Let me begin by saying that I’m a big fan of Ray Comfort’s 2011 pro-life movie, 180, which packed a powerful punch, but also made you think. The hypothetical question which Comfort posed to the college students he interviewed was simple but stunningly effective, in exposing the intellectual inconsistency of the pro-choice position.
Last night, I viewed Ray Comfort’s latest movie, The Atheist Delusion, which is now available on Youtube. Professor Jerry Coyne has already critiqued some of Ray Comfort’s anti-evolutionary arguments – especially the ones about the chicken and the egg, the origin of the eye, and the origin of the heart and circulatory system (see here: his segment starts at 46:45 and runs till 56:30). I will be saying more below about Comfort’s two main arguments for God (relating to the origin of the universe and the origin of DNA), which Coyne did not address.
But the aim of Comfort’s movie is not merely to convince people that God exists. Ray Comfort is, and always will be, a missionary, and in the latter half of the movie, he tries to convert the people he interviews to Christianity. Not all Christians agree with his theology, however, and in this post, I’d like to ask him one question which I think will blow his apologetic to smithereens. But before I do that, I’d like to describe Comfort’s interviewing technique.
Ray Comfort’s method of interrogating his subjects
Ray Comfort’s standard method of interrogating the people he interviews goes like this:
Do you think you’re a good person?
(Most people, rather foolishly in my opinion, answer yes. The fact is that we’re a mix of both good and bad.)
Have you ever lied, stolen, lusted or blasphemed?
(After some hemming and hawing, most people admit that they have, once Comfort points out that illegally downloading music is stealing, and that taking God’s name casually – even saying “OMG” – is blasphemy.)
What do you call a person who lies, steals, lusts and blasphemes?
(The answer Ray Comfort obviously wants to hear is: a liar, a thief, a fornicator and a blasphemer. But that’s not true. Describing a person who has lied only a few times in her life as a liar is silly: a liar is someone who habitually lies. Also, someone who used to lie habitually but who no longer does so is an ex-liar, not a liar. The same logic applies for the other vices.)
Come on, admit it: you have a vested interest in denying the existence of God, because it gives you an opportunity to do the things you do, like fornicating and viewing pornography, without feeling guilty. Isn’t that right?
(This one usually makes the young guys squirm, as most of them, sadly, are into online porn, nowadays. But the logic of the argument is weak: even if atheism lets you off the hook for doing these things – and many feminist atheists would argue otherwise – affirming the existence of a personal God doesn’t entail that you are not allowed to do these things. The Kama Sutra, after all, was written by Hindus, who are theists.)
How do you think God reacts to your lying, stealing, lust and blasphemy?
(Most people say: He sees that I’ve done these things, but He sees my good points, too. Comfort usually responds by pointing out that a judge wouldn’t be too impressed with a defendant accused of robbing a bank, who argued: “Your Honor, look at all the banks I could have robbed, but didn’t rob. I’m good most of the time.” On the contrary, the judge would still send the man to jail for robbing just one bank. Since God is all-just, He won’t be impressed with that kind of excuse, either. But what Comfort omits to mention is that the penalty for robbing a bank is finite: at most, his argument shows that sinners pay some penalty after death.)
Here’s what the Bible says on the sins of lying, stealing, lust and blasphemy. These sins make God angry.
(At this point, many of Comfort’s interviewees start to look very uncomfortable. However, Comfort’s argument assumes that the Bible accurately reports God’s feelings, which begs the question. It still has to be shown that the Creator is the God of the Bible. Comfort hasn’t established that. How would he answer a Deist, for instance?)
The Bible also says that thinking of murder and adultery is just as bad as committing murder and adultery.
(Actually, the Bible says no such thing. There is a moral difference between:
(a) thinking of X;
(b) momentarily enjoying the thought of doing X, without actually intending to do X; and
(c) seriously intending to do X, if given the opportunity.
It makes sense to argue that seriously intending to do X, if given the opportunity, is just as bad as actually doing X, and I presume that’s what Jesus meant in Matthew 5:28: “But I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman with lustful intent has already committed adultery with her in his heart” (ESV). However, cases (a) and (b) are different, although (b) may be morally wrong, too.)
Thinking of murder and adultery really means you would do those deeds, if you had the chance.
(That doesn’t follow at all. See above.)
So, if God judges you by the Ten Commandments on Judgment Day, do you think you’d be innocent or guilty?
(At this stage, most of Ray Comfort’s interviewees acknowledge that they’d be guilty. But hang on. We still haven’t established that the Ten Commandments are God’s rules. There’s a gap in the logic here.)
So, do you think you’d go to Heaven or Hell?
(By now, most of the people whom Comfort interviews are sheepishly admitting that they’d go to Hell.
However, Comfort’s argument assumes there’s no intermediate purifying state, which is Scripturally doubtful – see also here.
Also, if Hell is God’s prison, then why does it follow from the fact that I have lied once that I should stay in God’s prison forever? Show me the judge who would lock up a liar forever.)
There’s only one way out of the strife you’re in. There is no other name under Heaven by which you can be saved but that of Jesus. You cannot earn eternal life from God. Other religions try to do that, but it’s in vain. These religions cannot get you out of God’s jail, Hell. God is a just judge. We are sinners who have violated God’s commands. We’re headed for Hell, which is God’s prison without parole. But Jesus stepped in and paid for our crime. He paid the penalty. So God can legally grant you the gift of everlasting life. What you have to do, to have your case dismissed and walk out of God’s court and receive the gift of everlasting life, is: repent of your sins and trust in Jesus Christ alone. God will forgive you instantly. God’s grace is a free gift.
(Non sequiturs galore here. Ray Comfort seems to have a background theory of God’s justice that He hasn’t told his interviewees about. He still hasn’t explained why we have to stay in God’s jail forever, even if we tell only a single lie in our lives. He tells us that only Jesus can pay the penalty for sin, but fails to explain why there has to be a penalty in the first place. Why can’t God just commute it, if He is all-powerful and all-merciful? Also, it doesn’t follow from the fact that I can’t earn Heaven that I cannot pay the price to get out of Hell. Comfort is assuming that those are the only two alternatives. What about some sort of lesser, natural state of happiness without the vision of God – i.e. Limbo? Could I earn that? Comfort doesn’t say.
