Ray Comfort is an evangelical Christian minister who worked in New Zealand and Australia before coming to the United States. He has been an open-air preacher, a prolific author, a blogger on atheism and the star of a viral web video on creationism featuring a banana.
His book God Doesn't Believe in Atheists: Proof That the Atheist Doesn't Exist (1993) was supposedly a response to atheism, but it was a straw man — atheism as imagined by a Christian — because it did not cite atheist thinkers. A later attempt, You Can Lead an Atheist to Evidence, But You Can't Make Him Think: Answers to Questions from Angry Skeptics (2009), was another riff the same theme. It has a slight improvement over the 1993 book insofar as it was formatted as a Q&A with real questions that real atheists (supposedly) had posed to Comfort on his blog. These questions were short, unscholarly, and vague, allowing Comfort ample room to misinterpret them.
Here are a few main themes of these two books, both of which failed to convince me of God's existence.
Trope 1: True atheism requires omniscience
What is Comfort's "proof that the atheist doesn't exist?" It is only the disappointing and silly claim that true atheism in "the strict sense" fo the term — the certainty that there is no God, according to his definition — would require omniscience. People who "insist upon disbelief in God," he advises, must emphasize their own "limited knowledge" and must phrase their statement as "I believe that there is no God." (God Doesn't Believe in Atheists, p. 15)
A juvenile gambit. If he defines the term "atheism" as knowledge of God's nonexistence, he must make the parallel definition for "theism." Of course, no one knows whether God exists, and if that's the standard for theism or the lack thereof, no one can be atheist nor theist — right? Since everyone must admit that our own "limited knowledge" leads us to mere "belief," then — if atheism and theism require higher levels of knowledge, none of us are atheists or theists.
Of course, Comfort doesn't really define the term "atheism" as claiming knowledge of God's nonexistence. How do I know he does not? Because the very title of his 1993 book, God Doesn't Believe in Atheists, is a joke that only makes sense if you recognize that atheists are people who don't believe in God. If he (or others) really interpreted "atheism" as a claim to knowledge, the joke would have had to be "God Doesn't Know That Atheists Don't Exist." (See, for example, how I played on this theme in the title of this blog post.)
Comfort is deliberately, temporarily misdefining the term "atheism," without making the parallel change to the definition of "theism," to pretend to "win" this particular point. I put "win" in scare-quotes because no one started this argument with him. It's a non-problem. He is making it up.
If he is claiming more specifically that it is impossible ever to deny anything, what to make, then, of his own repeated denials of evolution? "It doesn't matter how many thousands of years pass," he asserts confidently, "elephants don't have [i.e. give birth to] giraffes, nor do monkeys have men." (God Doesn't Believe in Atheists, p. 71) How does he envision himself escaping the snarky retort that, because he isn't omniscient and didn't witness the birth of every animal that ever lived, he cannot deny evolution? How does he avoid the charge that — to riff off his book title — God doesn't believe in creationists?!
Trope 2: Atheists are already theists
Now and then, Comfort says the burden of proof is not on the theist, since — according to him — atheists somehow secretly already believe in God. "We don't have to prove God to the professing atheist. This is because he intuitively knows that he exists." (You Can Lead an Atheist to Evidence, p. 9) Of course, if Comfort were to properly acknowledge his own epistemic limitations, he wouldn't try to claim what any atheist, much less all atheists, intuit and what proof they require, and he would admit the burden of proof inherent in his own position.
Atheists are really already theists deep inside their hearts? Comfort asserts that, but he doesn't provide any proof. He has not provided "Proof That the Atheist Doesn't Exist" (the subtitle of his 1993 book).
Trope 3: Every building has a builder
"Every building has a builder." This is Comfort's recurring argument for why living beings must have had a Creator. Of course, as has been acknowledged by theologians for thousands of years, this principle implies an infinite regress of creators.
If everything needs a creator, who created God?
No one, says Comfort, because God created time and nothing could have been created before time.
But this merely exchanges one problem for another:
If everything needs time to be created, how was time created?
Another, more subtle issue:
If it's impossible to create God, why assume that God is an uncreated being?
Why not go with another option: God doesn't exist at all?
Trope 4: Your conscience tells you God exists...or does it?
