Just days after making a post on this very topic, a creationist actually hands me a pamphlet. Now I'm in a different state so scanning this badly drawn, terribly reasoned excuse for apologetics won't be able to happen until I get home. So for now, I'll just express my incredulity and take the pamphlet at my first from the Global Atheist Convention.
Hilarious stuff, it really needs to be seen to be believed. I only wish I could repay the guy handing out the Ray Comfort screed by giving him a banana...
Showing posts with label Ray Comfort. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Ray Comfort. Show all posts
Saturday, 13 March 2010
Thursday, 9 April 2009
The Inadequacy of Poe's Law
Just to show that even the arguments of a creationist can evolve, Ray Comfort has reprised his atheist nightmare. But the focus is no longer the banana - the product of artificial selection and human design, he's now moved onto animal. In a "debate", Comfort has shifted his argument to the majestic dog. For those not in the know, dogs like bananas are a product of artificial selection. As far as we can tell, dogs were the first animal to be domesticated by man, some 15,000 years ago in Asia. Dogs are wolves, selected for particular traits that suited the purposes of man.
Adding another level of irony, the dog is actually a very good example of where new species come from. Comfort's cartoonish version of the origin of a new species is that it would be impossible for a male and a female to evolve simultaneously. PZ Myers has as good an explanation as anyone in pointing out the obvious absurdity of Comfort's claim. Just look at the dog breeds that are there now. Great Danes and Poodles both reproduce sexually, a Poodle won't give birth to a Great Dane or vice versa. Yet it was only 15000 years ago that these two shared a common ancestor that reproduced sexually as well.
To get the exaggerated difference between the large Great Dane and the cutesy Poodle, it's taken selection. Each step of the way there has been reproduction between a male and a female. It's that variations that occur by nothing more than the virtue of being born are deliberately bred against. By selecting favourable features and choosing mating pairs that will breed such features, over time those variations will accumulate. All the breeds and all the different features and specialisations in each breed are the result of only 15,000 years of breeding. Yet there are dogs specialised for a myriad of different roles. A Chihuahua may make for a good house pet, but it can't run like a Greyhound, nor can it be used for hunting like any variety of scent hound. Nor is it specialised for being a beast of burden, unlike sled dogs, or be useful with livestock like a cattle dog is.
I've got to wonder if Ray can be so unintentionally stupid, it's hard to imagine that someone can be that profoundly ignorant when it comes to science. Evolution doesn't happen in individuals, rather it happens in populations. In the case of mammals, that includes both males and females. There's been direct breeding from the grey wolf to the German Sheppard as there has been to the Great Dane and to the Poodle. Each step of the way there has been variation, and there will be an accumulation of these traits over time. This obviously is a much faster process than what happens with natural selection in the wild, but the principle is the same. Animals reproduce, there are born both male and female - and those offspring will both compete to reproduce. Thus the cycle of life brings on change over time. That is the inevitability of evolution, highlighted by an unintentional 15,000 year global experiment.
Adding another level of irony, the dog is actually a very good example of where new species come from. Comfort's cartoonish version of the origin of a new species is that it would be impossible for a male and a female to evolve simultaneously. PZ Myers has as good an explanation as anyone in pointing out the obvious absurdity of Comfort's claim. Just look at the dog breeds that are there now. Great Danes and Poodles both reproduce sexually, a Poodle won't give birth to a Great Dane or vice versa. Yet it was only 15000 years ago that these two shared a common ancestor that reproduced sexually as well.
To get the exaggerated difference between the large Great Dane and the cutesy Poodle, it's taken selection. Each step of the way there has been reproduction between a male and a female. It's that variations that occur by nothing more than the virtue of being born are deliberately bred against. By selecting favourable features and choosing mating pairs that will breed such features, over time those variations will accumulate. All the breeds and all the different features and specialisations in each breed are the result of only 15,000 years of breeding. Yet there are dogs specialised for a myriad of different roles. A Chihuahua may make for a good house pet, but it can't run like a Greyhound, nor can it be used for hunting like any variety of scent hound. Nor is it specialised for being a beast of burden, unlike sled dogs, or be useful with livestock like a cattle dog is.
