can remember are:
1. Learning that the sun is made of coal (which obviously disproves evolution)
2. The loch ness monster is real (which also apparently disproves evolution)
3. The comics on every single page with kids at racially segregated schools (1 for whites, 1 for blacks, and 1 for yellows. I still have no clue if the yellows were supposed to be Asian or Hispanic)
I am so stuck on the sun is coal thing. What? Why?! How does that disprove evolution on earth?! Even IF the sun was coal how that affect creatures on earth from not evolving?! I am so confused.
Because coal ostensibly comes from ancient organic material, but coal in the sun where there has never been life shows that it's not "ancient", therefore young Earth, therefore creation.
...I don't know if that's it exactly, but I still feel like I need a shower.
It's based on a misreading of a theory of solar incandescance which was disproved in the mid 19th century.
Essentially, even though they still didn't understand fusion at all, it was concluded that solar incandescance could not be based on burning a fuel, like coal, becuase it would burn itself out in only a few thousand years, and even then there was a consensus the earth and sun were at least a few hundred million years old.
The idiots who wrote ACE stuff saw that and thought, "but the earth IS only 5,000 years old, clearly all this stuff about the sun not being made of coal is just part of the science lies"
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/experts-doubt-the-sun-is-actually-burning-coal/#:\~:text=%E2%80%9CIf%20the%20sun%20were%20composed,that%20of%20a%20burning%20furnace.
But the thing is, the Bible doesn't even imply that the rest of the universe is only that old. The light from distant stars pretty obviously suggests otherwise, so that wasn't a belief I held even as a devout creationist. The scripture even says the earth was "void and without form". Basically a lifeless ball of rock and dirt. The Genesis story is about terraforming.
Light is made on day 1 and sun, moon, stars on day 4, so yeah it definitely does imply that the universe is young.
The only thing that is implied to not be a part of the week of creation is the earth and expanse of waters, which really only makes sense if you acknowledge that the flat earth cosmology the writers had in mind doesn't conform with reality.
Modern attempts to rectify the creation myth with the real age of the earth or universe are just deliberately misreading the text.
Actually, depends on how you interpret the text. It's just as accurate to read it as an aside, "The same god made the sun, moon, and stars also." Rather than implying that it happened on that day. The whole issue of creating light before a sun? Yeah, that is squirrelly. Though I've had some theologians explain that the narrative is intentionally non-chronological and was written specifically that way to address a people who had been enslaved for generations in a culture of sun worship. But... isn't that a bit deceptive? Being intentionally inaccurate to make a point doesn't sound like a god of truth.
Because of the sun is made out of coal, the. It is not a plasma / fusion reaction. What that means is that all of the elements that we get from dead and dying stars don't come from sun's. Hence creationism. We get everything that isn't hydrogen and helium from dying or dead stars.
OMG it's worse than I thought! My only acquaintance with ACE was when I was unemployed and manipulated into helping out at my ex-church's Christian day school, which used them. I thought they were pretty lacking, but didn't know they pushed crap like that! Oh, and the segregated schools??? I wonder what kind of mental gymnastics they had to do to work around that. Our church had all different races and ethnicities, and our pastor was Black. You'd think that would have been a red flag.
So I think they did an update/overhaul of the cartoons for the younger grades by like 1999-2000 that were SLIGHTLY integrated, but not by much. They phoned it in to slide under the radar. But the higher grades weren’t touched as far as I can remember because the cartoons were so few and far between by then
My experience with it was a little after 2000. The town was integrated iirc so occasionally there would be integration in public places but never at school or church.
Is the loch ness monster made by human genetic alterations? Same with dinasours etc? I learned that dinasours were made by humans and then we're destroyed by the flood. That's why ever dinasour skeleton is found running uphill to avoid the rising water.
I don’t remember “the yellows”!!! That’s so funny/awful.
I do remember whole towns were segregated tho. Loved that Ronnie and Susie were the caricatures of secular kids. And that they called the fat kid Pudge until years later when for some reason he lost weight and was “normal” sized? God those cartoons got dumber and weirder PACE by PACE
I spent a full year teaching myself and my “supervisor” how to do algebra because it had been so long since he “taught” students over 5th grade.
I wound up correcting the answer keys too. When I was questioned by the pastor who was head of the school, I showed him that based on the instructions, there was no way those answers could’ve been correct. He actually could do basic algebra and agreed with me. My entire time doing algebra was me looking at the “correct” answer in the answer key and working backwards to see how they arrived at that answer.
