Earlier today, Google Reader picked up on a new post from Ray Comforts blog, Atheist Central. However, when I went there to read the comments, the post had been taken down. Now, given what the post was about, I’m not too surprised. In fact, I’m going to post it in its entirety right here, and let you all laugh at what was too stupid even for Ray Comfort to admit to ever writing:
Look at what Darwin said about the complex nature of and evolution of the eye:
“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. 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.”
Charles Darwin believed that the eye gradually evolved, absurd though it seemed.
The human eye is complex beyond imagination. It is a perfect and interrelated system of about 40 individual subsystems, including the retina, pupil, iris, cornea, lens and optic nerve. The retina has approximately 137 million light sensitive cells that send messages to the brain. About 130 million of these cells look like rods and handle the black and white vision. The other seven million are cone shaped and allow us to see in color. Incredibly, the eye, optic nerve and visual cortex are totally separate and distinct subsystems. Yet, together, they capture, deliver and interpret up to 1.5 million pulse messages a millisecond! Michael Behe, a biochemist from Lehigh University, coined a term for describing the design phenomenon inherent in molecular machines such as the bacterial flagella motor — “Irreducible Complexity” — “a single system composed of several well-matched, interacting parts that contribute to the basic function, wherein the removal of any one of the parts causes the system to effectively cease functioning.”
But when we speak of the evolution of “the eye,” we are not talking about one eyeball. There are 1.4 million species in the world. Every single one of those species had to miraculously and coincidentally evolve two eyes, which were connected to 1.4 million different incredibly complex brains, from the amazing eagle eye, to the huge elephant eye, to the tiny eye of an ant, and not one of those eyes could function without every interlinked component doing its job. It’s also important to realize that each one of the 1.4 million species would remain totally blind, until all the components had evolved to maturity and began to work. Then each of the two eyes had to somehow connect themselves to the 1.4 million functioning brains that had also miraculously evolved to maturity.
But there’s more than that, that had to take place. There had to be 1.4 million different shaped skulls with the appropriately shaped eye-sockets, from the large skull of the elephant to the tiny skull of the ant. Each had to evolve with the correct working muscles, nerves and tendons to secure and synchronize both of the eyes in place. Each eye then needed two moving and coordinated eyelids, as well as duel and working tear ducts, fed by an outside source of extraordinarily high quality lubricant.
The thought that the eye could evolve by itself without an Intelligent Designer over millions of years is truly “absurd to the highest degree.” So how could anyone (in his right mind) believe such an obvious absurdity? Easily. The necessary ingredient is “time.” Scientific America explains: “Time is in fact the hero of the plot. The time with which we have to deal is of the order of two billion years. What we regard as impossible on the basis of human experience is meaningless here. Given so much time, the ‘impossible’ becomes possible, the possible probable, and the probable virtually certain. One has only to wait: time itself performs the miracles.”
The miracle worker for the believer is “time.” It makes evolution believable. It performs miracles. The evolutionist wasn’t back in time to see the unseen do its impossible work, but he unquestioningly believes beyond the reasonable, and accepts as gospel that which is utterly ridiculous.
There it is, boys and girls. Ray Comfort has still not learned a single thing about the theory of evolution, or how it works. He still actually expects us to uncover a CrocoDuck, and that for every species of animal, a male and a female had to evolve independently of each other, find each other when adults, and mate. Really. What has been explained over and over again to Ray Comfort has not made a single dent in his Jesus-armour. It is utterly impervious.
The first thing that struck me was the type of comments he had selected for this book. Emotional, angry responses from people who felt personally offended by his message, and repeats of old and worn “God-killer” type arguments. There are currently several people with actual scientific knowledge who regularly comment on all Comfort’s posts, whose questions would be utterly fascinating to hear him answer seriously, but those are not the questions you will see answered here. The point of this book is to evangelize, nothing more and nothing less. For someone who implies in the very title of his book that he provides atheists with “evidence” for God’s existence, this proposed evidence is suspiciously absent throughout every last chapter.