The Atheist Blogger

Ray Comfort is back from his “debate” which I’m sure he lost on actual content. There is only so far you can go denying reality and actually having a credible argument. Ray simply argues from ignorance, and eventually someone will educate him on the truth. Of course, it doesn’t help that Ray has repeatedly asserted that he would never consider any evidence for Evolution, because that would directly contradict his scripture. This makes Ray not just ignorant, but willingly ignorant.

Ray was quizzed on his “painting implies painter therefore creation implies creator therefore God exists” argument by a reader of his blog:

Ray, when you see a painting, it is reasonable to assume that a painter painted it. Is it reasonable to assume that his name is Alan Jeffrey Pinkerton? How would you go about validating your claim? Would it be enough for you if someone just told you his name was Alan Jeffrey Pinkerton? What if somebody else told you that Alan Jeffrey Pinkerton never existed and it was really painted by Cecil P. Fitzwilliam? Imagine that it is your job to find out who really painted it. How would you begin your investigation? You see, creation = creator is all well and good… but how do I establish who that creator was?

In other words, if we assume Ray’s argument stands, how do we know which creator created creation? Ray takes a stab at this question, and fails miserably.

The One who created the universe must be supernatural. With all our “genius,” humanity can’t create one grain of sand, a leaf, a flower or a bird, from nothing. The Creator must have powers that are infinitely greater than the greatest human being.

It’s true, humanity with all our genius cannot create sand, a leaf, a flower, or a bird from nothing. That would defy the laws of physics. However Ray makes his first mistake here, because he is setting the goalposts too far away. Nobody is arguing that nothing created everything, this has been established many many times to him, but Ray never seems to get it (willingly ignorant anyone?). The Big Bang was a rapid expansion of space-time, and to be an expansion, something must already be there. The initial condition of our universe is often considered “nothing” because it is considered to be extremely small, sometimes thought to be a singularity. However none of these are “nothing”.

Given that his premise is completely flawed, the rest of his argument falls down in style. He claims that the creator must have infinitely more power than the “greatest” human. Since the universe did not just spring out of nothing according to latest theories, any “creator” has to be more complex than the universe itself. There is no need to have some “infinite” attribute unless the creation is also infinitely complex. If there is anything we have learned through the last 500 years of science, it is that the universe is finite and it can be understood by a bunch of ape-like beings that have evolved on one of the planets that forms part of that universe.

So, if the “creator” does not need to be infinite, it doesn’t need to be supernatural, thus nulling is original statement. Ray then continues to answer the question:

The claim of the gospel is that this Creator will reveal Himself to all who repent and trust Jesus Christ.

Of course this answer does not cover the full question, as the reader specifically asked Ray to explain how you would validate that claim. To Ray this task is impossible; you just have to have “faith”, but this has problems when you come across people like me who have believed and realized that Christianity has no answers. Evidently Ray’s method of knowing the creator does not work, as there are many atheists who have been even more fundamentalist than Ray Comfort with their previous Christian beliefs. Ray’s only answer to these people is that they were never “true” Christians, but this really begs the question: how Christian do you have to be to be “true”?

The whole problem with the “painter” argument is that Ray is taking something for which we know the process of creation (i.e. the painting, the book, the car) and comparing it to something for which we either do not know the creation, or do not know if there even was a “creation”. Before the argument can work, Ray must prove that what he cites as “creation” was in fact created. To do this, he must disprove the Big Bang theory, and although he has attempted to do this many times, he has always failed because the simple truth is this:

Ray Comfort is a willingly ignorant fool.