BELLFLOWER, Cal. – This week’s debut of Ray Comfort’s latest film was met with such overwhelming interest that his ministry’s website temporarily crashed as a result of the number of visitors trying to download the new movie.
As previously reported, New Zealand-born evangelist Ray Comfort has released several influential films and documentaries in the past, including 180—a 2011 movie about abortion that has received several million views. His latest project, Evolution vs. God, features interviews with several well-known evolutionist professors who struggle to provide observational evidence supporting evolutionary theory.
“As you will see on Evolution vs. God,” Comfort told Christian News Network last month, “not one of the experts could give me a whisper of evidence for Darwinian evolution. The movie is going to shatter the faith of the average believer in evolution, and strengthen the faith of every Christian.”
On Thursday, a pre-release version of Evolution vs. God was made available for the first time as a $19.99 MP4 download, and Comfort’s ministry’s website quickly became overloaded by the barrage of traffic.
“It began slowly and built to over 1,000 people,” Comfort told reporters. “That’s a huge amount of people to be downloading an entire movie, and it proved to be too much for our site. It crashed.”
Comfort also believes that one of the indicators of the 36-minute movie’s effectiveness is the attention it has received from several well-known atheists. Richard Dawkins mentioned Comfort’s project to over 750,000 followers on Twitter. PZ Myers—one of the evolutionist “experts” interviewed in Evolution vs. God—angrily called Comfort a “liar” and “a dishonest fool,” labeled the movie a “monstrosity” with “Jesusy nonsense,” and then posted the entire film on his blog. And the group American Atheists recently posted a 700-word “critique” of the movie, claiming it is “misleading” and “shameful” with an “overwhelming number of fallacies.”
“[Comfort is] ruining science education with this nonsense,” the American Atheists critique states. “We are the only advanced country on this planet that denies evolution on anything close to the scale that we do. People from other countries laugh (at first), then recoil, when they realize that we’re not joking when we say half of our country not only doesn’t believe evolution is correct but can’t properly define it. … We are not ‘related to’ primates; we ARE primates.”
The recent onslaught of criticism aimed at Evolution vs. God leads Comfort to believe that the film is striking a cord with the evolutionist community.
“I’m no prophet,” he told reporters, “but I will predict that there are going to be full-scale attacks on my character, because atheists want to stop this movie from being seen. Many of them are very angry. But for me, this is a hill to die on, and I’m ready for battle and for whatever that brings with it.”
Meanwhile, dozens of influential Christian leaders have conversely praised Evolution vs. God, opining that it reveals the true weakness of Darwinian evolution, while strengthening the faith of the average Christian.
“The bottom line is that molecules-to-man evolution is a lie and there is no observational scientific evidence that confirms it,” wrote Ken Ham, president of Answers in Genesis, in a Wednesday blog post. “On the contrary, observational science confirms the account of origins as given in Genesis. I believe Evolution vs. God will do a lot of ‘damage’ in the minds of many in the general public who have been indoctrinated to believe evolution is fact … It will be very eye-opening for young people who have been brainwashed by their teachers to believe that evolution is fact.”
On July 22nd, Answers in Genesis will be hosting the world premiere of Comfort’s film at their Answers Mega Conference in Sevierville, Tennessee. Then, on August 7th, both the DVD and YouTube versions of Evolution vs. God will be made publicly available.