If you’ve never heard of Aron Ra, you are probably not an atheist. Don’t feel too bad. He’s rather famous, but mostly limited to secular/humanist circles. If the “Four Horsemen” of atheism, meaning Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett, and the late Christopher Hitchens, represent the creme of the crop of people who have become famous for evangelizing atheism, then Aron Ra ranks only one notch down on the totem pole, in the second tier of revered atheists with Seth Andrews and Matt Dillahunty who are collectively known as the “unholy Trinity.” Mr. Ra is the host of the “RaMen” podcast, a frequent lecturer, and creator of the Phylogeny Explorer Project.
These people have successfully turned their talent arguing for atheism into full-time jobs with career opportunities. They travel all over the world, giving lectures to crowds of adoring fans.
Not a bad gig, if you can get it. No wonder he’s smiling.
Now before I write another word, I would like to acknowledge that Mr. “Ra” (obviously not his birth surname) is quite an intelligent man, and I’m delighted to say he possesses an ego that easily matches and possibly exceeds my own. I personally find the guy quite entertaining. Mr. Ra has a Wikipedia biography that claims he studied paleontology in Dallas, but does not mention a college degree. Don’t let that fool you. He’s very clever and bright, as well as apparently smart enough to run away from a fight he was unlikely to win–an argument with me about the relevance of creation.
During the course of our recent conversation Mr. Ra bragged he would convince me that evolution is true and creation is false, setting the bar of expectations for himself impossibly high. As I tried to explain to Aron, the odds of success for creating a universe from nothing and life from inanimate matter are virtually zero. After writing both Divine Evolution and Counterargument for God to explain in painstaking detail why I have rejected the Darwinian explanation for the origin of new species, and while also realizing my argument relies on a much broader spectrum of scientific evidence than his limited argument based only on biology, I might be getting a little too overconfident about my own worldview to assume he didn’t even stand a chance of success. Unfortunately, we never got to find out for sure if Mr. Ra could meet his own challenge because he put an abrupt end to our conversation by blocking me. I know he didn’t simply delete our conversation because my friends can still see his comments, but I can’t any longer.
How courageous of him.
Granted, having listened to several of Mr. Ra’s “lectures” and read numerous books in subjects by respected experts on subjects specifically related to existential science, I have a pretty good idea of what the best atheist’s arguments might be, and how to attack them. Frankly, I wouldn’t want to argue with me, either.
Bluntly stated, life cannot evolve until it exists. Before evolution even becomes theoretically possible, creation has already occurred. QED.
I made it clear to Mr. Ra that I was somewhat familiar with his work, which gives me an advantage in shaping the argument. I was being brutally honest when I described his lectures as eloquent horse manure, but also quite sincere. Ra is a polished public speaker, to be sure, and he sure loves talking about biology. His arguments remind me of an old saying my dad used to say: if you can’t dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with BS. It’s a lot of fast talk peppered with buzzwords and a pretty slide show. Unfortunately, he’s not very interested in physics or chemistry, and those are critically important steps in the process of existence to be ignored. Nor does Ra show any concerns for the logical weaknesses in his arguments. There are enormous “origin” problems in physics and chemistry that must be considered and solved in some fashion before conversations about biology ever become relevant. Yet in spite of these limitations, Mr. Ra considers himself an expert on multiple subjects, as the video below demonstrates. Ra took a college class in geology, so apparently he’s now prepared to deliver a lecture that allegedly disproves Noah’s flood story. I had no idea that taking one college class in a subject would turn someone into a subject matter expert, ready to teach.
Not only did I also take Geology in college, I also took a class in Geography (passing them both), and I stayed at a Holiday Inn Express last night! (That was sarcastic humor, for those humor impaired.)
