Richard Dawkins or Ray Comfort?

Who would "win" in a debate? Some of you are going to lunge for one and some for another.

OK, so I post some quote in my status message. I found it on someone's YouTube profile and I thought it was quite inspirational.

When the atheist claims that the Christian is enslaved, it is like a land animal telling a bird it's enslaved to the sky.

That had been sitting there for a few days, and then my naturalist friend quotes this:

Isn't it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?

I immediately recognised this as a Richard Dawkins quote, even though I haven't seen the original quote myself, I know that he quite frequently associates God with fairies, probably because fairies sound pathetic.

So, I put this in my status message, after it:

A beautiful garden usually has a gardener to keep it beautiful.

Also, I should queue "Cows keep a farmers' paddocks mowed so they don't turn into swamps - grass doesn't cut itself".

But anyways, compare the second and third quotes: the Richard Dawkins quote (apologies to the author if I misattributed this) and the counter-quote I whipped up. The counter-quote is the sort of thing Ray Comfort would say about this. His primary argument is that a painting must have a painter, a design must have a designer, a creation must have a creator. So, if we have a beautiful garden, there must be something to keep it beautiful. And that thing is usually a gardener.

Of course, fairies could also do the job, but that's usually not what happens.

I have a rough idea of what happens when you don't do the gardening. Now, I could almost credit Philos. Dawkins for being a scientist, and I would do that in favour of crediting him as being a gardener. Someone should give him a pot-plant and slip in a wandering willie or something like that. Hint: simply watering the plant is not going to deal with the weed.

Now, in a "beautiful garden", usually, the trees are trimmed so they don't become a huge mess. Grass is frequently mowed or scythed or something like that. Another good "challenge" suggestion would be to give Philos. Dawkins a passionfruit vine. We had one and it miraculously survived about 5 years. We trellissed it correctly, and we got a lot of passionfruit. After about a year or something like that, it was like a huge shrub. Looking from the kitchen window revealed that it was full of blowflies.

I'm going to let you decide who won this debate between Richard Dawkins and David Quinn, but I think we can agree that Richard Dawkins has been quite cowardly and/or arrogant in this debate (the "Yes it is / No it isn't" tossing which happens later on suggests playground techniques which really achieve nothing).

I'll quote this part [ (C) RTE Radio, 2006 ]. The context of this is that Philos. Dawkins claimed that naturalists can have free will, and David Quinn mentioned how Dawkins quoted something that William Provine said about there being no free will, and that "many of [his] colleagues" believed the same thing.

Tubridy: Okay. Richard Dawkins, rebut to that as you wish.

Dawkins: I’m not interested in free will what I am interested in is the ridiculous suggestion that if science can’t say where the origin of matter comes from theology can. The origin of matter… the origin of the whole universe, is a very, very difficult question. It’s one that scientists are working on. It’s one that they hope eventually to solve. Just as before Darwin, biology was a mystery. Darwin solved that. Now cosmology is a mystery. The origin of the universe is a mystery; it’s a mystery to everyone. Physicists are working on it. They have theories. But if science can’t answer that question then as sure as hell theology can’t either. [ emphasis mine ]

Quinn: If I can come in there, it is a perfectly reasonable proposition to ask yourself where does matter come from? And it is perfectly reasonable as well to posit the answer, God created matter. Many reasonable people believe this and by the way… I mean look it is quite a different category to say look we will study matter and we will ask how

Dawkins: But if science can’t answer that question, then it’s sure as hell theology can’t either. [ emphasis mine ]

Tubridy: Richard, if ...

Quinn: Sorry — if I can come in there — It’s a perfectly reasonable proposition to ask oneself where does matter come from. And it’s perfectly reasonable as well to posit the answer God created matter. Many reasonable people believe this.

Dawkins: It’s not reasonable.

Quinn: It’s quite a different category to say “Look, we will study matter and we will ask how matter organizes itself into particular forms,” and come up with the answer “evolution.” It is quite another question to ask “Where does matter come from to begin with?” And if you like you must go outside of matter to answer that question. And then you’re into philosophical categories.

Dawkins: How could it possibly be another category and be allowed to say God did it since you can’t explain where God came from?

Quinn: Because you must have an uncaused cause for anything at all to exist. Now, I see in your book you come up with an argument against this that I frankly find to be bogus. You come up with the idea of a mathematical infinite regress but this does not apply to the argument of uncaused causes and unmoved movers because we are not talking about maths we’re talking about existence and existentially nothing exists unless you have an uncaused cause. And that uncaused cause and that unmoved mover is, by definition, God.

[ my emphasis was pointing out the irony of the overuse of idioms which the person would be embarassed to admit they actually said that. ]

After this, Dawkins rebuts this by the presumption that Christianity is inferior to naturalism in terms of philosophy and therefore cannot win against it. It turns to custard there and he starts acting like a little kid. I would like to get an audio recording of this debate, as Dawkins has what I would like to call "a cursed pen", which makes him sound absolutely horrible when his words are written down (although I have heard him speak and sound arrogant, too, so it's not particularly unfair).

Dawkins: You just defined God as that! You just defined a problematic existence. That’s no solution to the problem. You just evaded it.

Hypocrisy, anyone? Someone said in one of his asking-questions things, "What if you're wrong?" and he turned it back on the person asking the question. (If I ever go to one of those things, I'd just love to ask questions completely irrelevant to his fight.) P.S. The applause was far from deserved, because he didn't answer the question.

Now, back to the title point. I haven't really said anything about Ray Comfort here. While his banana analogy "has been 'debunked'" (super scare quotes here to save the day!), as a wild banana is different from the banana we know about (wild bananas have lots of hard seeds, whereas our bananas are infertile and grafted from one of several original banana trees), he still has the apple analogy. The thing is, these apples are still fertile, and so the idea behind it remains.

He did apologise for his mistake, though, and I can't remember the theory he follows for the banana nowadays.

I have two books by Ray Comfort: "God Doesn't Believe In Atheists" and "Hollywood Be Thy Name". Note that the blurbs on the back are a tad misleading. The former does a lot of biblical referencing, whilist the latter has a lot of material which isn't actually about the film industry. This is one thing Ray and I have in common, despite never having met: we rant.

I don't know a lot about Ray Comfort's debating style. I know that he had a debate with the chairman of American Atheists, Ron Barrier. As the story goes, Ray offered a debate with Ron, who turned him down, then AA members called Ray a chicken, where he explained that Ron was the one who chickened out, so the AA members pressured him and he finally accepted it, even flying Ray there. After the debate, they hugged each other.

So, let's actually have a look... Who would win in a debate, Richard Dawkins or Ray Comfort? Philos. Dawkins seems to be afraid of Ray; after all, bribing Dawkins, first with $10k, then $20k, doesn't seem to do it for him ($20k would get you a lot of propoganda to put on more busses, y'know - after all, busses can't think for themselves, so why would they care?).

Seeing as I'm pretty much out of steam, I'll have to conclude something. It really depends on the audience. With the RD.N community, it doesn't matter who's doing the debate; if Dawkins were to debate God himself, Dawkins' followers would still claim a victory for naturalism. However, given a fair representation of the general population, I believe that, no matter who wins, Dawkins will be arrogant about it, and pretend to win.