Because he makes himself into an easy target?

Seriously, if you want to use the “arguments we prefer creationists not use” thing, why not mention one of my other favorites:

Barry Setterfield scientist.

Basically, his arguments are also bogus but you have to have a pretty good handle on physics to understand why. A possibly better way to get to what he is about comes from the fact that I have hacked his web site and (at the time) he had his resume on the site but not linked.

His claim to being a scientist arises from the fact that he completed the first semester of freshman geology before dropping out of school to become an evangelist. As far as I can tell, he uses the word scientist as part of his name to make himself sound more important.

I try to give equal time to al of the incompetents you listed - Hovind's stuff still comes up (especially in the backwater where Ilive) so I play with him for the lulz.

If you'd like to bring up any of their material, I'd be happy to crush it like a cockroach for you. Maybe like a watermelon. OR like a car in one of those conveyer-belt compactor things. Those are awesome.

All I'm saying is crush'd.

I just said these guys were more intellectually stimulating than something like Hovind. But if you feel you have a need to "crush" them, by all means, go right ahead.

I'd be happy to play the devil's advocate, but picking a fight...that's not really what debates are all about. If arguments were suffeciently convincing one way or another, then I suppose there would be no need to debate them, would there?

I've never heard of this not-picking-a-fight style of debate. It sounds alien and dull.

Hahahahaha! He. Good one.

If evolution had all the evidence, and creationism had none, then the matter would be settled!

Yeah. Something makes me think that it's not always the rational in people that wins the day.

PS:

"Torn apart". Hmm...sounds like a paper shredder. Or an 80's rock balad. Are you talking about tearing them apart on grounds of soundness or validity? Most of Hovind's arguments fail in both area IMHO. But I suppose that's just it...my opinion. Countless people are convinced he's right. How do we conclude who wins and who loses? In debates I've been to, the winner was decided by a majority vote. If that's the case, Hovind wins...NO!!!!!!

Things that are grounded in solid empirical evidence. For instance when Hovind stated that you could cover the planet with one drop of water he was completely and unambiguously wrong. The easy stuff is picking apart seperate individual claims that he uses to support his overall bankrupt beliefs.

A formal debate structure does not define who is right, it simply defines who is better at debating. Put me in one with them and you'll watch me wipe them all over the floor. Most scientists who debate theists are crippled by sheer incredulity.
Logically and scientifically, their arguments all fail. They fail in physics, astronomy, geology, genetics, psychology, and every other branch of science. They also often fail at history, though I'll admit that is the one area where they can be right on occasion. Still, much of history is interpretation, not solid fact. There is no evidence to support or deny religion on a historic basis. That they go there at all is indicative that on some level they realise how far they have to stretch to convince the average person to convert.

Wiping the floor -- Isn't that what the janitor does after the debate? I suppose what you get when a theologian that dabbles in science is incredulity. And when a scientist is embarrassingly misinformed about theology, one gets umm....a raving mad man? But in any case, I suppose one can occasionally find a gem -- a scientist that is informed about theology or a theologian (or an 'atheologian' if you prefer) who is informed about science. I did go to a debate once between Bill Dembski and Michael Ruse. Bill Dembski, for what he's worth, had more substance that Ruse while Ruse had more style. At the end of the day most people felt that Dembski 'won', but not because he better substance, but simply because Ruse didn't have substance. In any case, I felt cheated and wanted my money back. 

An atheist who thinks of himself as a God. Does this mean you don't believe in yourself?? No really...what do you play?

Regarding the first segment of your post, I am rarely presented with theological problems that I can't overcome. All of those problems are historic in nature. And irrelevant to the issue of a god to boot, since there's no 2000 year old rock with perpetually glowing words backing interpretations of a god.
I don't have a problem with the belief in a deity or deities, unless it intrudes on my lack of the same to the point it interferes with my enjoyment of the only existence I will ever know. My morality extends this outwards to others, and I often get as mad seeing it happen to another as I would it happening to me. Sometimes more so.
As a result, the vast majority of the theists I encounter are the ridiculous ones that are a clear and present danger to humanities future and present. To a T, they are completely ignorant or illogical or both when it comes to reality. Usually both. Religion should be private. If it refuses to be, and is shoved in my face everywhere I turn, then I refuse to tolerate it.
tbc..

Shit. This turned into a 3 post rant going all over the place. Sorry.
Mod merge please?
I should probably wrap up on your second comment... lol.
I don't recognise a definition of god unless it is a natural explanation (I stretch it only for debate), and in this case, it basically indicates that only I control my destiny, with a bit of ego in my gaming skills/knowledge. It is my true love, even before Star Wars.
As for what I play, that could be another 5 pages, lol. Pretty well anything. Final Fantasy & Star Wars top the list, but it's a huge list. I've been gaming since the Pong/COCO2 era, and still pick up 20 year old games every now and then, but I don't skip out on the new ones anymore than my budget forces me to.
As an indicator, I'm posting with a PS3 here, hence the trip post. There's a character limit...

