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- This however, is an flawed argument known as Pascal's Wager. Ray Comfort says his parachute is safe and harmless, but suddenly another passenger tells you "Don't use his parachute, it has holes in it. Use mine provided by my invisible friend." Then a third passenger announces “My invisible friend slashed all the parachutes on board. He takes care of his chosen people, and as none of you were born into the correct lineage, it’s too bad for you.” Some people refuse parachutes and urge others to do the same, because it would interfere with the master plan of the father of their invisible friend . The drama goes on with the rest of the passengers, until you demand to actually see proof of a doomed plane and which parachute does work. Some say you must not demand for evidence and just have faith. Regardless, you inspect the plane and the parachutes. The plane is operating just fine in every way and each parachute has holes in them big enough you can fit your head through them. Some of the parachutes terribly constrict people, harming them. The plane reaches its destination safely, but the drama continues through the terminal, security, all the way out beyond the airport. You learn from airports around the world that many people have harmed many others and themselves due to their faith in their parachute provided by their particular invisible friend.
- This of course is based on ignorance of science . All societal species have a sense of compassion and community amongst their kinsmen, friends and fellows which - in many species - leads to acts of devotion, defense, and even self-sacrifice on their behalf.
- Comfort has it completely back-asswards. Not once in this section has Comfort provided studies, peer reviewed work, or predictions that can be falsified so this is not scientific. It is not logical or reasonable since there is no evidence to support it and its foundation breaks apart from what we have actually discovered about the universe and when you compare the same logic to God. Once the same arguments and logic is used for God, then it just vanishes. If God can be uncaused, then so could the universe. What Comfort is aiming for is a god of the gaps fallacy.
- No it does more than that, Exodus 21 goes into great detail of how to treat your slave and how to sell them. Jesus Christ, the perfect moral savior, never denounced slavery once.
- Lets address both parts,
1) As many scholars and historians would point out, Christianity was not responsible for the blossom of science. Science predates Christianity, back to the ancient Greeks . If science did arise in Christian Western culture, then why did it take centuries for it to come into being? Also, after the fall of the western half of the Roman Empire, the Byzantine Empire remained for many years, and yet science did not arise in that time - nor did it rise under Charlemagne, inside the Vatican, or any other church. Rather, new scientific discoveries were forced to be silenced because it contradicted Christian theology.
2) Faith" in the working of your computer or your car or your logic is not the same thing as "faith" that some collection of ancient writings simply must be self-consistent and inerrant, and that any evidence to the contrary must be fake or misunderstood. Ray tries to ask us to give up faith in mere humans for faith in humans' infallible Creator, but he must end up asking us to keep that faith in mere humans, and add to it faith in a set of ideas compiled and interpreted by more mere humans.
- Here, he admits the the Bible was written by man, he does not mention God. The difference is that the science texts are written by people who test and proved their claims, unlike the authors of the Bible who relied on superstition and blind faith to make up stories. All the scientists in the past have made breakthroughs based on the scientific method, not biblical revelation.
- If something cannot come from nothing, then where did the Intelligent Creator come from. Ignoring that Ray cannot empirically prove the Creator is his narrow version of God, if the answer to the previous question is "he is eternal" then why can't the universe be eternal? Occam's Razor would favor the non-created universe.
- Many of them are fake/imaginary prophecies or unfulfilled prophecieshttp://www.infidels.org/library/modern/farrell_till/prophecy.html There are several mundane ways in which a prediction of the future can be fulfilled:
# Retrodiction. The "prophecy" can be written or modified after the events fulfilling it have already occurred.
# Vagueness. The prophecy can be worded in such a way that people can interpret any outcome as a fulfillment. Nostradomus's prophecies are all of this type. Vagueness works particularly well when people are religiously motivated to believe the prophecies.
# Inevitability. The prophecy can predict something that is almost sure to happen, such as the collapse of a city. Since nothing lasts forever, the city is sure to fall someday. If it has not, it can be said that according to prophecy, it will.
# Denial. One can claim that the fulfilling events occurred even if they have not. Or, more commonly, one can forget that the prophecy was ever made.
# Self-fulfillment. A person can act deliberately to satisfy a known prophecy.
There are no prophecies in the Bible that cannot easily fit into one or more of those categories.
