Stephen Hawking is one of the smartest men in the world. If the world of our grandparents had Albert Einstein, we have had Stephen Hawking. Hawking’s book “A Brief History of Time” is something you can’t get out of college without at least carrying around and acting like you are reading.

The man is a cosmologist. Of all the “-ologists” you can be, that’s a big one.

But Ray Comfort says Stephen Hawking is a fool.

Now, while the name “Stephen Hawking” is known to pretty much everyone, there is probably a fair number of people asking, “Who the hell is Ray Comfort?”

Ray Comfort is probably best known as Kirk Cameron’s partner in crime who is not Robin Thicke’s dad. Whenever Kirk Cameron is spouting some half-baked attack on science and biology, you can bet Ray Comfort is there behind or beside him. Most of all that is really Ray Comfort’s message. He just didn’t have a 1980’s sitcom and loads of adoring girls.

Ray Comfort and Kirk Cameron edited and released their own version of Darwin’s “On the Origin of the Species”, handing out their version on college campuses. Their version was later found to have omitted key sections that were inconvenient for their argument against evolution.

And it is in the realm of evolutionary theory that Comfort attacked Hawking recently. On his YouTube channel, in a series he calls The Comfort Zone, Comfort — who did not attend college — said of Hawking — who obviously did:

“You know, if we disagree with the Bible, when someone says, ‘I’m an atheist,’ they’re saying, ‘I’m a fool’. They’re saying nothing created everything, which is just ludicrous intellectual suicide. The Bible says he who denies God’s existence is a fool, and if we say the guy is intelligent, then we are denying what scripture said.

“It’s like someone who sits in a 747 and says I believe this happened when nothing exploded and everything fell into place. Everything … all fell into place without a designer. That is ludicrous.”

Hawking has readily admitted that he is an atheist. He sees no conflict in recognizing the wonders of the world around him, while not needing to attribute that to anyone’s version of a higher power. Comfort says no one can be an atheist without “absolute knowledge” that there is no god.