The Atheist Blogger

A few months back, Ray Comfort asked Richard Dawkins to debate with him. Dawkins agreed, but requested a $100,000 donation to his foundation for reason and science (the standard rate he requests), and that the debate would be recorded. Ray offered $20,000 instead, and Dawkins refused. Ray could have left it at that, saying he was not able to pay anything higher, but instead he released a video with a futile attempt to mock Dawkins over a quotemined section of “Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed”. That alone was cowardly, but what happened a few days ago is enough to disgust any upstanding member of society.

As most people know, Thunderf00t is a very popular atheist YouTuber, and also a commentator on science, mainly evolutionary biology. He has been featured on many blogs, including Pharyngula, on certain issues such as the VenomFangX DMCA debacle and his popular “Why do people laugh at creationists?” series. Thunderf00t is, by all accounts, a mainstream and prominent atheist. He might not have books, but he has over 50,000 subscribers and the entire atheist blogosphere behind him.

So Thunderf00t decided to ask Ray Comfort to a discussion, since he was going travelling and would be close to where the Living Waters ministry is based. He dutifully contacted Living Waters, but they told him to contact Ray directly on his blog. This is the comment (now removed from Ray’s blog as requested) that Thunderf00t left:

For the attention of Ray Comfort,
Your staff (T Ramos) suggested I post this here.

I run the popular pro-science youtube channel under the screen name of Thunderf00t.

For context.
Thunderf00t 54 000 subscribers
Thewayofthemaster 9 000 subscribers

This summer I will be touring the US and should passing near to LA (the Mnt Wilson Observatory).

You have previously stated that you wish to have a public discussion with “prominent atheists.”;

My proposal would be simple and honest.
You and me, one room, one camera. Through civil discourse we examine our points of contest and points of agreement. We both then take a copy of the video. I will put it up uncut on my channel.
You are free to do with your copy as you wish.

If you have an interest in such a project, let me know some windows of opportunity and we will see if we can converge on a date.

If you accept or decline the offer, please delete this post. To otherwise will lead to pointless speculation about motives.
I would rather not have made such an invitation in public but it was suggested by your staff

Best wishes,
Thunderf00t

Polite, honest, and with all good intentions. Thunderf00t established himself as a popular science-minded atheist, and proposed a simple format for discussion. He didn’t even want a debate! He just wanted the two of them to sit down and discuss their views as any two men would do in a polite conversation. He requested it be recorded, so that others may watch, and Ray can do whatever he likes with his copy. The key thing to note at this point is that Thunderf00t demanded no money.

Ray Comfort accepted the proposal, but with his sick and twisted sense of morality:

Regarding your request for a debate. I would be more than happy to do this. The only condition would be an honorarium of $US100,000, payable to “Professor Richard Dawkins,” on my behalf.

In other words, Ray wants to use Thunderf00t to get to Richard Dawkins. He gets a decent and well-thought out proposal to a discussion, and Ray turns it around and throws back an insult. This is a despicable act of cowardice, and is deeply unfair to Thunderf00t, who was willing to give Ray the discussion he wanted, for free, and by means of a civil conversation. What kind of morality is that? Punish a person who comes to you with an honest request in order to get back at someone who you failed to meet the requirements of before? It’s beyond Ray’s usual ridiculous nature; this was pure greed, coupled with the kind of scheming you get from stereotypical “evil geniuses” in films.

Ray once agreed with Ben Stein’s criticism of Richard Dawkins, that he was fine with Intelligent Design, just not certain designers, like God. Well now Ray has shown his true colours, we can say a similar thing about him. Ray is not interested in debate or discussion with “prominent atheists”, only discussions with certain prominent atheists…namely Richard Dawkins.

Of course, who better to explain this than Thunderf00t himself:

Do Thunderf00t a favour and favourite his videos, rate them with 5 stars (it counters the votebotes that attack his account regularly), and leave a comment on his channel. He certainly deserves it.

Ray Comfort’s latest stroll into the land of irrational thought has produced yet another blog post that attempts to link the theory of evolution with Adolf Hitler. It’s common knowledge that Hitler was a creationist, at most believing in some form of “micro-evolution”. Hitler never mentioned Darwin in any of his books, and the mentions of “evolution” that Ray gives us are almost all references to social evolution. Hitler can be accurately described as a social Darwinist, a political theory that has no relation to Darwin or to the biological theory of evolution that is studied today ^[1][2]. With this in mind, after reading through the 5 or so quotes in the post, the rational thinker is left with the resounding question “Ok, so what?”.

