It's a Shame About Ray Comfort

I wrote a review of a book by an evangelical preacher on Amazon. Some bloke called Shawn implied I wasn't in a position to judge it.

I wrote a reply. It's long and quite wanky. I hope it makes a point.

----------------------------------------------

Shawn,

You've asked me whether I've read Ray's book or just skimmed it. I have not read Ray's book, nor have I skimmed it. I have read the excerpt provided on this website, and I am one of the many atheists whom Ray has misquoted and lied to on his blog 'Atheist-Central'. Ray's dealings with atheists have been characterised by extreme dishonesty. For a man that claims to be guided by an objective morality from his deity, Ray is sadly lacking in basic decency or intellectual rigour. Dealing with Ray is an exercise in frustration because he will not accept that there is anything wrong with inventing positions on issues and then insisting that these inventions are true despite being told unequivocally why they are wrong.

I would like to ask you to indulge me and follow me through the first seven paragraphs of Ray's book, as transcribed from the excerpt provided on Amazon. At every juncture on this journey, I implore you to check what I am saying. If I cite a source, please check it out. If I make an argument, please scrutinise it as closely as you can. Shake it and see if bits fall off.

I intend to show you why I do not need to read more than a few paragraphs of Ray's book to know it is terrible.

Halfway down the first page of Chapter One of 'You Can Lead an Atheist to Evidence, But You Can't Make Him Think', immediately after the chapter heading 'Creation must have a Creator', Ray Comfort quotes Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time as follows:

"It would be very difficult to explain why the universe should have begun in this way, except as the act of a God who intended to create beings like us”

Stephen Hawking

This quote is not actually right. It hasn't been altered much, but it has been altered enough to hide the fact that this quote does not stand on its own two feet. The actual quote is as follows:

"It would be very difficult to explain why the universe should have begun in *just* this way, except as the act of a God who intended to create beings like us."

Page 127, Chapter 8, The Origin and Fate of the Universe, A Brief History of Time, Stephen Hawking

The removal of the word 'just' subtly alters the meaning and gives the impression that Hawking's quote stands alone. In context, this quote is part of an argument in which Hawking examines the nature and origin of the universe. One of the questions he considers is issues about the standard model of the Big Bang and how there is a definite starting point to the universe, shortly after the expansion of the singularity that comprised all of the matter in the universe. He discusses various observed phenomena such as the fact that the microwave radiation we can detect is universally the same temperature, and how the rate of the expansion would have to be 'just so' in order that the universe expanded enough but no less and no more. He then says,

"This [the factors just mentioned] means that the initial state of the universe must have been very carefully chosen indeed if the hot big bang model [the standard model as mentioned above] was correct right back to the beginning of time."

He then gives the comment that Ray quotes.

So, in fact, taking the whole paragraph into account, it appears that Hawking is advocating that the universe is so finely balanced that it can only have been as an act of a God, and that my initial observation that Ray's removal of the word 'just' is extremely pedantic and irrelevant.

But hold on! Considered in its wider context, the chapter as a whole considers a more radical notion, that the universe has no boundary. It is this notion that Hawking supports. Why does this matter..?

"The idea that space and time may form a closed surface without boundary also has profound implications for the role of God in the affairs of the universe. With the success of scientific theories in describing events, most people have come to believe that God allows the universe to evolve according to a set of laws and does not intervene in the universe to break these laws. However, the laws do not tell us what the universe should have looked like when it started - it would still be up to God to wind up the clockwork and choose how to start it off. So long as the universe had a beginning, we could suppose it had a creator. But if the universe is really completely self-contained, having no boundary or edge, it would have neither beginning nor end: it would simply be. What place, then, for a creator? "

End of chapter 8, The Origin and Fate of the Universe

At this point, I would like to observe that it has taken me about eight hundred words to demonstrate how Ray Comfort has headed his chapter with a 30 word quote that, stripped of its context, appears to be saying something entirely different to what it actually is saying. This is classic Comfort. You can look on his blog and find many other examples of him doing the same thing with quotes from other people. This practice is so common among certain types of creationists that it even has a name; 'quote mining'. Ray is a master.

