Ray Comfort

Ray Comfort is a... well, lets just says he's not very good at whatever it is he does. This afternoon I read through a blog. On this blog was another blog by Ray Comfort and that blog, the second not the first, was incredibly irritating. Comfort has a penchant for keeping old arguments going long after they have been proven false and yes he has been proven false a number of times. Here is the link to the blog about another blog, here, Ray Comfort's has been removed and so is only available on the link above.

One thing I did find a little surprising is that Comfort quoted more of Darwin than I expected him to. I have seen this quote used before and it stopped sooner. Here it is:

“To suppose that the eye with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of Spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest degree."

That's where it usually stops, but he goes on.

"When it was first said that the sun stood still and the world turned round, the common sense of mankind declared the doctrine false; but the old saying of Vox populi, vox Dei ['the voice of the people = the voice of God'], as every philosopher knows, cannot be trusted in science. Reason tells me, that if numerous gradations from a simple and imperfect eye to one complex and perfect can be shown to exist, each grade being useful to its possessor, as is certain the case; if further, the eye ever varies and the variations be inherited, as is likewise certainly the case; and if such variations should be useful to any animal under changing conditions of life, then the difficulty of believing that a perfect and complex eye could be formed by natural selection, should not be considered as subversive of the theory.”

I'm not sure why Comfort would quote more because Darwin doesn't seem to be helping his case much. The last bit of the quote, "should not be considered as subversive," answers Comforts argument. The argument for Irreducible Complexity is an argument from theists that proposes that some structures in the natural world can not be broken down into smaller parts and thus can not have come about by the process of natural selection. This argument is very much a stall. Irreducible Complexity says God exists because the alternative hasn't sorted itself out yet, but the problem for theists is that it inevitably will. In fact one of IC's main arguments, the bacterial flagellum, has been reduced. You can watch an interesting video here where Kenneth Miller talks about this big problem for the IC guys. So really, if you can't understand evolution that doesn't mean it's wrong, it means it's strange and strangeness is what our universe is known for.