Whether through the inane and ridiculous rambling of well-meaning religious scientists or the outright lies and misrepresentations of creationists and other pseudo-scientists, the notion of science being somehow faith-based has become deeply embedded in the public perception of science. As an illustration of this notion, one need only look at Paul Davies’ well-known article “Taking Science on Faith,” a tragic collection of poor argument, equivocation, and bad theology masquerading as physics.

Davies’ arguments in the piece are representative of the position that science is somehow faith-based. Though the article is full of red herrings that really have no bearing on whether science is somehow justified through faith, it does touch on the well-worn argument about scientific presupposition. In Davies’ words:

All science proceeds on the assumption that nature is ordered in a rational and intelligible way. You couldn’t be a scientist if you thought the universe was a meaningless jumble of odds and ends haphazardly juxtaposed. When physicists probe to a deeper level of subatomic structure, or astronomers extend the reach of their instruments, they expect to encounter additional elegant mathematical order. And so far this faith has been justified.

At first glance the argument appears to be reasonable. After all, science does indeed proceed on the basis of various assumptions. In fact, it is worse than even Davies describes, for it isn’t just an assumption that the universe is ordered, but also an assumption that any empirical, tested claim is true. Owing to deep, epistemic limitations, we simply do not possess the capacity to know truths about reality with absolute certainty, and thus we can only formulate tentative theories that must continually be tested against observations. In a sense, then, all science is based on assumptions because we lack the capacity for logical certainty in empirical matters. But it is important to note that these are not baseless assumptions; they are based in evidence, observation, and probability. Davies acknowledges this fact when he says, “And so far this faith has been justified.”

And that, of course, is the problem with the argument. The scientific “faith” has been justified. That is, the word faith in this context is not itself a justification as it is in religious contexts. It is a testable hypothesis. Scientists may very well assume that the laws of physics will continue to hold true five minutes into the future, but this is an assumption that can be supported with evidence and justified. After five minutes, we can observe whether the laws of physics still apply.

The same is not true for faith as it applies to religious contexts. When a religious person claims to have faith in God, what you find is that this is often thought to be a justification for God’s existence. That is, a person of faith wouldn’t say their faith is justified; they’d say that their faith is a justification for God’s existence. When a person of faith is asked to explain why he believes in God, he does not list off empirical evidence supporting the existence of God as if he were a physicist adducing support for his physical theories. Rather, the theist will explain that he knows God exists through faith. This is the sort of fideistic type of faith that has taken root in religious argument. A fideist—or a believer in a transcendant, unknowable God—can only appeal to faith as justification, not the justified faith that Davies attributes to scientists. Faith in this religious sense is not something that can be tested or based on evidence—unlike the “faith” that is attributed to scientists. This conception of religious faith goes back as far as Aquinas, who invoked it to account for the specific qualities of his Christian God (le.g., being born of a virgin and being of triune nature) that could not be addressed by his evidence-based arguments (like the cosmological or teleological arguments). The difference between these two types of faith—justified faith and the religious faith as justification—is extreme, and those who assert that science is based on faith are unwise to use equivocation in an attempt to blur the distinction.

So the problem with the argument—and this is a problem for many of the ill-defined, amorophous terms in religion, like the word god itself—is that it perpetuates a blatant equivocation concerning the word faith. It is obvious that there are senses of the word that are compatible with science. For instance, when I say that I have faith in my friend, I mean that I trust my friend (and this trust is based on my knowledge of his or her behavior), and certainly one can trust science in just the same way. I have faith in science’s capacity to improve medical care and so on, and this is nothing more than trust based on evidence and experience. But to imply that religious faith, or faith as justification, is applicable to science is laughable and wholly wrong. Assumptions are not a justification in the sciences. Evidence is the justification, in accordance with this thing called “reality” that is frequently neglected by metaphysicians and theologians.

Of course, it seems unlikely that Davies himself endorses any fideistic faith-based conception of God. His appeals to the anthropic principle and other empirical observations mark him as a theist who does not make appeals to religious faith, but to evidence, in support of his God. It follows from this that Davies’ thesis is either unremarkable and trivial (yes, science and religion are both compatible with nonreligious uses of the word faith) or else wholly wrong (no, science is not based on the religious sense of faith—faith as justification—and your own belief in God is not based on this sense of faith, either).