I've got to wonder if Ray can be so unintentionally stupid, it's hard to imagine that someone can be that profoundly ignorant when it comes to science. Evolution doesn't happen in individuals, rather it happens in populations. In the case of mammals, that includes both males and females. There's been direct breeding from the grey wolf to the German Sheppard as there has been to the Great Dane and to the Poodle. Each step of the way there has been variation, and there will be an accumulation of these traits over time. This obviously is a much faster process than what happens with natural selection in the wild, but the principle is the same. Animals reproduce, there are born both male and female - and those offspring will both compete to reproduce. Thus the cycle of life brings on change over time. That is the inevitability of evolution, highlighted by an unintentional 15,000 year global experiment.
Friday, 23 January 2009
A Suggestion For Where Comfort Can Stick His Banana...
Yesterday I made mention of Ray Comfort's new site attacking atheism, and specifically address the 2 of 10 points he had listed on that site: atheists believe something came from nothing and that Darwin is the atheist equivalent of God. There are 8 other short articles on the site, all of which keep up that straw-man attack on atheism. He's obsessed with creation, reading the rest of the articles I was surprised how many he dismissed on the notion that something can't come from nothing. Even so, there are a few more nuggets of creationist "wisdom" that show just where Comfort has been sticking his banana.
The faith of science
Non-life to life is a big unanswered question in science, but the absence of an answer doesn't mean that it didn't happen. We've been able to create the building blocks of life through certain processes, and observe building blocks as remnants of other processes. As for randomness produces fine-tuning, it's again a misrepresentation of the process of evolution. Evolution is not random, selection acts on random events meaning that the process is guided by account on what is advantageous.
Where Strobel makes his mistake is making a dichotomy between God and randomness. On this account randomness would seem absurd to account for what we can see in nature. But it's not either God or randomness, there are set processes by which the universe works and those processes can account for all that we see. Evolution can account for fine-tuning, reason and the onset of consciousness in certain animals. Chemical reactions can account for the origin of life, though what those reactions were is yet unknown. The fundamental forces account for patterns and information in what looks a chaotic existence. Scientists aren't saying it's random, far from it. Scientists are saying there are guiding forces to the universe, it's just that the forces aren't a magic sky daddy. Some believe that the Magic Sky Daddy is responsible for those forces to begin with, but that's another story. The point is humans didn't pop into existence out of pure chance, they are a product of billions of years of mutation and selection.
Human testimony
This was possibly the only thing on the site I could agree with Comfort on:
But I'm in general agreement with Comfort on this, whether God exists or not is not dependant on any holy text or prophet. Either God exists or God doesn't exist. But the way we know of God and what is ascribed to God comes down to those aforementioned means. Take away the bible, take away the prophets, and there's nothing left of which to know God by. The path to salvation, heaven and hell, the very nature of God is handed down through generations by this means. By taking away the sources of knowledge, it brings any statement on God into the realms of speculation. It could be that the sources where speculation to begin with, but those are the foundational grounds of knowledge.
So when an atheist asks why won't god heal amputees, it's a question on why prayer is not as revelatory as some make it out to be. Likewise a contradiction in the bible or a history of the prophets is to cast doubt on those divine sources of knowledge that are at the base of Christianity. And without that foundation of knowledge, there's nothing that makes God distinguishable from something that is made up. It may be that God exists without human knowledge of God, but without reason to believe that God came down to earth in man form and died on the cross to redeem sin as the accounts of the bible testify, why believe in Jesus as God in the first place?
The faith of science
Ex-atheist, Lee Strobel said, "Essentially, I realized that to stay an atheist, I would have to believe that nothing produces everything; non-life produces life; randomness produces fine-tuning; chaos produces information; unconsciousness produces consciousness; and non-reason produces reason. Those leaps of faith were simply too big for me to take . . ."It's hard to keep pretending that this is an attack on atheists, it's an attack on science and a misrepresentation of science at that. As I argued yesterday, everything doesn't have to come from nothing, everything could be universal and it's the processes in between that are an alteration of infinity. But as for the other comments...
Non-life to life is a big unanswered question in science, but the absence of an answer doesn't mean that it didn't happen. We've been able to create the building blocks of life through certain processes, and observe building blocks as remnants of other processes. As for randomness produces fine-tuning, it's again a misrepresentation of the process of evolution. Evolution is not random, selection acts on random events meaning that the process is guided by account on what is advantageous.