Let's move on to Ray's first chapter proper. Let's break that first paragraph down.

"Atheists' beliefs vary as much as atheists themselves."

That's actually true; beyond the lack of belief in the existence of deities, there is no reason we should all think the same.

"Still, atheists hold a fundamental belief that unifies them. An "atheist" believes that there is no God and that man came into being without any intelligent design."

Note the use of the words 'belief' and 'believes' there. In fact, later on in his book, Ray will state, as he has in previous books, that there is no such thing as an atheist and that atheists all *know* there's a god, but pretend there isn't so they can be morally lax.

It's not entirely true to say that all atheists believe that man came into being without any intelligent design. A minority support the idea that life on Earth was seeded from elsewhere in the universe, a notion called Panspermia. Panspermia includes the possible position that an alien intelligence could have used their technology to plant the necessary ingredients for life on another planet. Most atheists wouldn't support this idea, but there is a faint probability that it could be true.

You may be aware that Ray claims Richard Dawkins holds this view. He doesn't - he was asked in the anti-evolution film Expelled whether there were any way in which intelligent design could be possible and he explained about Panspermia as a possibility, albeit an unlikely one, not as something he considers to have any great merit.

"If there was no designer, then an atheist owes his existence to random chance, over millions or billions of years, of course."

It would be a fair comment, except for the fact that no one with a GCSE or better level of understanding of evolution thinks it's random.

"While some believers in evolution deny that evolution is a random process, if it's not unplanned, it's planned."

On his blog, Ray has repeatedly been told by atheists that evolution by natural selection is not random. I don't know how much you know about natural selection, so I'll try and give you a thumbnail explanation so this point becomes clear.

A member of a population of creatures experienced a mutation (or series of mutations) that benefited the members of the species by helping them to live long enough to pass on their genes to children. Those children, also with the adaptation, were better at surviving to an age where they could reproduce too and thus gradually, the gene that makes an individual better at surviving to become parents becomes the norm in the population.

Maybe it gave some of them longer legs and this made them able to run from predators more quickly and thus more of them survived. Maybe it allowed them to include a wider variety of food in their diets, so they survived. Maybe it gave them a better sense of smell, so they could seek out food more efficiently or maybe it gave them longer hair so they were better protected against the weather, but in some small way, it made them more fit to survive in their environment to the point where the individuals that survived to pass on their genes all shared this advantageous gene.

This is why we say natural selection is not random. Yes, the mutation that gave advantage arose randomly, but it is the fact that ONLY advantageous genes that are passed on which proves that natural selection is not random. For Natural selection to be random, it would have to allow all mutations to prosper, regardless of whether they were beneficial.

"And if it's is planned, then there is Someone doing the planning."

Snowflakes have a predictable shape, yet no one suggests that there is some sort of intelligence planning them. A cannon ball dropped off a tower will accelerate towards the ground at a constant and repeatable rate, yet this is not planned. The beta decay of unstable atoms to stable atoms is entirely predictable, yet this is not planned either.

'Planned' is not the opposite of 'random'. Astonishingly, 'non-random' is the opposite of 'random'. Just because something isn't random, it does not necessarily follow that it must be planned. Ray's contention that non-random is the same as planned is wrong, so his implication that a supernatural entity deserving of a capital letter is involved is also false.

"Let's be a fly on the wall as man evolves as an unplanned being. We will give him a generic name, just to make it easier for us to refer to him. Let's call him "Adam"."

Ray's ploy is entirely obvious here, but it masks something else. When we think of the Biblical Adam, we're thinking of a modern human being. Ray's analogy will continue to present the notion that human beings arrived in situ as a complete being. It should be obvious to you why this is complete nonsense. As Ray's extended metaphor continues, you'll notice that he just repeats the same point again and again in a slightly different guise. His aim is to make us think that the range of factors that have to be `just so' is so great, that there is some weight to his claim.

