Sunday Sermonette: Atheism Destroyed!
I have a filter in my Google News for stories about atheism. For the past week, this little clickbait from Charisma News has been leading the pack: “Ray Comfort Dismantles Atheism With 1 Scientific Question.” A few days ago, a second Charisma News story appeared: “Evangelist Ray Comfort Boldly Declares ‘Atheism is Dead.’”
Well, I guess it’s game over, fellow atheists. I mean, if you can’t trust Ray Comfort, the guy who made the YouTube video that claimed the banana was the atheist’s worst nightmare, who can you trust? (The banana proves intelligent design. He’s right, it does. Before we humans designed it, it was a small tough leathery berry with starchy fruit and big hard seeds.)
"Just a few years ago atheism was entering the Promised Land. Books by new atheists such as Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, and Sam Harris were topping the New York Times Best Seller list. However, the landscape seems to have drastically changed. Hitchens has sadly passed away, Dawkins has suffered a stroke, and Harris has fallen from favor after being accused of racism and bigotry. And the much anticipated 2016 Reason Rally, which organizers expected would draw 30,000 atheists to Washington, D.C., managed to attract a mere 2,000, by some atheist estimates,” Comfort said.
Hard to argue with that. I mean, the only reason I’m an atheist is that Richard Dawkins is way smart, and he’s so cool he’s married to Lalla Ward, who played Romana on the Fourth Doctor Who (the guy with the scarf). Now that he’s an old man who’s survived a stroke, separated from his wife, he’s just not cool anymore. Maybe I should listen to this guy with the used car salesman’s mustache and the Kiwi accent. As we all know, the truth of an idea is directly proportional to its popularity, right?
"It seems the atheists have argued their case in the public forum and it was dismissed for lack of evidence," Comfort noted. "People have more sense of reason than atheists give them credit for."
Funny, I didn’t think we atheists were making any positive claims. We just don’t believe what theists are claiming. We don’t have the burden of proof, they do.
But Charisma says that Comfort’s new movie uses science to destroy atheism. So I checked it out at Atheistmovie.com. It won’t officially be released on YouTube for two months, but you can buy The Atheist Delusion: Why Millions Deny the Obvious in advance. (Catchy title, huh? Rather reminiscent of Dawkins’ book. Does he really think Richard Dawkins is the Atheist Pope?) The trailer gives you some hints. You see the faces of people answering Comfort, who’s conveniently off-camera. What is the question they’re answering? Do you trust that Comfort’s voice-over wasn’t recorded later?
Let me cut to the chase and save you $19.99 and 70 minutes of your life. Here’s the scientific question that will cause you to drop your foolish atheistic belief that there is no God and see the obvious invisible improbable Heavenly Father that Christians claim to see. Are you ready for it? Here it is:
He gives people a book and asks, “Do you believe that book could’ve come about by accident?” When the person answers in the negative, Comfort launches into an inaccurate oversimplification of DNA, then demands to know how you can believe that DNA came about by accident.
That’s it. This utterly disingenuous argument is his devastating proof.
No one but Comfort and other apologists deliberately trying to mislead people claim that DNA came about by accident. It’s been repeatedly explained to Comfort that DNA came about by random mutation and non-random natural selection. It evolved over hundreds of millions of years. But as Upton Sinclair said, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!"
This is the Argument from Incredulity: I have no idea how this could have happened naturally, therefore it must have happened supernaturally. Think of all the circumstances where that answer has been useful. I don’t understand electricity, therefore the light switch must contain a demon. We used to believe there was a scientific explanation for how television works, but now we know it’s magic.”
“Could DNA make itself?” is another of Comfort’s misleading questions. DNA didn’t do anything. It was an unguided chemical process. This can be shown by the amount of junk DNA that remains in the genome of every living thing. If some Intelligent Designer created DNA, it wasn’t his best work.
Comfort’s corker is “You’re an atheist, so you believe the scientific impossibility that nothing created everything.” Again, this statement is deliberately misleading. First, I’m an atheist, which means I don’t believe that a god or gods exist, full stop. There is no atheist creed. I can believe anything about cosmology I like. Second, how do you know it’s a scientific impossibility? What tests have you done? Third, why shouldn’t something come from nothing? (See Lawrence Krauss’ A Universe From Nothing.) Besides, where does Comfort believe his god came from? Fourth, using the term “created” assumes facts not in evidence. Again, see Krauss.
The rest of the movie is the usual fistful of J.T. Chick tracts: you know the truth, you’re just denying it so you can keep on sinning; you want to be our own god; imagine what would happen if you died today… Not to mention Comfort’s old Way of the Master standby: are you sure you’ve obeyed the Ten Commandments? All of them? Confess, miserable sinner.
As I said, atheism is nothing but the lack of belief in gods. There’s no educational requirement - even somebody like me can be an atheist. But I still can’t imagine The Atheist Delusion’s emotionally manipulative and logically flawed arguments persuading many people that the existence of a god is obvious. That’s OK, we aren’t the target audience. Apologetics are about reassuring the believer, not persuading the unbeliever. This is a movie for Christians.
