If you are reading this then you more than likely already know that Ray Comfort has some difficulty handling simple logic. If not, then consider this example. Ray posted the following critique of a few statements that Richard Dawkins supposedly made on July 8 over at his blog:

When I contrasted having absolute assurance of something with the word “probably,” an atheist (Richard) replied, “All planes and elevators are probably safe. Accidents do happen. All knowledge is probable . . . So the use of probably simple means the person is not as arrogant to assume he/she has absolute knowledge. Anybody who claims to have absolute knowledge is a liar.”

However (using his own standards of judgment), this man must be a liar, because he made a number of absolute statements in his reply. He said that “all” planes and elevators are probably safe. That means that he has absolute knowledge of all planes and elevators. There’s not one plane or elevator in this entire universe, of which he isn’t perfectly familiar.

What seems to have completely skipped Ray’s mind is that Dawkins’s is making what is called a logical induction. Or, in other words, generalizing from a few particulars. From its very nature a logical induction is not a statement of absolute knowledge. As David Hume demonstrated, a logical induction cannot be proven to be absolutely correct in its generalization.

When Dakwins says that all planes and elevators are probably safe he is making an inference from his own experience using planes and elevators and what one might describe as the relative lack of publically reported experiences with unsafe elevators and planes. To say that all planes and elevators are probably safe is not to say that none of them are unsafe. If Dawkins had absolute knowledge of all planes and elevators as Comfort suggets is implicit in the statement, then the statement would no longer make any sense. Anybody that is “perfectly familiar” with all planes and elevators in the entire universe could tell you precisely how many of them are safe and how many of them are not. Such a person would not say that they are “probably” safe. The word is a hedge against some planes and elevators turning out to be unsafe.

Take another example of induction. If after examining 500 swans I discover that they are all white, then I could make the induction that ‘all swans are probably white.’ That is not a claim to have any absolute knowledge of all swans that exist in the entire universe. Rather, it is an inference from my experience. My inference could be wrong. Somebody might come along and show me a black swan, at which point I could change my inference to ‘most swans are white.’ Again, my inference could still be wrong. Somebody might come along and show me the 1 million black swans that I missed, at which point I might reverse my inference to ‘few swans are probably white,’ and so on.

Implicit in Dawkin’s statement is that he made a best inference from the knowledge available to him but that he could in principle be wrong about all planes and elevators being probably safe.

Ray continues:

Then he does the same thing with his “all” knowledge. To say “all knowledge is probable,” he must have all knowledge to know that it’s probable. So he humbly claims omniscience. He thinks that he is God. Then he boasts of his humility (he’s not arrogant like those who use absolute statements) and says “Anyone who claims to have absolute knowledge is a liar.”

Again he makes the same mistake. The statments ‘all knowlege is probable’ cannot coexist with ‘I have all knowlege.’ To say that all knowledge is probable means the exact opposite of what Ray is concluding – it means that we cannot be absolutely certain about any knowlege claims that we make. Once again, however, this is just an induction from experience. Nobody can prove (deductively) that all knowledge is probable.