"As a fly on the wall, we are there when Adam takes his first breath. It is fortunate that, when his lungs drew in the air that surrounded him, the air was there. If there had been no air, he wouldn't have been able to breathe and he would have instantly died. But for some reason it was here, presumably at 14.7 pounds per square inch."

So, here's the first claim. That it is somehow evidence that human beings can breathe the air that they must have been created by a god (or God, if you prefer). But human beings did not arise in situ; Ray's analogy is more akin to a spaceman arriving on an alien planet picked at random by his computer, opening his faceplate and attempting to breathe without having run any tests on the atmosphere first. If he succeeded, then yes, that really would be quite astonishing. That a creature that evolved via non-random natural selection could breathe is about as surprising as discovering the word `zoo' contained the letter `z'.

The truth is, there's no such thing as the first human. We will never ever get an individual ape that gives birth to an individual human, or even an ape that gives birth to an individual semi-human. We would see an individual ape give birth to an ape that was virtually identical to its mother but with a teeny tiny genetic difference from her. They're both still the same species and will always be the same species.

Think about a rainbow. We can all say that the colours in a rainbow are Red, Orange, Green, Blue, Indigo, Violet. We could clearly point to a picture of a rainbow and point out where each colour was on the rainbow.

However, at what point does the Red become Orange..? Sure, you can point at Red and you can point at Orange, but at what point is the rainbow Red and then the next point Orange?

That's impossible to answer except by making an arbitrary declaration; "*There* on the rainbow is Red, but a micrometer further down the bow, it's Orange." Yet, you probably couldn't put those two colours next to each other and tell them apart, could you? You would require a pretty sophisticated and sensitive chromoscope to tell the difference.

That's exactly how it is with the mother and child, and in the same way you can start with one species and with lots of tiny changes over a long period of time you can get the equivalent of easily identifiably different species, much like the Red and Orange in our rainbow.

The point being, of course human beings were adapted to be able to breathe; their ancestors were.

"But it's more miraculous than the air just being there. It was fortunate the air was made up of 78.09 percent nitrogen and 20.95 percent oxygen - the exact mixture that his lungs and blood needed to survive. Without that oxygen Adam would have gasped, and his first breath would have been his last."

There is no miracle. If air had a different composition, life (assuming it were possible at all) would have evolved to metabolise that instead. Moreover, it's wrong to suggest that we rely on this exact proportion of air. What does Ray imagine is in a medical oxygen cylinder other than oxygen, yet that's what they give to sick people?

"What a miracle of chance that oxygen existed in just the right percentage to maintain Adam's life, and the life of his wife, whom we will give the generic name "Eve." She needed to be around to procreate the Adamic race. It's another amazing miracle that she evolved (with lungs) by chance over millions of years to maturity, at the same time as Adam."

This is just ridiculous. A child of ten could tell you why this is preposterous! Why would anyone assume that males and females evolved separately? It's totally inane and it's difficult to believe that Ray genuinely doesn't understand that the male and the female are the same species, yet despite repeatedly having been told that this is the case, he continues to write this nonsense on his blog (do check this claim out, please) and, it seems, in his book.

"It was also an amazing coincidence that gravity existed at the time of their evolution. Without it, the first man and his first mate would have spun off into the infinitude of space. But for some reason, it evolved and matured at just the right time to keep their feet firmly planted on the earth, which also evolved."

This is just rubbish. Gravity didn't `evolve' or `mature' and it existed long before there was any life on Earth, let alone human life. What Ray is doing here is implying that there is a purpose in gravity existing. But there isn't. It doesn't exist in order to facilitate something else. It exists and it unquestionably affects the development of life, but it doesn't do so for a purpose. Life has arisen in an environment where gravity means that it has weight, and this has consequences in terms of development. The point being, life has evolved to take account of the fact that gravity pulls everything in a particular direction.

