The other day I happened across, in a post on FriendlyAtheist, a book by Ray Comfort. For those of you who don't keep up with the minutiae of arguments between atheists and theists, Ray Comfort is the man who brought us the Banana Argument for God: essentially, that the banana is so perfectly formed, it has to be evidence of Yahweh. He is surely a man of formidable intelligence.

Needless to say, I was giddy with excitement to see the cover for his new book, Evolution: A Fairy Tale for Grownups. An excerpt was available, and I decided to check it out.

"Once upon a time," it began, "there was a man who became disillusioned about God."

Oh boy.

"Instead of believing that God made everything we see," it continued, "he formed a theory that all this amazing order and complexity came from nothing and randomly evolved over time."

By the time I reached the passage "This book will no doubt be seen by some as 'quote
mining,'" I knew everything I needed to know about Comfort's formidable tome. Apparently, a banana had eaten his brain and began nesting in his skull. Always happens this time of year. So tragic.

Ray Comfort's book supposedly contains "101 Questions to shake believers' blind faith in the theory" of evolution. I will not go into the scant few provided in the excerpt. They are inane, stripped of context, often irrelevant and are as pedantic and insulting to the reader's intelligence as Comfort's fairy-tale opening. Nor will I comment on the fallacy he makes in said introduction by saying that evolution theorizes that "all this amazing order and complexity came from nothing and randomly evolved over time." For that matter, I won't even ask why someone who criticizes others' supposed "blind faith in [a] theory" seeks to uphold an even blinder faith in a notion we were created ten thousand years ago by a deity allergic to evidence. No, I shall not venture into these topics.

Instead, I have one question for Ray Comfort: How do you explain the fossil record?

"What is there to explain?" a sympathizer might ask, "Fossils are just animals that were around before Noah's flood. When the worldwide Deluge came, the ones that were left behind sank to the bottom. It looks like forms progress from simple to complex because when you mix a lot of things up, the smaller pieces settle at the very bottom, and the larger pieces adorn the very top."

No.

As I mentioned in a previous post, scientists began with the assumption that the world had been created in six days, that there was a worldwide flood, and the aim of all geology was to create a record of that time. But as those scientists dug deeper, they unwittingly chipped away at the notion of biblical inerrancy. What they found made it utterly impossible for the Genesis account of creation to be true.

To begin with, there was the sheer amount and kind of material that made up the Earth. Specifically, rocks. There are three kinds of rocks: igneous, sedimentary and metamorphic. Igneous rocks are cooled magma, and are formed after volcanic eruptions. Granite and basalt are two examples. Sedimentary rocks are formed when dust, gravel, or sand accumulates and is subjected to high pressures or react with chemicals in the environment, solidifying the mass. Metamorphic rock begins its life as sedimentary or igneous, but is subjected to high temperature and pressure near the Earth's mantle, and, per its name, transforms. Marble is one of many kinds of metamorphic rock.

The Earth's crust is made up of many bands of stone, some igneous, others sedimentary, and others metamorphic. With the exception of igneous rock, all of these stones take large amounts of time to form, particularly metamorphic rock. As archaeologists and geologists cut away at the earth, they discovered many of these strata, each laid down during different periods of history. The sheer number of formations indicated that the earth must have been around for much longer than had been thought. They did not know exactly how long, but long it was indeed.

Radiometric dating helped to solve that problem. Radiometric dating uses the decay of radioactive materials to measure the age of rocks and fossils. Radioactive atoms are naturally unstable, possessing more mass than can be maintained by its nuclear forces. Every so often, such an atom will break down into a different element, emitting radiation in the process. By comparing the ratio of radioactive elements in a rock to its waste product, one can tell how long ago the rock formed. There are several such methods, and these have managed to make an absolute measurement of the Earth's age at 4.6 billion years old.

Many creationists claim that radiometric dating techniques, such as the Carbon-14 dating used to date once-living matter, are inaccurate. They may cite that a dog who died yesterday might be carbon-dated as a thousand years old. This, however, is not an accuracy problem, but a precision problem. Every measurement taken of anything has a margin of error, and the margin of error for carbon dating is wide on human time-scales. But that margin becomes insignificant when compared to the sheer age of many of the remains examined.

And that brings us to the fossils themselves. Creationists claim that there are no transitional fossils. But this could not be farther than the truth. Even I can rattle off a few: Tiktaalik, an intermediary between ancient fish and modern tetrapods; Archaeopterix, the fossil that helped solidify the link between birds and dinosaurs; and, of course, Lucy. There are not simply a handful of these fossils, either: at least seven skeletons of Archaeopterix have been found.

Many have tried to discredit these finds with accusations of dishonesty, but even if one example is cut down another rises to take its place. Indeed, all fossils are transitional fossils. We see the basis for four-limbed creatures in the fins of fish—we even see the same sets of bones that we have in our wrists and fingers adapted for aquatic life. Archaeopterix has the teeth and claws of dinosaurs and the wing-feathers of birds. Certainly, not every gap is filled. We do not have every ancestor preserved. But do we need it? A film is shot at only 24 frames per second. Whenever the shutter closes, part of the picture is lost. Yet when we play it back, the motion is preserved. Archaeology is like that film.

We could, of course, say that there is no connection between these animals. We could say that the pictures in the film are not meant to go together, that the man walking across the screen was in fact several different men, conjured into place in each frame. It could be a deception of some magnanimous Devil. But what a deception! Are we to believe that Satan had nothing better to do than lay down layer after layer of igneous, metamorphic and sedimentary rock, scattering fossils here and there? Are we to really believe that the world was created in six days, and then the Devil did 3.8 billion years of work in two?

I hope that these meager paragraphs I have written, sleep-deprived at twelve in the morning, at least convey the sense of the predicament Ray Comfort is in. I hope that you do not stop here, but instead hop right to the link on the sidebar titled "Understanding Evolution" to learn more about the subject. For if evolution did not take place, if the world is only a few thousand years old, how are we to explain the evidence? How did this God fellow create the world?

I doubt it is a question Ray Comfort would answer any time soon. As sure as his book begins like a child's bedtime story, his aim is not to answer questions, but banish them.