Answers in Genesis…facepalm

I’ve often thought that in some ways many atheists can have a tendency towards some of the same biases held by the religious, for example, how many atheists have gone out and read theistic apologist sites? and in comparison how many have read atheist blogs or watched atheist videos on YouTube? If we expect the theists to read our sites and watch our videos then it is only fair that we read theirs to hear both sides of the argument, to that end I have taken it upon myself to critique one of the biggest sources of Christian apologetics; answersingenesis.org

The segment of their site I am going to look at today in in their “Get Answers” section under “How Do We Know There Is a God?”:

The First paragraph is merely a description of their definition of god as per the bible, so nothing really to critique here as nothing contained in this paragraph can be considered either evidence for or against the existence of god, merely evidence that the bible exists.

Onto the second paragraph; this basically states that only God is capable of proving his existence and that we mere humans are not capable of completing such a task, and that through our limited “operational science” we would be unable to test God’s “divine, eternal attributes” even if we God were to appear on earth. Essentially this is another paragraph that provides no evidence for or against the existence of a higher being, it is merely speculation with rather poor reasoning.

The third paragraph is where we get into the territory of attempted proof, this segment starts off discussing prophecies, if the bible is filled with multiple detailed prophesies that have been confirmed then we do have some evidence for the existence of God, so does the author of this piece reference any of these so called prophecies? No, we are given a list of passages from Isaiah, none of which are actually prophecies (Isaiah 41:21–23, 44:6–8, 45:1–6, and 46:8–11). In truth most of the prophecies within the bible are ultimately vague or unverifiable and therefore cannot be given as evidence for the existence of God.

Moving on through this segment the author essentially postulates that the bibles existence is proof of the events told within it: 

Many people believe the written testimony concerning the events surrounding the American Revolutionary War without a single photo or video, yet they fail to believe the written testimony of the 40 authors whose works we collectively call “the Bible.”

This is probably one of the most ridiculous arguments I think I have heard yet; if the evidence for the American Revolutionary War was ONE book then it’s validity would most definitely doubted, however, we have examples of hundreds of diaries, treaties and census, birth and deed records regarding certain well known indiviuals of the time (English, French and American), as well as many historical artifacts from the time and literally thousands of grave stones of soldiers who fell during this war. Not only this; the authorship of the previous documents listed are generally known and verified and we have original copies of the texts, add to this that we have many pieces of artwork depicting the battles of this war that were painted at the time it was ongoing (or shortly after) then yes we have solid evidence that these events happened, the bible however does not have this level of evidence, in fact many parts of it contradict other records of the time (for example the flood of Noah would have wiped out the civilization of ancient Egyptians who were in existence in this time and at no point in their extensive records ever mention such a flood).

It is also worth mentioning another key point in why we can believe the writings from the period of the American revolution: The texts generally do not contradict each other, they show the same events from different viewpoint yet they still agree with each other; something the bible fails to do. The existence of the bible is most certainly not a proof of its contents.

Next the author makes Paley’s argument that the world is too complex for their not to be a creator; this has been explained so many times by others I am not going to go through it, if you are really interested you can follow this link to a very well written rebuttal to the argument.

Next we get a considerable misunderstanding of how geology works:

With the account of the Flood, we would expect to find billions of dead things buried in rock layers laid down by water all over the earth, which is exactly what we do find!

In truth, if the flood had ever happened we would find “billions of dead things” (not sure why he couldn’t just say fossils) under ONE stratum (layer) of sedimentary rock, however, in reality we find fossils of varying ages (the ages of which can be verified via numerous forms of radioactive dating) under multiple different strata, at differing depths depending upon their age; the geological and paleontological evidence actually shows the idea of “the flood” to be impossible.

We then get the argument that  love, reason, knowledge, logic, and morality are impossible in a materialistic world and that these concepts can only be explained by the existence of God; this is a point which pretty much any anthropologist, psychologist, behavioral biologist or social scientist would dismiss as ridiculous. It is understood that these traits have evolved within the human brain as a primal survival instinct which has become altered and enhanced through social development and interaction. The existence of psychological constructs such as love is not evidence for any God, it is certainly not evidence for any specific God.

After this we then get a brief explanation of how you now have no reason not to believe (I’d like to think that I’ve shown this to be utter bullshit) in the existence of God. It then goes on to make some wild claims about atheists:

he will deny the clear evidence for God and eventually invent “rescuing devices” like the idea that aliens planted our DNA on earth.

This is so ridiculous it is absurd, I have never heard an atheist make this argument and have to assume this is an attempt at a straw man argument and it should be disregarded just as everything else in this article should.

I feel it is worthwhile reading such articles, but it is even more worthwhile pointing out the ridiculousness of them even more because unfortunately these groups will target children in an attempt to teach them this is scientific, and that, is something that should be fought against.