- This is incorrect. As Christopher Hitches, and many secular dissents discuss, why should we be morally obliged to some incorporeal entity?
- However, this is incorrect. Evolution only explains the diversity of life, not the origin of life itself. How life started is irrelevant to evolution, because once life formed evolution kicks in.
- Both bear vestiges of an evolutionary history, supported by the fossil record . Not much complexity is needed for a functional ear. All that is necessary is a nerve connected to something that can vibrate. Insects have evolved "ears" on at least eleven different parts of their bodies, from antennae to legs . Even humans detect very low frequencies via tactile sensation, not through their ears.
- This is a lie. Hitler was baptized and lived a life as a Roman Catholic.
The site nobeliefs.com provides a full article refuting Hitler's table talk <a href="http://nobeliefs.com/HitlerSources.htm
Hitler">http://nobeliefs.com/HitlerSources.htm
Hitler</a> was not an anti-Christian. He supported and encourage the production of Christian churches and programs. He was clearly no an evolutionist. The only time he ever mentioned Darwin in his books or speeches is to slam Darwin and promote creationism.
Hence today I believe that I am acting in accordance with the will of the Almighty Creator: by defending myself against the Jew, I am fighting for the work of the Lord .
The Nazi Party in general rejected Darwinism and supported Christianity. In 1935, Die Bücherei, the official Nazi journal for lending libraries, published a list of guidelines of works to reject, including: Writings of a philosophical and social nature whose content deals with the false scientific enlightenment of primitive Darwinism and Monism .
- He claims there are none, but this is not true. There is Odontochelys semistestacea, a toothed proto-turtle with a plastron but no shell on its back , but transitional fossils leading up to true turtles are still rare. This does not, of course, make those australopiths and early hominines, whales with hind legs and small heads, feathered theropods, genetics, ERVs, etc. go away. Remember, gaps are expected to be in the fossil record, but already the fossil record is very rich and transitional fossils are still being uncovered by the bush full.
- Basically, it is the very same old Way of the Master material, ending with the old are you a good person? routine. Nothing new here, still dishonest as always.
- What he does not include is that there are flaws in the human eye, such as a blind spot, or that images are sent to our brains backwards and upside down.
- This is obviously not true. If the evidence for God was obvious, then the matter would have been settled way before the Greek philosophers. God, as described by theists, keeps changing over the years as new data is collected. Presently, God as described by theists does not agree with the current data.
# A God who is responsible for the complex structure of the world, especially living things, fails to agree with empirical fact that this structure can be understood to arise from simple natural processes and shows none of the expected signs of design. Indeed, the universe looks as it should look in the absence of design.
# A God who has given humans immortal souls fails to agree with the empirical facts that human memories and personalities are determined by physical processes, that no nonphysical or extraphysical powers of the mind can be found, and that no evidence exists for an afterlife.
# A God who miraculously and supernaturally created the universe fails to agree with the empirical fact that no violations of physical law were required to produce the universe, its laws, or its existence rather than nonexistence. It also fails to agree with established theories, based on empirical facts, which indicate that the universe began with maximum entropy and so bears no imprint of a creator.
# A God who communicates directly with humans by means of revelation fails to agree with the fact that no claimed revelation has ever been confirmed empirically, while many have been falsified. No claimed revelation contains information that could not have been already in the head of the person making the claim.
- This is a flat out lie, Ray is trying to rewrite history. Science did not teach the earth was flat at all, scripture did. Also, Galileo's scientific discoveries were not mere beliefs, but observable fact.
- This dead horse is taking a hefty beating. The Big Bang does not say the universe came from nothing; creationism does. The Big Bang does not prove the universe had a beginning, just the start of time in this universe, but the theory does not hold that everything had a beginning.
- By this logic, does lightning have a lightning maker? What about the patterns we see in snowflakes and crystals, and yet we know for a fact they form from natural forces. If we accept the idea that everything must have a creator, Ray fails to provide any proof that the creator is his narrow concept of God, or if it is even his God or multiple Gods, or even aliens, gnomes, or the Flying Spaghetti Monster.
