Creationists are typically pretty wriggly and hard to pin down. So when I argue with them, I don’t often get the ‘corner-and-kill’ moment. I usually can’t get them into that position where it becomes obvious to all listeners that the quarry knows he was caught in a lie. It’s always interesting when your opponent realizes that he can’t defend his position, and is forbidden to concede some academic point that was clearly lost, but escape isn’t possible either because you won’t let him change the subject. If you can get him there, and press him to hold him accountable, you’ll either witness a psychotic episode, or a lie so blatant that it counts as an admission of defeat. That’s what I got last night on the Dogma Debate podcast with creationist rapper, ‘Destiny Lab’.
C- [creation] rap on Dogma Debate
Well done Aron! A very sweet moment and a fine example of how to hold people accountable for the implications of their statements…
Nice. I’ve vaguely heard of the podcast before, but I’ve never actually checked it out. I’ll go grab the last few episodes.
Hooooooooooooly, crap. I just finished the section with the rapper. You just lay it out for him … piece by piece …
How can someone not see what a blatant lie they’re telling, after it’s put in that kind of order? Here’s the claim that there’s no explanation for this thing. Here’s the explanation for this thing. Is there an explanation for this thing? No.
What the fuck? How do you even begin to reach someone like that? Grrrrrrrrrrrr. How were you not screaming, like you were at Sye Ten Bruggencate, Aron? Or is that in the section I haven’t listened to, yet?
Wow. That Christian rapper was just so utterly out of his league when it came to dealing with your carefully and calmly explained facts that I think he did indeed perhaps have a psychotic episode. You left him with no possible escape in a prison of cold logic, and he essentially just put his hands over his ears and retreated into his shell.
I do hope he has the guts and the introsection to download the podcast and listen to himself absolutely flailing in a few months, after the denial has a chance to have worn off a little.
I do that sort of thing, since I’m an emotional masochist, but I don’t think most creationists have that level of intellectual integrity. Listening to my shows (on the rare occurrence that they’re recorded) sucks, but I make myself do it and analyze the hell out of them.
Aron,
I’m trying to separate features of epistemology from pragmatic choices in definitions.
At 20:50 you define “proof” and “evidence” and explain that one consequence of your definitions (at 21:36) is that a fact that concords with two logically exclusive claims is not evidence of either.
If I have three propositions: (X, Y, and Z), each of which logically excludes the other two, and P(X | E) >> P(X) and P(Y | E) >> P(Y) and P(Z | E) < P(C) and P(C | E) > P(C | not E)
I.e. E is evidence for C when the likelihood of C given that E is known is greater than both
1. C when the truth of E is unknown
2. C when the inverse of E is known.
E.g. P(house_on_fire | smoke) > max(P(house_on_fire), P(house_on_fire | no_smoke))
regardless of the relationship between smoke and other propositions like neighbor_having_barbeque and son_is_a_stoner.
cheers
The creationism test has been found to be at a private religious school in Kentucky.
Oh, the humanity! I’ve never been a smoker, but after listening to the last part of that discussion, I feel like I should light up a cigarette. Still, I’m sure he’s telling all his friends how he crushed Aron Ra in a debate, because Aron Ra couldn’t explain where all the parts and the fibonacci spirals and everything came from…
What a crap argument “atheists have empty shallow lives”, being a sock puppet of some ‘higher power’ really is shallow and meaningless (I’ve heard several times “I’m nothing without $deity )
Well done, Aron on this debate, and also on your demolition of Ray Comfort. It’s high time these creationists were called out on their blatant and repeated dishonesty.
The final meltdown of this twerp was both unsurprising (typical behaviour of a liar caught out), and shocking (laid bare in public, but refusing to accept what everyone had proven).
Very enjoyable, and keep nailing ’em up.
Very informative….
Now that was fun. I felt a little sorry for Archelogic, outnumbered and outclassed as he was on every turn. However, he made the claims, his song ‘A Happy Atheist’ was extremely condescending and insulting, so it was justice due. Great stuff.
Yup, after the ignorant stuff he said in his songs, he deserved a lot of smacking around. I didn’t feel very sorry for him. Pure entertainment.
Is it just me? The podcast froze 54 mins, in, just after the immature “There is no book of Hezekiah” ‘gotcha’ bait and switch.
Is there any way to download the entire podcast to my iPod?
If you go to the episode on the webpage and click on the NAME of the episode, rather than the play button next to the name of the episode, that will take you to the episode page. There’s a download link there.
The episode page is http://www.spreaker.com/user/smalleyandhyso/68_atheists_v_christian_rapper, by the way.
Mr. Ra, isn’t the aging overweight sagging hippie look getting a little old?
And the fake name doesn’t exactly encourage confidence in your integrity.
The Hat, the Beard, the sunglasses…what are you subconsciously hiding from?
So.. You have no rebuttals to the arguments and resort to discussing the person instead.
Does not exactly encourage confidence in your own integrety, does it?
