Pure Reason Revolution - Bodega Social Club, Nottingham - 13/03/09

As a consequence of the following review, I'm now part of a pool of music reviewers for a local regional newspaper. This was sent to them 'on spec', and wasn't intended for publication, hence I can post it up here. I'm waiting to discover whether I'm allowed to post the published reviews I've done up here.

A quick note on style. Reviews are 250 words, submitted after the gig itself (i.e. about 1 am once you've driven home), and this trial review was done as if under normal conditions. I would say that tonally they're a bit dry; we're certainly not supposed to be doing heavily-subjective, gonzo journalism. I will also freely confess I could have done with twice as many words, but it's not bad. The first one I did for real was pretty terrible; stilted and laboured, but the last one I did was much better (even if I do say so myself).

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Pure Reason Revolution, touring to support their newly-released second album, Amor Vincit Omnia, have certainly brought the punters out tonight. There's a palpable sense of anticipation building as roadies ready the stage. PRR release that tension with opening number Les Malheurs, a throbbing slab of darkly-groovy electro rock. Chloe Alper and Jon Courtney weave effective close harmonies through the guitar-free tune, setting the agenda for the show.

The first four tracks are all from the new album and showcase the band's new direction. Heavy electronica is the foundation, although that's not to say guitars are absent. The band still pulls off densely-layered and syncopated riffs that tip the hat to the Smashing Pumpkins and Muse, but spend as much time bent over keyboards, triggering samplers and jiggling oscillators to great effect.

Bassist/keyboardist Alper, standing stage centre in a Sonic Youth shirt, is the obvious focal point for the band but interplay with the crowd is minimal. The punters don't seem to mind as the band launch into The Bright Ambassadors of Morning, an epic that fuses Pink Floyd-esque soundscapes with contemporary dub and the band's trademark three part vocals, pitched somewhere between the Beach Boys and Rumours-era Fleetwood Mac. Animated projections play in the background as the band builds the song through multiple sections, the crowd singing the titular refrain with gusto. The euphoric AVO closes the main set, but the crowd aren’t ready to go yet.

The encore starts with Voices in Winter, a song that builds from a whisper to a roar while the Intention Craft sees more tight riffing and triumphant vocals to bring the evening to a satisfying conclusion. More please, and soon!

There's no real evidence to support the theory of evolution

Recently, an anti-evolution letter appeared in the Grantham Journal, my local paper. Here it is:

There's no real evidence to support the theory of evolution

Published Date: 27 March 2009

WITH the 200-year anniversary of Charles Darwin's death, plus 150 years since the publication of his famous book The Origin of Species, we have been bombarded in the media with his theory of evolution.
The fact remains however, that no real evidence has yet been unearthed to substantiate his theory.
The monkey/human missing links have proved to be well - missing, they are either ape or human or indeed fabrications.

These include the Java man, Piltdown man, Lucy and even now Neandertal man.

In the animal species there is evolution but within their kind but no evidence yet exists of evolution between the species.

Let's leave the final statement to Darwin himself.

"The number of intermediate varieties which have formerly existed must have been enormous. Why then is not every geological formation full of such intermediate links?
"Geology does not reveal any such finely graduated chain, and this, perhaps, is the most serious objection which can be urged against my theory" - Charles Darwin.

EDDIE BARRADINE
West Willoughby

Sigh... It's so egregiously wrong in pretty much every claim it makes, that it's almost as amusing as it is depressing.

To go through the claims one by one: (click "Read more" link in post footer)

WITH the 200-year anniversary of Charles Darwin's death, plus 150 years since the publication of his famous book The Origin of Species, we have been bombarded in the media with his theory of evolution.

Wrong! It's the 200-year anniversary of Darwin's birth, not death. This sets the bar for the accuracy of what's to follow.

The fact remains however, that no real evidence has yet been unearthed to substantiate his theory.

Wrong! In fact, the theory of evolution is one of the best supported scientific theories we have. Rather than detail all of it at length, Mr Barradine might like to check out Jerry Coyne’s new book, Why Evolution is True

The monkey/human missing links have proved to be well - missing, they are either ape or human or indeed fabrications. These include the Java man, Piltdown man, Lucy and even now Neandertal man.

We need to go through these one at a time:

Java Man
Java Man is the popular name for the partial remains of one of the first known specimens of the species now known as Homo erectus, found in 1891 at Trinil, East Java by Eugène Dubois. Dubois called his discovery Pithecanthropus erectus, meaning ‘upright ape-man’.

