Talk:Nothing Created Everything: The Scientific Impossibility of Atheistic Evolution

ray ray

I'd rather, when referring to the author, see Comfort, or Mr Comfort if you're going to make this a serious refutudiation. If it's just for fnu, nevermind, have at it. 16:05, 18 February 2011 (UTC) C®ackeЯ

I base this article on a much earlier review of Ray's book You Can Lead an Atheist to Evidence, but You Can't Make Him Think. This review has been around quite a long time for people to properly adjust it as they see fit, however it addresses Ray as "Ray" not Comfort. So it seems my choice of words for this article it just fine. If you disagree, then changes can be made. Feredir28 (talk) 17:59, 18 February 2011 (UTC)

That said, I don't think the tone of addressing Ray directly quite works. DeltaStar_{Senior Sysop}^{Speciationspeed!} 23:27, 20 March 2011 (UTC)

I agree with DS. Addressing Ray personally is a kind of fourth wall thing. Concernedresident ^{omg!!! ponies!!!} 00:21, 3 April 2011 (UTC)

Understood, a more appropriate tone will be used. After reviewing all these books and refuting twelve full bloody episodes of Ray Comfort AND Kirk Cameron for IronChariots[1], having to listen to these two clowns for hours as they constantly and shamelessly repeat the same old lies and dishonest tactics to mass amount of people gets very very annoying that a negative tone often slips. Believe me I can do a lot worse, but for now on I will do my best to keep it cool and save the tone for IronChariots. If anyone erases a piece that may not have a polite tone, please just reword it and keep the counter argument there. Thank you. Cheers. Feredir28 (talk) 22:14, 3 April 2011 (UTC)

Needs MOAR! Picktures!

But please, no HITLER! that is all. 00:02, 3 April 2011 (UTC) C®ackeЯ

needs Crocoduck or a bannana ! 67.72.98.45 (talk) 03:20, 3 April 2011 (UTC)

What it may need is some photos of evidence that Ray says does not exist. How do we set up or find photos to place in these articles? Feredir28 (talk) 22:14, 3 April 2011 (UTC)

Star Stuff

I'm in the middle of the article now, and thought I would point out a minor quibble. Most stars are formed from hydrogen and helium, not carbon, oxygen, etc...these heavier elements are formed in stars, and make up most terrestrial planets. Forgive my pedanticism, just thought I'd point it out. ^{— Unsigned, by: Dorianin / talk / contribs}

Depends on the generation, as second generation stars can incorporate elements fused within first generation stars and develop them further. ^narchist 22:42, 1 April 2012 (UTC)

which is irrelevant, as only elements up to iron can release energy from fusion. Heavier elements are created in Novae and Supernovae.Dorianin (talk) 07:23, 12 October 2012 (UTC)

Minor??? "The molecules required to form a sun are heavy elements such as carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen. Scientists have already established and observed how these elements form stars." is just plain wrong, and certainly not supported by the "citation". It is so wrong it's embarrassing. ħuman 20:36, 25 April 2012 (UTC)

Yah, I`m Canadian. Don`t like to make too big of a deal of things. You`re right though...it`s actually so awful, it`s not even wrong. I`ve started embracing my american half. BTW, I`ve kind of let rationalwiki slip, hence the distance between posts...long story.Dorianin (talk) 07:23, 12 October 2012 (UTC)

Sloppy

Putting editorial comments on the left side like "(What a selfish punk, it is only once a week. Try to be independent)" is a serious abuse of the point of the SBS format.

I realize for a book we can't post the entire thing on the left, but it must at least be a clear, honest synopsis. Running into a problem like this in the 3rd paragraph of a very long article makes me worry about the quality of the whole thing.

And on the other side, things like "Maybe it is atheist are interested in learning new things, or perhaps they just want to smell what Comfort is spewing." pretty much confirm my sense that this is one long sloppy hit piece.

Didn't I throw a "delete" template on one of these "book reviews" a week or two ago for similar reasons? ħuman 20:32, 25 April 2012 (UTC)

I removed any pieces that address Comfort directly, esp. in harsh tones. I agree that a general synopsis of the book should be included, which you should agree that generally this article basically does just that. The only exception is the quotes Comfort provides, which makes it pretty "lengthy" but some of them are necessary to point out quote-mines. And as I last recall from your "delete" book review was because you spotted one mispelled name (c'mon mate, we find those all the time on RW) and you dislike paraphrasing (in this case I was providing quotes appropriately when need be and summarized the rest) and you were confronted by a couple of other RW users who called for "improvement" over deletion. I favor the improvement side, otherwise I am sure RationalWiki would never have left You Can Lead an Atheist to Evidence, but You Can't Make Him Think online even two years before I ever came here. Feredir28 (talk) 20:25, 27 April 2012 (UTC)