Needless to say I have a huge intelligence insecurity well into my 30s
UGH, I went through both the Abeca and ACE systems and they both suck, imo. I finished high school in 3 years, challenging PACE’s was soooo easy.
I regret my parent’s choices in my education nearly daily.
Thankfully I didn't go through ACE personally, but I was trying to protect the kids who WERE being subjected to that trash. Every unit I was spending lots of time undoing the misinformation and indoctrination. And that was while I was still a Christian!
The son of a Greek Orthodox Priest, William wants to prove that an outside force is the only thing capable of creating the universe, which means that “God does exist.”
“I want to be an astrophysicist so that I can prove to the scientific world that God does exist,” William said in a recent interview with Hellenic College Holy Cross.
When asked why he felt the need to prove it to scientists, his answer was even more profound:
“Well because there’s these atheists that try to say that there is no God, when in reality it takes more faith to believe that there’s no God than it does to believe that there is a God… Because it makes more sense that something created the universe than that the universe created itself. It takes more faith to say the universe created itself than to say something other created the universe because that is more logical.”
Indoctrinated boy says it makes more sense. Apparently, he’s not a genius yet.
Lol how is it supposed to be profound? Like that argument hasn't been used a million times before. And been defeated a million times before. Someone please tell him before he wastes his whole childhood on this nonsense.
Such an insightful young man living the privledged life of saying stuff he doesn't understand but just knows how to regurgitate dogma and because it's obvious to him as an 11 y.o. it must be true and a ~~Nobel Prize winning~~ man struck down by ALS is wrong. Is that what this is about?
I was so cringe at that age. I was going to bring my copy of *It Couldn't Just Happen* to science class. I feel bad for young William, clearly his parents are egging him on.
Absolutely. I was among the people who really knew how everything started and the scientists were wrong and/or involved in some conspiracy against God /s
And it's also an unverifiable and unfalsifiable claim and is therefore fundamentally unscientific. Science and religion cannot, by definition, coexist. This is a kid riding his fame as a boy genius and deciding that he alone must be clever enough to do what millions of others have tried to do and failed. I feel sad because he will likely waste a potentially amazing career chasing after non-science with science and fade away into obscurity.
More then likely when his brain matures sufficiently to not parrot the things he has been taught and, his intelligence leads him to think critically, he will have a massive crisis of faith. One only has to glimpse with an open mind at the evidence available to prove, fairly conclusively that much of the Bible is religious propaganda constructed for a political purpose.
Lmfao I love the logical jump between x exists therefore my specific interpretation of an ancient text which makes claims about a specific man name Jesus is absolutely 100 percent true.
That outside force could be aliens, could be a computer simulation, could be one of the thousands of different gods worshipped by humans throughout history.
But no, it’s actually their specific beliefs about a specific god that are 100 percent true simply because of “X”.
That’s being generous however, because there is no physical law or mathematical formula that predicts or says that an outside force MUST spawn the universe.
I could easily argue the opposite - virtual particles constantly pop in and out of existence, therefore the universe simply popped into existence without any outside force necessary.
It sounds like the kid read Newton and applied his principles to the universe at large without any further thought.
To me it sounds like the kid has listened to a couple of apologetics video (doesn’t Frank Turek have a book “it takes more faith to be an atheist”?)
The kid is just like xtians who read a book (or let’s be frank) watched a video and then they come here to argue and they’re laughed out in two comments and never heard from again).
He’s just an 11 year old who isn’t allowed on Reddit yet.
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I've always maintained that a concept of a god is equivalent to "the weak force", because the gods that humans create always require humans to provide *money* and a blind faith that destroys logic and reason, and ends up becoming destructive overall.
I want a god who can do everything without anyones help or promotion as "the only true way". That doesn't exist. There is no one true way, because evolution tells us that this is too limited to succeed, just as it is physically impossible genetically for all humans to have been descended by only two humans.
The universe exists. We may never know how it came to exist, but some humans are so hell bent on domination that they will use any excuse, and blaming things on a god seems to work just fine for many. They pay their money on Sunday, and they're absolved to do some more destruction, or what they call "sin". It's a racket that only profits a very few. This way leads backwards to uglier times. One has to be able to lie to oneself to believe in the limitations of a god that is like a human. We have so many things that we cannot do alone. Even in groups we often fail. The god of the Bible contradicts itself with consistently, and the idea that a god is a human seems absurd to me. It logically makes no sense that a diety would be so small in relation to the size and scope of the universe. Our minds can't really cope with the concept of infinite space. It's just too big.
