ATHEIST REVIEW of, How to Know God Exists by Steven J.

Ray starts out How to Know God Exists with some self-deprecating humor, describing himself (with examples) as a "klutz" and inviting us to wonder why we should heed the opinion, on a question of such high import as the existence of God, of someone who apparently can't perform simple household chores without risking death or maiming.

My own problem, of course, is wondering why we should trust someone who assumes that "chance" is the only possible alternative to "design" as an explanation for biological complexity and adaption. Ray's answer to either question is that the answer really, really matters to us ... which doesn't, of course, have any terribly obvious bearing on the question of whether his particular answer is true. Note that "design" is not just Ray's answer to why we have eyes and ears and livers and (presumably) why we plantaris tendons and GULO pseudogenes and erector pili muscles. It's his explanation for why we have refraction (and hence rainbows), gravity (and hence oceans and air -- since he's arguing that the planet itself was intelligently created, he doesn't consider gravity an explanation for why we have, e.g. planets and stars in the first place).

Ray repeats some familiar arguments in this chapter, with some familiar problems. He argues that we wouldn't expect a Coke can to form spontaneously, metal sheeting and labeling assembling spontaneously from simple molecules, and therefore shouldn't expect a banana or the person who eats one to originate that way. He doesn't really consider the implications of the fact that Coke cans are manufactured and cannot reproduce themselves (so cannot evolve by mutation and natural selection), whereas bananas and humans had ancestors and do experience evolution. He complains (or at least notes) that this argument was mocked, but doesn't seem to quite grasp why it was mocked (one hint: bananas themselves, as we know them, are results of human selective breeding).

In other cases, Ray does incorporate responses to arguments he's presented before. He notes, when making the "a building implies a builder, hence creation implies a Creator," that we have indeed seen architects and building contractors and carpenters and plumbers, and haven't actually seen a Being capable of making buildings (or bananas) out of nothing by sheer intellect, with no physical mechanism. But he moves blithely and confidently on: even a stone-age tribesman, he argues, would see that skyscrapers were manufactured and designed things. This might well be the case, though it would still imply an analogy between making mud huts and making skyscrapers; this would seem to me to strengthen the case for ascribing biological complexity and diversity to observed processes like reproduction, inheritance, mutation, selection, and drift.

AUTHOR REBUTTAL: You said "My own problem, of course, is wondering why we should trust someone who assumes that 'chance' is the only possible alternative to 'design' as an explanation for biological complexity and adaption." I'm not asking anyone to trust me (see Psalm 146:3). Why would I do that? All I'm asking is that you are reasonable in your thinking, and think outside of the presumptions of atheistic evolution.

Charles Darwin had a tremendous imagination, and nothing epitomizes that more than the idea of natural selection. However, my belief is that if any animal, fish, bird, or plant has adapted to its surroundings, it's not because it did so over incredibly long periods of time, but because God gave it the ability to adapt.

The salamander "adapts" from water to air in about six weeks because God gave it the ability to do so. It was its Creator that gave the little caterpillar the ability to adapt butterfly wings for flight, and it does take millions of years. It goes through four stages of life: egg, larva (the caterpillar stage), pupa (the chrysalis phase), to the adult, and it takes only 30 to 40 days.

The smaller ears of the Indian elephant are smaller than the ears of an African elephant because God made them that way. They didn’t end up smaller because of Darwin's natural selection. Bird's have long beaks because God made them long so that they could get food from long stemmed flowers that He created. The giraffe has a long neck, not because it adapted to reach food in tall trees that God made, but because He created the animal with a long neck to reach tall trees that He made.

Modern natural selection sits on the crumbled foundation of the hoax of the peppered moth. Yet, if you Google "peppered moth" you will find a mass of naive believers in natural selection citing it as gospel-truth, when it's not:

"And all those still photos of moths on tree trunks? One paper described how it was done dead moths were glued to the tree. University of Massachusetts biologist Theodore Sargent helped glue moths onto trees for a NOVA documentary. He says textbooks and films have featured 'a lot of fraudulent photographs'."

Someone who believes in adaption looks at the billions of pairs of eyes of animals, insects, fish, birds and human beings, and sees them as the end result of natural selection, all coincidentally maturing to a point of being fully-functional at this point of time. On top of that, they believe that there was no designer, that all the eyes were unplanned, not created, nor made. They just are. Evolution-did-it.

Atheists also believe in "common descent," but they don’t know what all the animals, birds, fish, insects and human beings commonly descended from, in the beginning. They just did. Evolution-did-it. They believe with all of their heart. I don't have such unwavering blind faith in the idea. I don’t believe it for a second.

I could perhaps believe that an ocean wave could carve an image of a musical note on a shore. With billions of waves going back and forth, I suppose it could randomly happen, given enough time. I would be extremely hard-pressed to believe that a wave could carve a four note tune in the sand.

But you would have me believe that waves produced, not only Beethoven's 5th with its four movements, but every work he wrote, including his symphonies, operatic works, piano sonatas, string quartets and ballets, all randomly carved in time into the sand, by the action of mindless waves. You go even further, and want me to believe that the ocean and the sand produced itself, before it miraculously created the brilliant musical works on the shore. To even consider believing this is foolish talk, and I wouldn't bother to even go there, except that I care for you and where you spend eternity.

Two other points. You said, "He doesn't really consider the implications of the fact that Coke cans are manufactured and cannot reproduce themselves (so cannot evolve by mutation and natural selection), whereas bananas and humans had ancestors and do experience evolution." Can you give me just one example of a genetic mutation or an evolutionary process which can be seen to increase the information in the genome? If you can’t give me one authentic example, it points to the fact that the original information must have been at an optimum at some point in the past and has since been "running down." That is special creation. So how can you possibly believe that any Darwinian evolution take place?

And your comment "bananas themselves, as we know them, are results of human selective breeding" is bogus. See http://raycomfortfood.blogspot.com/2009/10/archeology-and-banana.html
It's just not true. Your belief that it is, is misguided. Prove me wrong.