I hate it when Christians with wacky beliefs about science, evolution, the world being flat and the great waters above the earth and below the stars and all that, decide to share those beliefs and claim to be giving glory to God. The first time I saw this video, I thought it was a parody. But Ray Comfort and actor Kirk Cameron are being completely serious here on their evangelical Christian show. This clip is called "The Atheist's Nightmare", and in essence, it claims that the nature of the yellow banana proves the existence of God and disproves the theory of evolution. The argument consists of a plain observation of the banana, the assumption that God made it that way when he created the Earth, and the assumption that God made the banana in that way to please humans. The observations boil down to these:
- Is shaped for human hand
- Has non-slip surface
- Has outward indicators of inward content: Green-too early, Yellow-just right, Black-too late.
- Has a tab for removal of wrapper
- Is perforated on wrapper
- Bio-degradable wrapper
- Is shaped for human mouth
- Has a point at top for ease of entry into the human mouth
- Is pleasing to taste buds
- Is curved towards the face to make eating process easy
There are some problems with Ray's theory:
Problem number one: bananas as we know them today are a creation of human horticulture. Wild bananas don't look like the ones you buy in the supermarket. They are inedible and have hard black seeds. The delicious seedless bananas you buy from the store, which Ray holds in this video, are of no natural use to the banana plant. Because their fruit is sterile, trees that grow these bananas have to be artificially cultivated by cuttings. Humans have evolved, or selectively bred these bananas for smaller seeds and a sweeter raw banana, and the banana in Ray's hand is the result of a well-documented chance mutation that occurred in 1836 on Jean Francois Poujot's Jamaican banana tree plantation and was thereafter exploited by man and science. Before then, bananas were not sweet and could not be eaten raw. They were starchy and had to be cooked. If designed with hungry human beings in mind, they were designed poorly until that 1836 mutation. In other words, this was either creation or evolution occurring right before our eyes, and the better bet is on evolution.
Problem number two: Why just bananas? Why aren't other fruits perfect? If God made all fruits and vegetables with humans in mind, why do so many of them have thorns or hard shells? Why does God make delicious apples that look almost exactly like deadly poisonous fruits? Poisonous fruits, hard shells, thorns and varieties in growth and color would be expected in an evolutionary system, but seem to make no sense in a perfectly created world.
Problem number three: the banana isn't all that perfect. In evaluating Ray's list of items in the nature of the banana that prove the genius of its creator, I might add the following
- spoils - turns black - quickly
- has a bitter thread along the inside of each ridge
- bruises easily
- has non-slip outside, but has slippery inside, that people can step on and break their necks
- Is perfectly shaped for a monkey's mouth, too, and those monkeys like to steal our bananas
- grows way at the top of a tree, which is hard to reach
- that tab often won't break apart without mushing the "easy-entry" top
Why do evangelicals have such a hard time accepting evolution? Why can't you believe that evolution is the most apparent means by which God's act of creation turned the world from a molten ball of lava into a world teeming with diverse life forms? Let atheists enjoy the understanding of the world that the theory of evolution affords us, and just claim it as our own, proclaiming it to be God's scientific method for his creation. All you have to do is what most serious and faithful scholars have done - accept that the Bible wasn't intended to give us a literal description of creation, with a literal timeline that makes the world just 6,000 years old. And even if they can't accept that, why must they use stupid examples as this to prove their point? It just makes the rest of us Christians look stupid.
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