Genesis Impact? Not So Much: My Thoughts on an Odd Little Video by Ray Comfort

A few days ago, someone in one of the Facebook Creation/Evolution groups I follow posted a link to an hour-long video entitled, “Genesis Impact,” and commented that it looked like something from Ken Ham and Answers in Genesis. His comment basically was, “Is it even worth it bother watch it?” Well, I figured that I could play the video at 1.5-speed and get through it in a little over 30 minutes. I haven’t written much about YECism lately, so I thought I’d give it a whirl.

As it turns out “Genesis Impact” isn’t from Answers in Genesis, but it certainly is a Ray Comfort YECist video, nevertheless. Before I comment on it, though, I want to first give an overview of the entire thing. This will not take long.

Genesis Impact Overview
The video begins with a 20-something-year-old man looking into the camera and asking the following questions: “Does what we believe about creation or evolution even matter? Does what we believe about our ancient past have any impact on our lives today? What about the Bible? How many people will trust what it says about salvation, if they believe it doesn’t even get the beginning correct? There is one simple question, and depending on how we answer that question, it can cause our lives to hang in the balance.”

The answer to those questions is given in the rest of the video. Spoiler Alert: The answer the video wants to convey is simple: Yes, it does matter. Convincing someone that the earth is only 6,000 years old and that Noah’s flood happened about 4,000 years ago can lead that person to Christ and save his/her soul…and help find them a loving spouse.

The next scene involves Ray Comfort (off camera) doing on the ground interviews with people at the Los Angeles Natural History Museum, where he asks them a number of questions regarding fossils, DNA, and genetics. This, though, simply is a way to set up the “story” of the video, for when then see a teenage boy sitting at home, watching the Ray Comfort video on his phone. He is clearly disturbed and is in deep thought. His mother comes in and he tells her that maybe the scientists are right—there certainly does seem to be a lot of evidence for evolution. He then asks here, “What if God used evolution?” At that point, his mother sits down with him at tells him a story about when she was a young woman. As a young woman, she had questioned things and had gone to a lecture at a natural history museum where a scientist had argued for evolution over the course of millions of years.

For the next 45-50 minutes of the video, there is a “flashback scene” to the aftermath of that lecture. After the scientist ends his lecture and dismisses everyone, a young woman, Christine, goes up front to ask him some questions. Christine looks as if she is in her late teens (and for some reason, I’m convinced that the actress playing Christine had a wig on—you watch it and judge for yourself), but she has come armed and ready with arguments and facts from Genesis Apologetics! Her initial question about the DNA similarities between chimpanzees and humans quickly “evolves” into a 45-minute conversation that ranges from the fossil record, geology, Mt. Saint Helens, Pangea, soft-tissue on dinosaur bones, to the mass extinction of dinosaurs.

Lo and behold, this doey-eyed young Christian girl, armed with her facts from the Genesis Apologetics app, completely schools the learned scientist. Chimps are chimps and humans are humans, radiometric dating is unreliable, evolution is false, Genesis gives us clear historical genealogies that go back to Adam, and the dinosaurs were killed in Noah’s flood. The scientist is stunned and dumb-founded at all the evidence Christine presents—he has never heard it before! At the end of the discussion, he tells her, “Christine, you’ve given me a lot to think about.”

During this entire time, the crowd that had begun to file out after the scientist’s lecture, has actually returned to their seats, enraptured by the elegant and sophisticated case young Christine is making. One of the people in that crowd was the mother (as a young girl herself) at the beginning of the video. She says to her boyfriend, “Everything I’ve ever believed was wrong!”

The scene then shifts back to the “present day,” with the mother talking to her teenage son. She tells him, “My life completely changed that day.” She then tells him that she soon broke up with her boyfriend because she had come to believe in God, and that because Christine showed her the truth about a young earth, she came to Jesus. In fact, she and Christine became friends and Christine eventually introduced her to her future husband. With that, the mother reassures her teenage son, ““You can believe that God’s word is true.”

The son smiles and goes back to watching the rest of the Ray Comfort video. It ends with the voice of Ray Comfort saying, “Jesus destroyed evolution in one sentence: ‘In the beginning, God made them male and female.’”

My Reaction
Starting in 2015, I did a whole bunch of reading and research regarding young earth creationism, and Answers in Genesis in particular. I had recently lost my job as a Biblical Worldview teacher at a small Christian school, where I had taught for eight years, because the new headmaster had found out that I was not a young earth creationist. When that happened, I was shocked and horrified that I could lose my job over that. I had grown up within Evangelicalism, and even though evolution was always looked as with suspicion (on the grounds that it was often associated with atheism), I had honestly never known anyone who actually believed the universe was only 6,000 years old. That notion was just bizarre to me. Sure, I knew some people believed that, but I thought it was rather fringe. Besides, never at any point in my life was the age of the earth presented as a fundamental tenet of the Christian faith.

And so, when I was essentially fired because I didn’t agree with Ken Ham, I couldn’t believe it. That is why I started reading up on him and Answers in Genesis, and when I did, I was even more shocked at what I was reading. Forget their “scientific” claims—as a Biblical scholar, I was horrified at the way they butchered Scripture. In any case, just to make sense of what had happened to me, I ended up writing my book, The Heresy of Ham: What Every Evangelical Needs to Know About the Creation-Evolution Controversy. Admittedly, during that whole process (which really took place over a number of years), there was a lot of frustration and hurt I had to deal with. It often made me angry that so many Christians had gotten sucked into this very bizarre mindset and, quite frankly, false teaching.

Eventually, my interest in YECism (thankfully) waned. Once you understand their basic arguments, shell games, and smoke and mirrors tactics, the whole thing just gets boring and old. There really isn’t much frustration or anger left. Whenever I do read or watch something by a YECist group (like this video), I just find it rather boring and I find myself feeling sorry for them. After all, the Bible bears witness to God’s activity in the history of ancient Israel, the incarnation, death, and resurrection of Christ, and proclaims (as the Church has done for 2,000 years) that through his death and resurrection, the new creation has dawned and that through faith in Christ, we can be taken up into the life of God. As Saint Athanasius famously said, “God became man so that man could become like God.” That is the good news of the Gospel…

…but YECists like Ray Comfort and Ken Ham are obsessing over soft tissue on dinosaur bones because they think that convincing people of their YECist arguments is the way to salvation? I mean, that is pretty much what the “moral to the story” was in the “Genesis Impact” video: If the Bible doesn’t get the beginning right, then how can anyone trust what it says about salvation? After all, it was Christine’s absolute take down of that atheist scientist that convinced the mother to come to Jesus!

I’m sorry, but no. I can’t be angry at YECists anymore, though. I just really feel sorry for them. I don’t want to sound mean, but the only people who will be impressed with this video are YECists who are already deluded by YECist thinking. Make no mistake, though, even though this video was made by Genesis Apologetics, it doesn’t argue for or make a defense of the traditional Christian faith. It makes a defense of a YECist idol.