The Atheist Blogger

A few days ago I mentioned how wrong Ray Comfort was when he remarked:

Light is invisible. We can’t see it.

I’ve checked back to Ray’s blog regularly to see what he does about this basic misunderstanding of physics and how the eye works, and to check up on the comments that his post got (almost all of them were mocking him). He appears to have now edited the article so it reads:

The essence of “white” light is invisible. We can’t see it. Despite this, science has taught us that it’s actually made up of seven beautiful colors that are undetectable to the human eye until they are refracted through a prism. Of course, we know that the seven colors are the amazing colors we see in a rainbow–red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet.

Nice bit of rewording he has done. Unfortunately it makes even less sense now than it did before his edits. What exactly is the “essence” of white light? Is he talking about the spectrum? That’s not invisible either. In fact that’s exactly how we see colours.

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I really had hoped to write something interesting for the 100th post on this blog (yay for the first milestone!), but this just appeared in my feed reader and I had to post it.

If you don’t know who Ray Comfort is, he is the guy behind the infamous banana argument / atheist’s nightmare:

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Atheist blogger Kieran Bennett was asked the question “Why are you atheist and not agnostic?” and replies in essay format. He argues that whilst I am correct in saying that agnosticism has nothing to do with gods, I am wrong in thinking that “gnostic atheism” is irrational, and it is in fact the agnostic atheists who are the irrational ones.

I find this a bit incredulous, but I think his argument stems from the semantics of the word “god”. Kieran says that every god that exists today can ben traced back through history to it’s human origin, and we can also explain why such gods have so much power over people (fear, comfort, etc). However, I do not think that any of these gods are gods that the agnostic atheist would claim are unknowable.

In essence, the agnostic atheist is as certain as the gnostic atheist about most gods humanity has ever come up with. What we are really agnostic about is a god that humanity has not just dreamt up, the god of deism. Ok, so perhaps this god was dreamt up by a human, but it very different from it’s brothers and sisters. The god of deism is an attempt at explaining the reasons for the origins of the universe. Instead of an all-powerful being, we have a semi-powerful being, able to create but not to interfere, thus letting science do all the explaining of existence and the universe.

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