Much of the article makes a big fuss about the laws of physics and their implications for science. For instance, he says:

The most refined expression of the rational intelligibility of the cosmos is found in the laws of physics, the fundamental rules on which nature runs. The laws of gravitation and electromagnetism, the laws that regulate the world within the atom, the laws of motion — all are expressed as tidy mathematical relationships. But where do these laws come from? And why do they have the form that they do?

Davies asks these questions not expecting a definitive answer, thinking that they are deep and profound and reveal some great metaphysical truth about our universe, and ultimately implying that some sort of God (i.e., an entity that requires no further explanation) is necessary to explain this. But the truth is, these are not deep or profound questions, and there is a rather simple and definitive answer. In fact, the answer is so simple and obvious that I am quite amazed that a physicist like Davies is unable to see it staring him right in the face. Where do the laws of physics come from? They come from our observations of physical entities. Why do they take the form they do? Because they are the best models and representations of observed behaviors and actions.

Davies can’t see these answers, of course, because of his metaphysical baggage. This is where he displays his first real use of faith as justification, or religious faith. He assumes, without any evidence or reason, that the physical laws that describe physical entities exist in their own right, over and above the entities they describe. That is, he endorses a sort of childish metaphysical Platonism that is scientifically unsupportable. He is making the child-like error of reifying a description of a relationship. For instance, if I were to tell Davies that there is air between my fingertips and my keyboard, he wouldn’t assert that air, my fingertips, and between exist. Between is only a description of the relationship between my fingers and the keyboard. In the same sense, it wouldn’t be reasonable to argue that the number four exists in its own right because you’ve seen four apples. What exists is a certain quantity of apples, not the number four that describes that quantity. So the problem with Davies’ reasoning, ironically, is that it is supported by faith in the religious sense. The “laws of physics” are simply descriptions of particles colliding and other physical events, not reified entities sitting in some ethereal platonic realm. This is nothing more than unsupportable metaphysics of the sort that scientists simply do not practice. Davies may as well ask physicists to explain Kant’s noumenal world, or Hegel’s Absolute, or Spinoza’s God or Nature. Sorry, my friend, but scientists aren’t metaphysicians! They expect their hypotheses and theories to be justified or capable of justification. Say it with me kids: WE DEMAND EVIDENCE, NOT FAITH!

Davies then goes on to advance the anthropic principle as an argument, though he is careful to leave God out of it for whatever reason. Davies sums up the argument like so:

Part of the reason is the growing acceptance that the emergence of life in the universe, and hence the existence of observers like ourselves, depends rather sensitively on the form of the laws. If the laws of physics were just any old ragbag of rules, life would almost certainly not exist.

First, is this even true? Perhaps if you change one variable and keep all the rest the same, the universe would collapse into some void without form or structure, but that doesn’t mean the laws of physics can’t be “any old ragbag of rules”. What if ALL the variables are different, but retain the same sorts of proportions we see in our current universe? Would that produce life? Are other forms of life that are unknown to us be possible in universes with alternative laws of physics? What reason is there to suppose no other laws of physics could support life? Indeed, it seems that it would be possible to create a universe with laws of physics that are more conducive to life than our current universe, which seems best suited to the production of stars rather than life. Most of the universe is quite hostile to life, so it seems we are wrong to see this as a “Goldilocks universe” ideally suited for life.

Of course, there is another obvious rebuttal to the anthropic principle. Theories of string theory that propose multiverses more than adequately explain our ideal situation by positing an infinite multitude of other universes, each with their own laws of physics. It shouldn’t be surprising that one universe out of infinite may have a physics that is conducive to life. Davies, naturally, dismisses multiverse theories for all the wrong reasons, asserting that they merely “dodge the whole issue” because they don’t explain the ultimate “laws of physics” that would undergird it all. The poor man is still unable to see that he’s mixing his metaphysics with his physics, and hence that this is not an adequate scientific criticism. The scientific criticism of multiverse theories is that they are still in the hypothesis stage. As yet, there isn’t enough evidence to solidify any of these theories that attempt to explain things beyond the Big Bang or even beyond our own universe. Davies does not advance this criticism, though, because he most likely realizes it applies equally as well to his silly notion of God. Because multiverse theories and other proposals haven’t been adequately tested, it won’t do to just attribute everything to God. The best thing to do is simply admit that we do not currently have answers to questions concerning things that go beyond the Big Bang.