Here's a hideously embarrassing contradiction in You Can Lead an Atheist to Evidence. Comfort says the conscience, rather than the intellect, testifies to God's existence and therefore the atheist's motivation for rejecting God "is moral. It's not intellectual." (p. 8) Then he says the conscience has nothing to contribute whatsoever on this issue because "atheism is not a moral issue. It's an intellectual issue." (p. 35) On one of his central theses in a bestselling book, he blatantly contradicts himself.
(He does not seem to be sensitive to contradictions in general. In responding to an objection that the creation stories in Genesis 1 and 2 contradict each other, he simply responds that they do not. Actually, they do, on the issue of whether plants were created before or after the first human.)
He is also unclear on whether atheists are intelligent and ethical. He acknowledges that studies have revealed that atheists and Christians are roughly the same on these two counts, and furthermore that people do not necessarily change their ways when they convert to Christianity, yet he insists on calling atheists "foolish" and "immoral."
In some places, he says an atheist has a working conscience and should recognize that it is God-given. But elsewhere, he implies that a person's conscience doesn't function properly unless they recognize God, and that a typical atheist feels constrained only by "the bounds of a civil law he's ever expanding to accommodate his sinful desires." (You Can Lead an Atheist to Evidence, p. 17) This is false, of course, and a smear. I have a conscience; I merely have an atheistic theory about what it is, what it does, and where it came from. Even if I am mistaken in my atheistic understanding of how I am wired for morality, and even if the true explanation is a theistic one, I am nevertheless capable of decent behavior, which is far more important than whether my limited knowledge has grasped the correct explanation for the origins of my behavior, and it is a point on which Comfort doesn't give me full credit.
Trope 5: The threat of Hell
If I believed in God and Hell, Hell would be a barrier toward my relationship with God. I, personally, don't wish other people to suffer harsh punishment for minor infractions. Why should God desire and enforce this?
Comfort superficially explains that God is different because He is perfect and has more exacting standards. Of course, this does not answer the question. If I fundamentally disagree with a moral standard, increasing nitpicking about the standard and intensifying punishment for violations does not make me say, Oh, well, now I see that the moral standard was perfect all along. Instead, it makes the problem worse.
That which is not a perfection in a human is not obviously a perfection in God.
Trope 6: Always wear your parachute
The parachute allegory is a cornerstone of these books. Comfort describes himself as being in the position of knowing a plane is going to crash and warning the other passengers to put on their parachutes. Many passengers — so he characterizes them — do not listen due to their pride, laziness, or disbelief. Why not, he suggests, just put on the parachute, which is faith in Christ, because it is harmless and it will save you from infinite suffering in Hell if it turns out there is such a Hell?
Essentially, this is a version of Pascal's Wager. Pascal's Wager has been refuted elsewhere. It's easy to do. There are two basic ways to refute it, as I see it, because it requires you to make two assumptions. First of all, that the infinite joy of Heaven and the infinite suffering of Hell are real possibilities. If you say that the afterlife cannot possibly be infinite, now you are in a mathematical position to weigh your finite experience in this life against the finite afterlife that you may reap as a consequence. Secondly, that the Christian God (who can help us with this afterlife) is the only possible god. This is an even easier rebuttal. If any gods are possible, we should review various options. There is no reason to entertain the Christian god as a viable possibility while excluding the possibility of the gods of other religions. And then we have to consider that, even if there is an infinitely long heaven and an infinitely long hell, we have no idea which god is going to save us.
To continue the parachute allegory, and to put my own spin on it, from the point of view of my admittedly limited knowledge:
The parachute is ripped and will not save us.
The plane is not crashing.
Thank you anyway.
The books:
Comfort, Ray. God Doesn't Believe in Atheists: Proof that the Atheist Doesn't Exist. (1993) Gainesville, Fl.: Bridge-Logos Publishers, 2002.
Comfort, Ray. You Can Lead an Atheist to Evidence, But You Can't Make Him Think: Answers to Questions from Angry Skeptics. (2009) WND Books, February 2009.
This January 2022 blog post is based on an old article I wrote that was published in Positive Atheism, June 2009: "God Doesn't Believe in Atheists: A response to the books of Ray Comfort." The publication went offline.
If you'd like to learn more about my work, I've published books. Also, I write for Medium. There, readers with a paid membership don't have to worry about the paywall.
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