The Atheist Blogger

In my random stumbling around on the internet, I found a bunch of creationist websites that contained photos of various creationists as part of some kind of “about our team” page. Now some of these pictures are just plain and boring, but there are a few that simply cry out for a funny caption. So I’ve decided to create a caption competition in order to correct this massive lack of creationist captions, and here is the first picture.

So dear reader, what exactly is Eric Hovind reaching for? Why does he have a look of terror on his cute creationist face? Why is he clinging to that rock so desperately? The answer to those questions is up to you.

Now onto the issue of a prize. As a student I generally don’t have any money, which means I cannot promise a prize, although I do have an extra signed copy of Ray Comfort’s latest masterpiece “You can lead an atheist to evidence, but you can’t make him think”. To be quite honest, such a book would be better off as a booby prize instead, but it is all I can offer at the moment. Perhaps I could get some cheap badges made, I’m open to suggestions.

So really, it’s a double competition now: Whoever comes up with the best caption and a great idea for some cheap (but cool) prizes will win…er…one of the prizes (and a copy of Ray’s book that I will sign / doodle in). You have a week to do so; off you go!

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.

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.

I didn’t check my feeds much when away, mainly because I was on holiday, but also because my laptop completely died on me. I’ve only just set everything back up, and whilst I did check the odd website (like Friendly Atheist and Pharyngula), I didn’t check on many of the others. One of the sites I avoided was Ray Comfort’s site “Atheist Central”, and it doesn’t look I missed a lot. For one, he seems to have come up with this idea that because atheists don’t believe in God, they must therefore believe everything came from nothing. Comfort must have had a “eureka!” moment when he came up with that one, because he has proceeded to make several posts all centering around the same idea. I’ll debunk them all now.

From “The Intelligent Atheist is not an Atheist“:

It is scientifically impossible for nothing to create everything. If nothing created everything, then the “nothing” isn’t nothing. It is something, because it had the amazing ability to create everything. Only an unscientific ignoramus would hold to the thought that nothing created everything. We have the dilemma of having everything, so we therefore have to come to the conclusion that something made it. Whatever it was, it had to be non-material (unseen), eternal (without beginning or end), and it had to be omnipotent (have the amazing ability to create everything from nothing). If the professing atheist concedes to such basic logic (which he must or he reveals that he is unscientific and unintelligent), then he’s not an atheist. He is in truth an agnostic (“One who is skeptical about the existence of God but does not profess true atheism.”). He is someone who believes that there was a creative force that brought everything into existence, but for some reason he denies that it was God.

Firstly, I’d very much doubt that creating everything from nothing would be held as “scientifically impossible”. There are very few things that are labelled scientifically impossible due to recent research in quantum mechanics. Given that the Big Bang is a well supported theory, and we have no definitive theories about what happened before it, then a “nothing to everything” hypothesis is still on the table. Just because the nothing caused everything doesn’t change it being a nothing though, as Ray would like you to believe. He is arguing with semantics, saying that if nothing has an ability to do something, it must be a “something”, but this argument holds no merit because he fails to understand simple concepts like cause and effect. If there was nothing and then the universe suddenly appeared, it doesn’t mean the “nothing” was the cause. Secondly, the whole argument is rather silly as few scientists hold to the theory that “nothing” created everything. The scientific consensus is that the Big Bang was the beginning of the universe as it currently is today, and that before that everything might have been compressed into an infinitely small point (a singularity), which although infinitely small, is not “nothing”.

Ray then goes on to say that the “creator” of everything must have been non-material (why? define “material”), eternal (why?), and omnipotent (why?). Already he is committing a logical fallacy by assigning the properties of a God onto this hypothetical creator. Why does the creator need to be non-material, when we have no idea what was there before the Big Bang? Why does it need to be eternal, when the current scientific argument is that time began at the Big Bang (and therefore there is no such thing as “eternal”)? Why does this creator need to know how to do everything in order to create a universe, which after all is a finite thing? Ray then goes on to a very bad definition of an agnostic (person who holds that the idea of God is unprovable) and how no atheists are really atheists at all. Many people have shown that agnosticism and atheism are not mutually exclusive, and I hold to both views.

From “Atheism’s Best Kept Secret”

An atheist is someone who believes that nothing made everything. He will of course deny that because it’s an intellectual embarrassment, but if I say that I don’t believe that a builder built my house, then I am left with the insanity of believing that nothing built it. It just happened.

