Thunderf00t Debates Ray Comfort

An interesting series, unedited, of a video debate YouTube personality Thunderf00t had with Ray "Bananas are the Atheist's Nightmare" Comfort. It goes about how you'd probably imagine. I'm not saying Thunderf00t had a great performance here. I'd say it was very good, but not great. But, on the other hand, he was clearly more interested in having the discussion than winning the debate, so, points to him. The part that's the hardest to watch is all the variations of "I know this is true" "Why?" "Because the Bible says so and the Bible is true" from Ray. His absolute statement near the beginning of "I know what happened in the beginning, you don't know, but I do, in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth" is...well...painful, to say the least. You also get the sense that there is one proposition that Ray will never, ever, EVER consider - maybe, just maybe, the Bible is not absolutely true. Comfort brushes aside any other scripture as drivel or evil lies, but never applies the same logic he uses to bat those aside to his own scripture. He begins with the unquestioned assumptions that God exists, it is the Christian God, that God created everything, and that the Bible is absolutely true and as long as someone is born again, they can never be wrong when reading the Bible. The other extremely painful part is in Part 7 of this playlist, when Thunderf00t describes in detail an observed instance of speciation, a ring species of salamander, well, perhaps more accurately a forked speciation event, but, regardless. Ray agrees with every part until Thunderf00t gets to the conclusion - "That's speciation." Ray then goes on to basically say "Okay, sure, there is this species of salamander, that after sufficient geological distance cannot interbreed with the two ends of the range. Sure, you can interbreed salamanders from each fork all the way back to a common salamander at the top of the fork, and the two at the end of the forks cannot interbreed. But this is not speciation. This is not evolution. It's just infertility problems. Even though they can still breed with themselves or other salamanders close to their part of the river." I wanted to scream just a bit after watching that fail of logic. I know that this kind of response happens on both ends. You feel that you are using logic and reason to its height, and whomever you're talking to is just not getting it, or accepts every step until the logical inference to the conclusion. I do feel, however, that Ray got himself into more trouble in this kind of situation, however, because Thunderf00t makes it clear that he doesn't accept at face value Ray's basic premises. That's important - if you accept Ray's premises, such as God existing and having created everything and the Bible being absolutely true, then yes...it all makes sense. But that's exactly where the atheist draws the line - show me that your premises have merits, and then we can argue about the finer points of deduction or induction. Ray utterly fails to provide any evidence to back up his basic premises.

Anywhere, here's the video. Watch it if you can stomach it: