Oh poo, Ray finally honored me with a response (in a new post no less) and I didn’t find out about it for more than a week :( If I had seen it right away I would have taken the opportunity to continue the argument, but he has a rowdy blog with frequent posts and threads go stale quickly.

My comment was in relation to one of the many thousand posts in which he claims to have caught atheists is some kind of logic trap, because we believe that "nothing created everything" and such a notion is clearly even less plausible than the idea that a supreme being created everything, and therefore everything the Bible says is true. People have been trying to get him to drop this bone for the better part of a year and he shows no sign of letting up. So I vent:

It’s not the ‘nothing’ we have a problem with, it’s the ‘created’ and you’ve heard this a million times you creepy ignorant man. If you ask me: ‘What created the universe?’ I will answer ‘Nothing.’ You will then proudly quote me as holding the position that ‘Nothing created everything’… and for this I have every reason to call you a stinking liar, because what I actually believe is that the universe was not ‘created’ in the first place. Just like you believe your insubstantial God was not ‘created.’

And he responds

Those who believe that the universe is eternal (that it wasn’t created) reveal their lack of understanding of basic science. Look at the words of Stephen Hawking:

"The conclusion of this lecture is that the universe has not existed forever. Rather, the universe, and time itself, had a beginning in the Big Bang, about 15 billion years ago" (The Beginning of Time).

There is disagreement about how long ago the universe began, but there is no doubt amoung scientists that it had a beginning. So the belief that it wasn’t created is completely unfounded. Which brings each of us back to the question: "What was initial cause?" That Cause was God.

…

I don’t think I need to explain how unsatisfactory and unsurprising I find his response (he goes on to say something about the Bible and that he cares about where I spend eternity). Ray is a giant wall of stupid, smiling benignly and filled with the glory of Christ, and this is why I stopped reading his blog regularly; I finally realized it didn’t make a speck of difference what anyone said to him, nothing would adjust his "worldview", and that trying to engage in a dialog would always result in full face-palming frustration. If I had seen this post and replied, my response would have pretty much mirrored the second comment on that post, from Lord Runolfr (although mine would have been more snarky… I stopped trying to be polite to Ray long ago)

Thank you, Ray, for at least trying to answer the question that people have been asking you repeatedly for days. Not exactly a satisfactory answer, but it’s a start. Problems with this response.

1) Thinking the universe is "not created" does not automatically equate to thinking the universe is "eternal". Some people apparently think this, but not all. Even if the universe has only existed for 15 billion years or so and thus has a start time, that doesn’t automatically mean it must have been "created". There is therefore no ignorance of science involved.

2) Even if we take for granted that the universe was "created", that still doesn’t automatically point to your God as the "cause" of the universe. When you say that "the initial cause was God", you are jumping to a conclusion without evidence. (Please note that the Bible is testimony — hearsay testimony at that — as opposed to actual evidence.)

3) Even if we grant that your God (or any god) created the universe, the 15-billion-year timeline and everything else we know about the universe from scientific observation is incompatible with a literal interpretation of the Genesis account of the world’s origins.

Finally, it occurs to me that someone who knows neither myself nor Ray may feel that I took an unnecessarily harsh and insulting tone in my initial comment. If this is the case, I beg you to withhold judgment until you read his latest post about how God isn’t evil for sending Jews to Hell (because Jews are free to accept Jesus Christ as their saviour any time they like… until they die and go to Hell for all eternity of course). If you can read that post without wishing life-long explosive diarrhoea on this evangelical twit, you are a gentler person than I.

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