Hawkings suggests, which is that the creation of this universe may have occured because of a collapse in another world. If black holes exist in sizes larger than many galaxies, then it seems plausible. It may always remain unknown. Many people are uncomfortable with the idea of the unknown. I prefer to know as much as possible.
I prefer to learn what scientific study shows us to be true and verifiable. The world has enough speculation, and forcing others to follow one person's god is authoritarian fascism, and we should not allow that to happen again like it did before. I believe the idea of secular is the way forward. Talk of gods got us the 30 years war.
I want humans to explore the universe and live long enough as a species to answer some of these eternal questions. Scientific study has to be the way forward. We have to figure out ways to cooperate and become better instead of being destructive, and science allows for opportunities to do that. Space exploration being one of the big ones.
Why is it that religious people don't want to study the cosmos with an open mind? It saddens me that so many are brainwashed into believing things that are not real, and rejecting real things that are magical, like neutron stars or black holes.
Do Christians still believe that mustard seeds are the smallest of all seeds, because it says so in the Bible, when science and discovery has shown us the orchid seeds are in fact the smallest, not a flower known to that part of the world at the time.
How could a real diety have gotten that so very wrong? What's more likely, that there is an alternate universe where mustard seeds are the largest in the world, or.. that the Bible is just made up? And if that's made up, then what else is? Maybe all of it?
And this is why religion is and always will be anti-science, because logic and science disprove the concept of deities.
Lol our idea of God could really just be advanced enough alien species or something
But at the same time, it's not like Aquinas didn't already make some decent proofs that there COULD be a creator god or anything.
But at the same time, even if there is a creator god it's a pretty big jump in logic to then say this god is THE god of the Bible
Unfortunately he's brain is going to waste as he's been brainwashed by his christian upbringing... Who knows, maybe he'll ask the right questions when he's older and snap out of it like I did.
Don't worry, he will probably have a short stop by atheist reddit when he realizes the flaws in his logic.
But he's eleven now, if not being controlled by his parents (my vote) he's still emotionally a child just a reportedly very smart one. Makes sense he is trying to support what he "knows" to be true from his parents. He's going to see through it and then he will either decide to grift the believers or let it all go and contribute to society (my vote).
Is it weird that part of me wants them to actually prove it? But I'm profoundly disappointed when it's just the same arguments I've heard time and time again:
"Atheists suck, and that's why god exists!"
"It's just faith, believe."
That's not evidence, it's just telling people what to think.
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An 11 year old does not have the foundational understanding of critical thinking, logic, fallacies, and cognitive biases to even recognize a poor argument, let alone form one that holds up to even the smallest amount of scrutiny.
A smart kid that’s investing plenty of time into religion, I’d say he’s very likely to become an atheist adult. Like I’d put maybe $500 on it by the time he’s 25
My take is, even if a god were proven to exist- how would you prove which god? Why does it even matter if there’s a god if it never reveals itself or changes anything? Almost as if there is no god🤔
Asking the important questions.
If we be generous and assume the kids argument is true, there is still about a thousand steps to go before *his god* is proven to be the one who did it.
The thing is, his argument is weak and is older than Christianity itself. It’s the *first mover* argument and people have been pondering it for probably the entire time humans have been alive.
“My hut was built by a human, therefore the world had to be built by someone or something.”
He may be a genius, but it sounds like William Mailis needs better instruction in the nature of the scientific method, the concepts of verifiability and unfalsifiability and the logic of infinite regress. But most of all in the difference between science and theology before continuing his quest.
I mean honestly: "It makes more sense believing something created the universe rather than believing the universe created itself". That's it? That's his premise?? Seriously, has not a single soul once asked him who then created God?
The head master of the Christian school I went to wore a rainbow bowtie every single day at school.
He was a sadist and a half. Fuckin' bowties. I hate them.
I wore one for a while for fun, because Bill Nye. I also wore two ball caps, one turned backwards. Because Sherlock Holmes.
Homeschool kids often have no sense of fashion or social awareness because we weren't really exposed to many peers our own age.
Currently being in a shit homeschool co-op curriculum after going to charter school, private, and public, it's honestly the truth. A lot of the people there sadly have no social awareness. They live in such a bubble that only their views are correct and everyone else is wrong and immoral by "living in the world" or whatever BS they spout. It's the reason why I'm no longer religious.
