The Bill Muehlenberg Trophy: Garret Oden's Burgess Shale of ignorance

Lately I’ve been weighing in to a debate on Matt’s Notepad between the eponymous Matt and one Garret Oden, regarding the latter’s “A couple reasons [sic] to believe that God DOES exist.” Pointing out the manifold factual errors and logical fallacies in Oden’s list of arguments for theism, a plurality of which are based on the assumption that arguments against evolution are arguments for the existence of God, would (if you’ll pardon the expression) try the patience of a saint; you may do so at your leisure. His waterboarding of reasoned argument is replicated in his exchanges with Matt and myself, such that it is difficult to determine whether or not Oden is a Poe. A glance at his website makes it all the more tempting to draw that conclusion:

 

 
(Source: Fred the Spot)

[UPDATE: BTW, Fred the Spot "evolves" into a crucifix, complete with Biblical texts so grovelling and self-abasing that they would make a BDSM sub blush. This guy should be writing Chick Tracts.]

Garret’s name links to the aforementioned website, so it is reasonable to conclude that it is his. Here are a few tasty morsels, both from his own Forever Christian blog and from pages linked to Fred the Spot.

On the defeat of a Republican amendment to the Obama stimulus package, that would have stripped from the bill language preventing funding for school improvements being used for sectarian purposes, Oden says:

Religious freedomes are being taken away from Americans… Don’t let it happen!

Oden reviews the Pixar film Happy Feet:

Mumble represents gay people. He isn’t accepted. And they make the elders and conservative penguins look really bad! And they make it look like because they accepted Mumble, they got all the fish, and everything was just perfect!! Yay. Gay people make things perfect!

(Has to be a Poe.)

Oden watched an episode of The Atheist Experience, and he claims it lowered his IQ:

I registed with the website and started talking to the other people through the chat box conveniently located right next to the video streaming area. I was the ONLY Christian.
I made it clear to everyone I was a hardcore creationist and the battle began. They started asking me,”Where’s your proof of God?”.

Well I told them the greatest evidence,”Look around. Everything around you was made somehow… and all options are provable to be wrong except for God’s creation.”

They started bashing me and calling me stupid. I didn’t mind. It reassured me I was spreading God’s word where I needed to be. By the time the show started, there were about 290 people in the chat room; and just about all of them had been arguing against me.

The show started and most of the people became quiet. The start was quite boring, and I assumed it would become entertaining with other callers. But no Christian called to share the truth. It kind of dissappointed me.

I knew from the start I wanted to call in, I have been training myself to argue against evolution, but I felt like now wasn’t the correct time to call in yet. So I waited. All the people in the chat were chanting: Lets see a theist!! They were tellin me to call in already and such (for they knew I was a hardcore Christian by now).

Well I never called in. I was too dumbfounded by the talkshow host’s stupidness. Everytime a new issue would pop up, they would blame us Christians. It was just unfair, and all based on fallacies (lies).

Well tune in next week, for you will find me in the chat rooms arguing as HOOBLAH2U2. I am hoping I will feel the need to call in and shut them up for a bit, but it’s up to God.

Oh, please, God. Please let Oden call in. Please. And please let it be on an episode hosted by Matt Dilahunty.

Via Fred the Spot, Gospelway on homosexuality:

Note that God created woman to satisfy man’s need for a marriage companion. Animals were not adequate, nor did God create another man for this purpose. For man to join to a man (or a woman to a woman) violates God’s order in marriage and sexual mating just as surely as joining to an animal. And it follows that such relations cannot truly meet man’s need for companionship, which explains why we will see that homosexual relations virtually always fail. (This point will also be made below on 1 Cor. 7:2-4.)

Via Fred the Spot, Christian Courier on the cosmological argument:

In view of the foregoing, namely that something has always existed, and yet that “something” is not of a material nature, the student of logic is irresistibly forced to the conclusion that the “something” that is eternal is non-material—which means it must be “spirit” in its essence. The Scriptures identify that spirit Being as God. “God is spirit?” (Jn. 4:24)—an uncreated, eternal Spirit Being.

Both Scripture and logic, then, in marvelous concert, testify to the fact that God is eternal. He had no origin. He is the everlasting I AM. No one “made” him. He simply IS.

Via Fred the Spot, All About the Journey shares with us his “stream-of-consciousness skepticism” regarding Big Bang cosmology:

How can nothing explode? Where did all that matter and energy come from? What caused its release? How did this explosion of everything (from nothing) order itself? How can simplicity become complexity? Where did the chemical elements come from? Where did the mathematical laws and physical properties come from? How do we explain the design, complexity and fine-tuning inherent in spiral galaxies, solar systems, and stars?

How did life come from a rock? How did a bird come from a lizard? Why don’t we see birds come from lizards today? Why are there no transitional fossils in our museums today? Why have we never observed beneficial mutations? Where did the information code in DNA come from? Where did the language convention that interprets DNA come from? How can we explain the random development of the human eye, reproductive system, digestive tract, brain, heart and lungs? What about the subconscious mind? What about love, morality, ethics, and emotions? Can these things really evolve gradually and randomly over time?

Jeepers! What was happening to me?

Literally, I was in a state of “stream-of-consciousness” skepticism. Everything I knew (and thought I knew) about the world around me didn’t make sense any more. I couldn’t go back! If I was going to be intellectually honest with myself, I couldn’t retreat to my prior way of thinking… I had to go forward and personally look at the observable evidence… But, where to begin?

“Where to begin?” indeed.