FIREBLIND.COM

Back in my younger days, I used to read a Christian publication put out by a guy named Chuck Missler. I don’t recall the name now, but it was kind of a small Christian version of Reader’s Digest with a Cloak and Dagger twist. For example, on one page you might read an inspirational story about a woman honoring god through the gift of bake sales, and on another, you might read about how the UN is building up its military presence in the US in an effort to let the antichrist take over American discos, or something like that.

Basically, he claimed to have “sources”, and these “sources” (if you make your fingers into quote marks when you say “sources”, it sounds cooler) were always leaking things that no one could possibly believe, but which sounded kinda plausible because they involved missiles and weird looking guys from foreign countries. Like this guy:

In looking around youtube after the famous Kirk Cameron Banana Incident of Ought-Seven (which actually happened yesterday, and wasn’t really an incident), I found this chestnut. Please, enjoy yourself. We’ll resume our pleasantries afterwards.

Before I get to the heart of my argument, let me say one thing: the fact that the blond woman is standing in what looks like a court room has totally sold me on Jesus. That, and for being a crazy middle-aged woman, she’s not bad. I wonder if she’s single….

I digress. My point is this: even after I stopped being a believer, I still held Chuck Missler in relatively high esteem. The guy is highly intelligent and tends to make good points. But this video demonstrates that to be false. Chuck Missler has broken my heart. He is a complete fraud of an intellectual.

Because I’m already bored, I’ll quickly list the problems with the video:

• Just because the crazy old man in the bad suit at the beginning says that theories of life are fairytales doesn’t make them so.
• Science holds that life can arise spontaneously, but that there are probably limited conditions in which it can do so.
• Peanut butter is not an ideal climate for the spontaneous creation of life. But jelly is! That’s a little known scientific fact.
• Science doesn’t state that the first signs of life that appear are multi-cellular organisms that should be readily visible to the naked eye. Rather, the foundations of life arise out of atomic and sub-atomic patterns that over time might barely be able to replicate themselves. For all we know, the creation of peanut butter might actually be creating the atomic building blocks of life and that by eating a PB&J, we’re essentially performing an abortion. A creamy, crunchy, good-for-you abortion.

Technically speaking, it’s entirely possible that the building blocks of life could be popping up all over the place but are being eradicated too quickly to take hold.

It is complete and utter bloody nonsense to suggest that evolutionary theory contends that we should find well-defined, highly evolved life when we pop open a can of peanut butter. That Chuck Missler would even suggest that this is the case makes him look like the worst kind of idiot. He should know better. Any 9th-grade drop-out with even basic reading comprehension could tell you that this is not what evolution is about.

Seriously. Nuts to Chuck Missler. He should be ashamed of himself. He’s smart enough to know what a bloody straw man argument is.

(For a funny spin on this, watch Pasta Sauce: The Creationist’s Nightmare