It’s Official! Pineapple Is Theists Worst Nightmare
A couple of days ago, DisComforting Ignorance started a 7 part debunk of the Living Waters “Atheist Test“. The test is a rather silly way of converting atheists into theists. It uses quite a few irrational arguments, including the “buildings have a builder” argument, and of course the standard “banana argument“. It was this banana argument that DisComforting Ignorance addressed in the first part.
The article did the standard debunk of the banana, and added what he supposed was the “theists nightmare”
The coconut — the theist’s nightmare.
Although the meat and water is pleasing to our taste buds, note that the coconut:
1. Is not shaped for human hand
2. When it has ripened, it doesn’t detach for a few months, at which point the coconut water has become bitter. If you want coconut water, you have to get it while it’s still unripened.
3. When it detaches, it falls from tall palms, injuring people.
4. Has no tab for removal of wrapper
5. Has no perforation on wrapper.
6. You have to whack it many times about its circumference with a tool.
7. It is not shaped for human mouth
8. Has no point at top for ease of entry
9. Removing the meat from the shell is a laborious process, even with a tool.
10. Is not curved towards the face to make eating process easy
I posted a comment saying that the coconut does fit nicely in the human hand, and that atheist author Nick Gisburne had already suggested the Pineapple as the theists nightmare. The full video is below:
DisComforting Ignorance decided that there should be some kind of official test done, and decided to use his day off to hold a death match…pineapple vs. coconut.
I have to say, I was laughing pretty much the entire way down the page, mainly because of the pictures that were included. In the end, the pineapple won by a small but significant margin, making it the official theists nightmare.
DisComforting Ignorance also noted how easily the atheists nightmare (banana) is overcome by the theists nightmare (pineapple):
Contact Adrian Hayter
My Facebook
My Atheist Nexus Page
My Twitter
My Reddit
My Atheist Spot
My FriendFeed
My Technorati
Atheist Forums
Loading ...
“buildings have a builder” is a irrational argument?
…well, I guess so if you are using Atheistic reasoning which has no foundation, anyway.
Ed, welcome back!
The “buildings have a builder” argument is irrational, not the statement “buildings have a builder”. The argument goes that since buildings have a builder, paintings have a painter etc, then “creation” must have a “creator”.
The argument fails on every level because the builder / painter is observable and so is known fact. Secondly, we have no evidence that we are a “creation”, and we certainly have evidence that we are “evolved”.
It tries to personify a God and prove that everything has been created by it. It is irrational because it has no basis in observation or evidence.
Ah, yes, I’ve seen that video before. At 3am in the morning, I guess I was confusing Nick Gisburne with someone else.
Thanks for straightening me out, Adrian :-)
@Ed
Of course it is not irrational to claim that buildings have a builder. Adrian was referring to the “buildings have a builder” argument that Ray often touts. It goes a little like this:
If there is a building, that proves there was a builder since the building necessitates a builder.
If there is a painting, that proves there was a painter since the painting necessitates a painter.
If there is a car, that proves there was a car maker since the car necessitates a car maker.
Therefore, if there is creation, that proves there was a Creator since the creation necessitates a Creator.
There are *many* many things wrong with this, as Adrian pointed out. Ray also tries to use it to disprove evolution. It’s a bit of circular logic, though, as he defines the us as creation. As with many of Ray’s irrational arguments, it can easily be used to disprove the antithesis:
If there is a building, that proves there was a building process since the building necessitates a building process.
If there is a painting, that proves there was a painting process since the painting necessitates a painting process.
If there is a car, that proves there was a car making process since the car necessitates a car making process.
Therefore, if there are evolved beings, that proves there was evolution since evolved beings necessitates evolution.
I would like to theorize that God made bananas for lazy white middle-class Americans, whereas he made coconuts and pineapples for people who can handle a challenge. I would also like to theorize that coconuts and pineapples taste better than bananas because God didn’t feel the need to reward the lazy people too highly.
The coconut:
Pacific islanders recognize different stages of growth, assigning to them different names. When the nut is young, it is without the white endosperm (“meat”), but filled with “water” and is used for drinking. When older the endosperm is soft and rubbery, a stage preferred by some. When still older, the husk is still green, but the shell is now brown. At this stage the water tastes like sparkling water, though I don’t know if this is from dissolved gases. Finally when mature and the husk brown, the endosperm is usually ground off on a serrated blade and added to other dishes or rendered for oil.
Anyway come over to my blog ‘Debunking Atheists’ to talk about it.
One of the reasons I come to this site is that I often feel like I’m in an episode of Doctor Who which deals with stepping into an alternate universe where up is down and down is up and we argue about the shape the number of sides on a circle.
Regarding the Building/builder argument. You seem to agree that the conclusion of the argument isn’t irrational but somehow the argument itself is. This is likely a bad use of logic, but since I slept in class during set theory. Lets move on to analyizing the argument:
All created things have makers
Buildings are created things
Builders are makers
Therefore, all buildings have builders.
I’m supposing that you take issue with the first premise (because of obvious conclusions).
If we changed it to be Most created things have makers…then your conclusion would be most buildings have builders.
Since you brought up the issue of evidence with: “it has no basis in observation or evidence.”
I’d challenge you to name me just one building that has ever existed without a builder.
If you cannot, then it appears as though you need to account for why you presuppose that the argument is irrational.
Ed,
For the last time, the “buildings have a builder” argument is the name of the argument not the argument itself. It includes very rational definitions of buildings and builders to start off with, before being irrational at the end and in its overall conclusion.
I am not arguing against the idea that buildings have builders. (In fact I stated that beforehand but you seem to have ignored me). We know buildings have builders because we know the process of building a building needs a builder.
If however, you took a child from a aboriginal tribe or amazonian tribe who had never seen any kind of building before, they would not say “well obviously that building had a builder”. They would (I presume) think that such a building was a natural occurrence. We don’t know that buildings have builders because they necessitate them, but because of past experience and knowledge.
I am not against the statement: buildings have builders.
I am against the premise that this statement can then be used (later on in the argument) to say that creation must have a creator. Of course, there is nothing wrong with this statement either, but it is widely used to mean that the “creation” is humanity, and the “creator” is God.
I object to this because firstly we have not observed such a “creation” of humanity by a God, so how are we suddenly meant to know that we were created, and secondly because the argument makes the leap of faith and says that “God” is the creator.
This can be turned around via the buildings argument as well. Say we took a bird’s nest, and got a human to make an exact replica, perfectly duplicated in every detail. The “builders” are very different (a bird and a human) but we are unable to tell (without having observed the process of building) which builder built each nest.
Likewise, I object to the conclusion that it “must” have been God who was the creator, because there are other candidates at hand. Evolution certainly had a massive role to play in the diversity of life as this has been observed. Abiogenesis has likewise been experimented with and has formed the basic building blocks of life. Who knows, perhaps everything was “created” by the Flying Spaghetti Monster, we have no way of knowing for sure.
So to sum up, the “buildings have a builder” argument is not an argument about buildings, but the commonly used name for the argument that God must have created humanity. I am against this type of argument because it ignores the processes of “creation” and jumps straight to the name of the “creator”. Without knowing how creation is created, we cannot say that a creator did it.
Also, have you noticed that the human penis fits perfectly into the human anus, thus proving divine approval for anal sex between man and woman as well as man and man.