Sunday, May 13, 2007

Ray Comfort and Kirk Cameron are Liars

Well, I’ve watched a pretty good deal of the “debate” that ABC hosted in which Ray Comfort and Kirk Cameron claimed they would present scientific evidence for God and the Rational Response Squad would refute their claims.

I couldn’t finish because it was just that awful. In the introduction, the pair claimed that they would prove God’s existence without invoking the Bible.

Ray’s first “proof” was the argument from ignorancedesign in which he says paintings need painters, buildings need builders, creations needs creators. Creator = God. His second was that we have the 10 commandments and that everyone is a thieving, lying adultering person who’s going straight to Hell. His third was that God gave us a conscience, so we know he must exist.

This should have been astoundingly easy to counter for the RSS, but they managed to screw it up. Perhaps part of the reason was that Ray and Kirk both lied through their teeth and the RSS wasn’t really prepared for it.

Ray had claimed that he was not going to invoke the bible, yet he did. Repeatedly. The RSS seemed so hung up on this that it threw the rest of their rebuttal into disarray. So much so that they bungled the refutation of Ray’s first, horribly ignorant claim in which he claimed creation needs a creator

What they should have pointed out is that every time we see something like a painting or a building, we know it has been made by a painter or a builder respectively because we've witnessed painters and builders doing precisely that. Thus, we can correlate the two with a good amount of certainty. But since we've never witnessed a mythical builder putting together universes, no correlation can be honestly made.

Additionally, every time we see these things assembled, it's done by a human. Thus, if we're truly going to follow the logic through, we must conclude that the universe was created by a human. Not God.

This is ridiculous and if we can find things that can be created without the help of such things, then the entire argument (everything needing a creator, whether human or magical), falls apart. Thus, we consider something similar to a building. Buildings are used for shelter. In ancient times, caves were used for shelter. But did the cave have to have a designer? Absolutely not. We know fully well that they are typically carved out by flowing water. Thus, the argument that things require a designer crumbles. We can only infer a designer when we have witnessed the creation of such objects in action.

The RSS hinted at this but it was very confused in the stating. They did rightly call him out for the blatant lie that he would not cite the bible however.

Kirk Cameron is a tremendous liar as well. He claimed to have done extensive research into evolution, and that his research had led him to conclude that evolution was false.

So how does he define evolution? Well, in his bizarre land, it starts off with an explosion…

Wait. Wha?

I think he’s trying to describe the Big Bang. But he even got that wrong. It wasn’t an explosion. It is an expansion. He also said that there’s no such thing as a transitionary fossil. Oh but there are! He then proceeded to say that a transitionary fossil would be a horrible chimera of half crocodile, half duck, or a half frog, half bull. Little does he know (I could end the sentence there) that this would entirely disprove evolution.

So here we have Kirk presenting a disfigured strawman. Either he honestly believes it’s all true, in which case he’s lying about his extensive research, or he’s lying to the audience about what evolution actually states. I wonder which it is…

One of the questions the moderator asked Ray and Kirk later, was if faith was a projection of culture, noting that certain religions are most prevalent in certain cultures. Apparently Ray isn’t bright enough to understand the question because he spent several minutes dodging it, saying no matter where he went in the world, he would feel God’s presence.

Entirely missed the point of the question and pretended that Christianity was the only religion on the planet. Apparently his research is more than a little lacking as well. He also said, “If you hear the gospel and call upon the name of God, He will reveal himself to you. You’ve got God’s promise.”

Funny. I know many, many atheists who have heard the gospel, called upon the name of God, and gotten nothing but a bunch of proverbial chirping crickets. Many of the atheists I know point out that they gave up on Christianity because they were tired of talking to themselves.

Kirk claimed to have gotten an answer when he tried this, but as the RSS pointed out, this is anecdotal evidence, and cannot be reproduced or tested in any way. Ray and Kirk claimed to bring scientific evidence, yet brought logical fallacies and personal testimonies; neither of which constitute science.

Which brings me back to the first point: Ray claimed that being a liar proved that there was a God and you needed him. If this is true, and considering his bald faced lies, who’s the one that really lacking morals here? Did God forget to install his conscience?

On a side note, one of the advertisements between the segments was for Nicoderm in which one of the people in the commercial said they “needed something bigger”. I suspect that, in this case, they didn’t turn to God.