What is strange is that Davies almost seems halfway aware of the problems with the religious arguments he relies on:

Clearly, then, both religion and science are founded on faith — namely, on belief in the existence of something outside the universe, like an unexplained God or an unexplained set of physical laws, maybe even a huge ensemble of unseen universes, too. For that reason, both monotheistic religion and orthodox science fail to provide a complete account of physical existence.

No, religion and science are NOT based on faith. Your conception of science is based on faith, because you think it is appropriate to bring in your tired, platonic metaphysics into the question without any sort of support or evidence. You are correct to note, however, that belief in the existence of something outside the universe and totally unexplained and unknowable does NOT provide a complete account of physical existence. It is a shame, however, that this criticism only applies to your metaphysical conception of science, and not science as it is practiced by everyone else.

And now, I’ll simply let Davies revel in his own ridiculousness:

If one traces these reasons all the way down to the bedrock of reality — the laws of physics — only to find that reason then deserts us, it makes a mockery of science.

No, my friend, it does not make a mockery of science to assert that the laws of physics don’t require an ultimate, metaphysical explanation. They are explained by the very existence of the physical entities they model, you clown. What makes a mockery of science is to trace these reasons down to the bedrock of reality (and there’s a reason it’s called “the bedrock”, because that’s the bottom!), and then invent some deity (that also conveniently doesn’t need to be explained itself) to “explain” a metaphysically muddled reification of physical laws. What makes the deity a mockery of science isn’t that it absolves itself of ultimate explanation, however, but that there is absolutely no evidence to support such a conjecture. Once again, it comes down to the evidence. You’d think a scientist would know this by now.

Most people, at some point in their lives, have spilled cream of mushroom soup while trying to eat, type, listen to a podcast, and play a cello all at the same time. Modern life, which necessitates such multitasking, prevents one from enjoying cream of mushroom soup in silence and without interruption, the way nature intended cream of mushroom soup to be enjoyed. Instead we are cursed to eat our mushroom soup at our laptops while playing cellos like terrible, mushroom-soup-eating beasts.

This, at least, is what I tell myself when trying to rationalize the fact that strange life is currently growing on my pants.

Allow me to explain. A few weeks ago while trying to enjoy my cream of mushroom soup, I had forgotten that bowls inadvertently get hot when holding mushroom soup, and hence I found myself clutching a searing object, with no place I could rid myself of it to adequately prevent severe burning of my hand. Initially the pain had caused me to practically throw the soup at my laptop, but quick-thinking reflexes caused me to deftly throw out my arms to protect my precious computer from being ruined by soupy doom, preferring instead to burn the hell out of my crotch. I stand by my choice to this day. Is my crotch capable of downloading 200 gigabytes of porn per day? I don’t think so. In fact, if I were forced to throw scalding culinary dishes at either my crotch or my laptop every day for the rest of my life, I’d throw the scalding meal at my crotch each and every time, no questions asked. Like Gandhi, I am willing to sacrifice myself for the greater good.

Upon covering my pants with cream of mushroom soup, I did what anyone else would do: I cried for hours on end. I cried neither for the scalding nor for Argentina, but for the insufferable waste of a perfectly good meal. I really wanted to eat some mushroom soup, god damn it! But after consoling myself by picking out the stray mushrooms from the folds in my pants and eating them, I decided it would be best to remove the pants and attempt cleaning them. So I took them off and haphazardly scrubbed them off in the sink, then threw them into my pile of dirty clothes so I could wash them the next day. And it seemed everything would end there. But it didn’t; oh, how it didn’t!

A few days later, I noticed a strange smell in my room. Normally this sort of thing is not unusual to me, as I live with a dog who is constantly producing strange smells, but this smell was different. It was overpowering and quite disgusting, whereas my dog’s smells are usually underpowering and slightly less disgusting. Then I remembered the fabled mushroom pants I had forgotten to wash, and crept slowly toward the pile of dirty clothes in which they rested. Those pants were somewhere in there. Their stench wafted toward my nostrils. I thought I saw the pile of clothes rustle and move. What foul monstrosity awaited within this pile of ghastly cloth and fabric?

When I found the pants, I nearly gasped in horror. These certainly looked like my pants, but no, these were a different color! These gray pants were now splotched with irregular patches of red and magenta, smelling of soured milk. My pants were covered with life, sweet life!

