In case you don’t want to listen to a whole half hour of this, here’s my concluding statement:
Look. I’m an atheist. This stuff plays directly into my hands — if your religion demands that every statement in your holy book must be absolutely, inarguably true, and that your entire faith hinges on a complete lack of metaphor, poetry, allusion, and analogy in that book — that it is as dry and literal and factual as a table of measures in an engineering text — then I’ve got you. I am going to win over your children to my side, and you know it.
As an atheist, I’m often told that I don’t understand your religion. But I do. I understand it better than the fanatical literalists, anyway. Religion has a long history of struggling to reconcile reality and belief, to find humanity’s place in a largely unknown and complex and frequently hostile universe. If there is any saving grace in faith at all, it is that it is an attempt to find a rock of certainty in the unpredictable chaos of life — it is aspirational, a search for truth. As such, religion changes over time. It evolves.
Where it fails is when people like Ham and the Hovinds give up on the search and the struggle and decide that they have an absolute lock on an irrevocable and ultimate truth, one that will no longer bend to the evidence, that will no longer care about the nature of reality, but only the nature of one antique interpretation of the words of a book. They will not change any more. They will cling stubbornly to this one unmoving stone of dogma, and they will insist that everything else is wrong. They will close their eyes and grasp tighter and tighter to that one illusion of certainty as it crumbles around them. By refusing to bend, they commit themselves to someday breaking.
The movie goes on like this for another hour and a half: more tiresome and tired old creationist arguments interspersed with brief episodes of bad CGI accompanied by a slow, lugubrious voice of god. It ends with another 10 or 15 minutes of fast cuts between their cast members, all testifying and preachifying about the glory of god and how lovely Jesus makes them feel.
It just makes me terribly sad. These are lost minds committed to battling against the real world.
I “love” the statement that when purpose isn’t imposed then there is no purpose.
Substitute “value” for “purpose” also
Purpose and value are created by the people wanting them, and not artifacts handed down upon them.
/rant
slithey tove @1:
It’s like listening to teenagers discovering nihilism for the first time.
That last sentence was quite the “zinger” P.Z.
slithey tove @ 1
And what “purpose” do these geniuses often claim that their deity provides us? Why, to mindlessly obey and worship that deity. How convenient, eh?
I’ve been thinking something about arguing with creationists. I think the reason why some creationist arguments can persist for so long is because scientists who address them don’t go into enough detail. I’m thinking that it might be harder for creationists to wriggle out of criticisms of their ideas if scientists went into the actual equations behind the principles that they’re talking about and gave detailed descriptions of how the processes that they discuss work.
emergence, that’s not intended to be funny, is it?
(Tensor calculus FTW!)
Emergence, after many arguments with theists, the problem is isn’t evidence, it is presuppositional thinking that allows them to ignore any evidence that refutes their presuppositions. If one doesn’t presuppose an imaginary deity, there is absolutely no need for that imaginary deity except to fulfill their delusional presuppositions. They can’t except they are thinking about imaginary things.
I’m just trying to think of any strategy I can to get creationists to finally drop stupid arguments that they’ve repeated ad nauseam.
Just as an example, what if a population geneticist calculated out the required mutation rate for every species in a particular family to have branched off from each other in less than a couple thousand years? I’m fairly certain that the rate of speciation required for the ark story to work would actually require stuff like tigers giving birth to panthers and stuff like that. This “created kind” horseshit might be more difficult to defend if you show that it’s impossible with hard numbers.
Really though, I just want to make at least some sort of headway in the battle against creationist idiocy. I hate how arguments with creationists drag on and on, and then end up repeating themselves. If what we’re doing now isn’t working, then we should try something else to try to get through to them.
emergence:
As Nerd noted, facts ain’t relevant to them, and attempting to confront them on their own terms is also problematic. I like your attitude, but alas your naivety is apparent to me. I do encourage you to hang in there, though.
(Of course what you suggest has already been tried, for decades even — check out “Panda’s Thumb”, for example.)
So, what should we do? Do we try to win people over before creationist horseshit can take root in their brains and just let people like Ken Ham die off?
emergence @ # 8: … any strategy I can to get creationists to finally drop stupid arguments that they’ve repeated ad nauseam.
Try hitting them with topics they themselves don’t bring up. F’rinstance, few will have an argument prepared for a discussion of why, among all mammals, only chimpanzees and humans can’t synthesize their own vitamin C – and why the defective gene in question occurs in the same place in both species’ DNA.
I wish you luck – even while agreeing with Nerd of Redhead & John Morales that you’ve set yourself a steep uphill swim. Tactical advice: don’t bother trying to persuade your debate partner(s), just do what you can to discredit them in the minds of your audience. And study the videos of Aron Ra.
nope. it maintains itself purely through authoritarianism and peer pressure.
that’s it.
there is literally NOTHING a scientists can do via presenting just evidence to change this.
the authoritarian personality itself is what must be addressed, exactly like dealing with someone suffering from extreme Narcissist Personality Disorder.
until we get to that level, where we both recognize and accept that the psychological differences between us are real, and have impact, then nothing will really change.
end of.
for people close to you, you are far far better off treating them as if they are part of a cult, and look at methods used for deprogramming.
really.
here:
https://www.wikihow.com/Deprogram-a-Religious-Cult-Member
Emergence, the only thing you can really do is point and laugh. When they drop a zinger, let them know how fucking ridiculous their ignorant bullshit is.
What is a zinger?
It’s a kind of tea.
Ah, another zinger.
If part 1 is “Paradise Lost” will part 2 be “Paradise Regained?”
Giggles ! From the site, which I won’t link to:
Translation: If this scam makes enough money, we’ll try it again.
Sort-of related, The Earth may not be flat, but it just might be doomed:
I’m very curious just how these übereejits explain the Foucault pendulum. However, I will strap additional pillows to my forehead before going into that sinkhole.
On the Foucault pendulum question, the Flat Earth Loons have a page (which I won’t link to), Foucault’s Pendulum actually proves a Stationary Earth! The quality of the reasoning there can be deduced from the initial comment, which reads, in its entity (referring to five claims made):
A different site, which I also won’t link to, babbled on for a bit and then, finally, claimed (I’ve added the embedded link):
Ow ! I need yet moar pillows…
why, you can say the same thing about nearly EVERY FUCKING THING IN SCIENCE.
fuck me, this is an incredibly stupid thing to say.
it IS NOT reasonable, BECAUSE we have access to information, period.
that’s the whole fucking point.