Young Australian Skeptics

F*** bananas that’s a long chapter title. Part one of this write up is here, part two is here…welcome to part three!

“A group of self-​​appointed art experts stood around a beautiful painting. They admired each brush stroke with its vibrant colors and sheer brilliance. The painting was utterly unique in style. It was a masterpiece.

“One of the experts suddenly noticed a very small signature at the bottom of the painting. He leaned forward to take a closer look, stood back, and with utter disdain said the artist’s name and used the “n” word to describe him. […] Immediately they took out a small knife and carefully scraped off the artist’s name until it was no longer visible. They, in effect, tried to deny the painter’s very existence — just as some surrounded by this astounding creation every day try to deny its Creator.“

So begins the second chapter of drivel in Ray Comfort’s book, and believe me when I say you can expect more of the same ol’ crap. Right from the opening atheists are compared to racist bigots — hardly a smart way to address those who are supposedly his target audience — and we are told that the existence of a creator is signalled to us as clearly as a signature on a painting. Of course, simply asserting it doesn’t make it so — something Ray would do well to learn — and so we are left to ponder just what the hell this signpost to god’s existence actually is. Perhaps it is supposed to be the (apparently) god-​​given conscience, though if so one has to wonder why he waits for a full page to bother even mentioning it.

As an aside — Ray tries to make the case for a benevolent god at the start of this chapter, saying

“Our Creator didn’t leave us sitting on a barren rock with only the barest of essentials we need for survival. In creation, we see the beautiful, the sublime, the amazing. We have herbs for food and medicine. We find peace in the soothing sound of a brook and laughter in the antics of a playful puppy. We sit in awe of majestic mountains and glistening stars. We have the ability to do more than hunt and gather food — the human mind has discovered and invented some incredible things.“

First off, bleagh — Ray, it sounds like you graduated from the creative writing program at Sickly Sweet Cliche University. Second, I call shenanigans on your cherry picking of the good things in the world. If there is a creator, he has left us on a mostly barren or aqueous rock, hurtling around a giant nuclear explosion at twenty-​​nine thousand metres a second, surrounded by an empty nothingness punctuated only occasionally by unpredicatably sized bits of rock and gas, in universe almost entirely inhospitable to us without major human intervention. Even on our own planet we are restricted — most of the surface being covered with water, while we are stranded without gills on the land. Vast stretches of land are barren deserts of rock, sand or ice. We may be able to sit in awe of majestic mountains, but if we try to climb them we put ourselves in great danger. If there is a creator, he has imprisoned us in the tiniest fraction of a fraction of the universe and even that is trying to kill us. Moreover, if he gave us the ability to reason in the first place he’d have to be pretty pissed off at you for the ridicule and ignorance you show for the discoveries and inventions of the human race.

The main drive of the chapter, however, is yet another step toward the ridiculous and insulting: Atheists want to be free from all moral responsibility, to be able to lie, cheat, steal and kill with impunity. The reason we don’t is because deep down our conscience tells us not to, and our conscience could only have been given to us by god.

The short response to that assertion: Bullshit.

The longer response is as follows — first off, no, atheists do not want to be free from all moral responsibility. The vast majority of irreligious atheists I have encountered (and I would wager, probably the vast majority of atheists) adhere to a humanist moral code — rather than requiring the constant threat of eternal punishment to do good, they hold themselves to a high moral standard on the basis of empathy and respect for other people. Certainly the threat of punishment by the social collective is also ever present, but such threats are not the reason atheists refrain from doing harm. Indeed, if eternal punishment is insufficient to prevent Christians from committing atrocities (and they have), how can temporary punishment possibly prevent atheists from so little as shoplifting? When an atheist does good, he does it out of a sense of responsibility to do good, and not out of fear of eternal retribution. When an atheist does bad, most of the time it is for exactly the same reasons as a Christian.

His reasoning (if you call it that) behind the assertion that god had to have granted us our conscience is even more of an exercise in faulty reasoning. Essentially, it boils down to, “Evolution couldn’t have produced a conscience, therefore god.” — a statement that is both factually incorrect and a false dilemma. First and foremost, even if evolution couldn’t explain the origins of the conscience, that doesn’t mean we can automatically assume ‘goddidit’ anymore than we can assume that the conscience is caused by invisible conscience gnomes that burrow into our brainstem and stop us doing naughty things. On top of that, Ray asks,

“Why would evolution create something that tells us that it’s wrong to lie, to steal, to kill, and to commit adultery?“

Of course, the very question is a little arse-​​backwards in so far as evolution is not some nebulous creature from beyond the void, purposefully guiding our existence. Once that is cleared up as a concept, the question becomes a lot more sensible — what selection pressures could cause an animal with a conscience to outperform an animal without a conscience? That’s a question with so many answers, even Ray could answer it…probably.

Finally, there is Ray’s non-​​answer to the charge by one commenter that both Jesus and the god of the old testament would fail Ray’s “good person test”. I’ll leave you with it, as there’s really no point in responding — rather than answering the charges, he simply feigns shock and digust, before turning the question back on the person who asked it unanswered:

“Wow. It amazes me that anyone would dare point to Jesus Christ in moral judgment. You had better have clean hands and a pure heart before you point a finger at the Son of God. I can’t think of an appropriate metaphor. It’s like a flea shouting abuse at a massive elephant, as the flea stands under the shadow of the elephants foot. Nope. That doesn’t cut it. It’s like a heinous criminal, who is so morally corrupt he makes Hitler seem like a Boy Scout, yelling obscenities at a good judge. Nope. That doesn’t cut it.

Jesus never sinned once, in thought, word, or deed. He never lied, stole, hated, lusted, coveted, murdered, or dishonered his parents.

Let’s now turn the mirror back to you.“

Tags: book, Ray Comfort, Richard Hughes

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 22nd, 2009 at 11:51 am and is filed under Atheist, Religion, Richard Hughes, Skeptic. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.