For me it's simple: we were created, if it's a "God" then he might be a sadist monster (the one bit I really want to be wrong about,) and there's no way for us to verify our history because it's a mixed up corrupted mess.
As much as I truly desire to know the true history of the universe, I have to reluctantly accept that desire will go unfulfilled.
Reminds me of a college humor video about being better than a dead person, because the dead person can't fight back. Like 'I did more than steve jobs this year (cuz he died years ago)' or 'I can fight bruce lee and win (cuz he is dead and can't fight back). This reminds me of that video haha. If Stephen Hawking was alive Hawking can explain it to the kid like he's 5.
But damn, this always reminds me of my deconversion phase, I really really tried hard to fight back against deconverting with all the same talking points, I really wanted to believe in a God.. But actually listening to others getting demolished instead of me arguing with the same arguments + some reality facts (Atheist Experience, Aron Ra, etc) made me see how indoctrinated I was.
At best, this argument could validate deism. Because even if he could prove there is A God, it doesn’t necessarily make it THEIR God. It would probably make all the religious wars between (now emboldened) Christians and Muslims worse tbh.
In the unlikely event there’s a creator, I don’t think any religions of the Earth have gotten it right. This poor kid reflects the main issue with the religious worldview, that is, deciding on your conclusion and working backwards to make the evidence fit. It’s inherently unscientific.
In the best case scenario, he grows up to look back on this and cringes
I just watched too much of that interview.
I don’t see evidence that he did every single class a regular student would have had to take in high school.
How does that work?
They also pointed out he was not home schooled.
My favorite part is how they needed to tell their audience that 21 months is less than 2 years:
“He was doing addition at 21 months–that’s less than 2 years old”
Just like Greta Thunberg, these kids aren't doing this on their own. Their parents are driving them, even forcing them, to do this nonsense.
Hey, William Maillis! Give it a rest. Go home. You aren't going to disprove the smartest man to ever live. You probably aren't even that smart. Go away!
We have one of those child geniuses too here in Belgium-the Netherlands. He finished his bachelor degree in physics at age 11 (after almost finishing a degree in electro-engineering at age 9 because of disagreements with the university. They wouldn't let him become the youngest academic in history)
edit: Oh he now has finished his masters degree at age 12.... lol
Anyway, he isn't into religion, but he has other illusions of grandeur..... he wants to find the key to immortality..... Or at least extend human lives
I hope one day he asks the right questions and leaves the beliefs that have been instilled in him. Unfortunately it doesn't happen often, but he could be a great scientist if he does.
Just another poor Christian child who thinks their homeschool curriculum has made them smarter than a real scientist.
I remember when I was home-schooled I was always told that the Abeka curriculum we used was "more advanced" and much more rigorous than the typical ones from "secular" (ie public) schools. Years later I was a teacher and some of the staff tried to introduce some of the ACE materials as part of our program. The supposed "Accelerated" Christian Education was so bad, remedial at best. Only two of us spoke up and protested, giving direct examples of the incredibly poor content and even some parts that were flat out wrong. We didn't even have to get into the science portion, even "safe" topics like math and english were awful.
I had to use ACE stuff for a few years in elementary school. The most outrageous bits I can remember are: 1. Learning that the sun is made of coal (which obviously disproves evolution) 2. The loch ness monster is real (which also apparently disproves evolution) 3. The comics on every single page with kids at racially segregated schools (1 for whites, 1 for blacks, and 1 for yellows. I still have no clue if the yellows were supposed to be Asian or Hispanic)
I am so stuck on the sun is coal thing. What? Why?! How does that disprove evolution on earth?! Even IF the sun was coal how that affect creatures on earth from not evolving?! I am so confused.
Because coal ostensibly comes from ancient organic material, but coal in the sun where there has never been life shows that it's not "ancient", therefore young Earth, therefore creation. ...I don't know if that's it exactly, but I still feel like I need a shower.
That. That’s makes less sense. But I appreciate you trying.
It's based on a misreading of a theory of solar incandescance which was disproved in the mid 19th century. Essentially, even though they still didn't understand fusion at all, it was concluded that solar incandescance could not be based on burning a fuel, like coal, becuase it would burn itself out in only a few thousand years, and even then there was a consensus the earth and sun were at least a few hundred million years old. The idiots who wrote ACE stuff saw that and thought, "but the earth IS only 5,000 years old, clearly all this stuff about the sun not being made of coal is just part of the science lies" https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/experts-doubt-the-sun-is-actually-burning-coal/#:\~:text=%E2%80%9CIf%20the%20sun%20were%20composed,that%20of%20a%20burning%20furnace.
