Kirk Cameron, and stealing video from abcnews.com

Last wee­kend Kirk Came­ron and Ray Com­fort deba­ted some smug atheists over the exis­tence of God. Kirk’s and Ray’s claim was, to paraph­rase, that they could prove, 100%, scien­ti­fi­cally, the exis­tence of God, without invo­king faith or the Bible. The atheists were to prove, not that God doesn’t exist, but that Kirk and Ray can’t prove other­wise. The debate took place on Satur­day night and was taped to be strea­med on abcnews.com the follo­wing Wed­nes­day and Thurs­day, with select por­tions being tele­vi­sed on an epi­sode of Night­line.

Here’s Slate on the subject:

First, I grew exci­ted at this pro­mise, then began to won­der why no theo­lo­gian, phi­lo­sopher, or sit­com star in recor­ded his­tory had done it before—Thomas Aqui­nas, Imma­nuel Kant, Tina Yothers, whoever—and rea­li­zed I was in for a let­down. Comfort’s caden­ces were not even those of a preacher but of an info­mer­cial host, and the God Squad had but three argu­ments on behalf of the big guy: All things have makers; the human cons­cience is evi­dence of a higher moral power; if you read the Gos­pel, then Christ will be revea­led to you. For rea­sons too stu­pid to type, this was not an air­tight case, and the atheists made quick work of it in tones of juve­nile sarcasm.

They also threw in the first mover argu­ment, which tech­ni­cally dif­fers from the watch­ma­ker argu­ment. The con­tent of the debate is of almost no inte­rest, of course, as it clo­sely para­llels count­less con­ver­sa­tions that have taken place before it. But its being pre­sen­ted by ABC is sig­ni­fi­cant, even unpre­ce­den­ted by recent stan­dards of net­work tele­vi­sion. Which isn’t to say that reli­gion and God are never men­tio­ned on TV, but that when they are, they are dis­mis­sed as irre­con­ci­la­ble, deeply per­so­nal things that don’t invite ins­pec­tion beyond that of the effects they have on people’s beha­vior. They are approached as moral and cul­tu­ral issues — never as metaphy­si­cal ones. And the idea that a large-ish por­tion of the Ame­ri­can public might see peo­ple ear­nestly dis­cus­sing the nature of infi­nity and cau­sa­lity, even if ineptly, only hours after Ugly Betty, fas­ci­na­ted me, des­pite my con­fi­dence that none of it would be illu­mi­na­ting, and that it was a ratings stunt.

I didn’t see the “dis­ti­lled” ver­sion on Night­line, and the You­Tube videos were remo­ved before I could watch or save them, but I hear they did a pretty bad job with the mate­rial. At the moment, the entire debate is still avai­la­ble at the story’s ABC page, but, kno­wing that they pro­bably won’t last, and with a ten­dency toward obses­sive archi­vism and a dis­dain for ABC’s intrac­ta­ble flash pla­yer, I collec­ted them myself. Alto­gether they’re about 97 minu­tes. If you’re short on time and have to be choosy, watch the “Moc­king Dar­win” seg­ment, which con­tains the most lolz, and a gui­ded, pic­to­rial tour of an unders­tan­ding of evo­lu­tion so pro­foundly misin­for­med that even Lamarck is rolling his eyes. And he’s dead. As I watch this debate, I keep expec­ting Kirk to break cha­rac­ter. Then I think, Ray must have some dan­ge­rously com­pro­mi­sing pho­tos of him.

From the Colum­bia Jour­na­lism Review:

We could go on, but why? Night­line felt no res­pon­si­bi­lity to take the issue seriously enough to inc­lude, say, a scien­tist or a theo­lo­gian in the debate, so other than poin­ting out the dum­bing down of the natio­nal con­ver­sa­tion, we’ll just leave it at saying that we expect more of Night­line, and the Ame­ri­can peo­ple deserve bet­ter than being for­ced to endure half-baked publi­city stunts dres­sed up as news.

Thrown in at the end are some recent dis­cus­sions Bill O’Reilly has had with Kirk Came­ron and Richard Daw­kins, in which Bill pre­sents his own fuc­ked ver­sion of an anth­ro­pic argu­ment, expres­sing ama­ze­ment that we could have “luc­ked out” by having such a habi­ta­ble pla­net land on us, and plenty more frus­tra­tingly nebu­lous rea­so­ning for your teeth-gnashing pleasure.

The videos were recor­ded using a years-old tool that I’ve wan­ted for as long as I can remem­ber. CamS­tu­dio records the acti­vity in a selec­ted por­tion of your screen, and spits out an .avi. Its current ver­sion is from 2003, but, thanks to its open-sourceness, is still being deve­lo­ped. It gives you the option to use dif­fe­rent recor­ding codecs and to tweak their para­me­ters, but the only way I was able to get results was with enor­mous files, approaching 1GB for 15 minu­tes of 320×240 video. Which is a pain in the ass, but it works.