I’m reminded of the famed creationist video where a smug, retarded little man claims that evolution cannot be true because new life never forms beneath an air-tight seal in peanut butter jars. Well, my dear creationist friend, if the production of life in strange places is your test of evolution, then bear witness to my GLORIOUS RED-STAINED PANTS THAT SMELL OF MUSTY CHEESE! Fucking fuckwit.

Anyway, at first I thought that perhaps some new bloody feces organism had spawned on my pants, because it was red like blood and smelled distinctly of feces. Then I began to fear for my life, for I started sneezing profusely as soon as I got near these foul pants, and my eyes began to water, and I’d be a liar if I said that I did not fear that some sort of mind-controlling fungus spore would enter my nasal passages, get into my body, insert itself into my DNA and thereafter control my body like a puppet, the organism’s tendrils ripping through my body as soon as someone found out I’m really some sort of alien fungus spore as in the movie The Thing.

Luckily, the tendrils never ripped out of me and I’m reasonably certain my mind is not currently controlled by a fungus. (Please be on the lookout if I start constantly updating this blog with articles about my love of fungus, though.) After that, I began to feel strangely scientific. In fact, I felt a strange affinity for Alexander Fleming, the famed scientist who accidentally discovered penicillin’s antibacterial properties by observing the fungi in a petri dish. My red-stained pants were really no different from the penicillin he discovered, except that I have no idea what was on my pants, it didn’t have antibacterial properties and no doubt probably harbored a hefty colony of bacteria, and it didn’t revolutionize medicine. But really, those are only minor differences, as the overarching thrust of the stories are the same.

Now the pants are finally being washed properly, but I do not harbor any hopes that they will not be forever tainted with the redness of that fateful organism. Perhaps I will wear these stained pants on days when I want to remember that I almost sort of kind of nearly discovered something somewhat like penicillin. Or perhaps I will just wear them when I no longer have any pants, for all the rest are currently covered in soup, and these are somehow the cleanest pair left.

(If there are any science types out there who might know what sort of organism would produce a spoiled cheese smell and stain things red, be sure to offer your hypothesis for what this was in the comments, unless it’s something scary that will invade my brain, then I’d rather be ignorant of my impending doom.)

Philosophy, despite not being composed of four letters, is a dirty word. Granted, most parents would not run to cover their children’s ears or write angry letters to NBC should a primetime television show mention the dreaded P-word; instead they choose to guard their children from much more dangerous things, like nudity, as the sight of a bared tit has been known to cause many a child to explode in rage and consequently stumble about with maddened histrionics like tiny Godzillas menacing Japanese cities. But if these parents knew any better—indeed, if they were not already among the corrupted masses foully abusing this word—they would instead protect their children from philosophy.

Philosophy as it is taught in academia, of course, is not quite so worrisome. While it does not quite possess the austere honor of the hard sciences, it can nevertheless be compared with a respectable poetry course. And like poetry, there is good and bad philosophy, and the inane is usually left in the rubbish heap. To continue the comparison with poetry, as a student you may find yourself forced to read dreadful, overly intellectualized tripe like Eliot’s “The Wasteland” or wonderful gems like Wallace Stevens’ “Sunday Morning”—but rarely will you be forced to sift through anything that begins, “There once was a man from Nantuckett…” Likewise, in the average philosophy course, a student will come across throught-provoking and intellectually stimulating arguments from the likes of Descartes, Hume, Wittgenstein, Quine, Popper, and countless others. But the same student will also be subject to dreadful metaphysicians like Spinoza, Leibniz, and Hegel, or the empty pretentions of Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, or else the sheer insufferableness of Kant’s writing. And though some of the “philosophy” that manages to weasel its way into literary criticism comes close, none of it is tantamount to the inanity of a Mother Goose rhyme making its way into a poetry course.

Outside of the academy, however, philosophy is almost worse than a Mother Goose rhyme. Mother Goose poetry at least has the audacity to include the poetic device of rhyme. But what passes for philosophy among the masses does not seem to possess even the remotest vestige of proper academic philosophy.