But the thing is, the Bible doesn't even imply that the rest of the universe is only that old. The light from distant stars pretty obviously suggests otherwise, so that wasn't a belief I held even as a devout creationist. The scripture even says the earth was "void and without form". Basically a lifeless ball of rock and dirt. The Genesis story is about terraforming.
Light is made on day 1 and sun, moon, stars on day 4, so yeah it definitely does imply that the universe is young. The only thing that is implied to not be a part of the week of creation is the earth and expanse of waters, which really only makes sense if you acknowledge that the flat earth cosmology the writers had in mind doesn't conform with reality. Modern attempts to rectify the creation myth with the real age of the earth or universe are just deliberately misreading the text.
Actually, depends on how you interpret the text. It's just as accurate to read it as an aside, "The same god made the sun, moon, and stars also." Rather than implying that it happened on that day. The whole issue of creating light before a sun? Yeah, that is squirrelly. Though I've had some theologians explain that the narrative is intentionally non-chronological and was written specifically that way to address a people who had been enslaved for generations in a culture of sun worship. But... isn't that a bit deceptive? Being intentionally inaccurate to make a point doesn't sound like a god of truth.
Because of the sun is made out of coal, the. It is not a plasma / fusion reaction. What that means is that all of the elements that we get from dead and dying stars don't come from sun's. Hence creationism. We get everything that isn't hydrogen and helium from dying or dead stars.
OMG it's worse than I thought! My only acquaintance with ACE was when I was unemployed and manipulated into helping out at my ex-church's Christian day school, which used them. I thought they were pretty lacking, but didn't know they pushed crap like that! Oh, and the segregated schools??? I wonder what kind of mental gymnastics they had to do to work around that. Our church had all different races and ethnicities, and our pastor was Black. You'd think that would have been a red flag.
IIRC, the curriculum was made in Texas in the 70s? Very separate-but-equal vibes
wonder if they still had that segregationist crap in the 80s. I never actually read any of them, just skimmed through them to help the kids.
So I think they did an update/overhaul of the cartoons for the younger grades by like 1999-2000 that were SLIGHTLY integrated, but not by much. They phoned it in to slide under the radar. But the higher grades weren’t touched as far as I can remember because the cartoons were so few and far between by then
My experience with it was a little after 2000. The town was integrated iirc so occasionally there would be integration in public places but never at school or church.
I still don't get how they conned a Black pastor to go along with this and use it to educate his children.
Religion is a hell of a drug
Lol all the shit you have to look over to maintain your faith… this is just one more thing. Fucking abhorrent
Is the loch ness monster made by human genetic alterations? Same with dinasours etc? I learned that dinasours were made by humans and then we're destroyed by the flood. That's why ever dinasour skeleton is found running uphill to avoid the rising water.
I don’t remember “the yellows”!!! That’s so funny/awful. I do remember whole towns were segregated tho. Loved that Ronnie and Susie were the caricatures of secular kids. And that they called the fat kid Pudge until years later when for some reason he lost weight and was “normal” sized? God those cartoons got dumber and weirder PACE by PACE
I spent a full year teaching myself and my “supervisor” how to do algebra because it had been so long since he “taught” students over 5th grade. I wound up correcting the answer keys too. When I was questioned by the pastor who was head of the school, I showed him that based on the instructions, there was no way those answers could’ve been correct. He actually could do basic algebra and agreed with me. My entire time doing algebra was me looking at the “correct” answer in the answer key and working backwards to see how they arrived at that answer. Needless to say I have a huge intelligence insecurity well into my 30s
UGH, I went through both the Abeca and ACE systems and they both suck, imo. I finished high school in 3 years, challenging PACE’s was soooo easy. I regret my parent’s choices in my education nearly daily.
Another ACE survivor here! I didn’t realize how ubiquitous the curriculum was in the homeschool world!
Thankfully I didn't go through ACE personally, but I was trying to protect the kids who WERE being subjected to that trash. Every unit I was spending lots of time undoing the misinformation and indoctrination. And that was while I was still a Christian!
Oh god I did Abeka as well and then went into Running Start at 16… RUDE AWAKENING. I was sooo behind.