It would help here if Comfort were able to point to independent evidence that Christianity is true – e.g. evidence for the Resurrection. But in that case, he needs to present this evidence first, before accusing his interviewees of being unregenerate sinners. He also needs to show that his own interpretation of the Bible is the correct one.)
Despite these gaping holes in Comfort’s argument, his sincerity is obvious and touching, and many people whom he interviews welcome Jesus into their heart. And as I’m a Christian myself, I refuse to criticize them for doing that. Perhaps these people intuitively recognize that there is something deeply wrong with their lives, which only Christianity can set right.
But there’s one thing about Ray Comfort’s theology which really troubles me. And it’s not Hell, or the Penal Substitution theory. It’s something far more fundamental than that.
And now for the BIG QUESTION I’d like to ask Ray Comfort…
So here’s my big question for Ray:
Do you ever lie, steal, lust and blaspheme, and if so, doesn’t that make you worthy of Hell, too? In fact, since you have lied, stolen, lusted and blasphemed after encountering Jesus, doesn’t that make you even worse than the people you interview, since they did these things before they had met and heard about Jesus? So if you sin, aren’t you damned, too? And if so, doesn’t that make you hoist by your own petard?
Ray, I’m a Catholic. I won’t say I’m a good one; I know I’m not. But I have tried to research what you believe, and I have to say it doesn’t add up. I’d like to quote a few short excerpts from your non-copyright online publication, Sixty-six common questions and objections to the Christian Faith. (Actually, it’s 67.) First, allow me to quote from question 15. (Bolding in the answers below is mine.)
15. “Do Christians sin?”
“The great foundational truth respecting the believer in relationship to his sins is the fact that his salvation comprehends the forgiveness of all his trespasses past, present and future so far as condemnation is concerned (see Romans 8:1, Colossians 2:13; John 3:18; John 5:24). Since Christ has vicariously borne all sin and since the believer’s standing in Christ is complete, he is perfected forever in Christ. When a believer sins, he is subjected to chastisement from the Father, but never to condemnation with the world (see 1 Corinthians 11:31,32). By confession the Christian is forgiven and restored to fellowship (see 1 John 1:9). It needs to be remembered that were it not for Christ’s finished work on the Cross and His present intercession in Heaven, the least sin would result in his banishment from God’s presence and eternal ruin.” (Unger’s Bible Dictionary, Moody Press, p. 377).
To be fair, you do acknowledge that genuine repentance is necessary for salvation, and you draw a distinction between true and false conversion. But here, you insist that if someone genuinely repents and turns to Christ, his sins subsequent to repentance won’t prevent him from being saved: he will be chastised but not condemned. What kind of justice is this? “Your Honor, I’m a liar, but at least I admit it. And I know you let me out of jail free, once before, when I was summoned before this court, but now, after backsliding, I’m asking you to let me out once again. Please forgive me.” Is that a good reason to get out of Hell, which you describe as God’s jail? I ask again: if you sin, after encountering Christ, and if the just penalty for even “the least sin” is “eternal ruin,” what good reason do you have to think that God will forgive you? And why would forgiveness of the backsliding Christian be compatible with God’s justice in this case, while forgiveness of an atheist who hasn’t heard the call of Christ would not?
And now, here’s a quote from question 19 of your publication:
19. “Are you saying that Christians are better than non-Christians?”
The Christian is no better than a non-Christian, but he is infinitely better off. It is like two men on a plane. One is wearing a parachute and the other is not. One is not better than the other, but the man with the parachute on is certainly better off than the man who is not wearing a parachute. The difference will be seen when they jump. Jesus warned that if we “jump” into death without Him, we would perish.
Our great problem is a law that is even harsher than the law of gravity. It is the Law of an infinitely holy and just Creator. The Scriptures warn us, “It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the Living God.” They tell us that we are His enemy.
Ray, I submit that the parachute analogy won’t help you here. For on your analogy, the person who sins after repenting and turning to Christ is like a man who receives a parachute, and then throws it away. Should such a man get a second parachute? If I were the pilot, I certainly wouldn’t give him one.
But there’s more. You actually admit that Christians are no better than non-Christians. So you, a Christian, are no better than the lying, thieving, fornicating blasphemers whom you try to shame into repentance. And yet you believe that if you were to be struck by lightning tonight, you’d be saved, while they’d be damned. I ask: where’s the justice in that?
More to the point: if I am a lying, thieving, fornicating blasphemer, then why should I convert to a religion which, according to you, won’t make me any better? Doesn’t that negate the whole purpose of life, which is to become good? And didn’t Jesus command us to be perfect?
Finally, I’d like to quote from question 24 of your publication:
24. “Do you sin, as a Christian?”
If a Christian sins, it is against his will. He falls rather than dives into sin. He resists rather than embraces it. Any dead fish can float down stream. It takes a live one to swim against the flow.
Ray, I put it to you that your logic is specious. It is impossible to sin against your will. Sin, by definition, is a voluntary act. No choice, no sin. “I lied, I stole, I fornicated and I blasphemed, but it was against my will.” Oh, really? Tell that to the Marines: maybe they’ll believe you.
By the way, how do you respond to Professor Jerry Coyne, who accuses you of lying when you pose the chicken-and-egg question and other evolutionary conundrums to your interviewees, despite having had the answers pointed out to you previously by scientists?
I’ll leave it to my readers to decide whether Ray Comfort has a leg to stand on, after my cross-examination. And now, I’d like to address his two main scientific arguments.
Ray Comfort’s top two arguments for God
In his move, The Atheist Delusion, Ray Comfort deploys two key arguments to demolish atheism. He also attacks evolution, but his anti-evolutionary arguments are of secondary importance.
So what is Comfort’s first argument? In a nutshell: an atheist is someone who believes that nothing created everything, which is absurd. But that’s not what the vast majority of atheists believe. Lawrence Krauss and Richard Dawkins might subscribe to that view, but the more common view is that the universe arose as a quantum fluctuation of the vacuum. A vacuum is not nothing: it still has measurable properties. It’s simply the ground state of a quantum field. Many (though by no means all) scientists also believe our universe is contained in a larger multiverse.
