Hollywood High Students to Receive Movie Debunking Evolution

That is the headline of a press release printed unedited in the Sacramento Bee. The movie, by Ray Comfort of banana fame, is an excruciating 35 minutes of quote-mined sound bites, mostly from undergraduate science majors, but also from PZ Myers and a handful of other scientists (Gail Kennedy, Craig Stanford, and Peter Nonacs).

The interviewer, a fast-talking smart aleck, asks for observable evidence of evolution but predictably accepts only changes of “kinds” that can be observed in real time. Thus half of the movie consists of “Were you there?” and “Still finches!” He goes on to ask inane questions like “Can you build a rose?”

After establishing Hemingway as the only atheist on a poster that purports to show half a dozen or so famous atheists, the movie takes an unbearably sleazy and cheap shot, noting that Hemingway blew his brains out. That may be the low point of the movie, but there is much competition.

The interviewer asks people whether they have ever lied, stolen, and so on, and then notes that they are all liars, thieves, blasphemers, and adulterers at heart. He traps Myers by asking him if there is a universal moral code, or something to that effect, and elicits a predictably incoherent response. Asked whether they would save their dog or their neighbor, several students shockingly chose their dog, incidentally. The interviewer tells one person that he has chosen evolution because it gets rid of moral accountability.

The rest of the movie was almost unendurable, except for a snippet where one of the interviewees asks the interviewer whether he himself could be wrong about God’s existence. No? Then you are close-minded. The interviewer’s answer is priceless – I know the Lord, just as you know your wife. This, remember, is the interviewer who barely 20 minutes earlier wanted visible, tangible proof of evolution.