It Takes on to Know One
And why do you look at the speck in your brother’s eye, but do not consider the plank in your own eye?”– Matthew 7:3
On Jan 8, 2008, Christian Minister Ray Comfort wrote in his blog (emphasis mine):
“There is a temporary disadvantage for the Christian in that he or she is confined to having to always speak the truth… However, there are no holes barred for those that don’t fear God. Their weapons of warfare are lies, exaggerations, statements made out of context, hearsay, rabbit trails, misquotes, and false accusations.”
Of course, when debating an issue, any honest person should strive to avoid lies, misquotes, statements made out of context, etc. Skeptics are not exempt from this—but then again, neither are Christians. Comfort and his partner, Kirk Cameron, are ironic examples of this.
In The Way of the Master episode on Atheism, Comfort and Cameron discuss why it is an insult to one’s intellect to assume the complexity of the universe came about “by chance”. About five minutes in, (just after Comfort’s oft-used “banana argument”) Cameron explains why the human eye is another fine example of something that couldn’t have formed with divine intervention. To prove this, a quote from Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species appears on the screen:
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 possible degree.
As any evolutionary scientist will tell you, this quote by Darwin is very definitely taken out of context. Darwin is, in effect, setting up a counter argument only to answer it. The rest of the original paragraph (conveniently omitted by Way of the Master) continues:
Yet reason tells me, that if numerous gradations from a perfect and complex eye to one very imperfect and simple, each grade being useful to its possessor, can be shown to exist; if further, the eye does vary ever so slightly, and the variations be inherited, which is certainly the case; and if any variation or modification in the organ be ever useful to an animal under changing conditions of life, then the difficulty of believing that a perfect and complex eye could be formed by natural selection, though insuperable by our imagination, can hardly be considered real. How a nerve comes to be sensitive to light, hardly concerns us more than how life itself first originated; but I may remark that several facts make me suspect that any sensitive nerve may be rendered sensitive to light, and likewise to those coarser vibrations of the air which produce sound. (Darwin 1872, 143-144).
Other Christian creationists have long retired the idea that Darwin’s quote should be used to support their cause; AnswersinGenesis.org even lists it in their Arguments We Think Creationists Should NOT Use section. Obviously, Comfort and Cameron either A) deliberately misused Darwin’s quote, or B) failed to do the prerequisite research. Neither scenario is a shining example of their commitment to truth.
If Comfort and Cameron are really concerned about eyes, they should “consider the plank” in their own.