Let’s leave the fact that Hitler was a creationist, that his politics were not based on science but on racism and white supremacy. Instead, I want to examine the “so what?” that often gets ignored, yet is actually very important in analyzing Comfort’s argument. We shall begin by assuming that Ray Comfort is completely correct; that Hitler was a believer in the theory of evolution. We shall also assume that Hitler was so devoted to the theory, he decided to use it through social Darwinism in order to justify genocide. What does this tell us about the theory of evolution? Nothing. A theory is not defined by how people use it, but by what it tells us. The theory of evolution says nothing of “higher species” or that organisms must systematically wipe out all those who are “inferior”. In fact, the theory of evolution gives us no help in pinpointing which species are “more evolved” than others, or even what that would entail.

For instance, human beings are considered to be more evolved because of our consciousness, yet some bacteria have genomes hundreds of times larger than our own. So how do we calculate inferiority when we have two opposing lines of measurement, one based on evolved attributes, the other based on number of mutations. I don’t think one could make a good argument for either, especially given the further problem of how to compare attributes (is consciousness a better attribute than metabolizing citrate for example?). This all points to the conclusion that most would agree on; that science tells us about the universe in which we live by describing and explaining it, but it does not tell us what to do with this knowledge.

Science told us how to make the nuclear bomb, but science did not tell us to drop these bombs on Nagasaki and Hiroshima. If science was responsible for these actions, then you could easily justify Newton as responsible for the deaths of everyone killed by projectiles. The reason creationists like Comfort do not extend their argument to include men like Newton is that they accept the theory of gravity (and yes, it is just a theory Ray). By holding Darwin and his theory as responsible for the actions of men he never knew, yet not doing the same for other scientists like Newton, Nobel, Einstein, etc reveals Ray’s dishonesty and unwillingness to discuss evolution on an intellectual level. Instead, he prefers to launch a thinkly veiled ad-hominem attack in the hopes that people will focus on the supposed “link” and not the attack itself. This may have worked well for him in the past, but not today, and not on this blog.

With the recent discovery of Ida, also known as Darwinius masillae, it was only a matter of time before Ray Comfort got on the case and started spouting his usual rubbish. The cartoon provided with the post is rather amusing, and also quite ironic. There are no doubts that Ida is “definitely ape”, but then there are also no doubts that homo sapiens are “definitely ape” either! You only make this kind of statement if you believe (as Ray does) that apes and humans are completely different “kinds” and not related to one another.

Ray responds to a commenter’s challenge to come up with characteristics that one would “expect to see in a transitional reptile/avian fossil?” by dismissing the question outright, claiming that such thinking is mere “speculation”. Well of course it is speculation in Ray’s eyes! We know he doesn’t accept the theory, so any hypothetical question about the theory is going to be speculation for him. The point was for Ray to imagine a world where evolution were true, and then imagine what characteristics he would expect to see in a transitional fossil. It’s a very easy question, and it’s actually how science works. We come up with a hypothesis: “I think twins can communicate telepathically with one another”, and then make some predictions which are speculations based on the idea that the hypothesis is true: “If my hypothesis is true, then twins under controlled conditions should be able to communicate”. We then do experiments, and if the prediction remains true throughout the experiments, we are able to confirm the hypothesis. Ray’s rejection of the question is just evidence that he rejects science, yet he claims in his post: “I believe in true science, not in the pseudo-science of evolution.”. No Ray, you do not believe in true science. One cannot believe in true science and yet reject outright the scientific method.

I think another tell-tale sign of Ray’s rejection is this statement:

I have said that there is no scientific evidence of any species “evolving” into another species. That’s the evidence that is still missing.

Of course, the evidence is not missing, and every time we show it to Ray, he simply rejects it. He has said on his own blog that there is no evidence that would convince him of evolution, since evolution contradicts the Holy Bible. This kind of closed-mindedness reveals Ray as the hypocrite he is; always asking for evidence but never accepting any of it because of his presuppositions.

You have your own definition of evolution, but ask the average person on the street what they believe it is, and they will say that Darwin said that man evolved from primates–that our great, great, great grandfather was an ape.

The definition of something is based off the people who know the most about it, not the “average” person on the street. The average person on the street in countries like Sweden thinks that Christianity is ridiculous; does that define Christianity as ridiculous for you Ray? Darwin never stated that our great, great, great, grandfathers were apes; only creationists did that. It is not surprising that people disbelieve in the theory when most people are taught complete lies about it.

You believe in a common ancestor (like a branch on a tree of common descent), they don’t. They believe we are direct ancestors. That we are apes.

The common ancestor of modern apes and humans was (not surprisingly) an ape. We are direct descendants of these ancient apes, just as modern apes are. We are not direct descendants of modern apes. Just in the way both myself and my cousins are direct descendants of my grandmother, but not of each other. The only difference is that with evolution, it takes much longer than 2 generations.