To see my point, one need only look at the metamorphasis of the word metaphysics. Metaphysics used to signify the study of ultimate reality, the construction of vast, a priori theories-of-everything. Now, of course, metaphysics simply brings to mind a particular corner of the local chain bookstore, in which drivel about psychics, karma, astrology, ghosts, magic, and angels predominates. The metaphysics section of the bookstore is, in essence, little more than a collection of the silly things that political left-wingers tend to believe. (The political right has to remain content with the traditional, conservative religion section.)

The same sort of bastardization has occurred with the word philosophy among the masses, although this is a particularly greater loss than the loss of metaphysics. Though philosophical metaphysics is generally more substantive than your garden-variety astrology tome, it is difficult to lament the decline of the one branch of philosophy that produced the most monstrous and silly ideas. I stand with the pragmatist C. S. Peirce in my hatred for the a priori vagaries of the metaphysicians, producing the most elegant and profound theories of reality from thin air and resting them, ultimately, upon nothing but the wisps of their own breath, evidence be damned! Those fanciful constructions of metaphysics that disregard reality almost deserve their modern opprobrium and subsequent association with astrologers and voo-doo magic. But philosophy—that precursor to science, secular ethics, and modern government—deserves a better fate!

What has become of philosophy? Most are ignorant of its greatest thinkers, or at best can name only Plato and vaguely recall something he said about a cave with some dudes in it. To most, philosophy isn’t a matter of study. One need not read philosophy to be a philosopher, according to the person off the street. Philosophy, for all intents and purposes, has become the art of stating your opinion, frequently without any justification or argument at all. If you ask the average person to tell you their philosophy, they won’t try to recount the influence of the pragmatists on their epistemology or the positivists on their renunciation of metaphysics or the deontologists on their ethics. Instead, they will say something incredibly trite and silly, perhaps, “My life’s philosophy is to be happy!” while the real philosophers throughout the ages, long since dead, somehow manage to overhear this and subsequently muster the energy to spin within their graves. No longer is philosophy something that one studies. Philosophy is something you perform while sitting in an armchair while intoxicated or high, without a care for any sort of coherence or intelligibility, and can be boiled down to pulling ideas straight from one’s anus shortly after removing one’s head from there.

Even worse, what little authority real philosophers once had has been passed on to comedians, improbable religious figures, family members, and pop-culture figures. You’ll hear Jesus and “my mom” cited as the “greatest” philosophers by thousands of people before you’ll ever hear a name like Aristotle, Bacon, Descartes, Hume, Kant, or Russell. Imagine the analogue of this sort of tragedy in the sciences: people going about naming their mothers and God as the greatest scientists, people asserting that you don’t need to study science and can advance appropriate and sophisticated arguments concerning the subject matter from an armchair with no background familiarity, and so on. Granted, this is seen to some degree when people cite Kent Hovind as a “scientist” or produce endless conjectures about the existence of souls based on piss-poor understandings of quantum physics. But science is not yet a dirty word. When you do science, you are still doing respectable work. But philosophy is something anyone can do, without any effort at all. All it requires is a heap of bullshit and a mouth willing to spew it.

As a result of this state of affairs, the future for philosophy looks bleak. Perhaps this is a result of its unique niche among human endeavors. Though science is a form of philosophy (some of the earliest “philosophical” questions the early Greeks grappled with have been answered by the sciences, for instance), it has distinguished and separated itself and steals any credit philosophy could siphon away. As a result, philosophy is often seen as focused on those questions that science can’t currently address, or on explicating the process of science and knowledge-building. That is, philosophy is stuck addressing unanswerable questions, or else explicating an epistemic process of theory-testing we already find intuitively easy to perform (but for some reason perplexing to explain). This certainly explains why some of the most intriguing areas of philosophy are on the borderlands of legitimate science, be it the theory of mind and cognitive science or the philosophical implications of obscure theories in quantum physics.

Could this be the problem? Does good, tested philosphy simply become science, leaving only the leftovers with philosophy? We’ve already seen the hatchet-job the advent of science has performed on a priori metaphysics, maligning it as philosophy and leaving it abandoned and alone in far corners of bookstores, only to be overrun by magic and astrology. Maybe for that reason I am wrong to mourn the death of philosophy, for maybe it signals the birth of a more complete science. If that is truly the case, then the death of philosophy is more bittersweet than terrible, and I can take solace in whatever part of it remains, transformed into a science. But still, my primitive mind, with its fears of contamination and impurity, would not like to see philosophy become a parody of itself, bastardized like metaphysics by being inundated with nonsense bearing its name. O, though philosophy may have to die, I wish it could just fade away and be gone, rather than have its pristine corpse twisted and mutilated by religion and spiritualism and UFOs. Is it wrong for me to want philosophy—that queen of the sciences—to at least have a proper burial?