Well, I guess it’s game over, fellow atheists. I mean, if you can’t trust Ray Comfort, the guy who made the YouTube video that claimed the banana was the atheist’s worst nightmare, who can you trust? (The banana proves intelligent design. He’s right, it does. Before we humans designed it, it was a small tough leathery berry with starchy fruit and big hard seeds.)
"Just a few years ago atheism was entering the Promised Land. Books by new atheists such as Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, and Sam Harris were topping the New York Times Best Seller list. However, the landscape seems to have drastically changed. Hitchens has sadly passed away, Dawkins has suffered a stroke, and Harris has fallen from favor after being accused of racism and bigotry. And the much anticipated 2016 Reason Rally, which organizers expected would draw 30,000 atheists to Washington, D.C., managed to attract a mere 2,000, by some atheist estimates,” Comfort said.
Hard to argue with that. I mean, the only reason I’m an atheist is that Richard Dawkins is way smart, and he’s so cool he’s married to Lalla Ward, who played Romana on the Fourth Doctor Who (the guy with the scarf). Now that he’s an old man who’s survived a stroke, separated from his wife, he’s just not cool anymore. Maybe I should listen to this guy with the used car salesman’s mustache and the Kiwi accent. As we all know, the truth of an idea is directly proportional to its popularity, right?
"It seems the atheists have argued their case in the public forum and it was dismissed for lack of evidence," Comfort noted. "People have more sense of reason than atheists give them credit for."
Funny, I didn’t think we atheists were making any positive claims. We just don’t believe what theists are claiming. We don’t have the burden of proof, they do.
But Charisma says that Comfort’s new movie uses science to destroy atheism. So I checked it out at Atheistmovie.com. It won’t officially be released on YouTube for two months, but you can buy The Atheist Delusion: Why Millions Deny the Obvious in advance. (Catchy title, huh? Rather reminiscent of Dawkins’ book. Does he really think Richard Dawkins is the Atheist Pope?) The trailer gives you some hints. You see the faces of people answering Comfort, who’s conveniently off-camera. What is the question they’re answering? Do you trust that Comfort’s voice-over wasn’t recorded later?
Let me cut to the chase and save you $19.99 and 70 minutes of your life. Here’s the scientific question that will cause you to drop your foolish atheistic belief that there is no God and see the obvious invisible improbable Heavenly Father that Christians claim to see. Are you ready for it? Here it is:
He gives people a book and asks, “Do you believe that book could’ve come about by accident?” When the person answers in the negative, Comfort launches into an inaccurate oversimplification of DNA, then demands to know how you can believe that DNA came about by accident.
That’s it. This utterly disingenuous argument is his devastating proof.
No one but Comfort and other apologists deliberately trying to mislead people claim that DNA came about by accident. It’s been repeatedly explained to Comfort that DNA came about by random mutation and non-random natural selection. It evolved over hundreds of millions of years. But as Upton Sinclair said, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!"
This is the Argument from Incredulity: I have no idea how this could have happened naturally, therefore it must have happened supernaturally. Think of all the circumstances where that answer has been useful. I don’t understand electricity, therefore the light switch must contain a demon. We used to believe there was a scientific explanation for how television works, but now we know it’s magic.”
“Could DNA make itself?” is another of Comfort’s misleading questions. DNA didn’t do anything. It was an unguided chemical process. This can be shown by the amount of junk DNA that remains in the genome of every living thing. If some Intelligent Designer created DNA, it wasn’t his best work.
Comfort’s corker is “You’re an atheist, so you believe the scientific impossibility that nothing created everything.” Again, this statement is deliberately misleading. First, I’m an atheist, which means I don’t believe that a god or gods exist, full stop. There is no atheist creed. I can believe anything about cosmology I like. Second, how do you know it’s a scientific impossibility? What tests have you done? Third, why shouldn’t something come from nothing? (See Lawrence Krauss’ A Universe From Nothing.) Besides, where does Comfort believe his god came from? Fourth, using the term “created” assumes facts not in evidence. Again, see Krauss.
The rest of the movie is the usual fistful of J.T. Chick tracts: you know the truth, you’re just denying it so you can keep on sinning; you want to be our own god; imagine what would happen if you died today… Not to mention Comfort’s old Way of the Master standby: are you sure you’ve obeyed the Ten Commandments? All of them? Confess, miserable sinner.
As I said, atheism is nothing but the lack of belief in gods. There’s no educational requirement - even somebody like me can be an atheist. But I still can’t imagine The Atheist Delusion’s emotionally manipulative and logically flawed arguments persuading many people that the existence of a god is obvious. That’s OK, we aren’t the target audience. Apologetics are about reassuring the believer, not persuading the unbeliever. This is a movie for Christians.