Ray Comfort has this new cheesy “movie” in which he claims he destroys atheism with one scientific question
— which reviews revealed was where did the DNA molecule come from?
I explained that that was not very challenging and was actually a rather stupid question. But now he’s got new ads out that present a completely different question.
A thought-provoking question to ask an atheist is whether or not he thinks that his brain was intelligently designed.
No.
Well, that didn’t provoke much thought now, did it? All I have to do is look at Ray Comfort, who has the same kind of brain I have, and it’s obvious that if it were designed at all, it was done badly. Alternatively, I could look at a chimpanzee and see that its brain is smaller but otherwise very similar to mine, and it’s obvious that we have a modified generic ape brain, which is a kind of mammalian brain, which has all the hallmarks of a standard vertebrate brain.
If the whole premise of his movie is that he’s got this killer question that will rock atheists back on their heels, why is it that every question that’s leaking out of it is just kind of pathetic? Doesn’t he try out his question on informed subjects to see how they really react to it before he builds an entire movie that claims he has some kind of potent approach?
“Doesn’t he try out his question on informed subjects to see how they really react to it before he builds an entire movie that claims he has some kind of potent approach?”
Does he try a scientific approach to his jackassery? Does he science?
No, he doesn’t science at all.
Atheists learn what creationists think by listening to creationists.
Creationists do the same thing. They learn what atheists think by listening to creationists.
Is this just a dumbed-down version of Alvin Plantinga’s argument?
When Comfort does ask legitimate experts, he doesn’t understand their answers. He’s looking for the “gotcha” moment, where he can set simple folk ‘knowledge’ against a straw man interpretation of what the expert is actually trying to get across. No “could you explain further?” necessary.
The brain question looks like just another variation of the tired old Like-has to-come-from-like trope. Where does intelligence come from? Intelligence! Just like love has to come from love and life has to come from life and morals have to come from an Essence of Morality. Those things just are. Explanation finished. Easy peasy.
Wait, both Kevin Sarbo AND Kirk Cameron are on-board with this. Evolution is doomed!
Looks like he’s working on a Gish Gallop of videos.
I suspect that while that’s the core question, the expansion of that will probably attempt to build on Alvin Plantinga’s evolutionary argument against naturalism.
As pointed out in the comment thread, Plantinga and other theists haven’t even heard of evolutionary epistemology.
Yeah, that really isn’t thought-provoking.
Why would you ever think your brain was intelligently designed if you are an atheist and thus don’t accept Comfort’s preconceived notions? If he’s trying to preach to the choire, he’s doing it wrong.
Also, that single “A” taking up an entire line on its own really irks me for some reason.
I happen to know for a fact that my brain developed starting from a single cell. I haven’t any idea what it would even mean for it to be “intelligently designed”. If Comfort thinks it means that a god poofed my brain into existence ex nihilo, then he’s trivially ignorant of where brains come from.
From the Philosophical Lexicon:
alvinize, v. To stimulate protracted discussion by making a bizarre claim. “His contention that natural evil is due to Satanic agency alvinized his listeners.”
planting, v. To use twentieth-century fertilizer to encourage new shoots from eleventh -century ideas which everyone thought had gone to seed; hence, plantinger, n. one who plantings.
My brain is intelligently designed in the sense that an intelligent set of parents got together on purpose, then worked hard to raise their children right. But otherwise, it’s a bunch of neurons that crawled into place, in a pattern developed by millions of years of survival.
Does anyone think teh bananananaman is intelligently designed?
If an intelligence designed humans it was a crappy designer. Its design choices raise questions of why we should trust its opinions on things like morality. And it doesn’t seem like the work of an omnipotent being.
Well, I’m obviously not even being asked…
when I was a child and going to catholic high-school we had to take religious class I did not question it I just went and tried to understand and remember all of what I was being taught. They told us it was absolutely vital.
They often emphasized the “sin of pride” which was probably a mistake on their part but unavoidable because it set up the question and the awareness of self importance as a motivational goal. As my learning about and understanding of “the Natural world” grew the self regard of those who tried to deny what was demonstrably true stood out revealed.
It is not so much what the belief is to the believer as it is the “I” who believes.
