2012-12-27
Explanation
This comic tackles the classic philosophical "Problem of Evil" -- the argument that the existence of evil in the world is incompatible with an omniscient, omnipotent, and omnibenevolent God. A red-haired man presents this standard atheistic argument to a suited man (likely a theologian or apologist), who then flips it on its head with a creative but absurd counter-argument: if there are mistakes in the universe, those mistakes prove God exists, because only an animate being can make mistakes -- inanimate objects can't. He concludes with a triumphant "Q.E.D. There is a God."
The humor lies in the brazen logical sleight-of-hand. The apologist takes the strongest argument against God's existence and, through motivated reasoning and a superficially logical-sounding chain of deductions, converts it into an argument for God's existence. The red-haired man's reaction -- "They pay you to come up with this stuff?" followed by "That's messed up" -- underscores the absurdity of the enterprise, while the apologist's gleeful "Hallelujah!" shows he's perfectly aware of what he's doing and is delighted by it. The comic satirizes a real phenomenon in apologetics where practitioners construct elaborate rationalizations that can make virtually any evidence seem to support their predetermined conclusion.