Now, I have to acknowledge that the thought of a quantum vacuum giving rise to spiral galaxies, salamanders and Shakespeare does seem rather mind-boggling. But Dawkins would say that’s an argument from incredulity, and you need something better than a feeling of incredulity if you want to debunk atheism. Comfort could have said a lot more here about the fine-tuning argument, but unfortunately, he alludes to it only in passing.
Comfort’s second argument is based on the analogy between DNA and a book: DNA is the book of life. Now I could object that much of the DNA in our cells is junk, as Professor Larry Moran has convincingly argued, but I shall refrain from doing so, because the important point is that quite a lot of the DNA “book” (at least 10%) actually has a function, and that’s the part I’m concerned with. In any case, Moran’s view is not shared by all biologists, and even Professor Moran would agree that there are some species of organisms whose DNA is virtually junk-free.
The argument Comfort puts forward is a simple but powerful one: if you don’t believe a book could make itself, how much more illogical is it to believe that DNA, the book of life, could make itself. Just as a book requires a maker, so too, the instruction book of life, which surpasses our understanding, is evidence of an Intelligent Designer.
Comfort’s question to his interviewees is a very cleverly framed one – he is an excellent communicator – but it rests on several false assumptions.
I’d like to respond to Comfort’s argument by quoting from my recent review of Dr. Douglas Axe’s book, Undeniable (HarperOne, 2016). In his book, Dr. Axe frequently likens life to alphabet soup – which I regard as a very flawed analogy, for reasons I point out in my review:
Alphabet blocks illustrate this point perfectly. Let’s suppose you had a large box of alphabet blocks – say, about 1,000 of them. It would be pretty easy to make something useful with them, if you wanted to: a large square made of blocks could serve as a playpen for a baby, while a stack of blocks could support a tray or a pot plant. But only a very, very tiny fraction of all the possible arrangements of blocks in a stack (or a square) would spell out a meaningful message. Most of the possible arrangements of alphabetic blocks in a stack don’t spell out anything at all. That tells us something: the number of ways in which parts can be arranged to perform a useful function is much, much larger than the number of ways in which letters can be arranged in order to convey a meaning. In other words, the emergence of a system of parts that can perform a function is a much more likely event than the emergence of a sequence that can convey a message. The same point applies to the Chinese characters which Dr. Axe discusses on pages 210-214 of his book: they have a meaning, which is intelligible to anyone who can read Chinese, but they don’t actually do anything, so they cannot be said to perform a function. The concepts of meaning and function are quite different, for reasons I shall now explain.
In order for an accidentally generated string of letters to convey a meaningful message, it needs to satisfy three very stringent conditions, each more difficult than the last: first, the letters need to be arranged into meaningful words; second, the sequence of words has to conform to the rules of syntax; and finally, the sequence of words has to make sense at the semantic level: in other words, it needs to express a meaningful proposition. For a string of letters generated at random to meet all of these conditions would indeed be fantastically improbable. But here’s the thing: living things don’t need to satisfy any of these conditions. Yes, it is true that all living things possess a genetic code. But it is quite impossible for this code to generate anything like nonsense words like “sdfuiop”, and additionally, there is nothing in the genome which is remotely comparable to the rules of syntax, let alone the semantics of a meaningful proposition. The sequence of amino acids in a protein needs to do just one thing: it needs to fold up into a shape that can perform a biologically useful task. And that’s it. Generating something useful by chance – especially something with enough useful functions to be called alive – is a pretty tall order, but because living things lack the extra dimensions of richness found in messages that carry a semantic meaning, they’re going to be a lot easier to generate by chance than (say) instruction manuals or cook books. Hence it may turn out that creating life by chance is extremely improbable, but not fantastically improbable. In practical terms, that means that given enough time, life just might arise.
That should suffice as a reply to Comfort’s book analogy.
To be fair, Comfort shows his audience how physicist Lawrence Krauss responded to this argument: he maintained that the laws of physics, chemistry and biology could account for DNA, just as laws can account for snowflakes. Comfort’s counter-reply was that DNA, unlike a snowflake, contains specified and purposeful information.
Most ID publications argue that snowflakes have only a little specified information, rather than none, as Comfort evidently believes. However, in my opinion, it would have been better for Comfort to dispense with the problematic notion of specified complexity (which could apply even to arrangements of pebbles on Chesil beach), and use functional specified complex information (FCSI) as the hallmark of intelligent design. Comfort seems to hint at this when he remarks that the information in DNA is purposeful – in other words, it is beneficial to the organism.
But the problem here for Comfort is that functionality is not an all-or-nothing affair: there are many shades of gray. Some protein molecules, for instance, are only weakly functional. Also, functionality may be either focused and highly specific, or it may be broad and general: some enzymes, for instance, have a much broader specificity than others. Finally, functionality comes in degrees: some functional hierarchies have more levels than others. The visual system has no less than nine levels of organization underlying the top level, whereas the photosynthetic system of a cyanobacterium has “only” three. So, how many levels of organization in a biological system are required to warrant a design inference?
Comfort rounds out his case by quoting from Bill Gates: “DNA is like a computer program but far, far more advanced than any software ever created.” He omits to mention that Bill Gates was actually referring to human DNA, but we’ll overlook that point. More telling is the fact that the origin of DNA is not as mysterious as it used to be, as Michael Marshall’s BBC article, The secret of how life on Earth began (31 October 2016) beautifully illustrates. We now have a few good leads.
Finally, Comfort recommends that his viewers read “Made in Heaven” a book which tells the story of 32 modern inventions, whose designs were copied from Nature. The reasoning here is obvious enough: if our most intelligent scientists have to copy from Nature in order to come up with their inventions, doesn’t that strongly suggest that Nature herself is the invention of a Super-Intelligence?
Here, at last, I think Comfort is onto something. I would argue that if we know of no natural process that can generate biological structures whose complexity and efficiency far exceeds anything that intelligent scientists could produce in a lab, then the default assumption should be that these structures were intelligently designed.