I could tell Aron was getting annoyed with my line of questioning and a few of the more audacious claims I’m known for making, such as “If you don’t want to believe in a creator God, you’re choosing to believe in unbelievable good luck.” The fact is, when it comes to the creation of the universe via the Big Bang, if we merely accept what the scientific experts have claimed, before that anomalous event there were no stars, planets, or matter, and something (a.k.a. “First Cause”) created from some incredibly dense matter that did not contain even a single atom. That is what the scientific evidence tells us. Any competing explanation for the origin of the universe is an untested hypothesis lacking any evidence to support it. In other words, nothing more than relatively useless speculation.
Mr. Ra doesn’t like cosmology very much, but he sure did like to name drop several “famous” atheist astronomers such as Lawrence Krauss, author of A Universe From Nothing, to create the impression the “experts” agreed with him. Mr. Krauss is also an outspoken atheist, and I pointed out to Aron that his friend’s mental acuity was somewhat in question because when questioned, he couldn’t even bring himself to admit that incest was morally wrong in every situation.
The most amazing part of the “kids react” video above is that one young boy who doesn’t look older than ten perfectly sums up the morality problem for the atheist worldview: “You don’t really have a goal, so basically you can do whatever you want.” An atheist cannot publicly admit what a child knows instinctively–without an identifiable source of objective morality, we are left as individuals to make up the rules as we go along. If we deny our own instinctive knowledge that “sins” like incest and murder are morally wrong, how can we condemn others for committing incest and murder?
In sharp contrast to Mr. Krauss’ argument, I can give secular and religious reasons for condemning incest–in the first book of the Bible it is rather clear that incest was considered morally wrong and sinful. Otherwise, Lot’s daughters would not have had to get him drunk so he would impregnate them after Sodom and Gomorrah were incinerated, presumably to prevent the extinction of our species. For my atheist friends, I would merely point out that even Darwin thought incest had led to the health issues and premature death of his beloved daughter Annie, given that his wife Emma was also his first cousin.
I never managed to get Mr. Ra to say whether or not he rejected the scientific evidence for the Big Bang or if he was merely resin to parrot the speculative talking point that no one knows what existed prior to the Big Bang. It’s somewhat irrelevant, if we can be sure it wasn’t our universe. The steady state, or eternal universe model, was discarded after scientific evidence of the Big Bang became universally accepted. The Big Bang theory might not be the only competing idea in regard to the origin of our universe, but it is the only one with scientific evidence to support it.
As far as competing models with the Big Bang theory are concerned, an interesting argument I might have enjoyed the opportunity to challenge would be the oscillating universe hypothesis, but Mr. Ra apparently wasn’t interested, or perhaps realized he couldn’t present himself as an authority on the subject, so he abruptly put an end to our conversation by blocking me. But before I was blocked, Mr. Ra offered to engage in “Socratic debate” during which he would prove biological evolution and something to the effect of making me embarrassed to have ever admitted believing in creation. The prospect was intriguing, but his terms were absurd. Again my apologies for not being able to quote verbatim, because I’ve been blocked and cannot read the challenge anymore, but there were some terms that needed to be amended if he was serious. There was something about limiting the scope of conversation and evidence to “peer-reviewed” papers, or some such nonsense, and other terms to his advantage.
You know, I’ll bet I could beat Michael Jordan in a game of one-on-one, provided we play by my unique set of rules. Mr. Jordan would not be allowed to take a shot closer than half court, I should get possession of the ball after each made basket no matter who makes it, and Jordan can’t play defense, even if I’m taking an uncontested layup–with all those constraints, it would be difficult for me to lose, but we are talking about Michael Jordan. However, in a game with rules that aren’t designed to give one side the advantage over the other, the game would be no contest–the odds of my beating Michael Jordan in basketball are about a good as an “accidental” Big Bang–meaning slightly better than zero, but not by much. A miniscule fraction of a single percentage point.
Mr. Ra virtually guaranteed he would convince me that evolution was true and creation was false before he was finished with me, but he never got started because at some point, I believe he realized he’d just made a boast he would never be able to satisfy, because there is no way an argument involving evidence of change will convince me that creation did not occur.
