1,145 of 1,351 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Ziztur thoroughly reviews Comfort's book, February 18, 2009
This review is from: You Can Lead an Atheist to Evidence, But You Can't Make Him Think: Answers to Questions from Angry Skeptics (Hardcover)
Unfortunately, Ray Comfort has a large following of fans, and most who are critical of his work decide that the best course of action is to be dismissive. His style of writing can barely be called argumentative. He posits no compelling evidence for his beliefs, makes blind assertions, and clearly does not understand natural forces such as evolution by natural selection and by writing a book which mischaracterizes science, is undermining observation, experimentation, rational thought and critical thinking.
Comfort consistently confuses biology with other scientific disciplines such as cosmology and astronomy, and generally builds up a strawman science, only to knock it down by simply asserting, literally, that his god is real and that atheists are stupid and immoral.
Comfort has a former blog from which he drew the questions for his book, and though the commenters on his blog (including myself) explained repeatedly and thoroughly that evolution does not operate in the fairy-tale evolution he has constructed, that atheists do not believe that "nothing created everything", he continues to write as if he has not read their explanation or is intentionally ignoring them. He writes, for example, about what an amazing coincidence that when "the first man evolved", a woman just happened to amazingly evolve right beside him. This characterization of evolution betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of it. He creates a "fairytale" version of evolution and then goes on to explain what a silly fairytale it is.
Ray actually states in his book that Christians do not need to prove god exists to atheists, because atheists obviously know already that god exists, and are merely denying god so that they can be moral free agents.
I find this constant insistence that atheists and non-believers "pretend there is no god" just so they can "get away with whatever they want" to be tiresome and false. Insisting that atheists are immoral people and that all "true" Christians are good people only serves to divide believers and nonbelievers and perpetuate society's hatred for people who don't believe in their god.
There are many other apologists out there who are much better at apologetics than this author.
The rest of his book is filled with outdated arguments (such as the lord, liar or lunatic argument about Jesus' credibility) and petty jabs at people who don't believe in god which only serve to cut off coherent dialogue between believers and non-believers. To those people who are claiming any atheist who reads this book must admit it is full of good science - If you Google my nickname and Ray Comfort, or my blog name "Atheism is Freedom" you can find what amounts to a very thorough critique of this book - which would never fit in the space of a review here. This book is not good science, it is misunderstood, strawman science.
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148 of 180 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Utter tripe, March 5, 2009
This review is from: You Can Lead an Atheist to Evidence, But You Can't Make Him Think: Answers to Questions from Angry Skeptics (Hardcover)
Ray Comfort has no idea how evolution works, or what Atheists actually think or believe. His premise that Atheists "Pretend" there is no God is no less offensive than if an Atheist were to write a book with the premise that Christians "pretend" there is a God.
His arguments are shallow, and his lack of understanding of his subject matter is telling. He is simply an apologist without a real argument, and a lot of questions he doesn't really answer in his book. Readers: research his answers, and you will find he is very wrong pretty much on every point.
Presuppositionalist arguments really aren't effective at convincing skeptics, so I have to assume he's just preaching to the evangelicals who already believe.
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277 of 347 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
If I have to explain how dumb this book is don't bother reading this review., February 17, 2009
This review is from: You Can Lead an Atheist to Evidence, But You Can't Make Him Think: Answers to Questions from Angry Skeptics (Hardcover)
If you replace the word Atheist with Christian or Theist, then you may have an interesting book on your hands. Otherwise steer clear.
Ray's best argument involves comparing the shape of a banana to the way human's hold it and claiming that such amazing design is evidence of a God. Beyond the poverty of his imagination and his ignorance of evidence and science; it's an interesting claim given that most bananas grown for the western market are cultivated to be that way. They don't grow that way naturally.
If you are religious you will like this book as it allows you to continue bathing in a sea of ignorance.
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