People are only just now realizing how much work it's going to take to make your articles presentable. We're going to have to have a wiki wide discussion about how to approach the project. 20:35, 27 April 2012 (UTC)

Feredir needs to explain this

"A decade ago, Kathleen Hunt, a zoologist with the University of Washington, produced a list of a few hundred of the more dramatic transitional species known so far, all of which definitely fit every criteria required of the most restrictive definition. Myriad transitional species have been, and still are being, discovered; so many in fact that lots of biologists and paleontologists now consider that list “innumerable” especially since the tally of definite transitionals keeps growing so fast! Several lineages are now virtually complete, including our own." [2] (Lol the quote appears twice in this article in without a single alteration. No wonder it's 140k long)

"Kinfolk in the village of Limone Sul Garda in northern Italy have a mutation which gives them better tolerance of HDL serum cholesterol. Consequently this family has no history of heart attacks despite their high-risk dietary habits. This mutation was traced to a single common ancestor living in the 1700's, but has now spread to dozens of descendants. The Glycophorin A somatic cell mutation which has been identified in some Tibetans, which allows them to endure prolonged periods at altitudes over 7,000 feet without succumbing to apoplexia, or “altitude sickness”. A different, but similar mutation was identified in high altitude natives in the Andes.[8] We’ve also identified an emerging population of tetrachromatic women who can see a bit of the normally invisible ultraviolet spectrum. The CCR5-delta 32 mutation. About 10% of whites of European origin now carry it. But the incidence is only 2% in central Asia, and is completely absent among East Asians, Africans, and tribal Americans. It appears to have suddenly become relatively common among white Europeans about 700 years ago, evidently as a result of the Black Plague, indicating another example of natural selection allowing one gene dominance in a changing environment. It is harmless or neutral in every respect other than its one clearly beneficial feature. According to Science-Frontiers.com, if one inherits this gene from both parents, they will be especially resistant, if not immune to AIDS. there’s a family in Connecticut who've been identified as having hyperdense, virtually unbreakable bones. A team of doctors at Yale traced the mutation to a gene that was the subject of an earlier study. In that study researchers showed that low bone density could be caused by a mutation that disrupts the function of a gene called LRP5. This clued them that a different mutation increased LRP5 function, leading to an opposite phenotype, that is, high bone density. According to their investigators, members of this family have bones so strong they rival those of a character in the Bruce Willis movie, 'Unbreakable.'[9]"Cribbed from Aron Ra?

"Conventional wisdom has held that nothing smaller than 150 nanometres - 150 millionths of a metre - can survive independently as an autonomous life form, because that is the minimum size needed to contain the necessary genetic and other life support material. The nanobes discovered by Dr Uwins, however, were only 20-150nm in diameter - remarkable considering that the size of a single ribosome (site of protein synthesis) is roughly the same as the smallest nanobes. Equally as amazing, the nanobes most likely came from a sandstone rock sample retrieved from 3-5km below the ocean bed, where the pressure is around 2,000 atmospheres and the temperature ranges from 115-170°C. "[3]

"The question “How did life first evolve on earth?” is one of the most intriguing questions in biology. Examination of the wide range of modern organisms has provided a wealth of clues about some of the necessary chemicals and conditions required. While many models have been proposed, some are clearly better than others. One of the most likely is a protometabolism-transfer RNA model, consisting first of The Age of Chemicals providing the necessary organic compounds, followed by The Age of Information involving the co-evolution of polymers of RNA and protein. This model shows that the origin of life was not so intractable that only a divine creator could do it."[4]

"Dinosaurian traits include the following:

• no bill
• teeth on premaxilla and maxilla bones
• nasal opening far forward, separated from the eye by a large preorbital fenestra (hole)
• neck attached to skull from the rear
• center of cervical vertebrae that have simple concave articular facets
• long bony tail; no pygostyle
• ribs slender, without joints or uncinate processes, and not articulated with the sternum
• sacrum that occupies six vertebrae
• small thoracic girdle
• metacarpals free (except third metacarpal), wrist hand joint flexible
• claws on three unfused digits
• pelvic girdle and femur joint shaped like those of archosaurs in many details
• bones of pelvis unfused

...and over 100 other differences from birds (Chiappe 2002; Norell and Clarke 2001)" Right down to the cites, but no credit given for the quote, eh.

