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US News & World Report Showcases Creationist Ray Comfort
US News and World Report's Dan Gilgoff has charitably provided evangelist Ray Comfort a media platform in the form of a US News & World "exclusive" through which Comfort defends his efforts to distribute, on college campuses, up to 175,000 copies of Darwin's Origin of Species that include a creationist "special introduction" to the book.
How serious of a thinker is Ray Comfort ? Readers can decide for themselves. In the video on the right, Ray Comfort explains that bananas, which he suggests are divinely ordained, are optimally formed to fit the human hand, support creationist ideas, and rebut the Theory of Evolution. In the lefthand video short, evangelist Chuck Missler explains how Darwin's theory is disproved by a jar of peanut butter.
These video shorts have proved popular to both creationists and adherents to Evolutionary Theory, perhaps for different reasons. As a side note, peanut butter and banana sandwiches were one of Elvis Presley's favorite foods.
While Ray Comfort, in the the video below, suggests that the dominant banana of world commerce, the Cavendish banana, is the result of divine design, that's incorrect. Cavendish bananas are the product of human botanical tinkering. The Cavendish is a sterile hybrid developed several decades ago after the former banana of world commerce, the Gros Michel variety, fell to a ravening banana fungus. In the world of Comfort evangelism, there are layers of absurdity within layers of ignorance, like nested Russian dolls.
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As Dan Gilgoff wrote in his post,
When I blogged recently about a new, pro-creationism edition of Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species—complete with a rebuttal to the theory of evolution—the responses poured in. "I'm a little concerned," the communications director for the National Center for Science Education wrote me in an E-mail, "that some stuff—such as Ray Comfort's version of On the Origin of Species—gets coverage but no critical commentary."
So I invited the head of the National Center for Science Education, the leading organization promoting and defending the teaching of evolution in public schools, to debate Ray Comfort the communications director for the National Center for Science Education..."
But by acknowledging equivalence, Gilgoff seems to be validating a tactic that's been extremely effective at moving public opinion away from empirical explanations of the natural world. Dan Gilgoff appears to have fallen into the Moon is 50% Camembert trap so common today in mainstream journalism. As I wrote in the piece linked above,
If one side of an alleged "controversy" asserts the Moon is made of cheese, and another side (scientists) say it is made mostly of rock, does that mean, according to the best journalistic practices of our thoroughly modern, or perhaps postmodern, age that the Moon is therefore 50% Camembert and 50% of the stuff scientists say it is composed of, anorthositic rock, oxygen, silicon, magnesium, iron, calcium, aluminum, and so on ?
If people simply make assertions without proof, even if those are contra-indicated by a vast body of scientific research built up over decades or even centuries, does this mean that such assertions are nonetheless 50% correct ? Current journalistic convention would seem to suggest so. |
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