It is all a desperate attempt to be something important beyond that drives, it is pure pride, a kind of conceit and desperation that feeds all kinds of conflict and violence because it does not matter what anyone thinks at all what is is regardless.
it is really amazing how much effort some people expend trying to prop-up their delusion and their by their egos.
uncle frogy
That oft-repeated pseudo-argument is absolutely wrong. With evolution, of course, we don’t need a designer. But to claim the human body, with all its marvelous complexity (e.g., the immune system) would be a crappy design (if it were a design) is wrong. Sure the knees could be better, but the flaws pale in comparison to the successes. If the “design” is so crappy–how come we can’t design anything better? To build a wet system with that intelligence (the pattern recognition alone is unimaginably good) that routinely lasts for 80 years of continuous use–that grows, repairs itself, and to a large extent replaces itself–that produces offspring that are (over time) new and improved– that would not be a crappy design at all.
Bill Buckner
I once had a car where the exhaust system was so crappy that every time we used it to pull the caravan it would clog and leave the car with 20 instead of 120 PS. The fact that I can’t engineer a better car doesn’t mean the car wasn’t shit.
I’m pretty sure folx who HAD appropriate responses were edited out (see Expelled). Oh, and it took me until middle school to figure out these idiots were actually serious.
Wait a minute, why is Comfort posting this question in the first place? Didn’t he already destroy atheism years ago? Seems like his latest argument slipped on a banana peel.
Comfort, Ham, and Hovind are all trying to use the same arguments against atheism/evolution for many years. Easy to get confused as to the latest idiocy by them.
Their deity/designer still doesn’t exist, and abiogenesis and evolution is how life came about.
That is, until they show hard physical evidence for the “pooferies”, where new species come into existence. I’m not expecting said evidence in my lifetime.
Bill Buckner: I think it’s more that the flaws that the human body does have are often glaringly obvious — like the blind spot in the eye, or the ability to accidentally inhale food, or the narrow pelvis that requires babies’ skulls to be collapsible, or the inability to regenerate teeth, or a tendency for our joints and teeth to wear out before the rest of us does, or any of a hundred other awkward half-baked features that came about as a result of evolutionary compromise.
If creationists expect us to accept a designer, we’re well justified to ask why he half-assed some pretty basic tasks when he solved much more complex problems fine elsewhere.
Giliell, professional cynic -Ilk-
What an odd comment, that completely misses the boat. You don’t design cars.
If we encountered a car that wasn’t perfect, but exceeded the capabilities of the best designers we could muster–then we would not say that its imperfection made it a bad design. We’d likely say it was a spectacular design.
Yes we would, if those flaws were as evident as those of the human body (see Zeppelin’s examples – by no means the only ones – @21).
Gee, you miss the boat. Do you really believe there is an Intelligent Designer? If not, what is the purpose of your posts?
Nerd,
Holy shit , is my comment
Somehow ambiguous? Does it actually signal to you that I believe in an intelligent designer? Are you that fucking clueless?
The purpose of the comment was this: There are many arguments against an intelligent designer, the best one (apart from a complete lack of evidence) being the combination of the fossil record and the success of evolution. But a bad (very bad) argument against an intelligent designer is that the human body is poorly designed. That might be a good argument against an omnipotent omnibenevolent deity, but it’s an awful argument against a designer. It should be left to die on the side of the road.
In your mind, does pointing out a bad argument agains X mean you are a proponent of X? Really? Un-fucking-believable.
I’m sure Bill Buckner does not believe intelligent design applies to living creatures. He clearly qualified his comments about it with the word IF we were intelligently designed. We aren’t designed at all, so there is no way to have a logical discussion about the matter. Cells have had a very long period of time to iterate, humans only just discovered how to look at genomes. The fact that humans can’t build a self-replicating living robot isn’t surprising, or an argument in favor of intelligent design.
BB
Speak for yourself. I’ve built three of them and all I needed was one cell to start the process. We can design all manner of much better working parts, but our bodies will still break in the first place. There isn’t any evolutionary pressure for humans to grow better working parts. They generally last long enough to reproduce and raise young.
OP
It doesn’t destroy atheism, but is this really a stupid question? I am under the impression that the exact details of how non-living yet organic chemicals combined to form living and self replicating cells are unknown, though we have a good idea of the general pathway.
Bill Buckner: I think when the proposed designer is omnicient and omnipotent, as in the case of creationism, it’s perfectly fair to call our rickety fallible aching bodies “poorly designed”. The standard to which we would hold an omnicient, omnipotent designer being perfection.
