Debating is not an honest intellectual exercise. It's like a trial in which the goal is not to get to the truth but to win.

People want to be at the center of the Universe...and they're going to flock to anybody who tells them that.

Any strategy that attempts to reinforce faith by undermining science is also doomed to failure. Showing that some scientific theory is wrong will not prove that the religious alternative is correct by default. When the sun was shown not to be the center of the universe, as Copernicus had proposed, the Earth was not moved back to that singular position in the cosmos. If Darwinian evolution is proved wrong, biologists will not develop a new theory based on the hypothesis that each species was created separately by God 6,000years ago.

The belief in supernatural forces remains to this day a yoke on the neck of humanity, but at least Thales made it possible, for those of us who wish it, to be free of that yoke.

Fifteen years of skepticism has done more for me than 20 years of force-fed religion and 30 years of indifference in between.

But, as we have seen, movement does not require a mover, and modern quantum mechanics has shown that not all effects require a cause. And even if they did, why would the Prime Mover need to be a supernatural anthropomorphic deity such as the Judeo - Christian God? Why could it not just as well be the material universe itself?

In fact, current cosmological observations indicate that the average density of matter and energy in the universe is equal, within measurement errors, to the critical density for which the total energy of the universe was exactly zero at the beginning.