I’m on the Jinn & Tonic show right now.
And…now I’m done. Whew, two hours.
And it’s already up on youtube!
I have got to remember to set up better lighting when I do these things. It was fun, anyway, although it got a little exasperating late in the show when the Muslim apologist spent so much time trying to wheedle me into debating Hamza Tzortzis.
Ha ha, how did Muhammad know that an angel write down what the person will be after 40 days in the womb (80 days, or whatever)? He couldn’t have know that fact from the science of his day, so it must have been miraculous.
Oh, the posers that theists present to us!
Glen Davidson
Thanks for the link PZ. This is the first time I’ve listened to an online discussion in real time and I’m thoroughly enjoying it.
Suggestion: Tell all the Muslim experts to agree on an interpretation of the two lines of holy poetry and then submit that in writing to PZ/Science for evaluation. Or have Hamza rewrite his piece in that vein and then it can be critiqued simply and without threat of misinterpretation.
At least that will take a few millenia…..
As for the “this could never have been known at the time” discussion….how obtuse can they actually be without intent to
muddle??
It really is amazing how much they want PZ and Hamza to share a stage. And one can only conclude that the results would be edited to the detriment of reality.
Take the Dawkins line as reqards W(idly)L(oco)Craig….
Shoo fly, shoo.
You better debate Hamza, PZ, sounds like he is about ready to get out the empty chair.
I got a little past the part where PZ gives Hamza an alternative to a debate, which I thought was mighty nice of him rather than just saying “NO”.
I watched it as a guest and couldn’t comment.
You have so much patience, with both sides. Don’t debate a moot claim. Give a lecture if you feel like it to kill the stupidity of Hamza once and for all if you want.
If you ever find yourself in Malmö, Sweden, dinner and beer is on me.
Thank you PZ. You rock!
My reflections on the show, pertaining to Hamza’s troll-boy badgering you to debate Hamza:
http://klingschor.blogspot.com/2011/12/iera-are-desperate.html
Thanks for coming along PZ, I enjoyed it very much.
I would really liked to have had Hamza turn up and defend his position on the biology “Bones come before the flesh”, but really having you debate him on anything other than factual biology would have been pointless.
Scientists debunking bogus scientific claims from theists, great. Scientists debunking the Kalam Cosmological Argument, dull and pointless.
I thought it was funny when the guy from iERA said you must be an expert on Arabic in order to have any authority to talk about what the Koran says. I’m just screaming at my computer “somebody call him on that, please!” I mean here is he challenging PZ to debate Hamza when Hamza couldn’t and even admits he has no expertise on any field of Biology. Oh, Somebody Else’s God do these idiots have no grip on consistency at all. PZ Myers is an expert on Biology and he’s supposed to waste his time debating someone who has at least according to the iERA guy no right to challenge him in the first place. Man these religious debates piss me off…
I’ve just returned from an alien abduction, I wonder if PZ would be willing to have a public debate about how the aliens developed 3 arms and how this proves that evolution is not true.
The debate discussion is ridiculous. Why would anybody debate this guy who admits that he can’t even interpret the Koran correctly? What is the point?
[Garn that was painful. I watched the whole thing.]
The iERA shill let slip the reason for their wish for a debate: They want to claim an equality of opinion. They are trying to create a semblance that there are two equally scientific opinions. Nothing more.
You are right to deny Hamza a “debate”.
It comes down to only one point: It would look great on his CV. That’s the point. He wants pretend validity. Let him try to gather it at someone else’s expense.
But it is very arrogant of him to waste someone else’s time so willfully; life is short, and it is the height of self-aggrandizement to vandalize another person’s precious life-minutes that way.
The intellectual dishonesty and hypocrisy of Hamza and his crew, and the others like him, such as William Lane Craig, John Haught, and so on, appalls and even bewilders me. I can’t grok the willful dishonesty dressing in a pretense of intellectual ethics and scholarly standards. They backpedal, misrepresent, utilize fallacies, present falsehoods as fact with glib freedom, try to throw out clouds of misdirection. It is as if every moment they live were a dot on a ray of endlessly writhing ad hoc heaves this way and that, any point in their position shifting and twisting in desperation like a worm on a hook.