At the time of their discovery, the remains were the oldest hominid remains that had been found and many contemporary scientists suggested Pithecanthropus erectus was the direct shared ancestor of modern humans and the other great apes. The current view is that the direct ancestors of modern humans were African populations of Homo erectus, not the Asian populations, of which Java Man is one.

Some creationists, notably Duane Gish's Institute for Creation Research and Ken Ham’s Answers In Genesis have attempted to imply that Dubois denounced his find later in life, claiming it was merely a large gibbon. The pro-evolution site Talk Origins comprehensively demolished the claims here and indeed the previously-cited Answers in Genesis article does appear to accept that Dubois did still think his find was a missing link.

Piltdown Man
Piltdown Man was discovered in 1912, by Charles Dawson and Arthur Smith Woodward. They had found a mandible and parts of a skull from a gravel pit near Piltdown, England. The mandible bore signs of wear as one would expect from a human, but in structure, it was ape-like. The skull was like a modern human's, and together, these suggested to Dawson and Woodward a transitional fossil, halfway between man and the apes, one they believed was 500,000 years old.

Sadly, they were a bit too keen to believe they'd discovered the 'missing link'; Piltdown Man was a fraud. It was never universally accepted anyway, but it took until the 1950s, before it was firmly established that Piltdown Man was a fake. The fossil didn't gybe with the evidence from other hominid finds and the reason turned out to be that the jaw was from an orangutan, filed down to give the human-like wear with chimpanzee fossil teeth and fragments of a modern Homo sapien skull and then all stained to age them.

The prime suspect in the fraud is now considered to be Dawson himself, the man who originally found Piltdown Man. The problem with Piltdown Man is that it suggested that large brain size occurred before jaws adapted to a more human-like diet, and considerably resources were wasted as a consequence, including the ignoring of Australopithecine remains in 1920s South Africa, fossils which may well be a genuine ancestor of the Homo genus and in any case, is certainly transitional between hominids and apes.

Lucy
Lucy, more scientifically known as Australopithicus afarensis, is an East African hominid from between 3.9 and 2.9 million years ago, and ancestral to both the genus Australopithecus and the Homo genus (which includes modern man). Creationists make some claims that Lucy’s knee, which is somewhat germane to whether she could have been bipedal or not (there is debate about whether Lucy would have been exclusively bipedal or arboreal, since her skeleton shows features associated with both modes), was found too far from the rest of her skeleton to be sure it is part. Lucy’s skeleton does not have any intact knees, however. The knee in question belongs to a different individual of the same species, and in any case, subsequent discovery of additional specimens rather torpedoes this supposed difficulty and additionally, the pelvis alone contained enough evidence to support at least bipedalism.

Neandertal man
For a start, it’s most commonly written “Neanderthal man”, but it’s possible the newspaper introduced this less common spelling. I have to presume that Mr Barradine believes the notion that Neanderthals were merely modern humans with rickets, but this is so comprehensively destroyed as an argument, that I want to be charitable and think it must be something else. Sadly, I am not aware of any other claims. Rickets, as an ailment, leaves very distinctive marks on the body, most notably a frailty of bones. Neanderthal’s bones are about 50% thicker than our own, which sort of pisses on that notion. And then flicks it the Vees for good measure. And then kicks it in the love spuds for good measure and spits on the crumpled remains.

Moreover, Neanderthals were contemporaneous with modern humans, so couldn’t possibly be missing links. DNA analysis shows quite categorically that Homo neanderthalensis is distinct from Homo sapiens.

In the animal species there is evolution but within their kind but no evidence yet exists of evolution between the species.

Ah – smoking gun! Here we have proof of the religious motivation behind Mr Barradine’s claims. ‘Within their kind’ is exclusively used by those who believe in Biblical literalism. It derives from Genesis 1:11-24, in which God makes the plants, fish, birds and animals “according to their kinds”. It crops up again in the story of Noah, Gen:6:19-20 (“19 You are to bring into the ark two of all living creatures, male and female, to keep them alive with you. 20 Two of every kind of bird, of every kind of animal and of every kind of creature that moves along the ground will come to you to be kept alive.”).

The notion is that there are broad groups of similar animals that are ‘kinds’, so, for example, horses, donkeys and zebras can be considered a “kind”. Creationists refuse to be drawn on an exact definition of what “kind” actually means, but they nevertheless insist that evolution can take place within ‘kinds’, but that one would never see evolution between the species. Some, for example, the noted evolutionary dunce and evangelical preacher Ray Comfort will cite the fact that we’ve never seen a ‘croco-duck’ as proof that this is true, despite the fact that all evolutionary scientists would also be astonished if such a thing happened, since it is completely contradictory to the theory of evolution. They can be safely ignored because if you’re that stupid, you’re unlikely to be dangerous to anyone other than yourself. Those a little less embarrassingly ignorant will still fail to explain how they believe that ‘micro-evolution can take place within kind’ yet they can reject the notion that with enough micro-evolution and a long time you’d see the emergence of new species.

