Oh Ray Comfort........If You Only Had A Clue

Anyone know who Ray Comfort is, anyone? For those of you who don't know, Ray is a rather famous Evangelical Christian Proselytizer. He has his own evangelical T.V. show called "Way of the Master", which is co-hosted by none other than Kirk Cameron (yes, the Kirk Cameron of 1980's t.v. classic Growing Pains). They have brought us such intellectual gems like:



Do a quick Google search, and you will find that the banana Ray is holding is not a wild banana (they look very different). The kind of banana we usually find in the grocery store (the kind that Ray is holding) has been cultivated to be that look and shape over many generations. It was human guided selection (as opposed to natural selection) that gave us the banana we know today. But on to more important things than Ray's misunderstanding of the cultivation of bananas.

I found out from P.Z. Myers blog, that Ray has a new website called Pull the Plug on Atheism.
It's a slick looking website, easy to navigate, and it's full of short ignorant diatribes about atheism and science (especially cosmology, biology, and chemistry). For Example:

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.

There are a few things wrong with that statement:

1) An atheist is someone who believes that a god does not exist, and that's it. But, let's go ahead and play Ray's game. I can't speak for all atheists but here is my perspective. I don't know how the universe or anything for that matter, came into being. Cosmology has some interesting theories such as our universe could have been started because of a black hole in another universe. That is, if we belonged to a multi verse (Think of our universe as one among many, kind of like a slice of bread in a loaf.). This says nothing about how the multi verse came into being. So, it's back to I/we just don't know(yet?). Atheists will (or at least they should) admit their ignorance when it comes to this issue. But ignorance in science is OK, it is something it strives to conquer. As you can see, there is no belief there, it is simply a "I don't really know". Now, Ray is the one who believes something, he posits that a god created the universe. And Ray has to believe or have faith in his position because there is no evidence for such a position. Besides that, I could just as easily turn and ask who created Ray's god. If everything has to have a creator, then this line of questioning will end up in an infinite regress. The argument really gets us nowhere, and it is an instant draw in a debate on the god hypothesis.

2) Of course Ray believes that a builder built his house..........he understands the process of building a house. So, he makes no viable point here. He is just trying a bait and switch here. First, he uses the house metaphor and then switches the house with our universe. He and no one else knows how the universe came to be (in the sense of where all matter came from, the big bang is a very solid theory), so he uses god to make what is called an argument from ignorance.
He doesn't know how matter came to be, so he uses god (this is known as the first cause argument).

And then there is this gem:

So the next time you hear the word “atheist” and the word “intelligent” in the same sentence, you will know better.

At least I'm not positing certitude in the face of ignorance, I would say that that is a pretty intelligent thing to do.