The other day, someone said to me (and I honestly can’t quite remember who or where, but I seem to recall someone on 365project.org) that I should watch a documentary named “The Case For Christ”, as it was made by a sceptical guy who, upon investigating some science things, suddenly realised the one true path and became a Christian – a guy named Lee Strobel.

Being somewhat interested in this field I already knew his name, and the “Oh but I used to be an atheist!” card he attempts to play. If he really wasn’t already a Christian when he set out to make this documentary, then his choice of experts is pretty amazingly coincidental – they all turn out to be pro-Christian “scientists” from pro-ID fronts like The Discovery Institute! What are the chances?!

If he really wasn’t already a Christian, why did he use the most retarded conservative-right-wing-hardline-Christian form of language when talking about “committed atheism” and “darwinism” and suchlike? Curious… veeery curious!

Anyway, I decided to sit through the thing, as it’d had an effect on the person who said I should watch it, and I wanted to respect that. So, notepad.exe open by my side to keep track of bits to research, off I went.

Then An Hour (And A Bit More For Rewinding To Check They Really Tried To Make That Claim, A Few Times) Happened

Then I sat down and started writing this, lamenting that my amusing title didn’t factor in the extra hours it was going to take to research and write up the problems contained within the hour of absolute horse-shit I’d just witnessed, and that extending it would kill its brevity. Ah, the struggles of a literary retard. Anyway – ah yes.

Fortunately, this guy saved me the trouble of both wasting yet more hours, and factoring a mention of them in anywhere, writing, as he has, a pretty thorough commentary on the various mistakes and fallacies of both Strobel’s “experts” themselves and the claims they jointly make. He includes references too. It’s very good. Being a big fan of “not re-inventing the wheel” these days, I smiled a lot, deleted the paragraphs I’d already written, and wrote this part instead.

So that’s that.

Or Is It?

As the above-linked critique is pretty off-putting in its length, I wanted to provide a few handy snippets here, to a few things.

No, 600 scientists did not sign anything refuting the modern theory of evolution, they signed something saying “Darwin’s original ideas do not give a complete picture on their own”, which is true (there’s been progress since he came up with the original hypothesis, you know), and the Discovery Institute then published it with a misleading title. Also, only about 25% of them are even biologists. The modern theory of evolution is a scientific fact, it is not doubted by the scientific community at large, it is perfectly stable, and has a vast body of evidence behind it. There is no “controversy” as ID proponents like to claim.

Michael Behe has been peddling the same “irreducible complexity” line for years, despite his only examples of it having been refuted many times. During the Kitzmiller vs Dover case Behe maintained that there could not be an evolutionary answer to the existence of the immune system, despite being presented with several books detailing how it came about, which he said he had not read, and would not read, for “God did it” was the only possible answer to him, despite what “actual facts” might say. He’s probably the most well known of the retards Strobel turns to.

DNA’s “information” is not “a language” in the sense that we use “language” to communicate; the analogy is completely false. To abstract it and call it “information”, “language” etc and attach emotion and extra dimension to it is entirely unfounded. Besides which, our languages did evolve naturally over time, emerging as a useful system to have, they didn’t just appear one day, and nobody sat down and designed them from the outset. So the analogy could swing entirely in favour of evolution if spun a different way.

TL;DR

Strobel was never in any doubt as to his belief in the Christian deity, and it shows throughout. All of his “experts” ignore crucial evidence, and/or straight make stuff up, in order to back up their pro-deity beliefs.

You cannot have a scientific argument for a non-scientific thing, basically. Strobel and his band of merry blingwads need to stop trying to create them, because it can’t be done. If it could be, then god would be able to be tested (that’s what science does), shown to exist/not, and the question would be solved (and then someone would come along and invent a new god character, unable to be tested scientifically, and we’d be where we are already, all over again).