It is very clear that there is no empirical evidence for Darwinian evolution.

Fossils aren’t the only empirical evidence. Now that we know how DNA functions, we can see evolution in action. We have told you this, but you never listen. My only hopes are that some of your followers will read this and explore science for themselves, and hopefully rid themselves of your lies and misinformation.

Well, after almost a month of inactivity on the blog, I’m back! I firstly want to apologise for not making even small posts during my absence, but I honestly had so much to do I either forgot or couldn’t get the time to write anything. I have been reading and following my favourite blogs though, so I haven’t missed any of the things that have happened recently. The reason for my absence was a large number of exams that I always try to prepare for, but tend to ignore right up until they are actually upon me. Thus for the last 3 weeks I was studying like crazy, only stopping to send the occasional message on Twitter. I think that during that period, Twitter replaced my blog almost completely, and I know that large number of my readers follow me on Twitter as well (and if you don’t yet, please follow!).

So, now that exams were over, I went to stay with my mother for the weekend, and was cut off from the internet (apart from my mobile phone’s internet) for 3 days. To top it off, when I arrived back from a 3 hour train journey yesterday, I was whisked away by my friends to a Godfather film marathon. It was the first time I’d seen any of the movies (please forgive me), and I thoroughly enjoyed them all. With the help of two bloggers and Skype friends of mine, Splendid Elles (@elles) and Andrew Milne (@footbullet), we successfully created a new religion using Twitter, based on a truly awesome British snack: JaffaCakeology. If you want to join, simply hashtag all your tweets with #JAFFACAKES, and pledge devotion to our prophet, @cmkempe.

Back to business then, and I have 4 months off doing practically nothing other than some programming and various projects. This leaves plenty of time for writing blog posts, both short and long. Today I’m going to write about a presentation I saw over the weekend. It was the start of Salisbury Festival, which is an event spanning several months in which numerous activities are run in the city where I grew up. One of the events this weekend was a talk given by Charles Foster, a lawyer who has written a book called “The Selfless Gene”. His talk was entitled “Living with God and Darwin” and promised to

[demonstrate] that orthodox Christianity is not incompatible with what evolutionary biology says about our world.

The real problem, he said,

centres around the ethical implications of natural selection, and what such a system – based on selfishness, waste and death – might say about the loving creator God of the Christian faith.

I thought such claims were interesting, so I went along to hear his argument. However the talk was not what was promised. Instead of showing how Christianity wasn’t incompatible, he simply spent his time laughing at creationist claims (along with the rest of the non-creationist audience). He talked at length about how Young Earth Creationists were foolish, how the evidence contradicts their claims, how nobody can possibly claim such things without being ignorant. This was all very well, but he didn’t cover how this was wrong in a Biblical sense, which would have actually supported his argument. I highly doubt there were any Young Earth Creationists in the audience; this is England we’re talking about! I highly doubt there were any Old Earth Creationists there either! He spent a good 20 minutes talking about creationism in it’s various forms, spending a few extra on Intelligent Design, and ending his case against creationism with a passionate argument against a “god of the gaps”.

The rest of the talk was a haphazard presentation on the evidence for evolution, and I wasn’t impressed. He didn’t go into any detail, and his slides were all extremely bad quality, as if they had been photographed from some other talk. He never mentioned the mechanisms that make evolution tick, and he kept on blaming the “neo-darwinists” and “disciples of Dawkins” on most of the confusion over evolution. Overall though, there was nothing there that could convince anyone of either position. At the beginning he told people he would make creationists in the audience “very angry”, and atheists (well, “disciples of Dawkins”) very angry too. Neither of his prophecies held true.

At the end of the talk, an atheist at the back stood up and asked him to give the evidence for God, since his talk was about showing how God was compatible with Darwin. Mr Foster explained that the way he saw it, the lack of explanation for civilisation and morality is an indicator that a God exists. In other words, because science cannot explain everything about us, God must still have some hold. What a strange conclusion for the man to make, given his argument against a “god of the gaps” that he made clear earlier on. I started to raise my hand, but another atheist across the room from me got there first, pointing out his contradiction.

So poor Mr Foster lost out to the regular thorn in the side of theists: self contradiction. Such a pity. His book was on sale in the lobby afterwards, but there was no way I was paying £11.99 for it. I suspect it will include all the same repeated arguments against creationism, which in this country aren’t really needed. Nobody apart from the fringe churches accept creationism as a legitimate claim anymore. I further suspect that the arguments for evolution will be equally bad, thus misleading the people who read it into thinking that science knows very little about the subject.

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.