I stumbled upon the banana argument today. I don’t know whether to laugh or cry. A bit of both, I guess.
Laugh: Pardon me for resorting to such crude humor, but nearly every argument Ray Comfort presents as “proof” that the banana was designed by God for human consumption can also be used to “prove” that the human penis was designed by God for fellatio. Even better, the penis and its wrapper are reusable!
Cry: Comfort quotes Darwin to bolster his argument that the eye cannot possibly have evolved. However, the quote he uses is merely the first sentence of an entire chapter devoted to explaining how Darwin thinks it evolved. Here is the complete first paragraph:
To suppose that the eye with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest degree. When it was first said that the sun stood still and the world turned round, the common sense of mankind declared the doctrine false; but the old saying of Vox populi, vox Dei, as every philosopher knows, cannot be trusted in science. Reason tells me, that if numerous gradations from a simple and imperfect eye to one complex and perfect can be shown to exist, each grade being useful to its possessor, as is certainly the case; if further, the eye ever varies and the variations be inherited, as is likewise certainly the case; and if such variations should be useful to any animal under changing conditions of life, then the difficulty of believing that a perfect and complex eye could be formed by natural selection, though insuperable by our imagination, should not be considered as subversive of the theory. How a nerve comes to be sensitive to light, hardly concerns us more than how life itself originated; but I may remark that, as some of the lowest organisms in which nerves cannot be detected, are capable of perceiving light, it does not seem impossible that certain sensitive elements in their sarcode should become aggregated and developed into nerves, endowed with this special sensibility.
The rest is here (chapter 6, “Organs of Extreme Perfection and Complication”)
Comfort also quotes Einstein as a further appeal to authority. The problem is that Einstein, notwithstanding his quip that “God does not play dice”, was an avowed atheist, although he used the term “agnostic” to distance himself from those he called “professional atheists”. In his own words:
I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it.