"Another fantastic happenstance: the fact that Adam and his companion not only evolved a thirst or liquid that they had never tasted, but the needed life-giving water also evolved for them at he right time. Without its quenching ability, they would have dried out and died out."

Are we to believe that water exists for the benefit of human beings? Are we seriously supposed to perceive some coherent point here? Again, there's this notion of purpose. Water has chemical properties that make life more probable than somewhere without water, but that's not purpose. There's millions of planets with water but no life that we know of.

"Another incredible twist of Providence was that light existed. Somehow the sun evolved and set itself 93 million miles away from the Planet Earth."

It's probably worth pointing out that Ray has a history of exploiting ambiguity. For example, here he implies that the Sun has evolved. Well, yes, in the sense that it has changed over time, but Ray is clearly trying to get the reader to think the Sun's evolution is somehow in doubt and also somehow related to evolution by natural selection. The formation of the Sun and other stars is incredibly well understood, and it doesn't involve evolution of the natural selection variety. It does involve gravity, however.

"Without light, Adam and Eve wouldn't have been able to see each other, to come together for procreation, so that they could bring forth offspring after their own kind. But the light wasn't just for them to see each other."

The light wasn't there *so* Adam and Eve could see each other. It was there because vast numbers of photons are produced because of the Sun's nuclear fusion. Over eons of time, through very well understood processes, organisms developed organs that allowed them to process these photons to their advantage. Again, he assumes a purpose where there is none.

"Without it, they would have starved to death, because the food that had evolved could not have existed without photosynthesis. A process which itself evolved over the years."

I think we should re-iterate that light is a by-product of the nuclear fusion going on in the Sun, and without the Sun pumping energy into the Earth, there would be no life at all. Not just Adam and Eve, but any life, so there could never be any possible scenario in which Adam and Eve popped into existence full formed only to immediately asphyxiate, die of starvation or any of the other scenarios Ray has postulated. They're all equally stupid and not based on reality. His analogy is false, and exists only in his own mind. It is not a position held by any atheist I'm aware of and he has repeatedly been told this.

"Bear in mind that an atheist believes all these miraculous coincidence took place by chance."

Repeating something doesn't make it true, Ray.

"But he doesn't just believe that man and woman came into being without a Creator, but that all of creation did - amazing flowers, massive trees, succulent fruits, beautiful birds, the animal kingdom, the sea, fish, natural laws, etc."

No, we don't. I like the way that Ray mentions all those lovely things. Sir David Attenborough made an extremely good observation about this kind of thing recently; "They always mean beautiful things like hummingbirds. I always reply by saying that I think of a little child in east Africa with a worm burrowing through his eyeball. The worm cannot live in any other way, except by burrowing through eyeballs. I find that hard to reconcile with the notion of a divine and benevolent creator.".

"His faith is much greater than mine. I could never for a moment believe that all these things happened by chance. Never in a million years."

Ray has repeatedly shown he is far too lazy and intellectually dishonest to understand evolution, so I agree with this point.

"But the believing atheist does, and he amazingly looks down intellectually on those that maintain all this incredible creation wasn't an accident at all, but the act of an incredible Creator."

I look down on someone who knowingly lies to other people to make them believe that perfectly well-understood processes should be thrown aside in favour of explanations that explain nothing.

Shawn, that's over 3,000 words to explain why Ray's opening seven paragraphs are full of total garbage. It's virtually impossible for anyone to rebut every wrong thing someone like Ray says or writes. It would take more time than any person could have. I have spent several hours compiling this response so you can understand quite how appalling Ray's logic and arguments are.

Do you really think he's suddenly going to start being intellectually honest after chapter one? I've seen the contents page. I've seen the posts on his blog he's basing that stuff on. I know for a fact he's going to be using more terrible arguments that people have already explained to him are incorrect.

So, you keep defending it. Have you read it or skimmed it..?