Ray calls this analogy a "parody of evolution." However, this is not a parody, it is a straw man, and it is not even about evolution. As explained to Ray many times, evolution is not connected to Cosmology or the earlier stages of Abiogenesis before self=replicating molecules emerged. Whenever the term 'evolution is applied in these fields it simply means "change over time." At all times, everything is subject to change. The Big Bang Theory does not say everything came from nothing, creationism does.
- This is incorrect. Science actually comes from the Latin word scientia, meaning "knowledge." What he does not understand is that science makes no comment on the supernatural, and thus all of Comforts "sciences" above will be futile in proving the existence of God.
- Comfort knows what he is demanding is completely wrong. Comfort is the one who is defending magical creation, thus he has to provide empirical proof of creation and present that some material can be created from nothing.
- While this would not, in itself, be astonishing , Ray's interpretation would imply that Christians knew by faith what Epicureans believed by human reason or speculation, which seems an odd interpretation, especially in light of the Church's long suspicion of atomism.
- What Ray is doing here is saying that skeptics will not "test" Christianity by actually believing and repenting. How does he know many skeptics have already done that? It seems the only way to impress Ray Comfort is that we have to "know" God. How do we know what we experience is not just a product of our minds. Michael Harner, and anthropologist who lived among the Jivaro Indians of the Ecuadoran Amazon, described his experience with ayahuasca as follows:
“For several hours after drinking the brew, I found myself although awake, in a world literally beyond my wildest dreams. I met bird-like people, as well as a dragon-like creature who explained they were the true Gods of this world. I enlisted the services of other spirit helpers in attempting to fly through the far reaches of the Galaxy.”
There a literally hundreds or thousands of these reported events that certain drugs, seizures, stimulations, rituals, etc. all can produce feelings and connections with higher powers.
Also, about the electric company, there's the fact that the power company makes no claims that using electricity will make you a kinder, gentler person, or that "true electricity" can never be used for bad ends, or even that its brochures are completely inerrant. If electricity can be used to murder and to execute murderers, that has no bearing whatsoever on the reality of electricity or the truth of the power company's claims. But if Christianity does not change believers' lives -- or if it does, but there are so few true believers that they get lost in the masses of false converts -- that has rather more bearing on the claims Christianity makes for itself.
- That's not how he puts it; he argues that mutations exist before the environmental conditions that select for or against them, and do not arise in response to need, but then, that's more or less what "random mutations" means. He offers no dissent from the view that mutations occur, that they occur frequently, and that a few of them are beneficial, and that different mutations are beneficial in different environments. So we may take Ray as conceding that mutations occur and can be, on rare occasions, beneficial.
- Only a handful of scientists ever saw Archaeoraptor, but every one who did noted that it was composite piece, and the artistic amateurs who paid for the fossil were repeatedly warned that some parts of it might not even belong to the whole. Popular press foolishly scooped the story prior to peer review, where it was instantly exposed as a fake by multiple experts, and each submission to scientific journals was immediately rejected. Archaeoraptor therefore fooled no one in the scientific community at all. The irony there is that the tail of the alleged Archaeoraptor turned out to belong to the as-yet undiscovered Microraptor, a four-winged and apparently gliding feathered dinosaur which turned out to be even more compelling proof of avian evolution from dinosaurs than Archaeopteryx was in Darwin’s day. The scientific process of peer-review seeks out and exposes fraud by design. But antievolutionist arguments are withheld from peer-review because they are driven entirely by frauds including misstatements, out-of-context quote-mining, and contrived or distorted falsehoods, and terms erroneously redefined into instigative reactionary nonsense unintelligible as anything other than propaganda. In short, if creationists knew how to expose a fraud, they wouldn’t be creationists anymore. It's rather mind-boggling that people can still deny in their minds the existence of feathered dinosaurs. You can walk into any one of many Natural History museums all over the world and see one for yourself! Comfort Comfort claimed to have visited a museum in Paris, but saw no such creatures, meaning he choose not to see or did see but either did not know what he was looking at or decided not to tell his readers. Comfort also mistakes disagreement in science for a crisis. Disagreement is what makes science interesting. Science is progressive.
- However, this is very inaccurate. Multiple studies have shown that organic material and certain materials given in certain conditions can produce the first building blocks of life. The Human Genome Project has cracked many secrets of life, we have even created a living cell from a computer - that is, all it's information and formation was created by a computer, and successfully reproduced on its own. So Ray, we have created life, and we have done it for a while. Someone needs to do their homework.
