I have a signed copy of this book which Ray Comfort kindly sent me free of charge back when it first came out. The moment it arrived I excitedly sat down to read it, quickly working my way through a good portion of the book in a single sitting. There are many good arguments for Christianity out there, arguments that give an atheist like me serious pause and cause us to sit down and re-evaluate what we believe to be true. This book, I'm sad to say, does not contain such arguments.
I haven't read this book in a long time and to be honest had no intention of doing so again. The reason I decided to pull it off my shelf, dust it off and once more wade through the poorly thought out arguments and unanswered questions, is due to a blog post Ray recently posted on his On The Box website, in which he accuses atheists of being part of a "conspiracy" to down rate his book out of some desire for and love of "guilt-free sexual sin". Those comments I could have happily ignored, but I found the implied accusation that none of the atheist reviewers, all apparently lacking "integrity", had even read his book rather galling, though I guess I should not have been surprised by this seeing Ray started his post by saying "Never have faith in an atheist. Don't trust them for a second. This is because they are not worthy of your trust." It seems that the possibility that he simply wrote a bad book has never once crossed Ray's mind and that he prefers instead to believe that all negative comments about his book are untrue, I mean after all "an atheism's (sic) worldview allows them to lie through their atheist teeth". - (all of the above quotes are taken from Ray's Feb 28th, 2013 blog post - Words of Comfort: "worse than finding a six-inch horse hair in your peanut butter sandwich ...")
And so, with the book open on the table before me, I thought I would offer up my own review, a review very much based upon a reading, in fact a second reading, of his book. I should say straight away that there is so much that is wrong with this book that it would be impossible for me to list in detail even a fraction of the logical errors, bad arguments and blatant dishonesty found within its pages. I will however do my best to pick out examples of the worst this book has to offer, but rest assured that for every one I pick there are ten more just as bad that I left alone.
Fairly early into chapter one Ray introduces an argument that anyone who has ever visited his blog will be well aware of...as well as being well aware of the many, many comments refuting it. Ray usually likes to use dogs as the subject of this argument, but here instead he chooses man, the first man in fact that he names, unsurprisingly, Adam. Immediately Ray shows that he has not even the most basic understanding of evolutionary theory. Adam it seems is very luck as he has evolved at a point in time when there is air for him to breath and, brace yourself for this one, at the exact time when a female of the same species has also evolved, which is good seeing Adam will need to mate. If we accept that Ray is not being wilfully dishonest here, a thing hard to do given how many people have explained this very concept to him over the years, then it shows that he seriously lacks the knowledge required to critique the subject of biological evolution. Populations evolve, not individuals. There is never a point when a single individual of a completely new species just pops up. All species evolved from previous species which evolved in the environment in which they found themselves, slowly over many years, and who did not magically go from having no lungs to fully formed lungs for use in a modern atmosphere in a single generation. Ray's representation of evolutionary theory is so weak that it does not even reach the level of a strawman, a strawmouse maybe.
Much of this book is presented as a series of questions from atheists to which Ray provides answers, or at least responses to in some way as often he seems to avoid the actual question and talk about something else instead (such as when asked how old he thinks the Earth is, p12). When he does actually address the question asked his replies are often insulting and logically flawed to a mind numbing extent. At one point Ray is asked how he knows if he has the right God and his reply would make any thinking person scream. Ray's approach is this, first he lays out some of the foundational tenants of Christianity; we are all sinners, sinners deserve to go to hell, we can't work our way out of sin, we need a saviour to free us from sin. Then he goes through a list of other religions and sees how they compare to this list and, surprise surprise, finds that Christianity is the best fit to a list of religious concepts found in Christianity. At no point does he even consider that the concepts of sin and hell might be incorrect, or that the foundational ideas upon which other religions are built may be the right ones. No, he simply compares other religions to things he has read in the Bible and because they do not fit what is written there he dismisses them as incorrect.
Ray's arguments are also incredibly inconsistent. At various points he claims that atheism is an intellectual issue not a moral one...only to say a few pages later that it is a moral issue not an intellectual one. He seems to change his mind on this issue depending on what argument he is making. If he is asked about whether atheists have a conscience then atheism is an intellectual issue, if asked about the reason people are atheists then it is a moral issues, as apparently we all love to sin so much that we "pretend" God doesn't exists...oh did I forget to mention that Ray thinks all atheists actually believe in God and know he is real but just pretend otherwise? Throughout this book Ray is unwilling to even accept that when an atheist says he doesn't believe in God he is telling the truth. But then he openly says that he does not think atheists can be good people (p36), and that we have some sort of mental disorder (p4), so I guess it is unsurprising that he would not take anything we say seriously.
I could go on and on about this book all day, pulling out example after example of why it is a terrible book and fails to present a single good argument for the existence of the Christian God. Whenever Ray talks about issues related to science, he shows that he has no understanding of the topics about which he talks and furthermore that he happy to remain wilfully ignorant of them. Ray thinks he has the answer and as such anything and everything that disagrees with that answer is immediately dismissed as wrong without even a cursory glance. When dealing with the subject of atheists he refuses to even accept our most basic of claims, that we don't believe in God, and instead lumps all atheists together and proceeds to level the kind of comments that, if aimed at other minority groups, would easily get him labelled a bigot. The rest of the book is one big argument from fear. We are all born sinners, which is apparently our fault in some way, and as such deserve to be punished for all eternity in hell. The only way out of this is to become the right kind of Ray Comfort approved Christian. Otherwise we get the pointy end of the stick jabbed somewhere sensitive for the rest of time. Of course Ray provides no evidence for these claims, they are simply asserted as true, over and over again, and Ray likes to lay the fear on good and thick, knowing that emotion is a good way to "by pass the intellect" and get people to believe the things he is selling.
As I said to start with there are many good arguments out there for Christianity and many good books that contain them. This book is not one of them, the arguments here are poor and often refuted, the author seems completely unwilling to deal with the questions asked of him in an honest and direct fashion and often claims to have given answers where none actually exist. On top of all that it is badly written. This book is basically a collection of old blog posts put down on paper and that is exactly how it reads. Little effort appears to have been made to flesh out arguments or provide evidence for the claims made. The whole thing reads like someone who has spent five minutes responding to a question and has posted up the first draft of their thoughts for the world to see and then ignored all the people pointing out the flaws in their reasoning. And in fact that is exactly what it is. Almost all of the arguments in this book appeared first on Ray's blog and received hundreds of comments explaining why they did not work. People took the time to explain in detail, for example, why Ray's views of evolution are incorrect and what atheists believe and why his analogies are flawed. Ray ignored every single one and instead stuck the same flawed, scientifically inaccurate and dishonest claims in a book.