For first person shooters or MMORPG's, a keyboard is an absolute requirement for true interaction. For puzzles, non-action RPG's, old school 2D platformers, and similar genres it is equal to a good controller. But for todays platformers, sports games, action RPG's, third person shooters, and racing games, a keyboard doesn't compare I'm afraid. Of course, that's why you can get controllers for PC's.
Still, PC gaming has been too expensive for me for years. I own 4 consoles. Only one died in the amount of time that passes before you need to upgrade: N64(96). My PC(98) stopped being useful for even most flash games by 2003. The PS1(96) I bought only died after 8 or 9 years of constant releases. The PS2(00) I bought on launch still has games coming out for it every year. I fully expect a similar performance from my PS3(09). If I were rich I'd have it all. But I'm not, so I'm going for the greatest value per dollar so I can enjoy the most games. Sony has owned gaming since 1994. So be it.

As a member of the PC gaming master race I must disagree, there is only one genre that a contoller is better for, that is the random button mushing games, fighting ans sports games. I suppose yes driving games to but those aren't really games are they, you dont call driving to work a game do you? Third person shooters and action rpgs are great on PC, auto lock-on sucks balls, you just cannot beat a mouse.

Only plebs cannot afford to join the PC gaming master race , I bought my PC mid way into the PS2's life time, cannot remember exactly when but it still runs all the new releases with ease, wasn't that expensive either, far less than a PS3.  I will say if you just buy your pc in one piece as a complete box instead of buying it in pieces and puting it together yourself you are in for financial pain.

Cards on the table I have only owned to 2 consoles in my life, the snes and the PS1. Snes was great but dam did the PS1 suck balls. Put me off consoles for life. There were only 2 games i like on the PS1 FF7 and FF8. Every other game i got on i was a huge disapointment

ubuntuAnyone, nice South Park episode. Too bad th Wii wasn't worth it.
Tapey, I could launch into a 20 page post about how PC's cost more, have less, and can't compare, with proof to boot, but I don't have a working PC because my PS3 was cheaper than any equivalent PC will be for many many years. I also don't have to become an engineer in order to play a game. Patches are delivered to me, I don't have to hunt them down. And finally, mice suck for gaming. HORRIBLY. Any game other than solitaire anyway. Keyboard alone is better. Mice are JUST as finicky as controllers, and you can turn auto aim off, so no advantage for mice. I would beat you with a controller if you use one. Also... you've obviously never played Burnout, if that's what you think of driving games.

I'm twice as fast and twice as accurate with a keyboard alone as you'll ever be with a mouse. Never have to stop moving/shooting because you never have to lift it up.
Re: controller vs mouse, I didn't intend to imply it would be easy, but I would win in the end tally more often than not. You get precision with a mouse, but a controller is much faster. Keyboard still > both though.
Re: price... I paid 600 for my PS3. A pc with half the power/features would cost twice that, and be useless in a year. Must be a continental thing.
Edit, spelling/clarity...twice

Fuck kent, he doesn't deserve a thread anyway.
I would have thought there'd be a huge community of console alteration there to make up for the lack of titles, like China enjoys. Though for anyone in a second or third world nation, I must grant that PC's are the cheaper way to go. You just don't get enough attention from the big names.

Won't work for Xbox, and Windows I just don't know (Wii, who cares? lol), but about 99% of PS3 titles are region free. In other words, you can buy the game in Japan, but it'll still work on any PS3 ever made. I'd suggest trying to order online depending on how currency conversions work. But of course, best to know if a game is region free before going that route.

I'm sorry, what? Rationality is pretty simple. If you want to talk in degrees of rationality, that's fine, but what debate would you be talking about? And that bit about defining apart from ... actually, I honestly don't know what you're making reference to. How does one avoid rationality and define anything?

Honestly, it just seems like you're baiting. Blind faith doesn't describe trusting something that has been tested to work frequently. You might stretch the world "faith" a little, but having tested the tools of rational thought -- like logic -- over and over again, the "faith" that one might have in it's process isn't blind. Quite the opposite: it's informed.

Absolutely. I was showing solidarity flying the colours like that. I likes me some Linux, boy howdy.



And a good gaming discussion dies. The Panda weeps.

Maybe instaed of talking about gaming, we should be gaming . Besides, conversations about kent Hovind get boring after about 5 minutes. Why did I ever bring this up in the first place? Woe is me!

If you're mired in such things, that's fine, but for an actually successful epistemology, we have the empirical method. It works better than any other way we have to test the world around us by far. If all epistemologies were actually equivalent, it would be much harder to determine who to put into an insane asylum.

In reality, however, we rarely have that much trouble determining whether or not someone who claims to be Napoleon actually is.

Certainly not for those of us who are not professional philosophers. Pragmatism does have its place, here. Mathematics, which is held together by logic, has allowed us to describe much of the mechanics of our world within a very small margin of error. We can acheive statistically good predictions for physical systems. That's what I mean when I say "logic works".