- As already pointed out to him, by the Rational Response Squad and many others, we can prove that a building had a builder. We can contact the engineer, cities parking structure, the electrician, and others. We can do the same with a painting, we can contact the canvas maker, the paint maker, the artist, etc. however, we cannot contact God to take us to his "creation factory."
The reason why his creation requires a creator argument fails is that Ray, basing his views on a presupposition, is merely assume everything as a creation and labeling it so. Simply labeling something does not change its character or its origin. Ray says that accepting his "creation requires a creator" argument is "logical, reasonable, and scientific."
First of all, this argument begs the question of which creator? Ray cannot provide any tests to point that the creator is his narrow version of a creator and not some invisible sky pixie, the Flying Spaghetti Monster, or multiple creators. The reason why his argument is not reasonable or logical is because it has no evidence to support itself, contains several logical fallacies, and it breaks down the moment you bring God into question. Ray says God did not have a creator, so then why can't energy have no creator? The law of physics already states that energy cannot be created, and matter is composed of energy, so therefore the universe does not require a creator nor did it come from "nothing." The reason why Ray's argument is not scientific is because he has not and cannot provide any empirical data or falsifiable tests to prove that there is a creator. During a debate with the Atheist Experience, Ray admitted that all the testing that is requires is "common sense." This, of course, is ludicrous. Common sense at one point told us that the earth was fixed and stationary and all other objects orbited around our planet. However, as new data was collected and tests were done, we learned that what we previously once believed was not true. Everything we have learned about our universe does not hint or provide any reason that our universe was the product of some divine creation. Science has proven that our universe can arise naturally without any supernatural intervention.
- He may be right, if the following did not exist: transitional fossils, comparative anatomy, comparative genomics, ERVs, pseudogenes, biogeography, ontology, phylogeny, and so on and so on. Ray goes on to use the Law of Biogenesis to counter evolution, which permits Brussels sprouts and cauliflower to be bred from the same species, somehow prevents changes from accumulating enough to transgress the nebulous boundaries around "created kinds."
- The difference is that the Big Bang has evidence to support it and it has provided powerful predictions that have been proven true. Comfort's coke can argument has none of the above, it is rather a straw man argument of what the Big Bang Theory actually proposes.
- So technically, he's suggesting that not only is our only safe course to assume that the Bible is literally accurate, but to assume that "Hell" refers to an eternal conscious existence in an eternal lake of fire, even when it might speak figuratively.
- What Ray does not share is that 2 Peter is unanimously considered to be pseudonymous .
- Neither of these point to a creator. We may seen design in the universe, but that does not mean the universe as a whole was designed. We also see massive amounts of non-design and disorder.
- This is a fallacy known as appeal to authority.
- Very wrong mate. The Bible is far from perfect, and thus making God imperfect.
- It has been pointed out to Ray many times that evolution does not comment or even try to prove the origin of the universe or life, yet he refuses to accept this fact otherwise he would become honest. This is an old creationist straw man of what evolution actually explains. Evolution is not random as Comfort constantly tries to label it. Evolution can be and has been tested countless times. Also, the "were you there?" argument fails, because we have visual images of then and evolution continues to this day . However, we were not there to witness creation or the birth of Jesus.
- However, Pasteur's Law does not disprove evolution, it disproves a form of creationism. The spontaneous generation that Pasteur and others disproved was the idea that life forms such as mice, maggots, and bacteria can appear fully formed. This disproves a deity creating fully-formed creatures similarly described in a literal translation in Genesis. There is no law of biogenesis saying that very primitive life cannot form from increasingly complex molecules.
- The early christian fathers would disagree. Some actually cut off their hand and demanded their subjects to do the same, Origen was one example and several of his followers did the same. So, by what criteria does Ray use to determine which verses are literal or not? It seems the ones that are morally gruesome are not literal - all this shows is that humans can determine for themselves what is right or wrong without a higher being telling them.
- This is completely incorrect. Comfort's dishonesty may know no bounds. This quote, taken out of context, is from a 1980 article about a four-day meeting at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago attended, so the article says, by 150 scientists and a very few observers. The mechanisms of evolution were discussed at the meeting, but the article focuses on Punctuated equilibriumhttp://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/quotes/mine/part3.html.
