Ray Comfort Gets Confused About Sex

I recently came across a very unfortunate video of Ray Comfort appearing on Pat Robertson's 700 club show. We'll leave aside the amazingly fun list of "prophecies" Robertson has had over the years that never came true, or the absurdly offensive things he's said on live television for the time being (for anyone who's ever accused me of being offensive - just Google Pat Robertson and realize that I am only the student and he is the Sith master).

For anyone who isn't familiar with Ray Comfort, he's the buxom buddy of the infamous "you have to circumnavigate or go around their logic" Kirk Kameron. The duo recently colluded together to give away free copies of Darwin's "On the Origin of Species" with a 50 page introduction attempting to debunk evolution. Comfort is also famous (in the "Brittany Spears with a shaved head" sense of the word) for his video explaining that the banana is the atheist's worst nightmare (giggle). Comfort's argument was, and I'm honestly not making this up, that God must exist because the banana is easy to eat and is shaped well to fit in a human's hand.

Somehow Comfort missed that the yellow banana available in supermarkets that we know and love is in fact a genetic hybrid, created by man, and that a standard banana is not easy to open and is not shaped for a human hand. He also completely missed the reverse of his argument. If the banana proves God is real because it seems made for humans - then does the pomegranate, which is a total pain in the ass to eat, prove God is not real? How about the coconut or the pineapple? How about animals with teeth and fangs that don't want to be eaten? Logic and reason seem to be beyond Comfort, however, as you will unfortunately see should you choose to watch this particularly mind numbing video below.

It’s very telling that Comfort chose to ask random people on the street about a subject as complex as evolution, rather than asking an actual biologist or science teacher. It’s fairly clear the reason for this is because he didn’t want anyone knowledgeable on the subject to explain the answers to his questions. He’s already decided what the answers are, and doesn’t care to hear anything else. In fact it might even be safe to assume that, depending on how many people he interviewed, he very well may have spoken with people who did give eloquent and reasonable answers – he just didn’t put those in his video.

Imagine if Comfort had done this same thing, but instead of asking about evolution, he asked the people to explain another complex subject such as nuclear bombs or jumbo jet engines. The results would have been the exact same. These people, put on the spot and not experts in these fields, would have sounded equally unsure. Ray could have also made the subject matter sound equally unreal. “Oh really, so man can just split the atom then? How does that work?” or perhaps “Oh, so you think that spinning blades really fast just lets objects magically fly?”

It always amazes me when Christians try to say that atheists think everything came from nothing. Um, no, that's actually exactly what Christians believe - that a big invisible man in the sky magically poofed everything into existence from nothing.

Likewise, the "clock without a clock maker" argument needs to be retired, as its been refuted about one and a half billion times now. The Christian first claims that absolutely nothing exists without a maker. The atheist then asks who made God, to which the Christian responds that God doesn't need a God maker, despite the fact that he literally just said nothing can exist without a maker.

This argument only takes the equation back a step, it doesn't solve it in any way. It furthermore takes an exceedingly stupid leap in logic by saying that, since we don't yet have all the evidence on the origins of the universe, we must immediately jump to a supernatural conclusion and decide a big invisible man in the sky did it. Face directly to palm. This leap in logic is especially stunning considering the entire point of his video is that mankind is supposed to use common sense. Even if Comfort were correct (had trouble typing that), and evolution was total garbage, how does he then jump to the conclusion that humans exist as they are today because of one specific deity and his zombie son? It's a massive, absurd leap in logic that has no evidence behind it.

And now onto what Comfort thinks is the big question of how evolution can possibly work if reproduction is required between a male and a female creature. Comfort has this utterly absurd idea in his head of evolution. He's seeing this image of some sort of prehistoric snake randomly having a mutant baby that is suddenly the modern crocodile as we know it. He sees this creature, which is completely different than its parent, as a male who can't survive unless another prehistoric lizard randomly gives birth to another modern crocodile, that mutated in the exact same way, and is female.

Fortunately, this is an idea of evolution limited only to seven year olds and Ray Comfort. He completely misses that evolution occurs between large groups of creatures over long periods of time, so there will be plenty of males and females to copulate. He's also missing that sexual reproduction evolved way, way, way back in the days of things composed of only a few cells. There isn't randomly a male beagle popping out of an aardvark, desperately hoping another aardvark gives birth to a mutant female beagle.

This is actually a rather complex issue, and one that has been explained much more in-depth by others. An informative post specifically dealing with Comfort's claims by PZ Myers can be found at this location. I wholeheartedly recommend everyone read this post, as it breaks the topic down into chunks that are easy to digest.

There's also an article at the Examiner, which can be found here, that deals with this issue as well as several of Comfort's other ridiculous statements, such as the aforementioned banana debacle.