When I was younger, I used to abhor Valentine’s day, seeing it as little more than the idealization of my romantic hopelessness. Those Valentine’s days that were not spent in some depressed stupor, agonizing over some unrequited love, were instead spent relentlessly masturbating, my own tears serving as the lubrication. It was my most despised holiday, a time for ruminating in sullen angst, puffy-faced and alone.

But with age comes wisdom and experience, and now Valentine’s day represents something completely different. And while it is often accompanied with the same relentless masturbation, it is no longer an empty, quasi-depressive sort of relentless masturbation, but an unrelenting masturbation of joyous celebration. Now that I have experienced Valentine’s day with a date, along with its attendant responsibilities, I realize how foolish of me it was to disparage the holiday and resent being alone. This year, the obligatory fancy dinner, the half-hearted and uncomprehending attempts at romance, and the agony over the choice of gift were absent. I was not forced into some desperate pretense, to say suave and romantic things that are as natural for me as crapping out of my mouth, because I was alone. I did not have to endlessly search the malls for a gift, staring wide-eyed and afraid at the foreign and alien displays and trinkets, ultimately purchasing some overpriced perfume. No, this year I could masturbate—relentlessly—in peace. And for that I am glad.

Ray Comfort, unlike the banana, is perhaps the greatest boon to atheism since Darwin discovered the process of evolution. His sheer idiocy, voiced with childish certainty, is almost incontrovertible proof against theism’s view of humanity’s place in the cosmos. What sort of malicious, foul entity would create a creature such as Ray Comfort as the pinnacle of all existence? What madman would set this moustached buffoon at the center stage of the universe? Nay, no morally perfect being with any sort of competence would deign to do such a thing. A glimpse into Comfort’s beady eyes, an examination of his tiresome and relentless stupidity, or a simple glance at the insufferable tripe that constitues his blog are enough to send even the most ardent theologian backwards in shock, his hands to his face in horror, as he racks his brain for whatever theodicy could possibly refute this stark, moustached testament to God’s nonexistence. There is no such theodicy.

Take for instance, the following remark from Comfort:

Atheists don’t hate fairies, leprechauns, or unicorns because they don’t exist. It is impossible to hate something that doesn’t exist. And that makes the point.

This argument, aside from being poorly phrased and incomplete, has somehow managed to condense a wide array of logical fallacies and factual errors into only a few short lines. If stupidity were alcohol, this would be 190 proof.

Let’s take this apart bit by bit. First he claims that atheists don’t hate fairies, unicorns, and leprechauns. This simply isn’t true at all. Ever since I was a young child, for instance, I have hated leprechauns. Indeed, anyone who has ever seen Leprechaun in the Hood has inevitably come away from the film with an uncontrollable rage directed at leprechauns everywhere. Of course, because Ray insists it is impossile to hate something that does not exist, it follows that this leprechaun from the ‘hood truly exists. According to Ray Comfort’s strange existential proof, it also follows that hated fictional entities the world over actually exist, whether it be Jar Jar Binks from Star Wars or Allah. Comfort, naturally, can take solace in the certainty of his own existence without seeking the logical certainty of Descartes’ cogito by simply ruminating on the fact that he is hated and despised by people who value intelligence throughout the world, from which it follows from his own distressingly silly reasoning that he must exist. So clearly it isn’t true that nonexistent entities can’t be hated, but an unstated presupposition of this “argument” is that atheists hate God. For my own part, I can readily admit that I do hate the God as described in the Bible as an uncaring monstrosity, which differs little from my hatred of Leprechaun in the Hood, aside from the fact that the murderous leprechaun is at least mildly likeable and will at least allow you to look at more than just his hind parts. However, many atheists do not hate God at all, and in fact think the idea of God as expressed by many Christians is a lovely and beautiful concept. So as can be readily seen, Ray’s argument is fraught with errors and implausibilities. When the explication of everything that is wrong with what you’ve said more than quadruples the size of the original remark, then you know you’ve said something tremendously, stupefyingly stupid.

Of course, Comfort’s most oft-repeated argument in recent days has been the following:

Atheist: someone who believes that nothing made everything. A scientific impossibility!