Where Strobel makes his mistake is making a dichotomy between God and randomness. On this account randomness would seem absurd to account for what we can see in nature. But it's not either God or randomness, there are set processes by which the universe works and those processes can account for all that we see. Evolution can account for fine-tuning, reason and the onset of consciousness in certain animals. Chemical reactions can account for the origin of life, though what those reactions were is yet unknown. The fundamental forces account for patterns and information in what looks a chaotic existence. Scientists aren't saying it's random, far from it. Scientists are saying there are guiding forces to the universe, it's just that the forces aren't a magic sky daddy. Some believe that the Magic Sky Daddy is responsible for those forces to begin with, but that's another story. The point is humans didn't pop into existence out of pure chance, they are a product of billions of years of mutation and selection.
Human testimony
This was possibly the only thing on the site I could agree with Comfort on:
Was the recovery a miracle? Perhaps. Then again, perhaps it wasn’t. Only God knows. The fact is that we have no idea what happened. However, one thing we do know is that answered or unanswered prayer has nothing to do with God’s existence.If the bible was not an account of God, then it doesn't stop God from existing. Likewise if God doesn't heal amputees or lets a faithful die because they chose prayer instead of medical treatment, that doesn't stop God from existing. Where the contention lies is the kinds of evidence for God. The testament of prayer is one that is often used as evidence for God, another is how faith is rewarded. Pointing out that these occurrences are inconsistent is not alone enough to prevent the existence of God.
God’s existence isn’t dependent on the Bible or its authenticity, the existence of the Church, the prophets, or even creation. God existed before the Scriptures were penned, before creation came into existence, and even if the Bible was proved to be fraudulent, God would still exist.Without the bible, the prophets or the Church, how would people know of God? It may be that without any of those God still does indeed exists, but what those elements have been throughout history is the carrier of the meme that is Christianity. People have learnt of God through the teachings of the bible, through the church, through prophets and through their own reasoning; if you take those away then the reasons to believe are taken away as well. To mute them would be to cast doubt on how people came to know God in the first place.
But I'm in general agreement with Comfort on this, whether God exists or not is not dependant on any holy text or prophet. Either God exists or God doesn't exist. But the way we know of God and what is ascribed to God comes down to those aforementioned means. Take away the bible, take away the prophets, and there's nothing left of which to know God by. The path to salvation, heaven and hell, the very nature of God is handed down through generations by this means. By taking away the sources of knowledge, it brings any statement on God into the realms of speculation. It could be that the sources where speculation to begin with, but those are the foundational grounds of knowledge.
So when an atheist asks why won't god heal amputees, it's a question on why prayer is not as revelatory as some make it out to be. Likewise a contradiction in the bible or a history of the prophets is to cast doubt on those divine sources of knowledge that are at the base of Christianity. And without that foundation of knowledge, there's nothing that makes God distinguishable from something that is made up. It may be that God exists without human knowledge of God, but without reason to believe that God came down to earth in man form and died on the cross to redeem sin as the accounts of the bible testify, why believe in Jesus as God in the first place?
Thursday, 22 January 2009
A Banana Also Fits Well In A Vagina...
Banana masturbator and all-around nutter Ray Comfort has a site refuting atheism up, it's really great for a laugh until it gets to the fact he's serious. The straw-man attacks on atheism and evolution are no surprise out of the apologetics, it's still sad to see the effectiveness of the obvious fallacies presented. Credulous fools flock to these faux-intellectuals making the public understanding of both evolution and atheism a much more daunting proposition. It's quite sad that for someone who argues that if you lie then you are a liar will deliberately push lies about evolution and atheism.
Atheistic beliefs
The big bang is the limit of our observational point, beyond the big bang at best it can be nothing more than informed speculation. There is mathematical means to try and understand how the universe could be, but in all honesty there is a huge unknown when we hit the end of observable reality. As far as what atheists believe there is no consensus, Comfort makes the mistake of thinking that science = atheism and appeals against current scientific explanations on face value in order to attack atheism. There is no dogma to atheism, no tenets, no historical account, it's a position on the the supernatural and nothing more.
What Comfort is doing is creating a false dichotomy between nothing creating something and the Judeo-Christian construct of God creating something. Though there are many people who don't believe that there is a creation event at all, that the universe or multiverse in some ways is unbounded and infinite. Hawking and Sagan both talk of this unbounded reality, where time has a beginning but time is a creation of the universe and the components that make up the universe are eternal. There's the idea of a cyclic universe, one that is an infinite sequence of big bangs and big crunches where the universe has a beginning and an end but is still fully contained in infinity. There's also the concept of an infinite sequence of multiverses, an 11-dimensional reality where the universe is one 4 dimensional bubble of many floating in a higher reality. It could be that the universe is infinite too, that the beginning is nothing more than a limitation on our observation point. It could be that black holes in one universe are the beginnings of a completely new universe within. Quite simply there is no answer.