Logic alone, as you say, is ridiculous. To remove it from our world (or, indeed, our brains) would be to enter realms we have no means to discuss. But given that it conforms to so much empirical knowledge, it would seem that it works very, very well.

That's not a very specific question. Religion is a human behaviour -- that much we can know. Setting aside the ideas anyone may hold that the object of those peoples' attention merits an ontology, we can say merely that people engage in religious behaviour.

Not within an empirical "worldview". To the empiricist, the way one sees the world can be shattered by evidence.

I think I understand what you're asking, but you've jumbled the words a bit in there, so I'll attempt to answer the question I think you asked.

You're talking about the basis of logic, which is actually pretty solid, philosophically speaking. Unless you'd like to dissect a particular part of the theory of logic you find lacking, it serves little to throw out baseless questions about personal bias affecting the rules of logic. Especially when logic often helps to rule out bias.

The thing about quoting Dave Barry is that I know you'd like to keep this a light and informal discussion, but mentioning the orphaned and unfortunate field of metaphysics can be a real downer. Metaphysics, that sad serpent eating its own tail, that anemic set of sophomoric riddles -- we can find no satisfaction from turning it on itself like a loaded weapon. The problem, it would seem, is that it is not loaded, as it consistently fires blanks. There are so many more effective ways to hammer out problems -- even philosophical ones -- that attempted metaphysical relativism isn't really an argument, it's more like running away.

Obviously I do, too, or I wouldn't be here chatting away on the internet. I enjoy picking on metaphysics, though, I admit it. I feel like a teenager's father, frustrated that metaphysics can't just cut its hair and get a real job.

It's a dodge as long as we don't discuss epistemology in a serious way. If we're just going to ask, "yes, but what can we really know?" at every assertion, then you're setting up solipsistic black holes all over the place. A serious attack on empirical evidence would have to acknowledge its successes before spiraling into despair at the unknowable.

Okay, I see what you mean. Here, I think it's safe to say that I'm not a hard-core empiricist. I personally think that repeated testing is the best way to know something, but certainly not the only way. At this point, we'd have to get into the epistemology, and look for ways to describe knowledge, etc.

That's a fair criticism. The issue of trust definitely plays a part in belief. I wouldn't deny that.

I see what you mean, but I'm not sure how you would want to validate a logical system. Early logic was, of course, seated in the basics of our physical world. Mathematics involves discerning one thing from another, and determining relationships between the abstractions we create out of that process. Logic functions along the same lines, and by virtue of abstraction, has some well-known limits.

On the other hand, it's no small feat to land something on the moon several times. That's an example of abstraction meeting reality, and consistently. Of course, it doesn't do so absolutely perfectly, and even chaos mathematics hasn't pinned down reality to its final decimal place. But I'm not sure how else you would want to figure stuff out.

Right, and that's not where I would take the discussion, personally. The depth of human experience is ill served by stacking fallacies. Of course, the empirical method has its limits, philosophically speaking. In application, however, it's the most successful epistemology, bar none, and by a large margin. You seem to be ignoring Popper's contribution to the philosophy of the sciences: we don't actually confirm that things are true through the empirical method, we exclude those that are false. In this way, it's probably easier to see how the empirical method isn't as circular as you make it appear.

You would have no quarrel with me if you were to say that you believe all people carry irrational beliefs. The possibility, however unconfirmable, seems highly likely. The problem with the crux of what you're implying is not just that religious beliefs have some space, but that any irrational belief has space to be defined as rational.

I'll outline my personal objection to gods, as a relevant example of something I hold to be an irrational belief, so that we can make this more direct.

1. Gods never show up. At the very least, we can say they are presently unmeasurable. That is, we must acknowledge that we have no direct knowledge of them;

2. What purported indirect knowledge we have of gods comes from people. Note, then, that the issue of belief is not strictly of gods (of whom we can have no direct knowledge) but whether or not we believe the people who claim to have indirect knowledge of gods;

3. The descriptions of gods we have from people (or from books) are internally incoherent (omnipotence, etc)

4. Sometimes, gods are said to defy description entirely;

From these four points, I would argue that it is irrational to believe the claims of people who say there are gods. The first two are fairly straightforward in describing that, but the last two really hammer home the irrationality.

Given 3, that there is something internally incoherent, then what, exactly is a person asking you to believe? Something that contradicts itself?

Given 4, what does this person believe in at all? What are they trying to convince you to believe in if they can't tell you what it is? Obviously that wouldn't settle the ontology by itself, but "believe in this thing that I can't tell you what it is" is an odd request. It's an irrational request.

Thus, a belief in gods must be irrational.

I do, it's just ancient (win 98). The PS3 browses at least 10 times faster and more effectively, so there's not a lot of point in using the PC. It's not even connected to the net atm. I can't even play Star Craft on it, so it's just collecting dust.