Transitional fossils for horse evolution do existhttp://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/horses/. As Kathleen Hunt points out in her article "Horse Evolution",
As new fossils were discovered, though, it became clear that the old model of horse evolution was a serious oversimplification. The ancestors of the modern horse were roughly what that series showed, and were clear evidence that evolution had occurred. But it was misleading to portComfort horse evolution in that smooth straight line, for two reasons:
:# First, horse evolution didn't proceed in a straight line. We now know of many other branches of horse evolution. Our familiar Equus is merely one twig on a once-flourishing bush of equine species. We only have the illusion of straight-line evolution because Equus is the only twig that survived.
:# Second, horse evolution was not smooth and gradual. Different traits evolved at different rates, didn't always evolve together, and occasionally reversed "direction". Also, horse species did not always come into being by gradual transformation of their ancestors; instead, sometimes new species "split off" from ancestors and then co-existed with those ancestors for some time. Some species arose gradually, others suddenly.
Overall, the horse family demonstrates the diversity of evolutionary mechanisms, and it would be misleading -- and would be a real pity -- to reduce it to an oversimplified straight-line diagram.
- One hoax cannot indicate the inferiority of conventional archeology, because creationists have several of their own, including the Inca Stones, Paluxy footprints, the Calaveras skull, Moab and Malachite Man, and others. More telling is how people deal with these hoaxes. When something is exposed, it stopped being used as evidence. The creationist hoaxes, however, can still be found cited as if they were real.
- But it obviously didn't tell Josephus, or the author of Enoch, or Lactantius Firmianus, or Theophilus of Antioch, that the Earth was a sphere. Ray says science of the day taught the earth was flat, but this is demonstrably false. Ancient Greeks calculated that the earth was spherical, such as Pythagoras in the fifth century BCE. He figured out that the Earth is a sphere without divine inspiration and with no technology not available centuries earlier; even if the Bible did clearly state that the Earth was a sphere, it would not be knowledge that proved supernatural inspiration.
- Basically, Ray is repeating the No True Scotsman fallacy.
- However, "Vestigial" does not mean an organ is useless. A vestige is a "trace or visible sign left by something lost or vanished."
- Only 12? Of course, Ray is Cherry picking the simplest contradictions. People have written novels of confirmed contradictions and discrepancies in the Bible , the total number is difficult to pin down - but many have counted to near A THOUSAND.
- What Ray is careful not to include is Occam's Razor that refutes the concept of an eternal being who created the universe. This has been pointed out to him during a debate with the Rational Response Squad, which left him and Kirk Cameron speechless with no counter argument and hesitant to reply with only "I think the people can figure it out" . Also, just merely conceiving an eternal thing does not mean all eternal concepts exist in reality. It is possible to conceive a unicorn, but that does not mean they exist in reality.
- It may not have happened in Scripture but actually happened in real life, otherwise there would be no point of including this rule if it did not happen.
- With this, Ray creates a character whose intellect and knowledge is limited and restricted by Ray, and will likely give the type of responses that Ray will easily break down.
- We have heard that one before Ray, even many times from you. Ray Comfort proposed that he could prove the existence of God on Nightline with a debate with the Rational Response Squad without invoking faith or the Bible .
- However, morality comes from within humanity through evolution. A moral sense is something shaped by natural selection to enable us to live in groups and cooperate for mutual benefit. How does a Creator provide a basis for absolute morality? Here is a real dilemma Ray: Euthyphro dilemma. Does God say something is evil because he says so, or does he say it is evil simply because it is evil? Plus, if the Bible does provide an absolute objective moral system, where is it? Why cant genuine Christians agree on certain issues or agree what God thinks and what he wants?
- Simply incorrect. As already shown in this book review, his "facts" found in the Bible are not facts at all.
