As part of my effort to expand my knowledge of religious apologetics, and add to my personal library, I've just received a used copy of Ray Comfort's 1990 book, "God Doesn't Believe in Atheists."No, I don't expect this to profoundly change my life. And from reading Comfort's blog, I expect the book to contain little in the way of reasoning or logic.
Still, I want to see what he has to say.
First impressions from cracking the book - oversized text with average words per page of about 250. My eyesight is really really poor, but I think I could read this book without my glasses. It's almost a Reader's Digest Large Text version.
If Comfort used a normal font I think he could condense this 200 page book down to a 50 page booklet that would be cheap enough to give away for free instead of charging $12 a copy.
But I spent a lot less than $12. I spent about a dollar, plus another $3 in shipping.
I've been ordering other books too, from other conservative religious writers. I haven't forgotten my original challenge, I've been reading books and writing copious notes in the margins, and making notes on my PC. At some point I expect several essays to fall out of these.
6 comments:
Lord love a duck. Better you than me, Cal. Still, props to you for slogging through this stuff.
Hey Mark, sorry to leave several posts with extra possible work on your end attached to each, but I was wondering if anybody had suggested "signs of intelligence," ed. by Dembski and Kushiner. It is pretty good at tieing together many threads of the ID front. I think Dembski's book, Intelligent Design is a classic for the ID movement, but his basic argument is represented by a chapter in "Sings of Intelligence."
I noticed you read Eerman's book and found it devistateing for Christians who want to read the bible literally. If you are intrested in working on some sort of book exchange, I would not mind reading a book or two of your choice and presenting you with somewhat of a "Christian" response. Let me know what you think, or what you might recommend. Could be fun anyway.
Yours,
Loren
Loren, I find it difficult to consider that a mathematician and a religious magazine editor would have much authority in speaking about biology. I think that Jonathan Wells is more qualified to speak than Dembski's book.
However, I would be happy to read his book. I do have several other books ahead of me, including two D'Souza books!
I'd love to read books you recommend, or recommend books to you, but I'd prefer to not do an actual book exchange. I lose more books by lending them to my friends! Besides, I have a nasty habit of writing my notes in the book margins.
I have a link to my personal library that you can see to the right of my blog.
Oh, my take on Comfort's book?
I caught a couple of lies and a few quote mines. There were a lot of anecdotes and lots of poor analogies. The writing style was simple, 6th grade level stuff.
Shorter Ray Comfort, "If you can't disprove God, then you're NOT an Atheist" and "You're only an Atheist because you love doing evil!"
Also, according to Comfort some Christians weren't ever Christians, they are / were "False Converts". Especially ex-Christians like me.
As far as I can see, only time will tell if Comfort is a Christian or a False Convert.
Who knows? Comfort could become an Atheist any day now. Of course he'd have to forgo his sole source of income to do so...
oh, I am an advid writer in the margens kind of guy myself. I dont mean actually exchange our own books. I just ment, recomend titles that would challenge one another (always a good way to grow).
signs of Intelligence is better than you may give it credit for up front. It has contributions by Phillip Johnson (Darwin on Trial), Stephen Meyer, Walter Bradley, Paul Nelson, Jonathan Wells and Michael Behe (and others). Really a good grounding of ID.
I just finished Thomas Nagel's "the Last Word." Have you heard of it? it was fantastic.
Yours,
loren
Loren, I put "Signs of Intelligence" on my Amazon wishlist. It may be a few months before I get it.
I've never heard of "The Last Word" or of Nagel. I find the Amazon reviews to be fascinating though, so I've also added it to my wishlist.
I now have 536 items on my Amazon wishlist (sigh). So much knowledge to gain, so little time!
And seriously, I have 10 different books waiting for me to read, 3 of which I'm reading because I think I need to do so, not because I actually WANT to read them!
Still, keep recommending books for me Loren. I'll get to them as I can.
And maybe it's time for me to start thinning out my Amazon wishlist.
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