"The "tail like a cedar," which creationists think indicates a large dinosaur, is not even a real tail. "Tail" was used as a euphemism in the King James version. A more likely translation for the phrase is, "His penis stiffens like a cedar" (Mitchell 1987). The behemoth was probably a bull, and the cedar comparison referred to its virility."[5]

"This was spoken by Elohim (ironically, a plural name for the god El), who is the “Lord” of the Israelites. This is the equivalent of establishing the nation of Israel, not the United States of America. It can be taken as either monotheistic (only one god)"[6]

"It hasn’t been for a long time now. There was a missing link in 1859 when there were only two species of humans yet known in the fossil record, and no intermediate fossils to link them with any of the other apes we knew of at that time. Since then, we’ve found the fossils of thousands of individuals of dozens of hominid species, many of which provide a definite link to the other apes. But there were two particular pieces predicted to complete the puzzle: First, it was never supposed that we evolved from any ape species still alive today. Instead the theory held that chimpanzees and humans were sibling species, daughters of the same mother. So the first link we needed to find was an ancient ape apparently basal to either of us –to prove there was a potential progenitor of both groups. We had already found that link in Europe five years before Darwin went public. So we already had an evident “chain” of transitional species from which only one more “link” was needed. The theory then required that another extinct hominid be found in strata chronologically between the Miocene Dryopithecus fontana and the earliest known human species, which from 1891 to 1961, was Homo erectus. We’ve found lots of candidates, as many as fifty species of apes which are now all extinct. But more than that, the theory also demanded that we find one “half-way” between humans and other apes in terms of morphology. We found exactly that too way back in 1974. Australopithecus afarensis proved to be a fully bi-pedal ape who’s hands, feet, teeth, pelvis, skull, and other physical details were exactly what creationists challenged us to find, yet they’re still pretending we never found it."Right down to Aron Ra's spelling errors.

"This is an example of begging the question, as the point which he's attempting to prove is contained in his premise. Anything created must have a creator, but he hasn't demonstrated that what he means by "creation" (the universe, everything, humans, etc.) is actually a creation. The appearance of design, purpose or complexity alone is not sufficient to posit an intelligent creator. When he asks questions like, "When you see a building, how do you know there was a builder?", his answer is "The building is absolute proof of the builder." This avoids the important question about how we recognize design. He's relying on common sense and a lack of critical thinking, to support the idea that this is a natural, obvious and reliable assumption. In truth, we recognize that the building is designed because we have an abundance of evidence that supports that conclusion and no evidence to support the idea that buildings are naturally occurring. We possess, or can attain by research, empirical evidence about the history of a given building; who designed it, who built it, what methods they used, etc. We can also learn about the general history of buildings and other structures, throughout recorded history. All of this evidence, and more, in conjunction with a lack of evidence supporting the idea that buildings occur naturally, lead us to the reliably supported conclusion that a given building had a builder. We're not always consciously aware of this process, as we've come to trust our intuition without constantly analyzing why this trust is deserved. Considering a human, for example. We know that humans are the result of a natural process (sexual reproduction). Science has proven to be the most reliable method for explaining reality and its reliability supports the position that, until evidence to the contrary is presented, natural explanations exist for all phenomena. Ray, and others, aver that the natural world must have a supernatural, intelligent creator...a position wholly unsupported by evidence. Additionally, when humans create things, they use pre-existing material. To compare the creation of the universe by a god to the creation of objects by humans is to imply that this god used pre-existing matter to do it. This, of course, still leads one to ask, "where did this matter come from?""Cribbed entirely from Iron Chariots, where Feredir contributes, though he didin't contribute to this article.

"The law says that heat will not spontaneously flow from a colder body to a warmer one or, equivalently, that total entropy (a measure of useful energy) in a closed system will not decrease. Entropy is not the same as disorder. Sometimes the two correspond, but sometimes order increases as entropy increases. (Aranda-Espinoza et al. 1999; Kestenbaum 1998) Entropy can even be used to produce order, such as in the sorting of molecules by size (Han and Craighead 2000). Even in a closed system, pockets of lower entropy can form if they are offset by increased entropy elsewhere in the system. In short, order from disorder happens on earth all the time"[7]

"It is not simply a matter of being sexual or asexual. There are many intermediate stages. A gradual origin, with each step favored by natural selection, is possible (Kondrashov 1997). The earliest steps involve single-celled organisms exchanging genetic information; they need not be distinct sexes. Males and females most emphatically would not evolve independently. Sex, by definition, depends on both male and female acting together. As sex evolved, there would have been some incompatibilities causing sterility (just as there are today), but these would affect individuals, not whole populations, and the genes that cause such incompatibility would rapidly be selected against. ... many hypotheses have been proposed for the evolutionary advantage of sex (Barton and Charlesworth 1998). There is good experimental support for some of these, including resistance to deleterious mutation load (Davies et al. 1999; Paland and Lynch 2006) and more rapid adaptation in a rapidly changing environment, especially to acquire resistance to parasites (Sá Martins 2000). ..."[8]

"which to discuss morality, is without foundation. Plain empathy can trigger natural help responses to others distress and crate natural aversion to causing others harm. Likewise, the simple experience of living alongside others is a simple feedback about how our actions affect each other and how we might have to affect our conduct in response. The human brain contains “mirror neurons”; which mimic the activity of other parts of the brain or of other brains. This provides a literal biological foundation for empathy: individuals with mirror neurons, including humans and other primates, can actually feel what others feel. The two prerequisites for reliable moral assessment are 1) reason and 2) accurate and relevant information. Sound reasoning won't lead to valid assessments if we are operating under flawed information, nor with sound information if our reasoning is flawed. Without sound reasoning and information, we can' determine how the universe works, how different life forms suffer or flourish, where responsibility lies, or would the short or long term consequences of actions are on an inter-personal or global scale. And these are considerations on which moral judgments depends."Even included the original author's typo and citation.