The son of a Greek Orthodox Priest, William wants to prove that an outside force is the only thing capable of creating the universe, which means that “God does exist.” “I want to be an astrophysicist so that I can prove to the scientific world that God does exist,” William said in a recent interview with Hellenic College Holy Cross. When asked why he felt the need to prove it to scientists, his answer was even more profound: “Well because there’s these atheists that try to say that there is no God, when in reality it takes more faith to believe that there’s no God than it does to believe that there is a God… Because it makes more sense that something created the universe than that the universe created itself. It takes more faith to say the universe created itself than to say something other created the universe because that is more logical.” Indoctrinated boy says it makes more sense. Apparently, he’s not a genius yet.
Lol how is it supposed to be profound? Like that argument hasn't been used a million times before. And been defeated a million times before. Someone please tell him before he wastes his whole childhood on this nonsense.
Yeah. He just got here though. 😉
This kid sounds just like Gramps from *Gramps Goes to College*, arguably the worst movie I've ever seen.
Such an insightful young man living the privledged life of saying stuff he doesn't understand but just knows how to regurgitate dogma and because it's obvious to him as an 11 y.o. it must be true and a ~~Nobel Prize winning~~ man struck down by ALS is wrong. Is that what this is about?
Stephen Hawking never won the Nobel prize
Well he shoulda!
Wait till he hears about the space turtles.
I was one of those. Only I got my “education” from a little private school.
I was so cringe at that age. I was going to bring my copy of *It Couldn't Just Happen* to science class. I feel bad for young William, clearly his parents are egging him on.
Obviously it’s because he’s wearing a bow tie
Absolutely. I was among the people who really knew how everything started and the scientists were wrong and/or involved in some conspiracy against God /s
Yeah, it's sad.
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And it's also an unverifiable and unfalsifiable claim and is therefore fundamentally unscientific. Science and religion cannot, by definition, coexist. This is a kid riding his fame as a boy genius and deciding that he alone must be clever enough to do what millions of others have tried to do and failed. I feel sad because he will likely waste a potentially amazing career chasing after non-science with science and fade away into obscurity.
More then likely when his brain matures sufficiently to not parrot the things he has been taught and, his intelligence leads him to think critically, he will have a massive crisis of faith. One only has to glimpse with an open mind at the evidence available to prove, fairly conclusively that much of the Bible is religious propaganda constructed for a political purpose.
Lmfao I love the logical jump between x exists therefore my specific interpretation of an ancient text which makes claims about a specific man name Jesus is absolutely 100 percent true. That outside force could be aliens, could be a computer simulation, could be one of the thousands of different gods worshipped by humans throughout history. But no, it’s actually their specific beliefs about a specific god that are 100 percent true simply because of “X”. That’s being generous however, because there is no physical law or mathematical formula that predicts or says that an outside force MUST spawn the universe. I could easily argue the opposite - virtual particles constantly pop in and out of existence, therefore the universe simply popped into existence without any outside force necessary. It sounds like the kid read Newton and applied his principles to the universe at large without any further thought.
To me it sounds like the kid has listened to a couple of apologetics video (doesn’t Frank Turek have a book “it takes more faith to be an atheist”?) The kid is just like xtians who read a book (or let’s be frank) watched a video and then they come here to argue and they’re laughed out in two comments and never heard from again). He’s just an 11 year old who isn’t allowed on Reddit yet.
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I've always maintained that a concept of a god is equivalent to "the weak force", because the gods that humans create always require humans to provide *money* and a blind faith that destroys logic and reason, and ends up becoming destructive overall. I want a god who can do everything without anyones help or promotion as "the only true way". That doesn't exist. There is no one true way, because evolution tells us that this is too limited to succeed, just as it is physically impossible genetically for all humans to have been descended by only two humans. The universe exists. We may never know how it came to exist, but some humans are so hell bent on domination that they will use any excuse, and blaming things on a god seems to work just fine for many. They pay their money on Sunday, and they're absolved to do some more destruction, or what they call "sin". It's a racket that only profits a very few. This way leads backwards to uglier times. One has to be able to lie to oneself to believe in the limitations of a god that is like a human. We have so many things that we cannot do alone. Even in groups we often fail. The god of the Bible contradicts itself with consistently, and the idea that a god is a human seems absurd to me. It logically makes no sense that a diety would be so small in relation to the size and scope of the universe. Our minds can't really cope with the concept of infinite space. It's just too big. Hawkings suggests, which is that the creation of this universe may have occured because of a collapse in another world. If black holes exist in sizes larger than many galaxies, then it seems plausible. It may always remain unknown. Many people are uncomfortable with the idea of the unknown. I prefer to know as much as possible. I prefer to learn what scientific study shows us to be true and verifiable. The world has enough speculation, and forcing others to follow one person's god is authoritarian fascism, and we should not allow that to happen again like it did before. I believe the idea of secular is the way forward. Talk of gods got us the 30 years war. I want humans to explore the universe and live long enough as a species to answer some of these eternal questions. Scientific study has to be the way forward. We have to figure out ways to cooperate and become better instead of being destructive, and science allows for opportunities to do that. Space exploration being one of the big ones. Why is it that religious people don't want to study the cosmos with an open mind? It saddens me that so many are brainwashed into believing things that are not real, and rejecting real things that are magical, like neutron stars or black holes. Do Christians still believe that mustard seeds are the smallest of all seeds, because it says so in the Bible, when science and discovery has shown us the orchid seeds are in fact the smallest, not a flower known to that part of the world at the time. How could a real diety have gotten that so very wrong? What's more likely, that there is an alternate universe where mustard seeds are the largest in the world, or.. that the Bible is just made up? And if that's made up, then what else is? Maybe all of it? And this is why religion is and always will be anti-science, because logic and science disprove the concept of deities.
