Welcome the first ever Crazy Creationist of the Month. This month, trailing off in second place, you guessed it, is Ray Comfort, for his two week series of blog posts, "Seven of the most important questions you will ever ask."
The premise is that everyone is going to die eventually, and there are a few questions that will define your life and give you meaning before you, too, eventually die. Let's take a look at the first one.
How do I know God exists?
First off, it's a loaded question; it assumes God exists already. However, the question of "Does God exist, and if so how will I know," is important, especially if there is an afterlife and God controls what happens to our "souls" after we die.
So how does Comfort answer?
It’s amazing how many people think that God’s existence is a matter of "faith." They think that we choose to accept that an invisible God exists, without any real evidence for His existence. We just "believe."
Correct, your decision to believe in any god is a personal choice, and can't be justified with logic or statistics. There are many logical proofs for the existence of God, and they've all been thoroughly refuted and disproved a long time ago. The same goes for any alleged disproof of God, it can't be disproved for sure. So which fallacious proof does Comfort offer?
Could you believe that a soldier’s barracks had no builder? Obviously someone put it together, because buildings don’t happen by themselves. The fact that the building exists is positive proof that there was a builder. Who could believe that a building—with its doors, windows, heating, air conditioning, carpet, electricity, etc., happened by accident, made from nothing?
Its design adds to evidence of a designer.
Ray Comfort and former star of Growing Pains Kirk Cameron went on Nightline a few years ago under the claim that they could prove that God exists without the use of faith or the Bible. Of course they didn't do it, but the argument they gave before resorting to the Bible was, "Creation is 100% scientific proof there was a creator, you can't have creation without a creator." Obviously it was all just a publicity stunt, and they clearly knew that their argument was flawed because they had been spouting it for years before that.
There are a number of fallacies in this claim, first among them being that creation proves a creator. Creation implies a creator, but that assumes creation; existence doesn't imply anything. On that same note, if everything had to be created, who created God? Comfort has already answered this by saying that God is eternal, but then why not cut out the middle-man and say all matter and energy in the universe is eternal, which evidence indicates it may be. If anything, his argument stands against existence for God, because if given the choice of the universe being eternal and the universe being created by something else that's eternal, Occam's Razor allows us to assume that the universe is eternal. But that's making assumptions as well.
The real argument Comfort is giving here is a combination of straw man fallacy and false dichotomy. The straw man is that the atheist believes that nothing created everything, a mockery of Big Bang cosmology. However, the Big Bang Theory states that there was a singularity: consider that all matter is mostly empty space within atoms, and that protons and neutrons themselves are mostly empty, then consider that matter can be converted to energy following the equation E=MC^2. Now consider compressing all matter to a plasma-like state so dense that nothing exists outside of it, not even time. This is the singularity, and it didn't explode like the word "bang" suggests, it wasn't floating around for a while until something happened to it because there was no time or existence before it. There was a rapid expansion of space-time that still continues to this day (note that the universe is expanding). This isn't idle speculation either, it's the most comprehensive explanation for all the observed phenomena in the cosmos. The false dichotomy is that Comfort implies that by attacking Big Bang cosmology, it would give credit to his argument by default. It doesn't, it's a dishonest and childish attack on what he doesn't understand and refuses to understand.
Besides, none of this goes any distance to prove the God of the Bible, which is what he's really lobbying for.
But there is more. The evidence shows that this earth upon which we live was intended for our use. We have lighting during the day so that we can see what we are doing. The sea breeze keeps the air fresh and cool, and the warmth of a massive ball of fire in the sky keeps us warm and dry. Cows give us succulent meat to eat and leather to wear. They chew grass and give us milk, and from the milk we get cream, cheese, butter, yoghurt, and ice cream. Sheep give us mouth-watering meat to eat, and wool from their back gives us warm sweaters, and supplies carpet for our comfort. Chickens lay eggs for us to scramble, and sacrificially provide finger-lickin’ meat on our plates.
Not true again, it makes more sense that life adapted to conditions on earth, the parts of it that are easy enough to adapt to, anyway. If things were different, and we lived on Venus, Comfort would just claim that Venus was designed for life. It's all a meaningless tautology.
Comfort has failed to prove that God exists. Again. Every question after this one is completely inconsequential, since they depend on the first question. That's all for the best, since they're pretty unimportant questions. What does God have that I need, What is God like, How do I approach him to get the gift [of eternal life], all the answers given assume that God exists, and that He exists exactly as the Bible describes Him. What irritates me is that Comfort is asserting as fact things he doesn't know, and can't know, and does it as a career. Don't mistake Comfort's seven questions for important, it's just a dishonest attempt to proselytize under the guise of thoughtful reflection.
Stay tuned for the winner of February's Crazy Creationist of the Month. (I'll give you a hint, he thinks Adam and Eve rode dinosaurs as beasts of burden.)
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