I’d like to finish by quoting from a 2014 TED talk, “Digital biology and open science – the coming revolution,” by biologist and engineer Stephen Larson, who holds a PhD in neuroscience from University of California, San Diego, and who is CEO of MetaCell, a systems biology research and consulting company. Larson is a Darwinist with no religious beliefs whatsoever, yet he feels impelled to marvel at the staggering complexity of life, which far surpasses anything that even our most intelligent scientists could come up with:
…[A]s science continues to reveal how life works, we find again and again that the magic that seems to distinguish between things that are alive and things that are not [is] actually created by complex interacting molecular machines. These microscopic machines are as precise and intricate as a mechanical watch, but instead of being run on gears and springs, are powered by the fundamental rules of physics and chemistry. Our understanding of the precise coiling and uncoiling of the DNA molecule, or the way that one molecule can literally walk almost robotically along the tightrope of another molecule, continue to show us again and again, this molecular clockwork is real and pervasive.
Now what’s most unsettling to me about this is that we didn’t build these machines. As someone originally trained as an engineer, I’ve got to be honest with you, I kind of hate this.…
And yet when I look through a microscope at a humble bacterium — by the way its ancestors were on the planet a billion years ago, billions of years ago — I still wonder how it really works. Because the mechanical watch that is life is not like any watch we’ve ever built. It is biological gears and springs, but they fill rooms and buildings and cities of a vast microscope landscape that’s bustling with activity.
On the one hand it’s extremely well organized, but on the other hand the sheer scale of all of this unfamiliar well-organized stuff that happens in there makes me feel that I’ve stumbled onto an alternate landscape of technology that’s built by an engineer a million times smarter than me.
OK, not literally. I don’t literally mean that I think little green men and women came down to the earth and seeded life here a billion years ago. What we understand of course is that life evolved on the planet over billions of years. But the results of evolution confuse even our smartest engineers when we try to understand how we could build what biology has evolved.
Ray Comfort could have said a lot more about this. And I hope that one day he’ll floor his interviewees with a question about the design of molecular machines. But most of all, I hope he’ll stop peddling his version of how to get saved, which many Christians would regard as simply bizarre.
Phhhhhhhhhhhffffftttt. Ray Comfort.
The Day the Revolution Began: Reconsidering the Meaning of Jesus’s Crucifixion
Comfort should go back to selling bananas.
But the results of evolution confuse even our smartest engineers when we try to understand how we could build what biology has evolved.
And in fact, some really tough engineering problems are best solved with evolutionary approaches. Give a trial-and-error feedback process a few billion years, and it can do what no human engineer can do in a single lifetime.
As a retired computer programmer, I can’t count the number of times I was reminded of the computer science aphorism that computers are dumber than people, but smarter than programmers. The downstream, indirect (and sometimes data-dependent) symptoms of even simple bugs can defy mere human ingenuity. Surely an all-knowing bug-god must have been involved. No other explanation fits.
Good point.
What most non-engineers don’t consider, is that even the things humans can design are only possible after many generations of trial and error by tinkerers that came before them. ALL innovation is trial-and-error when you consider the complete history. Theists somehow believe you can understand how the universe works by just thinking about it. Like Rocky said to Bullwinkle, “That trick never works.”
Not unlike the results of EAs/GAs.
That’s because humans don’t think in the manner that evolution operates.
Glen Davidson
I have to say that Ray Comfort’s theology and apologetics are half a step up from a Chick tract, if at all. You and he are both arguing from a position of zero evidence, and the only apparent standard would be to select the less ludicrous. That isn’t a good standard. Let’s argue about who goes to hell or what hell is like once there’s some evidence that hell exists. Or god.
For the record, I lust and blaspheme quite frequently, but I don’t consider them sins. One might even consider blasphemy a virtue. I lie on occasion, though I don’t recall ever having stolen.
If. Now you have to provide some evidence that no process we know of can generate such structures. Most biologists would contend that natural selection can do that. If by “natural process” you mean anything other than intelligence, then your dichotomy isn’t a false one. But you still have to show that known processes are inadequate.
I would say that this is a strawman argument combined with a god-of-the-gaps gambit.
Looks to me a long more like an argument from ignorance. If I cannot imagine how anyone can get from Dallas to Denver, being either unfamiliar with transportation or theologically rejecting it, then of course the default must be some unspecified intelligence doing it somehow. And since I knew beforehand this was the only explanation I would accept anyway, why would I even bother learning about transportation, which I’ve known doesn’t exist since forever. Those unwilling to accept my convictions have combined closed minds with confirmation bias.
“What are the theological implications of a banana fitting perfectly in your anus?”
How many unwanted babies have you adopted vj?
Yeah, this: http://www.antievolution.org/cgi-bin/ikonboard/ikonboard.cgi?act=ST;f=14;t=6300;st=1200#entry157069
“Theists somehow believe you can understand how the universe works by just thinking about it.”
Is that laugher supposed to be kinda like the one about the atheist who doesn’t think but only feels?
But yes, I just had to do a ‘double take’ as the author wrote this amusing “Ray, I’m a Catholic” first-person takedown of Ray Comfort on The Skeptical Zone, of all places. The author must have had a strategy of monumental inclusiveness in mind from the Anglo-haven on his largely atheist (or agnostic) populated island lair.
vjtorley, I put it to you that your past defense of IDism and now (attempted) post-IDist floundering is unbecoming of a Catholic. Seek help … and stop wasting your time posting long-winded nonsense that the audience of this site cares little to nothing about.
Why not hike to BioLogos, perfect place … along with another former UD ‘heavyweight’ ; )
Ray Comfort is beneath me and my time. What a silly and dishonest little man.
The faux perspective on those alphabet blocks is triggering me.
vjt:
I’ve never found this compelling. If we have something that we can’t generate intelligently, it must have been generated intelligently, seems to be the thrust of it.
And if we can design it….then it wasn’t designed.
Weird heuristic.
I don’t know if those questions are actually Comforts or not, but here’s my replies:
Q1: Do you think you’re a good person?
A1: About average.
Q2: Have you ever lied, stolen, lusted or blasphemed?
A2: [after much laughter] Of course!
Q3: What do you call a person who lies, steals, lusts and blasphemes?
A3: Human.
Q4: Come on, admit it: you have a vested interest in denying the existence of God, because it gives you an opportunity to do the things you do, like fornicating and viewing pornography, without feeling guilty. Isn’t that right?
A4: [more laughter] No.
Q5: How do you think God reacts to your lying, stealing, lust and blasphemy?
A5: I don’t know if any god exists, much less how they might react to my behavior. But since my behavior is no worse than your hypothetical god’s, I don’t see why he’d be all that upset.
