Kirk Cameron is just plain dumb.
Yesterday I watched the Nightline Face-Off debate "Does God Exist?" between Kirk Cameron and Ray Comfort (on the side of the woo Christianists) and Brian Sapient and 'Kelly' (on the side of the "rational response squad"). Neither side argued particularly well, and although the intellectual debate was won by our atheist friends, the meta-debate was a clear win for the woos.
The debate kicked off with Ray Comfort giving his three 'scientific' proofs of God. These boiled down to this:
1. Pictures have painters, Buildings have builders, therefore nature has a creator. If you got 100 scientists in a room to look at a picture, you would get 100% agreement that the picture was painted by someone. There is nothing fundamentally different about the universe, it is just too 'design-like' not have been created intentionally by something. That something is God.
2. Humans have a sense of right and wrong. The bible lists things that are 'wrong' (the 10 commandments) and our moral sense agrees with the list. Each of us has done things on this list and have guilt about them. The only reason we would regret doing the things on the list is to seek forgiveness. We act as if there is something that can forgive us, that forgiver is God. [Note, this isn't quite how his argument went and I'm not sure if I have it right. If you understand this argument better please post it in the comments.]
3. When people give themselves completely over to faith, they recognize the tangible evidence of God for what it really is.
I'll start with #3 because it's the easiest to discount. He is stating the tautology "If I believe in X, then I'll believe in X." Not much argument there, but it doesn't count as proof. If I can fool myself into believing the 911 conspiracy theories, then I will see truth in the proofs of the conspiracy theory too, but my belief doesn't mean the conspiracy theory is any more true. Science never asks us to accept the conclusion before giving the evidence, it lets the evidence speak for itself. Science is about the unbiased analysis of evidence, it is about careful reasoning through each and every step to make sure nothing is taken for granted. By asking us to accept the conclusion first, Ray is saying there is no rational path to accept the 'tangible evidence' and only in the context of belief would you ever think it was evidence in the first place.
The second part about morals is just Christianist dogma. Here he invents a problem (the problem of sin) that wouldn't even occur if the proposition of God has not been accepted yet, and the solution (God can absolve it) isn't even arrived at rationally. Where is the science? What proof do you have that God and only God can do anything about it? It is like a strange little soap bubble that bursts the second you realize that if there is no God, there is no sin. Not to say there is no right or wrong, there is certainly morality in humans, but the act of doing something wrong doesn't have the supernatural consequences that the Cristianists are trying to portray it to have, and therefore absolution isn't even needed.
The first argument is the argument from ignorance. The lengths that they have to go to maintain their stupidity is just astonishing. I have to admit, just thinking about it gets me worked up, so I'll save that for another post.