But without an answer, does it make the Christian answer of an all-powerful deity creating it all. Why if a deity can be infinite, can't a component of reality be infinite? The big bang isn't the be-all and end-all of existence, it's the beginning of our 4-dimensional bubble universe. Our frame of reference limits us, but that does not make a deity any better of an answer. Imagine I had a box sitting next to me. Can you work out what is in the box without looking inside? Sure you could guess, and even make particular deductions about what could be in there, but the chances of being right purely on guessing aren't high. On earth it's limited to particular material objects, the size is important and the ability to to obtain it is another. The box that covers over what is beyond the observable universe isn't limited by these restrictions and without lifting the lid, getting the right answer becomes impossible. Proposing that God is an answer is nothing more than speculation, it has about the same probability as proposing that reality was created by a Flying Spaghetti Monster.
Darwinian equilibrium
Comfort makes a very easy dichotomy to pick against God:
It's an easy path to dismiss God for the same reason that some theists reject evolution, if we take the argument that one is true and the other is false then it's really going to be nothing more than a gut reaction. For the scientifically-inclined then maybe it would go to God not existing, for the believer it would go to God. It's a dishonest tactic even if it stems from an honest belief in the incompatibility. The fact that many believers accept evolution including prominent scientists and theologians shows that there doesn't need to be an incompatibility between God and evolution.
The main straw-man attack is the deifying of Charles Darwin, that it's his word against God's. Evolution is a scientific theory, not a religion, and there are no holy books that show irrefutable truth. Indeed when Darwin first wrote the hypothesis of evolution, the fossil record was mostly undiscovered, anatomists were only beginning to see the links between different clades, there was no knowledge of genetics and observed evidence was not there. Since then the evidence found supporting evolution has been overwhelming, and the theory has been updated and revised as all science is.
It's important to mention that evolution is not the single-handed work of Darwin, Alfred Russel Wallace came up with the theory independently. Through the good grace of both Darwin and Wallace they presented their idea together in 1858, over a year before The Origin Of Species was published. Since then the concept has become standard science, with many contributions along the way. Mendelian genetics added to the theory in the late 19th century. In the mid 20th century the discovery of DNA again changed the understanding of evolutionary theory, which led in the 60s to the gene-centred view of evolution. The idea of evolutionary arms races came about, a new driving mechanism to variation. In recent times the role of horizontal gene transfer has come to light, and the idea of spandrels playing a role in evolution has been added to evolutionary knowledge. All of this is beyond what Darwin came up with, yet all is now part of modern evolutionary theory.
The fact is that evolution is accepted by almost the entire scientific community, millions of people from different religious backgrounds and all walks of life who actually devote their lives to studying biology all agree that evolution happened. It's not the word of Darwin vs the word of God, it's an accumulation of millions of scientists all devoting their lives to understanding the natural world against the allegorical tales of one middle-eastern tribe. If the bible needs creation to be true, then the bible is mythology. But if like most rational theologians taking the tale of genesis is an allegorical tale, then there is quite simply no conflict.
Atheistic beliefs
An atheist is someone who believes that nothing made everything. He will of course deny that because it's an intellectual embarrassment, but if I say that I don’t believe that a builder built my house, then I am left with the insanity of believing that nothing built it. It just happened.I will deny that, an atheist is someone who doesn't believe in a god or gods. It's got nothing to do with whether they believe something came from nothing, it's simply to say that appealing to a deity is not an answer. For the house I'm living in, I know a builder built it. And I also know that the builder had a builder too, the builder had two parents who had sex. And where did those parents come from? Well their parents had sex as well. And if we go back far enough we get to a point where sex organs first developed, and even further back we get to a process by which the first replicating cells came about. Before that we get planetary formation, before that we have a giant star going supernova, before that we have that star formation and before that we have the origins of the universe.
The big bang is the limit of our observational point, beyond the big bang at best it can be nothing more than informed speculation. There is mathematical means to try and understand how the universe could be, but in all honesty there is a huge unknown when we hit the end of observable reality. As far as what atheists believe there is no consensus, Comfort makes the mistake of thinking that science = atheism and appeals against current scientific explanations on face value in order to attack atheism. There is no dogma to atheism, no tenets, no historical account, it's a position on the the supernatural and nothing more.
