The atheist's nightmare: a study in creationist folderol

Behold, the atheist's nightmare: Kiwi Christian minister Ray Comfort.

Reverend Comfort's proof of an omnipotent creator's hand in "creation" has been the butt of some well-deserved internet ridicule for years now. Arguably, it does more harm than good to respond in any serious fashion to such a ridiculous argument. After all, even reasonable ideas have poor defenses and incompetent defenders. To pick the worst of them makes it seem like you're shooting fish in a barrel, while avoiding the best arguments. But, though this is a particularly ridiculous argument for "creation", in the following ways it is typical of many creationist arguments, even the "best", and so I think it's worth answering:

1. It has superficial persuasiveness, from the point of view of the naive, ignorant, and credulous.
   
2. It involves very little in the way of evidence and all the evidence is either wrong or yoked in the service of false premises.
   
3. It recklessly and brazenly ignores equally persuasive counter-evidence.
   
4. The evidence presented, to the extent that it's correct, actually argues against the speaker's thesis.
   
5. A hand of god is not required to explain the "creation".

The banana does seem well-designed for human consumption. Everything about a banana seems to aid its being eaten. Although, in this case, most of the evidence presented is correct (the banana easily fits in the human hand, is easy to peel, etc.), it is only relevant if you accept Comfort's false premise that the banana is a natural part of "creation". The banana is actually the product of thousands of years of selection pressure brought to bear upon a tiny seed-ridden blandly starchy fruit that became a staple of certain groups of prehistoric humans. Whatever its shape and snugness in the human hand, that fruit was anything but wonderfully convenient to eat, but it was also likely the result of selection pressure from animals who chose to eat it and thereby propagate its seeds. It undoubtedly became more palatable as a result, evolving from an ancestor that was even less amenable to easy consumption. Here is what a wild banana looks like, ancestor of the banana that was selected for human cultivation:



A jejune and seedy "nightmare", surely, for any hungry atheist, or theist for that matter. Quite naturally, ancient humans who grew and harvested early bananas favored bananas that were sweeter, contained more fruit and fewer seeds. This logical preference, based on human dietary needs and convenience, led to the modern cultivated banana that Comfort admires in his video, truly a "miracle" of human, not divine, creation.

Put another way, though the cultivation of bananas was a conscious effort made by intelligent animals, it is also an example of evolution. Gene frequency changed over time (which is evolution, by definition) guided by the preference of those that depended on the fruit for sustenance and therefore required certain phenotypic characteristics to dominate.

If a god wanted fruits to be easy to eat, he would have done many things differently. For example, if the banana lacks seeds (which, too, is a highly unnatural result of cultivation), why shouldn't apples lack them, or, better, pomegranates? Have you ever eaten a pomegranate? Even those who find them delicious must endure the tedious and endless task of separating seed, rind, and flesh.

Why must a pineapple be so prickly? Why shouldn't an orange's skin slough off as easily as a tangerine's? Why is the pit of a mango so large, fibrous, and hard to separate from its pulp? Why is the coconut so damn hard to open and eat? For that matter, why must fruit ripen and go bad? Why can't it be ready to eat always? Etc. The counter-arguments undermining Comfort's wonder at the ingenuity of "God" in service of the convenience of man are trivial and require but a few seconds' thought. The continued cultivation of these fruits by the hand of man will surely solve these and many other problems, at an ever more rapid pace as our technology develops. No hand of god is required.

So, how could Comfort miss such obvious flaws in his argument? Why would he go before the video cameras with such a lame "proof" of the existence of god? I don't know, but I can guess. Since, judging from the fluidity of his speech and relatively competent grammar, Comfort has a normal IQ, I consider there to be two possibilities.

First, Comfort is so psychologically wedded to the notion of a god that he simply cannot see the obvious errors he makes. I suppose such psychological blindness is possible. It's certainly not unknown to anyone who has any experience with the follies and stupidities of human nature. But, given what I know of human beings, I consider the second possibility even more likely: it is possible that Comfort is deliberately and cynically leveraging the gullibility of his audience.

If that is true, then the purpose of his video is not to "prove" anything by rational argument, which is what it is designed to look like. The purpose is to create a memory in the viewer of once having witnessed the destruction of evolution by an apparently elegant and inarguable proof. Once that false impression has been created, the details are forgotten and the viewer, never seeking any other explanations or arguments, is more likely to remain in the creationist "camp", to vote for school officials that oppose the teaching of evolution, to vote for candidates who think the earth is 6,000 years old, and to give to creationist causes.

That is not to say Comfort disbelieves in his creationist folderol, but only that he has no rational argument against evolution. He "knows" evolution is false, because it contradicts his certainty in the literal reading of Genesis I. In the absence of a rational response to a century or more of massive amounts of supporting evidence for evolution, he resorts to this rather transparent propaganda. Once you understand reverend Comfort, you understand much of the snake oil sold by creationists.