Q6: Here’s what the Bible says on the sins of lying, stealing, lust and blasphemy. These sins make God angry.
A6: Is that a question? Your god has no just cause to be angry; if your god even exists, your god is the most morally compromised person conceivable. If your god exists, he could end sin and suffering in an instant. If your god exists, he’s forfeited any grounds for complaint against us.
Q7: The Bible also says that thinking of murder and adultery is just as bad as committing murder and adultery.
A7: Is that a question? Does it really?
Q8: Thinking of murder and adultery really means you would do those deeds, if you had the chance.
A8: Another non-question. And that does not follow.
Q9: So, if God judges you by the Ten Commandments on Judgment Day, do you think you’d be innocent or guilty?
A9: Again, your god would be the most morally compromised person conceivable. I am no guiltier than he.
Q10: So, do you think you’d go to Heaven or Hell?
A10: If those places even exist, and if your god is actually good, then I’d end up in the same cell as he.
Q11: There’s only one way out of the strife you’re in. There is no other name under Heaven by which you can be saved but that of Jesus. You cannot earn eternal life from God. Other religions try to do that, but it’s in vain. These religions cannot get you out of God’s jail, Hell. God is a just judge. We are sinners who have violated God’s commands. We’re headed for Hell, which is God’s prison without parole. But Jesus stepped in and paid for our crime. He paid the penalty. So God can legally grant you the gift of everlasting life. What you have to do, to have your case dismissed and walk out of God’s court and receive the gift of everlasting life, is: repent of your sins and trust in Jesus Christ alone. God will forgive you instantly. God’s grace is a free gift.
A11: Blah, blah, blah. If your god is a “just judge” then no one goes to any hell unless your god throws himself in those fires too. Really, you are describing a satanic deity. Are you a devil worshiper?
sean s.
BTW, regarding Q7: The Gospel says:
Matt 5: 21-2.
So just getting angry, being insulting, or calling someone a fool is, according to Jesus of Nazareth, the equivalent of murder.
Just in case his words carry any weight…
sean s.
The notion that Heaven is solely reserved for people who accept Jesus is problematic. Presumably, the place was all nibbles and dip, but no actual party-goers, before Jesus arrived on the scene and said ‘all back to mine!’.
Your comment reminds me of a comic I recently saw:
That’s a much nicer god than any the theists I know worship.
No doubt.
The Kingdom of God is a Party
Christian Universalism: God’s Good News for All People
“Christian Universalism”, in its simple and proper theological sense, is the doctrine of universal salvation; or in other words, of the final holiness and happiness of all mankind, to be effected by the grace of God, through the ministry of his Son, Jesus Christ.
http://www.auburn.edu/~allenkc/cudoctrine.html
I’ve adopted all you unwanted babies here at TSZ. You should thank me.
Nice. 😉
What do you think, Mung as yourself a recovering IDist, does vjtorley eventually need to man-up and stop with his long-winded quasi-pro-IDist squash on TSZ? Do you recommend him somewhere else to go?
Links welcome.
Alan Miller writes of my argument for Intelligent Design: “If we have something that we can’t generate intelligently, it must have been generated intelligently, seems to be the thrust of it.”
That’s not what I’m saying. If we find something that utilizes multiple layers of functionality to perform a useful task, and whose parts are more efficiently adapted to performing that task than any device we can make for performing the same task, and if no natural process that we know of is capable of generating the same level of multi-layered functionality, let alone the same degree of efficiency, then we should tentatively conclude that the parts were designed to perform the job by an intelligence superior to our own, while conceding that we might be wrong and that Nature may have some tricks up her sleeve that we know nothing of.
The suggestion that a genetic algorithm could accomplish the task, given a sufficient number of trials, leaves me cold, because it fails to take account of the fact that in real life, building a new layer of functionality on the back of an existing layer involves modifying the existing functionality of the lower layers as well. The higher you go, the harder that’s going to be. Mathematically, you can create a function of a function of a function, ad infinitum. In the real world, it’s not that easy. So far, I’ve seen nothing in popular expositions of how genetic algorithms are supposed to work that acknowledges this difficulty.
Flint: it’s not difficult to walk from Dallas to Denver. You can do it in less than two weeks: http://www.usageo.org/distance/4819000-820000
OMagain wants to know how many babies I’ve adopted. OMagain should be aware that: (a) decisions to adopt a child are never exclusively made by the husband of the family, but by the whole family, after an extensive period of consultation; (b) there is currently a worldwide shortage of babies available for adoption; (c) adopting children from overseas is a legal nightmare; (d) if you adopt a child from Welfare in the U.S., that child will probably be over three years old, and will almost certainly have been physically and/or emotionally abused (see https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/singletons/200810/why-more-people-don-t-adopt ); and (e) adopting children in Japan, where I live, is virtually impossible (see http://www.japantimes.co.jp/community/2013/09/30/issues/cultural-and-legal-hurdles-block-path-to-child-adoptions-in-japan/ ).
sean samis:
Regarding the meaning of Matthew 5:22, you might want to have a look at Elicott(s commentary here: http://biblehub.com/commentaries/matthew/5-22.htm
Gregory: who’s the heavyweight?
So the confidence in the plausibility of the “theory” relies in the absence of evidence of some other explanation… what a huge argument from ignorance. What’s “design” anyway, and how does it explain “multiple layers of functionality” in the context of biology?
Vincent. Check this out and let me know if this is something that “utilizes multiple layers of functionality to perform a useful task, and whose parts are more efficiently adapted to performing that task than any device we can make for performing the same task, and if no natural process that we know of is capable of generating the same level of multi-layered functionality”
http://astronomy.nju.edu.cn/~lixd/GA/AT4/AT421/HTML/AT42102.htm
Yes, of course. The problem has been in trying to explain this to people who reject the concept of transportation for theological reasons. Evolution is as simple a concept as walking, but look at all those who claim magic is required anyway. The argument from ignorance basically requires theological reinforcement of ignorance.
Substitute evolution for walking and I suspect you could not accept “natural walking”, even if you wanted to. You KNOW evolution would be impossible without some sort of supernatural input, just as I KNOW you can’t walk from Dallas to Denver, and your claim to the contrary will never convince me otherwise. I could watch you making that walk, and STILL reject the possibility if I were an ID proponent.