- The quote is taken out of context and is a common piece of creationist dishonest propaganda. Here is the full paragraph with the omitted section in bold
To suppose that the eye, with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest possible degree. Yet reason tells me, that if numerous gradations from a perfect and complex eye to one very imperfect and simple, each grade being useful to its possessor, can be shown to exist; if further, the eye does vary ever so slightly, and the variations be inherited, which is certainly the case; and if any variation or modification in the organ be ever useful to an animal under changing conditions of life, then the difficulty of believing that a perfect and complex eye could be formed by natural selection, though insuperable by our imagination, can hardly be considered real. How a nerve comes to be sensitive to light, hardly concerns us more than how life itself first originated; but I may remark that several facts make me suspect that any sensitive nerve may be rendered sensitive to light, and likewise to those coarser vibrations of the air which produce sound.
Darwin continues with three more pages describing a sequence of plausible intermediate stages between eyelessness and human eyes, giving examples from existing organisms to show that the intermediates are viable. Scientists have shown that these stages did indeed happen through natural selection.
- Ray still hasn't demonstrated that his parachutes work and rival electric company's don't, or that the Bible's threats of Hell are more credible than the Koran's.
- Charles Darwin was in his younger years a theist, however this does not prove anything. This is an appeal to authority. Many great men and women believe in God and many don't. Charles Darwin himself later on accepted there was no God: he changed his mind. Based on Ray's logic, even a smart man like Darwin can see through the fallacy and irrationality of believing in a higher power of some sort.
- Comfort just dances around the problem: the Bible says children should be stoned to death. This is the perfect moral system of God? If your child is caught sneaking several brews from the kitchen, do you take him to a non-family stranger with a holy book to decide your child's fate for you? Of course not. There is nothing moral about this law.
This is similar to a story that happened in Africa: a mother locked up her own daughter in a closet for nine years without food or water because her pastor told her that her child was a witch. Honestly, if none of these people were religious or superstitious, this pain and suffering could have been completely avoided. And there is the problem of death. Why kill these youths just for being drunk or rebellious? Why not a program to get them sober? No, the God of the Bible demands death.
- As we will see, Ray desperately pulled this feeble excuse out of the air.
- Ray simply does not understand the word "theory," misleading the audience. His argument is of course a logical fallacy: anything that exists, simply because it exists, must have been deliberately created by an intelligent being for an intended purpose. By his logic, does lightning have a lightning maker? His argument also includes an argument from design fallacy. We see design and beauty in snowflakes and crystals, but we also know they form under natural causes without invoking the supernatural. As Brian will point out, we can actually test if a painting had a painter and we could verify who it is and how they did it, but we cannot do so with God. And that is where Ray fails, who claimed that he would be able to prove the existence of God scientifically. Also, Ray builds an absurd straw man of the Big Bang Theory, abiogenesis, and evolution and falsely thinks that disproving them makes creation win by default. He also tries to mock the intellect and present an ad hominem towards those who don't believe in God by implying that their eyes and brains must not be functional. He insults skeptics as putting themselves on a pedestal, basically Ray's arguments are so feeble that they are simply comical and do not require a lot of thought to see through it, and that is why Ray attacks the intellectual and trying to prevent the audience from thinking to deeply into things.
- Ray and other Christians do not know anything if their God exists or not. Knowledge can be measured and demonstrated. If you cannot demonstrate it, then you do not know it. Ray provides no model or method to show how accurate or truthful Jesus was in comparison with other biblical, pagan, or mythological figures. Ray did not provide any proof or supporting evidence for the Resurrection of Jesus, but it does not seem to matter to Ray. What seems to really matter is personal experience, which dictates what religion he will believe.
- However, engineers do not create new things from nothing, and this "rocket science" will be unable to prove it.
- Scientific-illiterate Ray describes a 2% wing as a tiny, useless stub sticking out of the side of a bird that provides zero help for flight.
What is 2% of a wing? One might be inclined to start with coelurosaurs, and see that 2% wing in the arm of something like the down-covered forelimb of Sinosauropteryx: in this case, that two percent would be an insulated, grasping or climbing arm. It would not work as a wing, but it would work as a forelimb suitable for a warm-blooded predator. A 20% arm would be something with more complete feathers, used for display, to look larger and more threatening or to impress potential mates, and a 50% wing would be useful for gliding .
- What Comfort and Michael Denton continue to fail to realize is that the first cell was not as complex as our modern cells ; in fact they were incredibly simple. The fact that life began with incredibly simple cells and became the complex cells we have today is testament to the reality of evolution.