The word evolution literally means “change.” One of my favorite sayings I like to use with atheists like Mr. Ra is to remind them that life cannot evolve until life exists. Before evolution even becomes theoretically possible, two acts of creation have already occurred: our universe was created from nothing, and life was created from inanimate matter (a chemical hypothesis known as abiogenesis.)
Like I said, my argument to the atheist is a simple one–if you don’t believe in God, you must believe in extraordinary good luck. Why can I claim there are only two options? The scientific evidence overwhelmingly shows the universe had an origin, and we call it the Big Bang. The universe could have been created by accident (good luck), or it could have been created on purpose (God), but there should be no question about whether or not the Big Bang itself occurred. There is no evidence of an oscillating universe, but red shift and CMB are scientific evidence that moved the Big Bang from hypothesis to theory. Whether or not a Big Bang event occurred should not be open for debate.
As far was the initial debate overture from Mr. Ra was concerned, it’s too bad we couldn’t negotiate some mutually amenable terms to debate the existence of God, because that was the true gist of our dispute. Even though Mr. Ra didn’t write the words below himself, as an advocate for the same theories, he probably believes this outlandish claim. The evidence that my distant cousin is an aardvark is most certainly in dispute.
Evolution is a fact. Beyond reasonable doubt, beyond serious doubt, beyond sane, informed, intelligent doubt, beyond doubt evolution is a fact. The evidence for evolution is at least as strong as the evidence for the Holocaust, even allowing for eyewitnesses to the Holocaust. It is the plain truth that we are cousins of chimpanzee, somewhat more distant cousins of monkey, more distant cousins still of aardvarks and manatees, yet more distant cousins of bananas and turnips…continue the list as long as desired.
Dawkins, Richard. The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution. Free Press. Hardcover. Page 8.
After quoting Dawkins, I said something to the effect that I didn’t just fall off the turnip truck, so he was going to have a very difficult time convincing me it was sane and reasonable to believe I might allegedly be related to turnips by the same descent-with-modifications process (sexual reproduction) that caused my son to look sort of like me, without being my clone. That’s going to be a pretty tough row to hoe.
I even tipped my hand about how I would challenge the so-called physical evidence of ape-to-hominid-to-human evolution, by merely pointing out the evidence for Lucy would probably lead anthropologists to conclude that Oliver the humanzee‘s skeletal remains provided evidence of evolution, too.
Except it didn’t.
Oliver was merely a chimpanzee who preferred walking upright like humans. DNA tests confirmed it. I don’t care if Lucy is 3 million years old or not. Without DNA analysis, it can’t proved Lucy wasn’t simply a chimp just like Oliver, who preferred to walk upright. This is precisely why I coined the phrase “the conjecture of evolution.” Mr. Ra thinks he can educate me better than biology professor Benoit LeBlanc, who conceded that my description of macro evolution as “shape shifting” was a fair comparison, or Doctor Ken Miller, to whom I’ve previously directed some of my issues with ape-to-human evolution. He made the erroneous assumption that my problem is ignorance, but the truth is I’m just stubborn, and I don’t believe any of the “experts” have it right. My overwhelming advantage in the debate would be Mr. Ra has never heard my personal theory called iterative creation, but I’ve heard all the best arguments from his side before, and they have yet to convince me that they are right and I’m wrong. I sort of already know his argument, but he had no idea what to expect from me.
Of course, Mr. Ra is welcome to resume our conversation at his leisure. As long as I’m breathing, I’m always up to have a polite if spirited conversation about the existential questions, because I’m keenly interested in them. I also find atheism to be a fascinating worldview. If Mr. Ra would care to step down from his pedestal and engage with an admittedly arrogant theist-agnostic who lacks the Hovind last name, he would be encouraged to put forth his very best effort to keep his promise. I will carefully evaluate every individual piece of scientific evidence offered in support of his argument, and only ask for equal time and consideration for my arguments. If Mr. Ra does decide to accept his own challenge, I wish him the very best of luck. He’s going to need all the luck he can get.
My argument doesn’t require good luck. It only needs a Creator.
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