Let's leave the final statement to Darwin himself.

"The number of intermediate varieties which have formerly existed must have been enormous. Why then is not every geological formation full of such intermediate links?
"Geology does not reveal any such finely graduated chain, and this, perhaps, is the most serious objection which can be urged against my theory" - Charles Darwin.

The quote derives from the end of the very first paragraph of Chapter Nine of ‘On the Origin of Species’, as so:

“In the sixth chapter I enumerated the chief objections which might be justly urged against the views maintained in this volume. Most of them have now been discussed. One, namely the distinctness of specific forms, and their not being blended together by innumerable transitional links, is a very obvious difficulty. I assigned reasons why such links do not commonly occur at the present day, under the circumstances apparently most favourable for their presence, namely on an extensive and continuous area with graduated physical conditions. I endeavoured to show, that the life of each species depends in a more important manner on the presence of other already defined organic forms, than on climate; and, therefore, that the really governing conditions of life do not graduate away quite insensibly like heat or moisture. I endeavoured, also, to show that intermediate varieties, from existing in lesser numbers than the forms which they connect, will generally be beaten out and exterminated during the course of further modification and improvement. The main cause, however, of innumerable intermediate links not now occurring everywhere throughout nature depends on the very process of natural selection, through which new varieties continually take the places of and exterminate their parent-forms. But just in proportion as this process of extermination has acted on an enormous scale, so must the number of intermediate varieties, which have formerly existed on the earth, be truly enormous. Why then is not every geological formation and every stratum full of such intermediate links? Geology assuredly does not reveal any such finely graduated organic chain; and this, perhaps, is the most obvious and gravest objection which can be urged against my theory. The explanation lies, as I believe, in the extreme imperfection of the geological record.”

Firstly, we should note the reconstruction of the quote that has gone on. Some of it, we can charitably choose to believe is simply excised in the interests of space. However, it is difficult to excuse the restructuring that gives the impression that the quote stands alone. Moving the highlighted ‘must’ and the excision of the comma in the first sentence substantially changes the meaning. Worse still is the failure to report the last sentence. The quote is clearly intended to give the impression that even as he formulated it, Darwin knew of damning inadequacies in his theory, whereas in context, it is abundantly clear that he is anticipating a criticism and is clearly about to expand upon why that criticism is actually incorrect.

Of course, this further ignores the fact that the theory of evolution is not the same theory Darwin came up with. The neo-Darwinian evolution, or better still, the Modern Evolutionary Synthesis is a hybrid of what Darwin got right – and he got a lot right – and the introduction of genetics, which was unknown in Darwin’s time. This is because creationists love to poison the well, and therefore over-emphasize the dependence of the theory on its creator. A favorite tactic is to make claims about Darwin’s racism. That these claims are pretty baseless – Darwin certainly holds some pretty unpalatable views on race by modern standards, but by his own age was an enlightened progressive who had a life-long ethical antipathy to the then commonplace practice of slavery – but ignores the fact that Darwin could have fucked and murdered babies and it still wouldn’t affect whether his description of a natural phenomena was right or wrong; it would just make him a cunt who had also described a natural phenomena.

Here is the letter I sent to the editor:

Dear Sir,

Eddie Barradine's letter, "There's no real evidence to support the theory of evolution" (27th March 2009), contains so many falsehoods I could hardly correct them all in the space I could reasonably expect to be given in your paper.

To limit myself to just addressing two of the most appalling errors, while there have indeed been faked 'missing links', they do not disprove the evolution of man and ape from a common ancestor.
No one credible believes Neanderthal man is either a missing link (they were contemporaneous with Homo sapiens, so couldn't possibly be) or fake. The Darwin quote is actually incorrectly reported and consists of a hypothetical objection to his theory anticipated by Darwin himself in On the Origin of Species, to which he then responds.

Suffice it to say that Mr Barradine is entirely wrong to suggest there is no real evidence to support evolution. In fact, there is overwhelming evidence to support the theory and I'd be delighted if Mr Barradine were to contact me and allow me the opportunity to share it with him.

Yours etc.

"Who Watches The Night Garden"

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.

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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..?