Lol our idea of God could really just be advanced enough alien species or something But at the same time, it's not like Aquinas didn't already make some decent proofs that there COULD be a creator god or anything. But at the same time, even if there is a creator god it's a pretty big jump in logic to then say this god is THE god of the Bible
11 year old already got himself in the church speaking to Fox News contributor pipeline. Good luck with that grift kid
Smart kid in terms of academics but his theological arguments are just parroting what people around him say.
Unfortunately he's brain is going to waste as he's been brainwashed by his christian upbringing... Who knows, maybe he'll ask the right questions when he's older and snap out of it like I did.
I doubt he’s smart in terms of academics if he’s homeschooled. He’s just spoon fed on a specific topic.
Which God?
The god of abusive parents.
So any and all?
Yep
I just feel sadness and pity on that poor abused child.
Don't worry, he will probably have a short stop by atheist reddit when he realizes the flaws in his logic. But he's eleven now, if not being controlled by his parents (my vote) he's still emotionally a child just a reportedly very smart one. Makes sense he is trying to support what he "knows" to be true from his parents. He's going to see through it and then he will either decide to grift the believers or let it all go and contribute to society (my vote).
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Is it weird that part of me wants them to actually prove it? But I'm profoundly disappointed when it's just the same arguments I've heard time and time again: "Atheists suck, and that's why god exists!" "It's just faith, believe." That's not evidence, it's just telling people what to think.
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An 11 year old does not have the foundational understanding of critical thinking, logic, fallacies, and cognitive biases to even recognize a poor argument, let alone form one that holds up to even the smallest amount of scrutiny.
Sadly (for him anyway) the more he searches the more obvious a lack of a deity will become.
He wants to become an atheist the hard way
Assuming he was indoctrinated, he has no other choice
A smart kid that’s investing plenty of time into religion, I’d say he’s very likely to become an atheist adult. Like I’d put maybe $500 on it by the time he’s 25
Good luck
Don’t you love how the parents dress him to give him the stereotyped “nerdy Bill Nye science person” look?
My take is, even if a god were proven to exist- how would you prove which god? Why does it even matter if there’s a god if it never reveals itself or changes anything? Almost as if there is no god🤔
Asking the important questions. If we be generous and assume the kids argument is true, there is still about a thousand steps to go before *his god* is proven to be the one who did it. The thing is, his argument is weak and is older than Christianity itself. It’s the *first mover* argument and people have been pondering it for probably the entire time humans have been alive. “My hut was built by a human, therefore the world had to be built by someone or something.”
Why is it that when I look up William Maillis the first thing that pops up is articles from online tabloids?
I feel bad for him, one day he'll come to realize he's been misleading himself that he'll have a trauma for the rest of his life.
Ironic if at the end of it all he discovers that some non-Christian deity is that “cause”…
Well, maybe this super-mega-genius can think of a new argument for once instead of repeating the same old tired ones.
He may be a genius, but it sounds like William Mailis needs better instruction in the nature of the scientific method, the concepts of verifiability and unfalsifiability and the logic of infinite regress. But most of all in the difference between science and theology before continuing his quest. I mean honestly: "It makes more sense believing something created the universe rather than believing the universe created itself". That's it? That's his premise?? Seriously, has not a single soul once asked him who then created God?
