answers in genesis tackles logic, fails miserably
When you live in constant denial, one of the benefits of your avoidance of the real world is getting to make up your own rules of physics, chemistry, biology and history, and then pretending as if they actually apply outside of your imagination, especially when you sell them as your religious beliefs. Just ask Ken Ham and his band of professional ignoramuses. After publishing countless articles that are wrong about virtually every aspect of middle school science and opening a museum which serves as a testament of rabid religious denialism, they decided that if you believe that The Flintstones was an accurate account of human pre-history, you could tackle logical constructs to prove that those uppity atheists are the irrational ones rather than you. Really, at this point it’s actually kind of sad because the whole thing reads like it was written by a sixth grader…
The materialistic atheist can’t have laws of logic. He believes that everything that exists is material — part of the physical world. But laws of logic are not physical. You can’t stub your toe on a law of logic. Laws of logic cannot exist in the atheist’s world, yet he uses them to try to reason. … He is borrowing from the Christian worldview to argue against the Christian worldview. The atheist’s view cannot be rational because he uses things that cannot exist according to his profession.
Basically, the argument here is that since materialists believe everything is a part of a natural world and laws of logic aren’t tangible, therefore Christianity according to them is right and there’s a magical creature running the 6,000 year old universe to which you can telepathically talk at your leisure. Wow, gee, isn’t Jason Lisle, the AiG astrophysicist who sacrificed his reason to Ham’s inane war on science, so logical? Too bad he can’t distinguish between abstract concepts and physical entities, basing his entire argument on that inability, but hey, he says he can prove it by confusing the very measurable and well-defined physical laws of causality with the notion of a god’s supernatural consistency. Oh and by borrowing an example from Sunday School for first and second graders, which you’ll probably be able to recognize pretty quickly.
Breathing requires air, not a profession of belief in air. Likewise, logical reasoning requires God, not a profession of belief in Him. Of course the atheist can reason; it’s because God has made his mind and given him access to the laws of logic — and that’s the point. It’s because God exists that reasoning is possible. The atheist can reason, but within his own worldview he cannot account for his ability to reason.
Umm… ok? Note to the AiG’s zombies: asserting things doesn’t mean you logically proved them. We can see air, we can breathe it, we can trap it, measure it, analyze it, and create it in the lab. If you’re going to compare a deity to air, you better make sure we can do the same with the deity, otherwise you’re comparing apples to the third moon of Omicron Persei 8 and pretending that your lapse in thought is somehow logical. Even worse is the ridiculous insistence that just because we exist, it must mean your God exists too. We can reason thanks to millions of years of evolution which gave us the rudiments of intelligence, a real sense of right and wrong straight from the cradle, and helped spawn societies with their legal codices. But wouldn’t you know it, the brilliant logician that is Lisle saw through the ruse and can counter with the following…
The atheist might respond, “Laws of logic are material they’re electro-chemical connections in the brain.” But then the laws of logic are not universal; they would not extend beyond the brain. In other words, we couldn’t argue that contradictions cannot occur on Mars, since no one’s brain is on Mars. In fact, if the laws of logic are just electro-chemical connections in the brain, then they would differ somewhat from person to person because everyone has different connections in their brain.
Ow. The stupid. It burns like the death ray spawned by a feeding black hole’s surging magnetic fields, as Orac would probably say. While trying to prove that the laws of logic are invariable throughout the universe, Lisle is so completely unaware of what he’s saying, he doesn’t even notice that he proves himself wrong. Obviously, a mix of fundamentalism and denial gave him very different ideas of what the laws of logic are for most people since he’s trying to argue that his ability to think the way a rabid Biblical literalist does is incontrovertible proof of a deity. And on top of that, just to make this even worse and more embarrassing on himself, he goes on to compare the uniform laws of physics on a macro scale to his personal interpretations of Ham’s screeds. So he thinks that he logically proved that because gravity doesn’t reverse itself on Mars, he was granted supreme logical skills from the creator of the universe. Unless he prefixed all this with the world “Christianity,” most of us would probably think that he should spend a few weeks in a padded room for observation.
Is this what passes for logic in AiG’s collective lapse of thought? This is like being lectured about genetics by an obnoxious six year old who thinks he knows so much about the subject that he can condescend to you as he spews out utter nonsense. And if it wasn’t grown men doing the same thing and insisting on propagating this insipidity among others under a false guise of scientific authority, it would actually be kind of funny. But in reality, this exercise in “logic” is just the ramblings of a zealot desperately grasping at straws and passing off mindless repetition and assertions as an argument for a magical sky man who listens to his thoughts if he thinks hard enough. Really, what deity would even want to have such followers?