- Ray ignores the vast amount of study that shows the evolution of the conscious. Ray says our soul is the part of our bodies that produces emotions, will, and conscience. Actually, our emotions are produced in the limbic system of our brains, not a trace of a supernatural immaterial being required for it to function. Nobody has a soul, not even Christians like Ray Comfort.
- Ray is wrong, and he knows it. Atheism does not require acceptance of evolution, or vice-versa. Many Christians accept evolution, and some atheists do not. Evolution does not refute God.
- However, reality is not altered by popular vote. There still remains not a shred of proof of such a place like hell.
- He does not say what type of servant, like a housekeeper? Comfort says slave in the New Testament meant "bondservant" but does not provide any reference or scholar work about this.
- Ray avoided the issue at hand, the fact Lot did offer his daughters, and if the Scripture is a set of instructions, then indeed the Bible promotes giving away your daughters.
- Apart from appealing to authority, Comfort continues to assume everything must be "spontaneous" and be fully formed based on his personal presuppositions obtained from a literal translation of the book of Genesis.
- What Comfort failed to understand was the same result can be achieved for those who seek out ghosts, aliens, Bigfoot, or any deity "with their whole heart", meaning they have already assumed these things exist without question or prior evidence that they exist in the first place.
- The problem with this is, we are not comparing God to a mortal man. God is God, and does not have to leave to make money. Ray's response does not answer the question at all. Ray acknowledges that bits of the bible can portray God as a tyrant, but Ray implored the readers to think about what God has done for you . Sorry Ray, but this argument does not work. for instance, Hitler gave so much back to the German people, he loved his family and his dog, but that does not make him a good person nor does it excuse him for committing crimes against humanity.
- This is not much a dilemma at all, since evolutionists have proposed various explanations for religion. <a href="http://www.talkorigins.org/indexcc/CB/CB440.html">http://www.talkorigins.org/indexcc/CB/CB440.html</a> Religions themselves evolve.
- If you were expecting this chapter to include names of humans greatest thinkers, too bad. Instead, Ray creates three skeptics just like Ray created Mr. Joe Average in the first chapter.
- However, Comfort provides zero proof of this, nor does he even attempt to show that this creator is his particular god or a bunch of invisible sky pixies. Natural selection is a form of creator and builds up on pre-existing traits, so it is not surprising that later evolved animals will share similar features. Comfort's claim of a common-feature-common-designer cannot be tested and has no predictive power.
- Pascal's Wager is a flawed argument. If Ray is worried about the afterlife, then theoretically there are an infinite number of deities and Ray's chances of being right are near absolute zero.
- Why, thank you, Ray. We were overjoyed having to smell the crap you were spewing throughout every page. But Ray does not stop there, he encourages us to read the Bible and get to know God. The problem is, not even Ray Comforts knows God. He multiply claims he does, but the only thing he knows of his what he imagines.
- This is also incorrect, and atheist is someone who lacks a belief in God. Just as a person lacks a belief in the Flying Spaghetti Monster, no one would argue they believe he does not exist, they are just unconvinced that he does exist. Rays argument that atheists are a minority is fallacious. In much of the world, even people who accept evolution and a natural origin for stars and worlds are a minority. How likely is it that non-creationists are right when so much of the world is wrong? Of course, this argument has its problems: four hundred years ago, heliocentrists were a minority. Evidence, not mere numbers giving uninformed assent, is relevant here. Ray varies the appeal to the wisdom of the masses with an appeal to the wisdom of geniuses: Einstein, he assures us, believed in God. Not necessarily a personal God, not a God Who inspired an inerrant Holy Bible, and especially not a God Who judged and forgave us, but Something that Einstein thought was not quite the same as the universe itself . Oddly, Ray doesn't present us with Einstein's arguments for God , but appeals to the authority of cosmologists as he appeals to the authority of popular opinion.
- However, these are not dilemmas at all. Matter is made of energy, which did not have to come from anywhere because the law says energy cannot be created. What caused it to go bang? Simple, it became unstable.