What Comfort is doing is creating a false dichotomy between nothing creating something and the Judeo-Christian construct of God creating something. Though there are many people who don't believe that there is a creation event at all, that the universe or multiverse in some ways is unbounded and infinite. Hawking and Sagan both talk of this unbounded reality, where time has a beginning but time is a creation of the universe and the components that make up the universe are eternal. There's the idea of a cyclic universe, one that is an infinite sequence of big bangs and big crunches where the universe has a beginning and an end but is still fully contained in infinity. There's also the concept of an infinite sequence of multiverses, an 11-dimensional reality where the universe is one 4 dimensional bubble of many floating in a higher reality. It could be that the universe is infinite too, that the beginning is nothing more than a limitation on our observation point. It could be that black holes in one universe are the beginnings of a completely new universe within. Quite simply there is no answer.
But without an answer, does it make the Christian answer of an all-powerful deity creating it all. Why if a deity can be infinite, can't a component of reality be infinite? The big bang isn't the be-all and end-all of existence, it's the beginning of our 4-dimensional bubble universe. Our frame of reference limits us, but that does not make a deity any better of an answer. Imagine I had a box sitting next to me. Can you work out what is in the box without looking inside? Sure you could guess, and even make particular deductions about what could be in there, but the chances of being right purely on guessing aren't high. On earth it's limited to particular material objects, the size is important and the ability to to obtain it is another. The box that covers over what is beyond the observable universe isn't limited by these restrictions and without lifting the lid, getting the right answer becomes impossible. Proposing that God is an answer is nothing more than speculation, it has about the same probability as proposing that reality was created by a Flying Spaghetti Monster.
Darwinian equilibrium
Comfort makes a very easy dichotomy to pick against God:
Darwinian evolution and the biblical account of creation are incompatible. Either God made man in His own image as morally accountable beings, male and female, reproducing after their own kind, or He didn’t. If the theory of evolution is a scientific fact, then the Bible should be discarded as mere mythology. But if the Bible is right, Charles Darwin single-handedly propagated a fantasy that has hoodwinked millions.So if evolution is true, then the bible isn't according to Comfort. Well evolution is true, it's about as true as true can get in the scientific sense. So by this the bible is mythology and God was killed by Charles Darwin... Of course this line of reasoning is bogus, evolution is just one of a huge number of naturalistic explanations that have replaced the divine intervention that was once the explanation. Why should evolution kill God any more than heliocentric orbit?
It's an easy path to dismiss God for the same reason that some theists reject evolution, if we take the argument that one is true and the other is false then it's really going to be nothing more than a gut reaction. For the scientifically-inclined then maybe it would go to God not existing, for the believer it would go to God. It's a dishonest tactic even if it stems from an honest belief in the incompatibility. The fact that many believers accept evolution including prominent scientists and theologians shows that there doesn't need to be an incompatibility between God and evolution.
The main straw-man attack is the deifying of Charles Darwin, that it's his word against God's. Evolution is a scientific theory, not a religion, and there are no holy books that show irrefutable truth. Indeed when Darwin first wrote the hypothesis of evolution, the fossil record was mostly undiscovered, anatomists were only beginning to see the links between different clades, there was no knowledge of genetics and observed evidence was not there. Since then the evidence found supporting evolution has been overwhelming, and the theory has been updated and revised as all science is.
It's important to mention that evolution is not the single-handed work of Darwin, Alfred Russel Wallace came up with the theory independently. Through the good grace of both Darwin and Wallace they presented their idea together in 1858, over a year before The Origin Of Species was published. Since then the concept has become standard science, with many contributions along the way. Mendelian genetics added to the theory in the late 19th century. In the mid 20th century the discovery of DNA again changed the understanding of evolutionary theory, which led in the 60s to the gene-centred view of evolution. The idea of evolutionary arms races came about, a new driving mechanism to variation. In recent times the role of horizontal gene transfer has come to light, and the idea of spandrels playing a role in evolution has been added to evolutionary knowledge. All of this is beyond what Darwin came up with, yet all is now part of modern evolutionary theory.
The fact is that evolution is accepted by almost the entire scientific community, millions of people from different religious backgrounds and all walks of life who actually devote their lives to studying biology all agree that evolution happened. It's not the word of Darwin vs the word of God, it's an accumulation of millions of scientists all devoting their lives to understanding the natural world against the allegorical tales of one middle-eastern tribe. If the bible needs creation to be true, then the bible is mythology. But if like most rational theologians taking the tale of genesis is an allegorical tale, then there is quite simply no conflict.
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