Why don’t you have to account for the intelligence that you suppose created it? I don’t mean “explain it” or the more or less meaningless “problem” of regress (I don’t care if God does need an explanation, if there’s evidence for God that’s good enough to go on. But…), I mean actually have evidence that there is an intelligence that can handle the extreme complexity of life. You don’t get to just make up your “cause.”
And why don’t you for once back up your claim that multi-level functionality is a serious problem for evolution? Clearly it’s often a problem for designers, while evolution is more of a parallel process. That you read it in Doug Axe’s appalling nonsense isn’t any excuse, you need to actually make a case. You continually fail to do so.
Not necessarily. Developmental genes are highly conserved.
And again, quit assuming that evolution is like a designer, it can deal with multiple levels while thinking has a real problem with it. Your unsupported incredulity has no bearing on the issue.
You haven’t come close to showing that evolution has a serious problem with it, Doug Axe’s BS notwithstanding. You have yet to show that any intelligence exists that can handle biologic complexity.
Glen Davidson
So what we get is a ‘philosopher’ who can’t actually defend himself in front of fellow religious people who ask him patiently, kindly, carefully and with due respect for his person, to more clearly distinguish the ideology – Intelligent Design – from the science of evolutionary biology. And vjtorley cannot do this because vjtorley has intertwined his theology with Intelligent Design ideology = IDism and has anti-Darwinist ‘expelled’ fever just like most others. He could of course easily show us this is not the case by taking a more direct line of reverse perspective to the DI than he has yet done.
One of the questions I’d really like to ask Vincent J. Torley is why he neglects many great thinkers among his Catholic brothers and sisters and the broader Abrahamic canvas who reject IDism. It seems to be simply because he got sucked into a politically-motivated ‘think tank’ view (what Fuller calls ‘Prot-Science’) in Seattle, Washington, USA?
Still, why doesn’t he add an article in his voluminous writings, showing all of the Christians who reject IDism and list their reasons for this? That’s the kind of thing that vjtorley *could* do to add value in his ‘scientific apologetics’ or ‘theistic science’ strategy. Is it so far-fetched to imagine he could ever realise this and reach for such a place?
Moved a comment to guano. Attack arguments, not fellow members.
I’d rather leave off the claim about what Nature can or can’t do. Let the Un-Inteligent Design forces bear their own burden.
That’d be great! What do you have in terms of an argument for ID if you leave out the god-of-the-gaps part?
Hi Gregory,
You haven’t defined IDism. I have already written an online article exposing the bad science in Dr. Douglas Axe’s book, “Undeniable.” You seem to want me to criticize their theology. Frankly, that’s ridiculous. The Discovery Institute includes people with a range of theological views. You also deride IDism as “Prot Science,” citing Dr. Steve Fuller. You should read this article by Catholic apologist Jimmy Akin, which is about the fairest-minded article about origins that I’ve seen written from a Catholic perspective:
Akin sees no theological problem with Intelligent Design, so why should you?
Glen Davidson,
I concede that (a) multi-level functionality is often a problem for intelligent (human) designers, and (b) I haven’t shown that evolution can’t generate it.
However, at least we know that intelligent beings are capable of creating multi-level functionality on some occasions, whereas at the present time, we haven’t shown that unguided natural processes are capable of doing so.
I am quite open to such a demonstration, however. I’ve been thinking about what I’d accept as one. It wouldn’t have to be a biological problem, but it would have to be a physical problem and not a purely algebraic one. I was thinking of something involving objects such as geometric 2-D shapes, with a repertoire of basic moves, that were allowed to “mutate” (i.e. change shape and/or change the way they move) and that were pre-programmed with certain built-in goals. A function would then be defined as any sequence of moves that assisted a shape to achieve one of its goals. A mutation would either be a change in one of these functions, or a new function. A higher-level function would be a function that invoked two or more existing lower-level functions to help realize a built-in goal, perhaps modifying the way in which the lower-level functions are called in the process. The interesting question would be how often this would happen in a way that proved advantageous to the object (i.e. helpful to it in attaining its goals). Of course, all these functions would have to form part of the object’s description, in addition to its shape. My ideas are still rather hazy, as you can see. But a successful demonstration along these lines would constitute a “proof-of-concept,” showing that evolutionary processes are perfectly capable in principle of generating multi-level functionality. If you’ve heard of any program like that which builds up functions in this way, I’d love to hear about it.
dazz,
Thanks for the link to the page on the death of high-mass stars. I think you’re getting a sequence of functions (X->Y->Z) mixed up with multi-level functionality. The latter is what concerns me. What happens in the death of a star sounds more like the former.
Flint,
You write: “Substitute evolution for walking and I suspect you could not accept “natural walking”, even if you wanted to.” On the contrary, I am prepared to change my mind. It would be uncomfortable to realize I’d been mistaken about the design argument, but it would not be fatal to my world-view. My reasons for believing in God are multi-faceted.
Feser sees theological problems with Intelligent Design, so why shouldn’t we? Or should we let the pope decide? But when the pope decides, then isn’t it evidently a theological problem?
There are obvious logical discrepancies with ID version of design and design as used in scholastic design argument (such as Aquinas’ Fifth Way). A philosopher would acknowledge that.
My point didn’t have anything to do with the death of the stars, but their formation. Of course “design” or even “intelligent design” doesn’t tell us anything about how the purported designs materialize, which actually is the interesting scientific question. We all know IDers can’t address that because that’s exactly where “creation” comes into play. But of course, a “Creation” theory must be avoided at all cost for obvious reasons.
Clearly those stars exhibit the multi-layer characteristics that according to you point to “design”.
At least you have the honesty to talk about “generation” in your inference rule:
Problem is, this obviously turns your inference into an argument of ignorance / god-of-the-gaps, as already pointed out. But once you include the term “generation” there, it all falls apart: we know how the multi-layer complexity in living organisms form: for example, by Embryogenesis in some Eukaryotes, and descent with modification on an evolutionary scale.
You accept universal common descent, and we know those layers weren’t present in LUCA. Therefore those layers must have been generated through evolutionary processes. Again, “design” doesn’t generate anything so it can’t be the null hypothesis even if we didn’t have an alternative. But we have it, so your inference is already falsified in your own terms. Just like we know that stars grew bigger progressively, adding layer after layer as more elements were available.