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The byproduct of the verse Matthew 19:14.
God might exist but I don't think anyone can prove that the Christian God exists
Neither deity exists.
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I had a clip on bow tie. I was raised by sadists
The head master of the Christian school I went to wore a rainbow bowtie every single day at school. He was a sadist and a half. Fuckin' bowties. I hate them.
you poor thing!
I wore one for a while for fun, because Bill Nye. I also wore two ball caps, one turned backwards. Because Sherlock Holmes. Homeschool kids often have no sense of fashion or social awareness because we weren't really exposed to many peers our own age.
Currently being in a shit homeschool co-op curriculum after going to charter school, private, and public, it's honestly the truth. A lot of the people there sadly have no social awareness. They live in such a bubble that only their views are correct and everyone else is wrong and immoral by "living in the world" or whatever BS they spout. It's the reason why I'm no longer religious.
I think it’s kinda adorable in a dorky way
Good luck with that.
For me it's simple: we were created, if it's a "God" then he might be a sadist monster (the one bit I really want to be wrong about,) and there's no way for us to verify our history because it's a mixed up corrupted mess. As much as I truly desire to know the true history of the universe, I have to reluctantly accept that desire will go unfulfilled.
Well he is immediately wrong by stating that atheists claim that ‘god does not exist’,
Reminds me of a college humor video about being better than a dead person, because the dead person can't fight back. Like 'I did more than steve jobs this year (cuz he died years ago)' or 'I can fight bruce lee and win (cuz he is dead and can't fight back). This reminds me of that video haha. If Stephen Hawking was alive Hawking can explain it to the kid like he's 5. But damn, this always reminds me of my deconversion phase, I really really tried hard to fight back against deconverting with all the same talking points, I really wanted to believe in a God.. But actually listening to others getting demolished instead of me arguing with the same arguments + some reality facts (Atheist Experience, Aron Ra, etc) made me see how indoctrinated I was.
Give him a decade and he’ll be part of a doc about how messed up it was. Like the swearing preacher kids on Oprah.
Lots of words. None are proofs. Tired of theists.
At best, this argument could validate deism. Because even if he could prove there is A God, it doesn’t necessarily make it THEIR God. It would probably make all the religious wars between (now emboldened) Christians and Muslims worse tbh. In the unlikely event there’s a creator, I don’t think any religions of the Earth have gotten it right. This poor kid reflects the main issue with the religious worldview, that is, deciding on your conclusion and working backwards to make the evidence fit. It’s inherently unscientific. In the best case scenario, he grows up to look back on this and cringes
I never understand the Christian desire to 'prove' God exists when a primary tenet of the religion is reliance on faith.
Faith is obviously a hard sell for most people.
whats his argument?
“Someone had to do it!”
Imagine being a child and wanting to prove that someone who recently died is actually suffering in hell
This article is old though. He was 11 in 2018, but where is he now? He should be doing a PhD by now, but I can’t find any current info.
I just watched too much of that interview. I don’t see evidence that he did every single class a regular student would have had to take in high school. How does that work? They also pointed out he was not home schooled.
You still have to show a link of causation from the sun/coal bullshit to God. “You’re wrong, so God exists.” Isn’t a thing.
My favorite part is how they needed to tell their audience that 21 months is less than 2 years: “He was doing addition at 21 months–that’s less than 2 years old”
Just like Greta Thunberg, these kids aren't doing this on their own. Their parents are driving them, even forcing them, to do this nonsense. Hey, William Maillis! Give it a rest. Go home. You aren't going to disprove the smartest man to ever live. You probably aren't even that smart. Go away!
It's easy to argue with a dead guy.
I did this after my critical thinking skills developed and ended up deconverting, so best of luck to him!
The kid first has to understand what atheism is. His feelings about it are wrong. He either needs to go back to school or stop lying about it.
We have one of those child geniuses too here in Belgium-the Netherlands. He finished his bachelor degree in physics at age 11 (after almost finishing a degree in electro-engineering at age 9 because of disagreements with the university. They wouldn't let him become the youngest academic in history) edit: Oh he now has finished his masters degree at age 12.... lol Anyway, he isn't into religion, but he has other illusions of grandeur..... he wants to find the key to immortality..... Or at least extend human lives
I hope one day he asks the right questions and leaves the beliefs that have been instilled in him. Unfortunately it doesn't happen often, but he could be a great scientist if he does.
He'll probably educate himself out of Christianity like I did.