Oxygen is measurable. We can detect even tiny amounts of it, we know its makeup, we have well characterized its behavior, and we can make it work for us.
We have no evidence for the existence of any gods. Seems like we can exist without them just fine.
Holy mother Mary and Joseph! Do my eyes deceive me or is that the son of God etched into my sandwich!? Could it have been divine intervention that compelled me to put the cheese on the outside?! Literally no other explanation exists for why I might've done that!
That reminds me of a picture of "Jesus" that kept bleeding through the paint in one of my old landlord's apartments. He tasked me with stripping the paint off the wall to find out what was actually below the white paint he had slapped up. Several layers of white paint below the surface, I found an absolutely gorgeous oil paint mural of Bob Marley.
Not really, it stays liquid until it boils, so it can stay outside the cryo chamber for a few seconds. And since it's pure oxygen, on top of the dangers with liquid gases being super cold, it's also a potent oxidizer, so it can set fire to some fuels without a hear source
I realize I'm posting a complaint in my own thread so it's my own fault, but I keep getting "Love is Like Oxygen" by Sweet stuck in my head since I've posted this.
You don't even need oxygen to be in a liquid or solid state to see it: oxygen is the reason the sky is blue. When you look through a large enough volume of gaseous oxygen, as you do when you step outside in the day time, you can see it just fine.
Oxygen is absolutely measurable, and your own body will quickly tell you something is very, very wrong if your 02 intake is too low, or even weird (which is why SCUBA mixes are a topic of their own.)
There is the matter that oxygen does affect light, which allows us to tell if an exoplanet has oxygen in the atmosphere, which means it's not invisible, just very transparent. But when we look at other worlds we detect oxygen by analyzing the light that comes from them, so we see oxygen.
In the meantime, the human species as we know it (homo-sapiens) has been around for 250,000 years. The monotheistic version has been around for about 4,000 years (and even Adonai had others in His pantheon. The temple priests of Adonai murdered Asherah, His consort, by massacring all the Asheran desciples and burning Her temples down). For most of that time, ancestors, elemental spirits and animal spirits were central to our religious faith, not high-concept deities. For the vast majority of human existence, God did not exist as He is commonly regarded in popular religions.
AFAIK, we do not, in fact, have any biological system that detects oxygen in the air. What we use instead is detection of the things that are typically present when oxygen is not. Like CO2 concentration. This is what makes a room "feel stuffy", CO2.
I don't think this invalidates your point at all, of course you have a valid argument despite the biological misunderstanding here.
The only reason I know this is when looking into the whole, capital punishment by nitrogen hypoxia thing, I kinda stumbled into a lot of information. We don't generally detect nitrogen nor oxygen in any way, shape, or form, since it's quite plentiful in the atmosphere of the earth (78% nitrogen, 21% oxygen), there's not much reason to. We've never needed a biological trigger to say "there's oxygen here" because there's never been situations where that hasn't really been true until very very recently (eg. Closed systems like submarines, aeroplanes, vessels that go into high orbit/space, etc).
Looking at the evolution of it, any such space will accrue toxic/deadly levels of atmospheric gases, long before the oxygen is consumed. So we have biological processes to detect atmospheric toxin levels, with one example being CO2. According to some data I've read, CO2 freely is absorbed and expelled by the body through the blood via the alveoli (lungs), which makes the amount of CO2 in your blood a function of atmospheric CO2 levels, which may slightly waiver due to your physical workload. As you produce CO2 within your body from metabolic activity, either from regular metabolic tasks or through physical exertion, the rise in blood CO2 levels is expelled by the blood through equilibrium with the surrounding atmosphere. Simply, if you have higher CO2 concentration in your blood than there is in the atmosphere, it will diffuse towards the atmosphere (I'll reiterate that the process works in reverse too).
High CO2 concentration in your blood affects your blood pH and can create an acidic environment, which the body can easily detect.
As far as I'm aware, there's no similar biological process to detect oxygen levels, either directly or indirectly.
This is the danger of nitrogen hypoxia. If you're in a low CO2 environment which is devoid of oxygen (or has very little atmospheric oxygen, not enough to sustain human life), with most of the o2 concentration being replaced by nitrogen instead, your body can still expel CO2, but cannot obtain the o2 required to survive. Since there's no mechanism to detect this, your blood o2 levels drop to levels which are incompatible with living while you remain unaware that a problem exists.
Thus, you can easily perish when your o2 saturation drops to nil, with no indication that you're at risk of dying.
Sorry for the dissertation, this is just something I find incredibly fascinating about biology. I hope I didn't bore anyone too much.
Disclaimer: I'm not a biologist or scientist, I'm just some guy with ADHD, and I've hyperfocused on this subject a couple of times. If anything I've said is incorrect, I invite corrections. If possible, please link additional resources for further reading and my ADHD brain will thank you very kindly for the effort.
happycakeday. thx for the thorough insight.
so what happens with asphyxiation by noble gases?
with my limited knowledge helium makes your voice funny and nitrogen will boil your blood.(neither of which are noble gases).
I feel like that would be a cool terrible sci-fi movie where we make a Time Machine but it only works on small scales and discover a new element or something idk
In high school, there was a minor tradition of trolling the chemistry teacher during his talks about air. One student would say, “If I can’t see it, I don’t believe it.”
Of course the teacher would fall for it hook, line and sinker and the rest of the hour was spent arguing for air while the student would just repeat the same line again and again.
Good for me to remember that trolling and the resulting flame wars were around even before the internet. :-)
first of all what it's responding to is not an argument, it's a motivational quote of some sort. it's cringe trying to counter argue that to begin with.
like do you see people write something like "you only fail when you stop trying" and go "ummm actually the dictionary definition of failing is ..." and go to stupid technicalities about how one can actually fail despite insisting on trying? well this is atheist memes so don't answer.
second of all the main counter argument used for proof of oxygen is that it can be seen in certain situations. which is entirely dumb, because obviously we know stuff can exist and not be seen, so "where's your god photo" is not even a weak counter but an invalid one. ok i guess love doesn't exist because i cant post a photo of it on facebook, checkmate valentine.