Also, Vincent, it’s very disappointing to see you so impressed with all that nonsense about multi-layer complexity considering that it comes from Axe’s book. It’s totally unnecessary, Behe already had his “interdependence of parts” and both are simply rehashes of Paley’s watch, which in turn is nothing more than a reworded teleological argument.
I would really like to see an example of “multi-level functionality” from biology, and an explanation of why it is so much more impressive than a “sequence of functions”.
Does Axe’s book have one?
No, you can just do it right or forget it. We have the evidence for the evolution of life (including constraints that apparently are not overridden by intelligence, like the non-sharing of much polygenic information across vertebrate lineages), you haven’t come close to presenting any intelligence that could operate for billions of years (seems a tad unusual, as well as amazingly undetectable), nor to showing that any intervention of intelligence has occurred (you’re grasping at anything to do so, but you don’t have the data necessary to show it).
So we have the “historical” evidence that life did evolve according to the constraints of evolutionary processes (to the degree possible), including absurdities like the descent of testes (not necessary in birds–real designers know how to move ideas across lineages) and various vestigial organs, like our “tail vertebrae.” You have nothing but your insistence that evolution can’t happen like it must happen (building systems upon systems, thus “multi-level functionality”), with no detected designer operating over the course of evolution, the sorts of predator-prey and host-parasite relationships expected from evolutionary opportunism (no design reason adduced at all by IDists), and a host of features of life that transcendent intelligence didn’t bother to transcend.
We’ve produced the evidence, you have yet to produce anything credible at all. Should you ever do so, we’ll assess it and consider changing our minds. Until then we’ll just go by the evidence we have.
Glen Davidson
looks like I missed Vincent’s point that the layers in those stars are not the kind of multi-layer complexity he was referring to. Not sure there’s a proper operational definition there. The thing is, as Fair Witness suggested, why does it matter if its multilayers, or multiproceses, or interconnected parts, or whatever? We know how those things were generated
That’s exactly where I was going with it. If natural processes can connect functions in a causal sequence, why can’t they create branches, or loops, or 3D structures, or feedback paths? What level of complexity requires agency?
A very powerful mindset that is taught to engineers is that a process of any level of complexity can be built, diagnosed, or managed by subdividing it into simple subsets that are simply connected together.
I sometimes think complexity is an illusion created by the inability to access the simple components and their interactions with the whole.
The trouble with VJT and IDists in general is that they just don’t accept evidence as it must be accepted if we’re going to come to any reasonable, justifiable conclusion.
It’s like if you say that Alexander the Great’s army defeated the Persians, and you’re met with objections that doing so would be impossible, that Alexander the Great didn’t have enough men to do so. And you’re told that you have no evidence that Alexander could or did defeat the Persians (at least by himself). You say, uh, well, they fought, Alexander’s army took over the land and gold of the Persians, burnt their palace, and the Greeks changed the world as the Persian Empire faded from history. But no, that’s no evidence, it could have been the gods who defeated the Persians in one creationist fell swoop, or it could have been the gods tweaking everything that the Greeks did to turn what could never work by themselves in order that the Persians would be defeated. How can you show that it wasn’t intervention of the gods (with creationist-type miracles, or Behe-type hidden operations) that did it, especially since we know that Alexander’s men couldn’t possibly do it without it being demonstrated in the lab (or field, to be fair)?
And then you just have to note that this is utterly ridiculous. You don’t get to make up causes, like the gods who defeated the Persians, or the God(s) who developed multi-layered complexity, you really are only justified in noting what we have evidence for and to suppose that it really did what happened. You don’t get to pick and choose what you hope “can’t be caused by Alexander’s army, or by evolutionary processes,” then stonewall and demand evidence that it could happen. The evidence already is that it did happen, aside from the extraordinary demands of those who have preconceptions of what “must have happened.”
Of course we must be aware that it is possible that some things in history or in evolution couldn’t really happen according to our present causal understandings. But if that happens we need a lot better than Doug Axe’s and VJT’s unimpressive assurances that something “can’t happen,” especially since all of the evidence we have is that it did (nor does it seem especially difficult to conceive of how evolution can work at multiple levels at once–not that it necessarily did or “had to”). We know that they want their God to intervene, why must they continually demonstrate it, without any kind of credible evidence for their God?
No, in the end we get to use the evidence that Alexander with his armies defeated the Persians as evidence that he could defeat the Persians, barring some rather impressive evidence that really something quite different was happening. Likewise with evolution, objections that magic are necessary to do this or that are meaningless when we have only evidence of evolution with its constraints operating, and not magic.
In the end it’s a matter of being reasonable with the evidence.
Glen Davidson
vjtorley,
Yes, I’ve read Akin’s article already – perhaps linked it here too. As usual, vjtorley, well ahead of you.
It should be obvious, but let’s spell it out because vjtorley apparently got his philosophy PhD on another planet and doesn’t know what ideology is. IDism is the ideology of Intelligent Designism. Admittedly, not the smoothest of words, more than a bit clumsy, but the term is easy to understand as far as one knows a thing or two about ideology.
Ideological IDism exaggerates ‘design’ by ‘intelligence’ just about everywhere and claims it is relevant for every field (wedgification!) in universities today to adopt. It is the ‘creation’ of the ‘Intelligent Design Movement’ based in the Discovery Institute in Seattle, Washington, USA. The ideology can also be highly damaging psychologically to Muslims, Christians, and Jews who adopt it, turning them into ‘design detectives’ and other such ‘ID dogmatists.’ (ETA: atheists cannot adopt IDism by definition because the ideology of IDism is in its ‘heart of hearts’ anti-atheistic.)
IDists, who promote IDism, are amongst the most propagandistic ideologists of the past 20 years in topics related to natural science. The large book “The Nature of Nature” is simply drenched in ideology; yet no term ‘ideology’ is in the Index. ; ) Retired DI propagandist Luskin thinks IDT is completely non-ideological! ROTFL
I don’t have any ‘theological problem’ with the innocent combo duo ‘Intelligent’ + ‘Design’ as one of MANY names of Divine Action. Just stop the fetish display in public for the term as if it really does the ‘scientific’ lifting when it doesn’t. Akin also rejects the IDism of the DI, an idea you have not yet shown yourself willing to entertain, vjtorley. You can be helped (likely not at TSZ) out of your recent IDism, instead of going it alone, Vincent. ; )
In what way does Avida not meet your criteria?
