Please forgive my not quoting by name, but I'm answering several posts at once and can't seem to get the multi-quote feature to work.
It was just an illustration of the general idea. Flawed, perhaps, but defeating the illustration doesn't necessarily defeat the argument.
Meanwhile, here's something that may help. The astronomer Carl Sagan came up with something called the Cosmic Calendar that condenses the history of the universe into a single 12-month earth year. In the Cosmic Calendar, Creation/The Big Bang occurs at the beginning of the first second of January 1st, and the end of the last second of December 31st is RIGHT NOW (whoops, you missed it ;D). On this scale, the Milky Way galaxy began to coalesce on March 13; the Solar System, including earth, began to form on September 1st; on September 29th the oldest form of life on earth, stromatolites, developed; and dinosaurs lasted from December 25th until December 30th. Then comes December 31st: at 1 AM the first primitive apes arrive; modern humans, Homo Sapiens, come along at 11:54 PM; the rise of Sumer is at 11:59.46 PM; finally, Moses leads the Hebrews out of Egypt 8/100s of a second ago. This Cosmic Calendar is a great tool for appreciating the incredible time spans we're dealing with, in both cosmology and evolution. I also think it would help the religious to understand the breadth and power of their God. It's not in the Quran, of course, but neither are most other tools we use.
Fair enough.
Why do you think precise timing is such a big deal? Given the time spans involved, an error of 10,000 years is miniscule.
For some, perhaps. Those are the ones who treat their disbelief as if it were a religion. In which case, why wonder at atheists and not at, say, Shiites? For others, atheism is a conclusion or a verdict, arrived at after an examination of evidence. For the skeptical atheist there are no final answers and everything is subject to revision pending additional evidence. It is only the religious who claim to have found The Answer, just like Blasphemy is an accusation that can only be made by the religious.
