Ray Comfort's Bananas

The title of this post is an intentional pun, since it could be a reference to the bananas belonging to Ray Comfort or to the fact that he is bananas. Both are relevant, since he is famous for introducing the laughable “banana argument” into the discourse of apologetics. More recently, he helpfully illustrated that scientific evidence, even scientific evidence from the last century, is simply too dangerous and too harmful to young-earth creationist pseudoscience for it to be safe to expose such people to it. And thus Comfort has offered a bogus edition of Charles Darwin’s On The Origin Of Species which offers a dubious introduction and leaves out parts of the book the argument of which might have been too persuaded. I still can’t figure out how many Christians, whose Bibles contain warnings about teachers who “tickle the ears” and say what they want to hear, can so persistently assume such warnings are about others, their opponents, but not relevant to themselves. Much contemporary Christianity is characterized by limiting one’s exposure to any viewpoint that doesn’t agree with what you already think – an approach that obviously makes learning impossible.

Genie Scott has offered a response to Comfort. And if you want some responses to the banana argument, I’ve shared a number of those before. I also shared before a Romanian’s reply to Comfort and his sidekick Kirk Camerson.

Let me also emphasize that Charles Darwin’s classic On The Origin Of Species is, on the one hand, superseded by the vast amount of further knowledge about biology, paleontology and genetics that has accumulated since he wrote. But on the other hand, those who want to read it can download it for free from the Internet Archive or Google Books and thus have no reason to read Ray Comfort’s rewritten “Conservative Bible Project” edition of the book.