Three Wise Fools

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Fresh off his earthshaking debunking of the whole of evolutionary biology with his classic “banana” and “coke can” arguments, Ray Comfort has a compelling new argument against atheism: the electricity argument. It’s a little story about “three wise fools” who are exposed to electricity for the first time, and who refuse to believe in this amazing invisible force, and refuse even to test it. Obviously, the “wise fools” are supposed to be modern scientists, and the invisible force they refuse to acknowledge is a god. Comfort tells the tale to make the scientists look like obstinate idiots who refuse to look at the evidence in the natural world and instead make rabbinical arguments about authorities and texts and…hey, wait a minute! Who’s being parodied here?

Anyway, his parable is a patent lie, and he completely misrepresented the events in the encounter. I know. I was there. The full and accurate transcript of the actual test follows.

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I’m sure we can think of better TV to convince people there is no god

While I might wish that this satire were true, it has a few problems.

SEATTLE–Members of The Discovery Institute, a Seattle based think tank, publicly rescinded their demands that intelligent design be taught in public schools after watching an Ultimate Fighting “best knockouts” compilation video Monday night. The video, which depicted wild men viciously attacking one another before a crowd of bloodthirsty spectators, provided “the smoking gun ” that man is descended from apes.

“It is with great regret that we abandon our quest to have the theory of intelligent design taught in public schools,” said Bruce Chapman, president of the Discovery Institute. “We are now convinced that Charles Darwin was right and we are just a bunch of hairless apes. We came to this conclusion after watching some Ultimate Fighting. Those men are subhuman brutes. The violence was unremitting. What’s worse, we thought it was extremely entertaining, which doesn’t bode well for us, either.”

Verisimilitude is lost because:

  • There’s no way the members of the Discovery Institute would be sufficiently self-aware or cognizant of the evidence that they would back off. If one of those fighters had smacked them hard in the nose, they wouldn’t have noticed.

  • Brutish thugs pounding on one another for an audience is more a human trait than an ape trait, I’m afraid. It sets us apart, which nominally fits with DI biases — the DI might just concede that it tells them the designer is a vicious bastard, but that’s about it.

  • Most of those DI guys are Christians. They’re familiar with the Old Testament. Evidence that the Designer is a vicious bastard would just confirm his identity with the Christian god.

Personally, the few times I’ve seen a couple of minutes of American Idol, I’ve almost been convinced that there is a Satan.

Roy Zimmerman keeps writing those songs

As a fan of Roy Zimmerman — I’ve mentioned his Creation Science 101 before, among other lovely songs about the modern world — I have two revelations for you. If you’re a guitar player, he has released a short clip that is a tutorial on how to play Creation Science 101. There are fingerings and keys and chords and things that lost me. If you aren’t a guitar player (like me!) you can still enjoy the wisecracks.

Secondly, he has a new YouTube video titled “Ted Haggard is Completely Heterosexual”. Watch out, it’s a little bit risque — he rhymes “schism” with … well, it’s obvious from the subject matter, isn’t it?