- These verses are not taken out of context, they are there for all to read. Ray settles that if such a confusion is found, he must decide to doubt or trust in God. Of course, he chooses trust, or have blind faith in a book of contradictions. If we quote a horrific verse in the Bible, Ray shouts at the top of his lungs "OUT OF CONTEXT!" but if a person quotes a verse of love in the Bible, he lets it slide unquestioned and unchallenged. If a person takes one single horrific verse from the Koran , Ray automatically concludes that the entire Koran is evil and should not be taken seriously. The double standard is clearly shown in this chapter the moment ray claims that each of these verses pointed out by skeptics are 'out of context.'
- Comfort does not provide anything further from Andrei Linde, nor does he offer any other explanation from any other scientist whose expert field is in cosmology, physics, etc.
- Lets stop kidding ourselves. This "scientist" is merely repeating all of the same nonsense used by Way of the Master, practically verbatim. This engineer claims to have a Masters degree, well since we do not know who this scientist is or where he obtained this degree, we cannot verify it. It is just as valid as saying the author of this article/review of this book holds a Masters degree in Religious Studies of the New Testament, and claiming that every bit Ray makes regarding the New Testament is wrong.
This is more likely, this scientist is just one of the few scientific-illiterate members of Way of the Master writing this section for Ray , or maybe it is Ray Comfort himself just lying to us and coming up with a phony case to deceive his readers. Either of these is more likely, since Ray has a habit of avoiding talking to actual scientists - for instance, on his program episode on evolution, he does not once talk to any scientist or professor, rather he asks big questions about the theory to random people in public or a few college students not trained in the field of biology.
- Comfort provides no reference of the practices and beliefs of the pagans.
- Simply wrong. Natural selection is the only explanation with evidence for the complexity and diversity of life. There is no evidence, however, for an Intelligent Designer. In fact, this argument can be turned on its head when you examine nature and see how unintelligently designed it has.
- However, this is a big straw-man of the Big Bang theory. The theory does not claim that everything was spinning. This is a old creationist argument originating with creationist charlatan Mr. Kent Hovind, who misread a middle-school textbook about the formation of a star and confusing the process with the Big Bang theory. The big bang is quite a different subject from the formation of solar systems. Rotations within the universe are not expected to be related to any rotation of the cosmos. Galaxies probably arose from slightly denser regions of the early universe, which coalesced and combined due to gravitational and viscous interactions. Since these early density fluctuations were apparently random, we expect galaxies to have random orientations. Solar systems within galaxies have still different origins and additional random influences on their orientations. Conservation of angular momentum doesn't require that everything spin the same way. It requires that a change in spin in one object be compensated for by an opposite change in spin in one or more other objects. Retrograde planets are not a violation of angular momentum because other bodies in the early solar system could account for the compensating spin.
- The problem with this line of thinking, Ray first sets up a scenario that traps everyone that makes nobody innocent, and provides a method of salvation that only his narrow version of God can help. Basically, he is just providing the readers with snake oil.
- This however, does nothing to counter the fact that Pakicetus still fits the link between land mammals and whales. Pakicetus rear limbs resemble flippers, but still walked upright. <a href="http://www.rescast.com/specimens/show_specimen.php?SpecimenID=127">http://www.rescast.com/specimens/show_specimen.php?SpecimenID=127</a> Examining its skull alone tells us much about it. The shape of its skull was definitely cetacean, and its teeth were between the ancestral and modern states.http://www.talkorigins.org/features/whales/ Ray does not include any of the following links between land mammals and whales: Ambulocetus natans, Indocetus ramani, Dorudon, Basilosaurus, etc.
- Not all humans agree what is exactly right or wrong. Human beings do indeed live up to their moral standards, most likely they reflect that of the laws of their culture. The last bit is an absolute claim with zero proof, there can always be a single to a million human beings who don't seek something beyond this world.
- This principle is defeated simply because it is a tautology, weakened by the fact of quantum mechanics and the multiverse. The Copernican Principle is more accurate. The Copernican Principle is the opposite of the Anthropic Principle and states that humans do not occupy a privileged place in the universe. Successive astronomical discoveries seem to support this principle. The Anthropic Principle emphasizes the rarity of life and consciousness while the Copernican Principle forces us to realize it was not all done just so we could exist.
- Actually, Ray, the correct question would be can a scientific-illiterate make any case against the strongest scientific theory that is a proven fact.
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