(Also I didn’t think you were advocating for creationism based on your post, for what it’s worth :v )
@Bill Buckner #25:
Yet the proponents of intelligent design do believe that the designer was (or is) an omnipotent, omniscient and omnibenevolent deity. They’re just careful not to say it out loud in case a judge hears them.
Let’s not lose sight of the target.
Haha no, anyone giving an informed reply to his question simply ends up gutted during the editing process, until they sound like Comfort’s expectations of what they should sound like. i.e. dumbfounded rather than knowledgeable.
Here are some books that destroy theists. It makes ’em wanna run away, screaming to their mommies.
1. Origin of Species by Charles Darwin.
2. Principia by Isaac Newton.
3. The Origin of Continents and Oceans by Alfred Wegener.
Rich Woods @28:
And it’s still a crappy argument. Why should your (or my) ideas of poor design be the same as those of a designer, even if it’s omnieverything? You’d have to know the design goals.
I really don’t get this “if yer god is so great, why does it do X?” bollocks. It’s a mug’s game, and an unnecessary one. Sort of like “if it thinks we’re so special, why are we on this little speck in a vast cosmos full of black holes and shit?” The argument from human incredulity is a silly one, from either side.
Almost there. Every animal’s body is poorly designed. For instance, in most mammals the vagina is BENEATH THE ANUS. Potential infection city….Get out of human being special mode….
when arguing about how bad or good the design of humans are don’t forget that they have this magic answer that they will fall back on when pressed. It is the fall of A & E. the faults are all come after the fall for which there is no proofs either of course, the suffering and the nakedness hence we need salvation
” I can show you the way through jesus”
uncle frogy
unclefroggy #33
I knew it had something to do with bad television. Of course, all television is bad…at least, that’s my prejudice.
We need some “this is your brain on religion” ads.
Rob Grigjanis #31 wrote:
I don’t think we’re dealing with an argument from incredulity, which would be a more simple one part “I don’t understand why God did X, so there is no God.” The atheistic Argument from Scale points out the huge discrepancy between the claim that the universe was created so that God could love human beings (and/or vice versa) — and the fact that the vast time and distances involved don’t track with this goal. It’s a probabilistic argument, in that a small, young cosmos with earth at the center would be difficult to explain under atheism, but would be predicted given theism. That then reverses — and the atheist has a better explanation for the unexpected disparity in scale.
By the same token, the Argument from Bad Design isn’t just that a designer wouldn’t have designed the back or whatever the way it is; it also includes why the less than optimal features make sense given multiple steps in evolution.
@Tethys #26
I agree that the question of DNA origin is interesting. I don’t see offhand how the answer could be verified, given that those chemicals aren’t preserved in the fossil record.
This paper looks interesting. Quote from the introduction: “We are reasonably sure now that DNA and DNA replication mechanisms appeared late in early life history, and that DNA originated from RNA in an RNA/protein world.” It goes on to speculate that the advantages of DNA would have provided such an advantage that RNA based forms would have been out-competed. (Viruses excluded?)
Of course, that pushes the question to the origin of RNA. Or proteins, or peptides …
Sastra @36:
You’ve just illustrated the argument from incredulity. What do you think “the fact that the vast time and distances involved don’t track with this goal” means? How do you know they don’t “track”, whatever that means?
The answer to theist nonsense is education, not stupid little gotchas, and that’s a long hard road.
Oh, that question again? I’ve already seen that tactic before, in a youtube video. I only saw it because an atheist on youtube I followed did some videos debunking it :P
That was just about three years ago. I did my own debunking too. And I suspect such arguments were debunked by others even longer before that.
This Ray Comfort guy really needs to keep up.
@Rob Grigjanis #31:
It is certainly true that it is quite beyond me to understand what might be the collective design goals of impacted wisdom teeth, a vaginal fistula, lower back pain or age-related macular degeneration, let alone a retinal blind spot or thalassemia. But then I never claimed to be omniscient, nor did I put people on earth who claim that I am omniscient. The non-design argument does work against the design argument, because prior plausibility suggests that intelligent design is not a valid hypothesis.
You mention education in a later post. Demonstrating the invalidity of such poor hypotheses forms part of that education. What’s the practical alternative? Never attempt to say anything when someone blindly says “Goddidit!”?
@38, Rob Grigjanis
It isn’t a mere argument from incredulity. It’s a proper argument based on evidence that contradicts the predictions of a hypothesis.
Remember the 6 day creation myth? The writers of that had a better grasp of what their hypothesis predicted than you do. That prediction was falsified. That counts for something.
