The Antichristian Phenomenon

Do you remember Ray Comfort? Ray Comfort is a man who likes to make claims about atheists, especially if it helps his own agenda. He is one of those Christians who try to defend their beliefs by attacking what they perceives as its opposite. To a person like Ray Comfort, the only logical step following “not atheist” is “Christian”. And that is what he does – or tries to do. He has written publications with impressive (and sometimes ironic) sounding titles such as “Scientific Facts in the Bible: 100 Reasons to Believe the Bible is Supernatural in Origin“, “How to know God Exists: Scientific Proof of God” and “Evolution: A Fairy Tale for Grownups“.

But wait a minute. Ray Comfort… Wasn’t he the one who proposed a banana as the object of an atheist’s worst nightmare? Yes he is. In a televised ABC Nightline Faceoff debate with Kirk Cameran versus two members of the Rational Response Squad on the existence of God, he claimed to be able to prove the existence of God without resorting to faith. You can watch it here. In the debate, Comfort’s buddy Cameron attacked evolution by claiming evolutionary biologists are looking for things like the (now infamous) Crocoduck and the Bullfrog. Cameron and Comfort further demonstrate their ignorance regarding evolution by the most basic error of using it in a cosmological evaluation of the world, while evolution only deals with explaining the diversity of life. It is true, ignorance is a common basis for arguments that Cameron and Comfort put forward.

And so is Comfort’s new toy, Pull the plug on Atheism. This time Comfort proposes ‘atheism’s biggest secret’:

мебели пловдив

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.

First of all, Comfort got the definition of atheism wrong. An atheist is somebody who does not believe in any gods. Even if this first sentence wasn’t meant as a definition, it is factually wrong because Comfort makes the mistake of all atheists share more than just a disbelief in gods. In his assessment I think he is referring to the big bang, but his wording is off. Nothing “made” everything. The big bang model of the the universe started to expand from a hot and dense state 13.7 billion years ago. It makes no assessment on what was there before the ‘primeval atom’ or how it came there. This is a question for the future generation of scientists, and to put the God lid on this vat full of exciting questions is to revert to the god of the gaps, which does nothing but kill off our inquiry into the nature of reality. Third of all Ray Comfort keeps going back on his old arguments of supposed design in the universe. These have been addressed by a plethora of philosophers and scientists, but I fear somebody so much blinded by his own convictions will not yield to reason.

I’ve said that ignorance is a common basis for arguments by Comfort and his ilk, and I don’t mean that as an accusation. We are all born ignorant, but we can learn. I do accuse these people of not wanting to learn. They will ignore everything if it means defending their earlier conceived notions of reality. It is of course a freedom they have, but to bother other people who are trying to unlock the secrets of the universe is wholly detestable. And even though they might be happy living their lives in hiding from reasoned and empirically substantiative answers, I fear that if they would have their way in the politics of education, the God lid would be placed on all intellectual pursuit. “God” will be graffitid over the equations derived by Newton, Einstein, Kepler and consorts. Books on science would be replaced by a leaflet featuring Michelangelo’s The Creation of the Sun and Moon. Science labs would be emptied of microscopes and Bunsen burners, to be replaced by Bibles. This will be the result if we surrender to the will of men who live their lives according to one old book. It is why it important we don’t let these people kick the scientific legs from under modern society and let them spread nonsense unopposed

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 22nd, 2009 at 4:25 pm and is filed under Religion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.