Are there any skilled biologist debaters?
Posted on: September 14, 2007 - 4:39pm
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Are there any skilled biologist debaters?
I was watching samples of some debates on You Tube where Kent Hovind debates with genuine biologists, and in all the ones I've seen, the biologists are really poor debaters.
I mean, they know their facts and their science, but they present their arguments at a level waaay over the heads of the audience and with poor public speaking skills.
Then Hovind gets up and seduces the audience with a lot of BS that sounds good and successfully steamrollers the scientist, confirming all his audience's misconceptions.
Are there any clips anywhere of anybody acutally giving Hovind a good pwning?
"After Jesus was born, the Old Testament basically became a way for Bible publishers to keep their word count up." -Stephen Colbert
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An actual debate requires honesty and two debators who know what they are talking about... Hovind fills his audiences with people who know even less than he does about biology, and he does so for a reason:
Most humans, when given a choice between these two options:
1) You are smart and know enough to make a snap judgement and you can write off the 'know it alls' as misguided.
2) You are actually ignorant and incapable of making an informed opinion
Will grab at option 1 like a drowning man grabs at a lifeguard.
Hovind takes advantage of human vanity like any other demogoge. These are therefore not debates at all.... a biologist walking into that room talking biology is wasting his time. At best they can try to provide remedial lessons in the basics to people who are emotionally driven towards option 1 like lemmings.
Call it the 'dilbert effect' - our tendency to write off everyone 'above us' as lost, clueless, while we're the only ones who know what's really going on...
And of course, those 'below us intellectually' are in fact just below us....just stupid... and hey, there's no contradiction there....
"Hitler burned people like Anne Frank, for that we call him evil.
"God" burns Anne Frank eternally. For that, theists call him 'good.'
Hmm, gonna have to go ahead and disagree with you there, Tod.
I agree with Dawkins that there is a group of people out there who disbelieve evolution because it's such a counterintuitive idea and they really just don't understand it. They are perfectly capable of understanding how natural selection/evolution works, but it has never been explained to them in a way that they've understood. Talking over the heads of these people just exacerbates their opinion that evolution is a lot of bogus smokescreening.
It seems to me that working to educate people is more likely to help "free humanity from the mind disorder known as theism" than just saying that people are stupid and incapable of learning.
I think I remember reading somewhere that you're a psychologist? Didn't you read your Vygotsky?
"After Jesus was born, the Old Testament basically became a way for Bible publishers to keep their word count up." -Stephen Colbert