Is this modern-day Tennessee, or 1925? Hard to tell. From Panda’s Thumb:

Unable to deny the word of god to his students or himself, Joe Wilkey walks a thin line between science and religion…

No he doesn’t; he spews unadulterated horseshit. Perhaps he should watch some Eugenie Scott to bring himself up to speed.

Starving, exhausted, lobotomized fish in a nearly-empty barrel.

Creationist nut-bag Ray atheists’-nightmare banana-fetishist Comfort has had the audacity (bad judgement? misfortune?) to go mano a stupido with actual scientist and non-crazy-person Dr. Eugenie Scott in a resent set of essays on the US News & World Report Blog. (Dragon*Con-ers may remember Dr. Scott from Skeptrack this year.) Comfort starts out . . . strong? Well, he starts out . . . and gets knocked down, but he gets up again (you’re never going to keep him down!) – oh wait, yes you are. And Dr. Scott does so handily.

Comfort’s arguments really are almost indescribably bad (he says, immediately before going on to attempt to describe them). Fallatious arguments abound: ad hominems, quotes out of context, straw men, special pleading, moving the goalposts, non sequiturs, appeal to consequences (hell, it takes him all of five paragraphs to smack into Godwin’s Law!). These essays, and everything Comfort has ever done, frankly, are such a mess of ignorance, mischaracterisation, and misinformation that they pretty much devolve to the level of Gish Gallop: he gives so much bad, innaccurate data so fast that’s wrong on so many levels, that a step-by-step refutation becomes impossible in the allotted space. For instance, here is his “argument” that evolution is wrong because of the problem of the evolution of sex:

[E]volution has no explanation as to why and how around 1.4 million species of animals evolved as male and female. No one even goes near explaining how and why each species managed to reproduce (during the millions of years the female was supposedly evolving to maturity) without the right reproductive machinery.

This argument is so blitheringly stupid, and is wrong on so many (basic) levels that even having it postulated in a “serious” debate makes my eyes bleed. Fortunately, it also makes him sound like a raving loon.

The sad thing is that people like Comfort, who is at best a complete idiot, and at worst an outright liar, are given such prominent stages from which to present their arguments, as if they weren’t definitively refuted long ago. Of course debate of contentious issues should be fostered in the public arena, but you don’t see them giving Time Cube Guy a chance to debate his position on ABC’s Nightline. Why? Because he is clearly nuts, and any rational person can see that his arguments are ridiculous. It’s about time to start treating Ray Comfort the same way.

For a cogent and thoroughly watchable discussion of “Why Evolution Is True” (and a pallet-cleanser to get all the Comfort out of your system), check out this recent lecture Jerry Coyle at the AAI conference in Californina:

Particularly nice was his inclusion of the excellent transitional fossil record of whales, which Comfort claims is completely missing – something that further shows that he is either completely out of his depth, or is deliberately misrepresenting the facts. Or both.