A Logical Argument

Religion, and specifically, the brand of Evangelical Fundamentalistic Christianity expoused by Ray Comfort is based primarily and mainly upon fear. It is partly the terror of the unknown (Death without salvation) and partly the wish to feel that you have a kind of loving father (Jesus), who will stand by you in all your troubles and answer your prayers.

Ray claims to have the authority to preach this gospel based on his interpretation of the Bible. An argument based solely on his concept of Biblical inerrancy. Such biblical inerrancy is only supported by the Bible itself. In other words, Ray claims that the Bible is the "Word of God", and the only evidence supporting this is that the Bible itself claims to be the "Word of God". This is merely circular reasoning, not a logical argument.

I present a logical argument that the Bible is nothing but a childish collection of stories. The most childish is the story of the global flood.

Looking at this fable only from a geological point of view, one would realistically expect at least a scant amount of geological or natural evidence for a global flood if the supernatural catastrophe took place, but the signs overwhelmingly point to the contrary. The flood should have created a massive extinction along the floors of the oceans. Likewise, millions of land organisms that would have certainly been victimized by the flood would also have deposited a large layer of terrestrial fossils. Of course, neither one of these evidential necessities is apparent.

Miles of coral reef, hundreds of feet thick, still survive intact at the Eniwetok atoll in the Pacific Ocean. The violent flood would have certainly destroyed these formations, yet the rate of deposit tells us that the reefs have survived for over 100,000 undisturbed years. Similarly, the floodwaters, not to mention the other factors leading to a boiling sea, would have obviously melted the polar ice caps. However, ice layers in Greenland and Antarctica date back at least 40,000 years.

Impact craters from pre-historical asteroid strikes still exist even though the tumultuous floodwaters would have completely eroded them. If these craters were formed concurrently with the flood, as it has been irresponsibly suggested, the magnificent heat from the massive impacts would have immediately boiled large quantities of the ocean, as if it wasn’t hot enough already. Like the asteroid craters, global mountain ranges would exhibit uniform erosion as a result of a global flood. Unsurprisingly, we witness just the opposite in neighboring pairs of greatly contrasting examples, such as the Rockies and Appalachians.

Even if we erroneously assume there to be enough water under the earth’s surface in order to satisfy the required flood levels, the size of the openings necessary to permit passage for a sufficient amount of water would be large enough to destroy the cohesive properties of the earth’s crust. However, the outer layer is firmly intact, and there’s no evidence indicating that it ever collapsed. All this hypothetical escaping water would have greatly eroded the sides of the deep ocean fissures as well, but no such observable evidence exists for this phenomenon either.

We can obtain additional geological evidence suggesting that there will never be records discovered for this particular global flood by examining fossil deposits via radiometric dating. We know that isotopes, specific forms of chemical elements, will naturally convert to other isotopes over time. The rate at which they undergo this change depends on the concentration of the original isotope.

Results from this radiometric dating method unambiguously indicate that many of the less complex fossils are billions of years old. This realization drives a painful thorn in the Creationist hypothesis that attempts to explain how the flood deposited the fossils only a few thousand years ago. Furthermore, time has also neatly separated the earth’s fossils into distinct layers according to their radiometrically determined age. In fact, there has never been a verifiable instance in which two fossils discovered in the same layer were dated appreciably different. Even if we entertain the possibility of the fossils being deposited by the biblical flood, the field of fluid mechanics tells us that the smaller fossils of less complex, more primitive life forms would not sink as fast as the larger fossils, yet the remains of these tiny creatures are the sole occupants of the basement layer because they obviously settled millions of years prior to the deposition of fossils belonging to more complex, more recent life forms.

We can also observe algae deposits within the fossil layers, a phenomenon that could not have formed during the flood because they require sunlight to thrive. It’s quite reasonable to assume that the clouds would have thoroughly obstructed the sunlight during such a tremendous rain indicative of the flood. Setting aside this and all other known fossil inconsistencies with the Bible, archaeologists have found human footprints within the upper layers. Moving water simply could not have deposited these markings. This seemingly endless list of just the geological problems was completely unforeseeable to the primitive authors, thus the Bible offers no justifications or explanations for our discoveries.

If there is such gross factual error in just this one bible story, how can anyone claim Divine Authority and inerrancy for the rest of the Scriptures?

With these and other ongoing discoveries, the outdated concepts of revealed religions must eventually join the other mythologies on the scrapheap of theism. (Sorry all you Thorists and Zuesists)


A good world needs real knowledge, kindliness not predicated upon eternal punishment, and real courage of modern thought; it does not need a regretful hankering after the past or a fettering of the free intelligence by the words uttered long ago by ignorant men.