02:15, 13 May 2012 (UTC)

You mean he didn't write all his tripe on his own? Heavens to Betsy! I keep forgetting to userfy all these crappy "reviews"... ħuman 02:26, 13 May 2012 (UTC)

We need to do something about this. It has far too many problems:

• Namely, it is too long. WAY too long. I'm less interested in reading a point-by-point rebuttal of a bad evangelist's book than the book itself.
• Too many errors. It'll take hours to go through and correct all of the mistakes.
• Plagiarism, apparently.
• Not notable enough to have this much discussion on it. Ray is only semi-famous because of that banana debacle; no one reads his books. The only reason they're published in the first place is because he either publishes them himself or gets someone like WND to do it.

I propose we dump all of the point-by-point stuff in a subpage and put a brief summary up on this page. Cow...Hammer^time! 20:19, 14 May 2012 (UTC)

A subpage isn't going to happen with the serious problems with this article. The question is whether we even want a stub before I move this to his userspace. Why isn't Feredir participating in this discussion or even responding to any of this? 23:27, 14 May 2012 (UTC)

Fair Use

I wondering about articles of this type, where there's extensive quoting of a book, paired with responses. Has there been any discussion of the fair use rationale? Are there guidelines on the amount that can be quoted?Fdof (talk) 05:59, 10 August 2012 (UTC)

Try here. It's short and might not be an actual "guideline" so it might not be what you're looking for. We had a couple lawyer folk around here when we started that would vet things like this. I don't know if they're still around. C®ackeЯ 06:19, 10 August 2012 (UTC)

aliens

"While it may appear far-fetched to most people, the alien scenario can be testable and is more likely then we are the products of a supernatural diety."

How is the alien scenario testable? DinoCrisis (talk) 03:19, 11 October 2012 (UTC)

Because, in principle, aliens are naturalistic and isn't separated, by the argument's very design, from being connected to us in a meaningful manner. We could, for instance, find the alien species in question, or find chemically identical DNA on another planet. By contrast, anything "supernatural" doesn't fit any useful definition of the word "exists". ^pathetic 18:36, 11 October 2012 (UTC)

Additionally, what on fricken earth does a supernatural entity have to do with life outside of earth?Dorianin (talk) 07:27, 12 October 2012 (UTC)

Contrast "directed panspermia" with "intelligent design". ^sshole 20:59, 12 October 2012 (UTC)

You only need to look at the title to know it's wrong.

The very title of this book immediately tells you that it was written by somebody with a shaky grasp of the concepts.

I guess that it means that the biological theory of evolution is somehow dependent on theories about the origin of the universe. I suppose it is in a way, but only in so far as everything ultimately goes back to the origin of the universe. This inability to understand the difference between the the three concepts: the origin of the universe, the origin of life and the evolution of life is one of the hallmarks of creationism.--Bob^{"I think you'll find it's more complicated than that."} 09:11, 27 May 2014 (UTC)

"haphazardly slapped together"

This phrase is an artless, opinion laden assessment concerning the evolution/design of the eye. One could easily argue that it economically uses the material available to it especially viz the the gradual way it was built. The eye neither leans towards simplicity over complexity. It represents a useful mixture of function, durability and seamless integration. Really one wonders how a visual organ that concealed the drive behind its evolution without starting from the outside and building inward is ineluctable, if one assumes avoidance of the blind spot is necessarily preferential.^{— Unsigned, by: 162.207.68.254 / talk / contribs}

On talk pages, please sign your comments using four tildes (~~~~) or by clicking on the sign button: on the toolbar above the edit panel. (You can indent successive talk page comments using one more colon (:) for each line.) Thank you.

I can't understand a word you're saying. Christopher (talk) 18:30, 7 May 2017 (UTC)

Something funny

Comfort says God never changes. But I've heard others attempting to justify the bloodbaths of the OT claiming that God's moral evolves, so those massacres were justified from his POV.

Just like other apologists who attempt to convert non-believers with the classical "Jesus saves", etc., not to mention to talk about "omniscience" and "omnipresence" without caring for the consequences (and the failure that is "omnibenevolence"), everything boils down to use the Bible as justification ignoring the problems it has. Circular reasoning at its finest. --Panzerfaust (talk) 23:35, 13 March 2018 (UTC)