As for vast space, that’s not an argument from incredulity either. It’s an argument from falsified cosmology. Don’t forget, the old christian cosmology was really small. Again, you’d see this makes sense if you were capable of using hypotheses to make predictions.
Or maybe you don’t know what their hypothesis is. Or you do know but…you have some issue that compels you to “forget” their hypothesis. I don’t know. I think you are obsessed with the Cartesian Demon version of god.
Their hypothesis is that there is a being that has a specific character and great power.
Which is why we can use arguments like: “if god is loving and powerful, why doesn’t he stop cancer from killing people?”
A
thought-provoking question is to ask an atheist whether they think the brain is intelligently designed.Also I love how this thread shows atheists can be just as good at coming up with Bible fan theories as the Bible beaters. Maybe I should share some of my own afterlife headcanon.
Why is Comfort so obsessed with converting/challenging atheists? It seems that he would be better off reaching out to people who are neutral towards religion rather than people who have made up their minds that there is no god.
gak, the brain is so obviously not designed! compare it to all the computers we so carefully design, the brain is a glop of a soup with bazillions of random connections and weird chemical conconctions floating around. It’s a random assembly that happens to function. no designer needed other than the requirement “function, or bye bye” Trial by error resulted in this weird assembly. case closed.
was that arrogant enough for the Comforter?
Rich Woods @40:
You’re seriously suggesting that any argument against ID “works” because ID is probably not valid? Bloody ‘ell.
Bad design doesn’t demonstrate anything, but how about pointing out that there are no testable hypotheses in ID?
Brian Pansky @41:
Hilarious. I’ve seen no evidence that you have the faintest idea what a proper argument is.
I give you full marks for sheer gall, if nothing else. All I’ve seen of your “capability” is parroting Richard Carrier’s crappy arguments without understanding them.
Well, it appears Ray Comfort’s questioon can at least get atheists at each others’ throats!
If a hypothetical ID proponent said no more than “The universe/the human body was intelligently designed”, then you’re right, there would be no testable consequences of that claim – if only because the designer may have intelligently intended to conceal their own existence. But real cdesign proponentsists don’t do that – they go on and on and on and on about the marvels of the eye, the brain, the heart, the functional fit of the hand and the banana… so at least implicitly, they claim that the human body is well-suited to fulfill the functions of survival and happiness. Pointing out that in sepcific respects, that is not the case, is thus a perfectly valid response. Of course it’s not a sufficient response to creationism – but no-one is arguing that it is.
KG @47:
Comfort, GEO, nuclear power, movies, the price of tea…it rarely takes much, does it?
Rob Grigjanius #38 wrote:
I don’t think so. An argument from incredulity is a pure appeal to ignorance. The Argument from Scale is a probabilistic argument which draws attention to a discrepancy between a universe created by God specifically for humans … and a universe in which humans play a marginal role. It’s similar to the Argument from Evil: the world does not look like one would reasonably expect it to look if it were watched over by a loving, benevolent, all-powerful God. Neither one is a cheap ‘gotcha.’
It’s not that atheists are saying we can’t imagine a way to reconcile the two. It’s that reconciling the two involves a lot of strained extra assumptions. Again, IF the universe was very small, very young, and earth was at its center, this would certainly count in favor of theism. But given a theism which claims that the universe is a stage for human drama, what would be the reason the stage is instead so disproportionately large?
At some point or other, most arguments bring in some surprising fact, or contradiction, or lack, or disparity. That in itself doesn’t make them Arguments from Incredulity. The Argument from Poor Design, the Argument from Scale, and the Argument from Evil all go on to address the common rebuttals. Arguments from Incredulity tend to just repeat themselves — or advance into God of the Gaps.
Does Ray Comfort believe that the mind of his (allegedly existing) god is intelligently designed ? If not, why should this being be able to reason intelligently ?
Sastra @50:
Show me the probabilistic argument. Dividing the volume (space or spacetime) occupied by humans by the volume of the observable universe and saying “gosh, that’s a small number!” isn’t it. Show me something that doesn’t reduce to “I find it hard to believe that…”.
There’s a huge discrepancy between the value of the vacuum energy from quantum field theory, and the value of the cosmological constant. It arises from the inadequacy of our theories in certain domains; in other words, our ignorance. So beware apparent discrepancies, and your own notions of what “marginal”, or “one would reasonably expect”, or “disproportionately”, or “surprising” mean.