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.