Erik writes:
Feser’s own version of Aquinas’ Fifth Way is badly flawed. see my online article, Feser’s Fifth: Why his up-to-date version of Aquinas’ Fifth Way fails as a proof, and how to make it work.
Aquinas himself believed in a version of Intelligent Design, as I demonstrate in my series of articles, St. Thomas Aquinas and his Fifteen Smoking Guns (A five-part reply to Professor Tkacz).
You mentioned the Pope. Here’s a quote from paragraph 84 of his encyclical, Laudato Si’: “Our insistence that each human being is an image of God should not make us overlook the fact that each creature has its own purpose. None is superfluous.” Although he’s no fan of ID, the Pope clearly believes that each and every species was designed by God. He doesn’t believe that any species arose by accident.
Gregory writes:
Sorry, but I’m afraid you’re mistaken here. ID theorists continually emphasize that while Dembski’s explanatory filter can identify systems that were designed, there may be many other things in the natural world that were designed, which are not identified by the filter. Indeed, one of the reasons why Feser doesn’t like ID is that he thinks it doesn’t cast its net widely enough: he thinks he can show (philosophically) that hydrogen atoms were designed, and he faults ID theorists for focusing on things like DNA, where the design inference is a lot more obvious.
Fair Witness asks:
Happy to oblige. I’ll quote from my own review of Dr. Douglas Axe’s book, Undeniable:
Later on in the review, I point out that “the visual system illustrated by Axe on page 177 of his book has no less than nine levels of organization underlying the top level, whereas the photosynthetic system of a cyanobacterium (illustrated on page 173) has ‘only’ three.” These systems are the sort of thing I had in mind.
As to why it’s more impressive than a sequence of functions, consider this: in real life, building a new layer of functionality on the back of an existing layer typically involves modifying the existing functionality of the lower layers as well. Building a sequence of functions (X->Y->Z) doesn’t require any of these functions to be modified, so there’s no risk of a system crash, so to speak.
dazz writes:
Behe has always conceded that co-option could, in theory, explain irreducible complexity. His point was merely that as the number of components of an irreducibly complex system increased, co-option became less and less plausible as an explanation. If I were to come across a broad, general description of an evolutionary mechanism whereby multi-level functionality could arise, then I’d be happy to acknowledge that it’s no more special than Behe’s irreducible complexity.
Patrick asks:
A very good question. I haven’t looked at Avida for a long, long time. When I wrote for UD, it struck me as irrelevant to biology. But I’ve just been looking at Lenski et al.’s 2003 paper, The evolutionary origin of complex features, and I will concede that it appears to be able to generate multi-level functionality. So far, I’ve only skimmed the paper. What I’d like to ask is whether the organisms are purely digital, or whether they have some kind of analog representation (or instantiation) as well. If they did, then I think they would be sufficiently similar to organisms for them to qualify as meeting the challenge.
Most ID proponents have dissed Avida over the years. One noble exception is Johnnyb, whose UD post, Why I Love AVIDA – Detecting Design in Digital Organisms I’m just having a look at now. Johnnyb agrees that Avida “is one of the few evolutionary systems that is truly Universal.” He concludes:
Do you think this is a fair statement?
“Aquinas himself believed in a version of Intelligent Design”
But of course that’s true English teacher! 😉
Gobbledygook. You mix your ‘Intelligent Design’ so liberally with the Discovery Institute’s ‘intelligent design’ that it sounds like a 2-toot horn! 😛
No repentance for the innocent vjtorley.
Having read your small correspondence on his web page with Prof. Feser, who is a professional philosopher, and who doesn’t publish his ‘greatest works’ on a disturbingly partisan (just like this place!) blog called ‘Uncommon Descent’ (RIP?), it is clear to me that you haven’t the faintest idea why Feser REJECTS (not just ‘doesn’t like’) the Discovery Institute’s IDT. Everything is just an attempt at self-reparation after the Axe dropped on IDism’s scientific pretensions.
Again, well ahead of you in having witnessed this before.
You are stuck on vjtorley’s own recipe of uppercase (because it really *IS* theological) ‘Intelligent Design’ (without the ‘theory’ please). And nobody I am aware of knows what that even means and certainly does not consider it a contribution to global knowledge, scholarship or human understanding.
What else more fruitful might you suggest, vjtorley?
“Systems” crash all the time in evolutionary history. There are lethal mutations, species go extinct.
But anyway, I think you (and of course, Axe) clearly fail to support why multi-layering poses a problem for evolution. What makes you think that, in the (X->Y->Z) sequence, ‘Z’ can work without ‘Y’ having been modified any more than Layer N without modification in Layer N-1?
And once again, if you accept common descent, how could those layers have evolved if not by small, gradual changes, totally consistent with standard evolutionary processes? Because the alternative is ridiculous.
“In real life” ??? You mean how humans do things? Is that really a good source of useful analogies for understanding biology?
It seems apparent that by layered, you mean hierarchical. The statement that hierachy requires modifications while sequential does not, holds no water. I can only imagine that you think this way because perhaps you are a programmer and have personal experience in reusing someone else’s subroutines/classes/functions, where the original author did not plan for his code to be used in your specific application.
Usually, when humans build a system, they have specific requirements that might indeed require them to tweak lower-level components, if they were not built with reusability in mind.
Evolution has no specific goals, except that the organism survive and reproduce. All you need is to do an image search on “bizarre organisms” and you will see that there are MANY ways to achieve that.
Also, there is ample opportunity for many variants of a low-level function to arise, so the next level has many options to choose from, over a large population. Just because hierarchies are developing, it doesn’t mean the lower functions stop evolving.
Back to “real life”: Ever looked through the DigiKey catalog? There a many off-the-shelf components that can be used to build hierarchical systems without having to change them.
Dazz points out that crashes do occur at the species level and organism level. This is part of the process, not something to be avoided. Sometimes it seems that creationists don’t grasp how important a role that DEATH plays in evolution.