The audacity of this remark lies not in its bold and outright strawman of the atheist position, but in the sheer hypocrisy. Presumably, Comfort believes that God created the universe as it is described in Genesis. That is, God created the universe from the void, from nothing, ex nihilo. Obviously, if this accurately describes Comfort’s account of creation, then the basis for his argument applies just as well to his own position, for he believes that everything was made out of nothing, an account just as hard to envision as nothing making everything. Of course, Comfort could try to avoid such a criticism by positing a sort of eternal silly putty that always existed alongside God, but then God becomes an unnecessary hypothesis, as the material silly putty no longer requires an explanation for its origin.

Beyond that, though, is the fact that many atheists don’t claim nothing created everything. Prominent cosmological models of the recent past posited a singularity as the initial condition of the Big Bang, which may have always existed in that state of infinites. Current views seem to disregard this because it relies on relativity, which breaks down at quantum microscopic levels. Various alternatives are hypothesized, but as yet none have been proven to any reasonable degree, and string theory models are prominent in emphasizing the concept of multiverses, which is a far cry from creation by nothing. Some philosophers, like Quentin Smith, have advanced scientific arguments for big bang cosmology in regards to atheism by showing that the universe could have arisen from what is essentially “nothing.” The details are over my head and outside my expertise, but I gather it has something to do with quantum vacuum fluctuations or matter and energy being “cancelled out” by equal amounts of anti-matter or dark energy being brought together. So the basic point is that those atheists who do make a claim similar to what Comfort asserts are a bit more nuanced about it and certainly not saying anything nonscientific, whereas ultimately the best we can say is that the answer is unknown and awaiting confirmation. I guess it is hard to embrace uncertainty when the evidence is inconclusive if one believes in a God that will punish you for not accepting things on blind faith, though.

Here is one more quote from Ray:

Imagine being there when the first dog evolved. Let’s say it’s the African hunting dog (Lycaon pictus), the wild canid of Africa. There was a big bang, and millions of years later an animal with a tail and four legs, a liver, heart, kidneys, lungs, blood, ears and eyes evolved (through natural speciation) into the first dog. Fortunately for him, his eyes had evolved to maturity after millions of years of blindness, so that he could see the first female dog that had evolved standing by him. It was actually very fortunate, because if the female dog hadn’t evolved also and been at the right place at the right time, with the right parts and the willingness to mate, he would have been a dead dog. He needed a female to keep the species alive.

After reading this drivel, it really is no wonder that more than half the population in America doubts the theory of evolution. Like a similar sister criticism often advanced by clueless gits, “I don’t believe in evolution because I’ve never seen a dog give birth to a cat!”, this argument falls flat simply because it demonstrates more about the speaker’s ignorance of evolution than it does about evolution.

Notwithstanding his obvious errors in terminology (hearts, kidneys, and other organs are not species, you fucktard—they are produced through natural selection, not “natural speciation”), the whole blathering tale is so riddled with misconceptions that one wonders if Comfort is simply making this all up as an elaborate ruse, only to exclaim “GOTCHA! I don’t actually believe that evolution posits each individual of a species arising separately—that would be stupid!” Unfortunately, it seems he is serious. The basic error with his silly thought experiment is that he doesn’t understand that evolution affects populations, not just individuals. In a sexually reproducing species, the opposite gender doesn’t have to arise independently because the genes that produce phenotypic variation and survival advantages end up being spread through a population in gradual degrees for each variation. Offspring are genetically different from both parents through a variety of mechanisms, including the mixing of genes from both parents, recombination, and the occasional mutation. Each generation varies only slightly from the preceding, so the differences are not so great that they cannot mate with other members. Over time, as these variations slowly accumulate, another population may arise that has evolved some novelty that enhances its survival. Comfort’s criticism would only make sense as applied to a model of evolution that saw speciation occurring in a single generation (a dog being born from a completely separate species) and thereafter being unable to mate without another partner also being produced in a single generation. As I alluded to earlier, this is nothing more than Comfort’s fancy way of saying, “I’ll believe in evolution when a cat gives birth to a dog … twice!” Perhaps if we all shout at him in unison, “And we atheists will believe in God when you fuck a broomstick” he’ll realize that his own argument has just as little to do with evolution as this had to do with belief in God.