A few days ago I wrote an article about a crusty old religious white dude who claimed to know more about the Universe than Stephen Hawking, presumably because a dusty old book of myths told him so. Because Stephen had the “audacity” to postulate the Universe created itself, religious rubes have been tripping over one another trying to voice their objections to one of history’s greatest minds smacking down their God myths. A number of irrational voices are making themselves heard, including my favorite mustachioed clown, Ray Comfort.
“It is embarrassingly unscientific to speak of anything creating itself from nothing…Common sense says that if something possessed the ability to create itself from nothing, then that something wasn’t nothing; it was something – a very intelligent creative power of some sort”
The only person here who should be embarrassed over such a dumb statement should be Comfort himself. This is the same man who argued the banana was proof of God’s designing genius . You may also recall a few months ago, this moron released a highly edited version of the Origin of Species with a 50 page foreword trying to undermine what is arguably one of the most important books in the history of our species. He might as well have tried doing the same with Newton’s Principia, but since gravity doesn’t actually interfere with his narrow belief system (he lives in an age where most Christians have begrudgingly accepted the Earth is not the center of the Universe), he desperately needed to diminish the brilliance of evolution any way he can.
As for his statement “common sense” can tell us something about the world, it only further proves he has no idea what he’s talking about. Our powers of perceptions may be useful to us when trying to navigate this cooling ball of rock we call home, but they are completely inadequate when trying to understand the nature of the Universe. Take quantum mechanics as an example: anyone who aspires to comprehend the world of atoms using common sense is bound to lose their minds. The Universe does not conform to our senses; rather we must conform to it.
Comfort isn’t the only fool trying to tackle the magnitude of Professor Hawking’s genius. Religionists all over the world probably felt a mixture of confusion and frustration over the fact the best minds in the world continue to deny the supremacy of their God. They are convinced only a dogmatic belief like theirs could make such pronunciations, and science has become a new religion. Comfort and his ignorant brethren fail to realize if the evidence was pointing towards a God, science would be fully endorsing the notion of a creator. Unlike religion, which begins with a set of beliefs and tries to find ways to justify them any way possible, science is about direct observation, experimentation, and falsifiability, all things which are antithetical to religion. That the search of the truth about our world and our existence has revealed religion to be the make-believe nonsense it is must be a painful pill to swallow. Of course, there’s no law that states a person has to accept reality, is there?