An atheist is someone who disbelieves in the existence of all gods. Atheism doesn’t have a position on how everything came to be, and the atheist is welcome to subscribe to a number of ideas if they so wish. Many do, many do not. I don’t deny Ray’s point because it is an intellectual embarrassment (it’s not though); I deny it because I don’t believe it. I personally accept the Big Bang theory as the explanation of how the universe began, and before that I can safely say I don’t know. Unlike Ray though, I am prepared to look at what scientists are saying, and the stuff concerning string theory, multiple dimensions, and “brane worlds” is intriguing. It’s nice to see the “building means a builder” fallacy again though, and those reading who recognise why this reasoning only works on things we know the process of, can stare in disbelief at how Ray hasn’t realised this simple point yet, even though it has been explained to him many times over the years.

From “Response to the Below Blog”

There is no intelligent response that can justify the embarrassment of professed atheism. It is intellectual suicide. Remember, if you believe that something made everything, then you are not an atheist.

These statements quite astound me when coming from a man who openly mocks Evolution by inventing the “Crocoduck” and claiming that scientists are looking for it to prove their theory, who says that the entire idea is a “fairy tale for grown-ups”, and who keeps on claiming these same things even when presented with as much evidence as his detractors can throw at him. There is misunderstanding; there is utter ignorance; and then there is Ray Comfort, and you don’t get much lower than that.

On his second point in this paragraph, Ray has committed the common fallacy of assuming that there are only two options for everything. Either nothing created everything, or “God” created it. He completely misses the point that if something created everything, it could be all manner of “somethings”, some of which include gods, some not. An atheist can easily fit in the “some not” group.

From “Eternal Everything”

There were a number of responses to the impossibility of the common atheistic belief that nothing made everything.

I bet there were.

They haven’t argued the point, but rather defaulted to the belief that the universal is eternal. But that won’t work. It’s a scientific impossibility. The Law of Thermodynamics proves that the universe cannot be eternal.

The Second Law of Thermodynamics only proves that the current state of universe we live in is not eternal, and had some sort of beginning. However, it says nothing of what happened before the beginning, or what will happen when entropy increases to maximum (Big Crunch anyone?). This is thinking outside of the box on a literally universal scale, and the thinking extends to unseen dimensions of space-time, as well as the multiverse. Of course Ray would probably either mock this view or call it “unscientific” (like he actually knows what that word means), all because he has a closed minded view that this is all there is, and only God can explain it.

From “Atheism: the Intellectual Embarrassment”

It’s a matter of definition. If you say of your Ford Expedition that you have no belief that there was a maker, then you think that nothing made it. It just happened. You have defined yourself as having that mentality. So if you call yourself an atheist, you are saying that you have no belief in a God–a Creator. Creation just happened.

It is indeed a matter of definition, and Ray simply moves the goalposts by assigning the “creator” as an actual being. He ignores the creator as a natural process, and says that if a being couldn’t have done it, nothing could have. This is an extremely simple view to take when you take into consideration all of man’s achievements compared to those made by natural processes. As I have already pointed out, the “building means a builder” argument only works on things we know the origin of. I know a building needs a builder, so I expect one. I have never seen a universe being “created” so I have no idea what did it (if anything). Atheists have no belief in a God as a creator, but that doesn’t mean we don’t believe in some creative force, and just as we accept the creative force of Evolution and natural selection, we accept the creative force that brought the universe into being (whatever it was).

So now we uncover theism’s best kept secret; the fact that although theists appear on the most part friendly and welcoming, they will be dishonest and lie to cover up the truth. They will create complex explanations for why science does not reflect their god, and when the explanation looks so silly even to them, they will renounce it and claim that science has got it wrong. For the best kept secret of the theist is that they cannot possibly be wrong, because after all, they have a holy document given to them by their god, and their god just has to exist. Theism is the intellectual embarrassment, and always will be, because without the doctrine, theism is nothing, and boy do they know it.

I attended a lecture a few months back (before I started this blog) entitled “Enemy in the Mirror: Richard Dawkins, the New Atheists and their Crusade against Fundamentalism”. It was nothing special, and the “lecturer” didn’t actually talk about anything to do with the subject. She just went on a random rant about how everyone should respect the church etc.

However, after the lecture there were a lot of questions asked from the audience, a large majority of whom were openly atheist. One such question was from a theist (towards the atheists) who complained that we argue all the time about religion and yet send our children to catholic schools and CofE schools with no problems. The parents in the audience said they do this because the results from those schools are better than those at non-religious schools, and they wanted the best for their kids.

I’ve got no problem with people doing that, they want their kids to do well. However I personally do not trust education systems that rely on religion to get students. The only reason that these students are getting better marks is because of the high levels of discipline those schools have, and the only thing large amounts of discipline does is inhibit creativity. You are taught what to think and how to think, and completely ignore the principles that freethinking was founded on.

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