My review of Ray Comfort's "Evolution vs. God"

Have you had a chance to see Ray Comfort's new documentary "Evolution vs. God".  The film is available for free (linked below), but it will cost you 38 minutes of your life.  And no, you'll never get those minutes back.

For those of you who think that there might be a good case to be made against evolution, or maybe even for creation, this film is not it...  Ray Comfort put this documentary together by interviewing  some scientists, students, and even some people on the street. 

Right off the bat, Ray tries to pretend that evolution is not observable, and therefore it is not science.   This is a silly argument.  Fossils are observable, their ages are measurable, organisms changing over time (morphologically and genetically) is an observable fact.  And not only is it observable, it's repeatable.  Every time a new fossil is unearthed and dated, the science is being repeated and tested.  If you're wondering why, out of all those being interviewed, not one person said what I just said, I'm wondering the same thing.  There seems to have been lot of selective editing going on with this documentary (see here), and Ray seems to have been dishonest with his previous edits before (see here).  So, it is very possible that they did answer Ray's question about observable evidence, but he is not really looking for answers, only video clips that support his preconceived conclusion.

Next in the documentary, Ray takes on the tactic of confusing the issue by using the term "kind", as in one "kind" of creature vs. another "kind".   The term "kind" has no scientific definition, so he is free to play fast and loose with it, changing its meaning as needed.  "You say it's a new species of fish, but it's still a fish, it's the same kind"  This shifting of the goal post, in how much change is needed in order to prove evolution, is only meaningful to creationists.  In science, any biological change over time is evolution. Creationist, like Ray, say that they will accept "micro-evolution" but not "macro-evolution".  Again, these terms are not really scientific terms, so they can move the goal post as needed.  The very argument, that macro-evolution is somehow different from the changes that they do accept, implies that there is some sort of master DNA (like a backup) in each organism that will only allow an organism to change to a point. But no further!  There is no cellular repository that holds a master copy of the "original-kind's" DNA.  If you want to argue that "macro-evolution" is impossible, it is up to you to prove/show/demonstrate that there is some sort of mechanism that could prevent genetic change from accumulating over time, that there is some limit.  Science has clearly shown that genetic information does change over time, and those changes are cumulative.

Ray then tries a common tactic of attempting to equivocate belief in evolution as being some form of faith.  Again, this is silly.  An average person may indeed need to trust the experts in order to believe that evolution occurred.  And as some will to point out, trust and faith can sometimes be used interchangeably.  But that doesn't mean that they are equivalent.  Most of us understand the difference between trust and faith.  Trust is earned and faith is given.  In other words, I trust the experts because I have been given many examples of them backing up their claims.  Every bit of technology, every medical advance, is a demonstration that the experts got it right.  Faith is truly a cop-out, it's the last excuse given in order to "justify" holding a belief without good reason. 

The questioning then moves on to erecting a whole bunch of straw-man type arguments; "can you make a flower out of nothing" (as if that's what the theory of evolution says), "do you believe that nothing exploded" (as if that is what the big bang theory says, and as if that had anything to do with evolution), "do you really believe that everything could have come from an explosion, including giraffes" (really, are we now bypassing evolution completely and just saying modern animals came from the big bang explosion?).

Then, for some reason, Ray thinks it's important to show how some of the people seemed to have trouble naming some famous atheists.  Again I have to wonder about all the answers that were edited out.  He goes on to point out why he thinks some of their answers were wrong.   Ray, like a lot of people, doesn't seem to know what an atheist is, and he also doesn't seem to understand (or allow for) some people truly being atheists even though they don't adopt the label when describing themselves.  Carl Sagan and many others, who are in fact atheists, don't want the stigma that can sometimes come with adopting that label.  Atheism is just a-theism, which is just another word for non-theism or non-belief in a god.  Many, like Ray, have this misconception that atheists actually believe that there is no god.  It is true, that a person who holds the belief that there is no god would still be called an atheist, but that type of atheist is less common and they are often referred to as strong atheists or anti-theists (anti-belief in god, as in belief that there is no god).  To misrepresent all atheists as if they were strong atheists, is like asserting that all Christians are like Catholics.  Ray's only point in weeding through who was "a real atheist", seems to be to get to the one atheist he can say blew his own brains out, and say "see, there is your poster boy for atheism".

Ray then goes on to argue that belief in evolution leads to immorality.  As if the prospect of having unpleasant results would somehow change the truth-claim as to whether or not it actually happened.  This argument makes no sense.  And besides that, no one is claiming that we should base our societies, or how we treat each other, on what evolution has to say about anything. 

Finally, near the end, Ray devolves into his typical fear tactics, 'look how bad you've been over your lifetime, you need to save yourself from (Christian) hell'.  He doesn't bother to consider how bad he might be in the "eyes" of another god.  He doesn't seem to think it matters if our conversion were only motivated by our own self-serving survival instinct.  Motivation by fear seems fine for his god.  And he ends up admitting that he doesn't even consider that he might be wrong.

Needless to say, I did not find this documentary compelling, in the least.  Ray has again shown himself to be, in my opinion, a person who is happy to argue irrationally and dishonestly if needed, just to bolster his own convictions.  I would really love to see the unedited interviews, to see what really happened, but I doubt that will happen.
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