In May of 2007, former child actor, Kirk Cameron and fellow advocate of idiocy, Ray Comfort, promised to scientifically prove the existence of God on national television,
“100% absolutely –without the use of faith”.
Of course that didn’t happen. Religious beliefs –as everyone knows- are assumed on faith in lieu of proof and regardless of evidence. Cameron and Comfort had neither. Instead they presented a series of fallacious absurdities revealing the depth of their own impressive ineptitude. First they tried to parody cosmology and abiogenesis -as if criticizing them should somehow challenge evolution; as if disproving evolution could imply creation by default; as if God would only be indicated by a failure of science to explain what religion also does not explain; as if science did not adequately explain every aspect of biodiversity very well, and hadn’t already disproved all the Genesis fables which Cameron and Comfort are still trying to save.
Failing that, they immediately resorted to their usual staple of mined quotations appealing to authority with irrelevant comments made by folks who often meant the very opposite of what these two implied. Then they revealed a profound incompetence on the subject of logic. When all that inevitably failed to impress anyone either, they tried to intimidate the audience with a sermon of emotional pleas entirely reliant on fear and ignorance. But this assembly wasn’t stocked only with paranoid and superstitious zealots; this was a more intellectually curious group, many of whom already believed in God. But whether they did or not, everyone in attendance was sincerely disappointed with Cameron’s & Comfort’s inability to produce anything they promised.
"I think everybody here can tell that
there was not one piece of evidence
presented -at all- for their god."
Comfort insulted fellow believers by assuming that, if there is a god, then his religion and absurdly narrow interpretation of it was the only acceptable option, a notion his cohort unwittingly described as idolatry. Cameron insulted the rest of the audience by pretending to have once thought as rationalists do, a lie he himself also accidentally exposed when he then accused rationalism of being a belief based on faith. Finally, Comfort implicitly admitted that his god could only be indicated if one was already determined to believe in it regardless of evidence, and the only claim to it they had depended on religious references which they had earlier promised they would neither need nor use. If they knew this going in, then their whole premise was phony, because they also knew they didn’t have any evidence, –much less proof- and would have to rely entirely on assertions of faith, –and their reverence of scripture.
“The invisible things of him from the creation of the world are
clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made.”
“I find it incredulous –if not astounding-
that when it comes to knowing all things
and having all things at your fingertips,
you turn the Bible, a book riddled
with things we know are wrong!”
Amazingly, subsequent interviews showed the duo apparently oblivious to any of their string of utter failures in that forum. They went into this venue as if they actually believed they had something to present, and may even have come out thinking they showed it. But much of the alleged evidence they declared to be “irrefutable” had already been refuted thousands of times. The rest were merely unsubstantiated assertions, flatly stating as fact unsupported assumptions which can neither be evidenced nor confirmed, presenting their baseless speculation as though it were certain knowledge.
“God is gonna punish murderers. He’s good. He’s just.
He’s gonna make sure murders get what’s coming to them.
But realize this; that God is so good, he’s also gonna punish
rapists, adulterers, pedofiles, fornicators, blasphemers.”
Obviously Cameron & Comfort hadn’t any idea what they were talking about at any point, neither in fact nor fiction. They certainly didn’t know what the words, “science”, “knowledge”, “proof” or “evidence” even mean. Creationists typically don’t.
“We’re both looking at the exact same facts;
we’re just coming to different conclusions.”
No we’re not. First of all, facts are objectively verifiable -and thus indisputable- data. But dogmatic religious beliefs depend instead on subjective impressions of personal preference, erroneous assumptions, and assertions of logical fallacies.
“Creation is 100% absolute scientific proof there was a creator.
You cannot have a creation without a creator.”
“Everything is just so incredibly complex, there has to be a creator.”
“Everything that has information and is complex has to have been created.”
“That’s not true at all.”
Second: We could rationalize a few of the facts differently. But mere facts don’t qualify as evidence until or unless they collectively indicate –or can be accounted for by- only one scenario over any other available option. By definition, the same evidence cannot imply two mutually-exclusive opposing positions.
Besides, we’re obviously not both looking at ERVs, atavisms, transitional forms, physiological, anatomical, and molecular vestiges, ontogeny and developmental biology, protein functional redundancy, convergent phenotypes, mobile genes, observed speciation, or the myriad methods of dating geologic stratigraphy, nor any twin-nested hierarchy of phylogenetic clades. All of these are peer-reviewed and verified accurate evidence positively promoting evolution as well as directly disproving creationism. But you know what we’ve never seen? We’ve never seen anything “created”. No one has ever seen a complex life-form (or anything else) magically pop out of thin air. But that’s what creationists are arguing for! Talismans, incantations, elemental component spells, enchantments, clairvoyance and prophesies all consistently fail every test.
To confirm this, James “the Amazing” Randi, a former Las Vegas illusionist well-versed in the angles used in supernatural pseduoscience -has for ten years- offered a million-dollar prize for anyone who can show testable evidence of the things we should expect would also be true if there were etherial entities influencing things with molecular structures. In that time, he has exposed a few frauds. But to date, no one has ever produced any actual evidence for faith-healing, telepaths, psionics, precognative psychic friends with astral bodies, past life remembrance, or spectral manifestations of any kind. So where is there any field of study or accurate fact positively promoting a magical creation?
“We’re considering this matter of life origins, and there’s an incredible body,
a pyramid of evidence in support of divine orchestration,
divine engineering, divine creation.”
Great! Where is it? What is it? Because each of the arguments presented for “irreduceable complexity” (the best arguments creationism ever had) were disproved scientifically and exposed in court. And apart from a series of frauds and falsehoods like these- the only arguments anti-science evangelists have ever had seem limited to nothing more than ignorant criticisms of dwindling and already irrelevent gaps in the ever-enveloping advancement of science. But vague criticisms against science still wouldn’t count as evidence for creationism even if those arguments weren’t all completely wrong. Even if there was evidence of gods, it might not be their god. Even if it was, that wouldn’t be evidence of creation either, because that still wouldn’t dismiss any of the evidence for evolution and against mythology; nor could it change the fact that humans are still apes. Creation relies on a false dichotomy –rejecting all other options and insisting that there can only be two alternatives; So they can imagine that criticizing the one will vindicate the other by default.
“Question for doctor Hovind: What is your strongest piece of evidence for creationism?”
“I think the evidence for creation would be the absolute impossibility of the contrary.”
Convicted fraud and pseudoscience charlatan, MISTER Kent Hovind argues that what has already been directly-observed and shown to be certainly true is (in his opinion) impossible, and the only option he thinks is possible is that an imperceptible (and possibly imaginary) mystical being poofed everything out of nothing by magic. The irony is that what he proposes is physically impossible because it defies all natural laws, and it’s logically implausible since it has neither precedent nor parallel anywhere in reality to imply that it could still be true anyway. Where is there evidence anywhere that such a thing actually exists, or that anything even could have any of these abilities?
The evidence of evolution, and even the event of evolution itself, –the proof of it- are both directly observed, and testable, and demonstrably factual. But religious beliefs are none of the above and never have been; they’re assumed on faith. Whether or not these beliefs turn out to be correct, they are asserted as true without justification in the form of evidence.