What are you subconciously hiding from? 🙂
Oh you’re so privileged.
Can’t you see Ronnie comes from a scientology background and believes that “What is your crime?” is a perfectly legitimate way to introduce yourself to another person…
Hippie? Seriously? If anything, he looks more like a Hell’s Angel, not a hippie. They’re kind of anti-hippies. At least learn to be accurate with your childish slander.
Ronnie, if I look like I’m 50, it’s probably because I’m 50. I don’t have any problem with that, because I’ve had a much better youth than you did or will. I can tell that much just from your post.
Now if I wanted to be a childish troll too, I would glance at any picture of you and insult your hairstyle, or make vague insinuations about your lack of fashion sense, your imposed conformity fearing attention, your physical defects, or what sort of repressed psychological disorders you might have. No doubt I will prefer my look over yours. I wouldn’t do that however, because I’m better than that. I can rely on the strength of my argument, and you’d be no challenge to me in any case.
But I can’t look at any pictures of you, can I? Because you appear to be just another closeted nobody on the interwebs. That’s how brave you’re not. I’m the one in front of the camera or on stage addressing live and occasionally hostile audiences and protest groups all over the US and in other countries too -yet you somehow think that face-to-face confrontation with potentially dangerous religious whackos = hiding. What a strange juxtapositional delusion you have! I think you’re trying to project your own faults and your own inhibitions of inadequacy onto those who will not share them.
Don’t expect me to give you any more of my time; you didn’t deserve this much.
That was a wonderful episode. I especially love how you continued to nail him to that one point. For him to concede the point, while denying it’s importance to the creationist stance, was too much for him. It’s this kind of focus that I’m missing from my own debates; so it’s nice to see it applied expertly.
Well, you can’t actually do that, in a formal debate. That’s why I’m not a fan of the format, and creationists are. You get no back-and-forth, in a formal debate structure, just 5 minutes of uninterrupted lecturing, during which a creationist can say more wrong things than you can correct in an hour.
Haha. Well all of my debates are informal. But yes, the structure of a formal debate is what makes special moments like this such a rare occurrence. JT’s debate against Bill Victor also contained one of these rare moments,(which we can blame on Victor’s lack of experience in common apologist tactics and for the moderators allowing the Q&A towards the end to become a more casual conversation between him and JT). I recommend it if you haven’t seen it.
Ah, cool. The conversational “debates” are much better, yeah. I’ve had plenty of discussions like that with local preachers and amateur apologists, myself.
Cool, I’ll pull that up on YouTube. It should be up there, right?
Hmm, I’m not finding anything when I type “JT Everhart Bill Victor”, into YouTube.
It’s on JT’s blog: http://www.patheos.com/blogs/wwjtd/2013/04/video-of-debate-with-bill-victor/
Cool, thanks. It’s wacky that that didn’t even turn up in the first couple pages of my Google search.
Thank you, Steve.
I think I see the problem. His name is ‘”Eberhard”.
That should do it.
Can someome please post a link to the audio? My screenreader is having a hard time with the Dogma Debate site.
Here you are:
http://api.spreaker.com/download/episode/2647894.mp3
Heh, maybe he’s using frames? My girlfriend has all sorts of fun making things accessibility-compliant, and I hear endless diatribes about people still using frames in 2013.
Now now, don’t hide behind intellectual integrity once you’ve already admitted emotional masochism as your motivation. Perhaps the problem with creationists is that they are intellectual sadists who want to cause us pain when we listen to their nonsense XD..
It’s not so much that the masochism is the motivation. It’s more of an enabling factor.
Thank you Entrak.
Welcome. (“,)
I listened to it on low at work, and I think I heard all the important parts. I think the segment would have been improved if the creationist rapper was asked to define irreducible complexity. I believe he didn’t really know what it means. Did I miss something?
That was my take too. Like his use of the Ken Miller Dover quote his explanations sound confused rather than consciously duplicitous. I seriously doubt he has ever questioned any of his positions as rigorously as Aron exhorted him to. Nevertheless by refusing to accept that his erroneous information has been refuted he commits a de facto lie.
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Listed to the debate, which was enjoyable.
But amazed that Destiny Lab has managed to create something worse than regular rap. He should be subtitled “I found the Lord and lost my talent”.
Just an FYI: Archalogik (Destiny Lab) created an account at the League of Reason and was trying to spin this event in his favor. He still does not understand that the bacterial flagellum is not irreducibly complex, even after he pointed out that the bacterial flagellum is made with the type-III secretory apparatus. Apparently, he does not understand his own argument.
He has run off now, but I thought you might be interested in leaving your two cents on that thread.
Which blog post was that on?
It was not a blog, it was a thread.
http://www.theleagueofreason.co.uk/viewtopic.php?f=13&t=11631
Oh, discussion board thread. Cool, thanks.
This reminds me of an amusing fact in the creation/evolution debate. We understand their own arguments better than most of the creationists do. That’s at least partially by design, too.
For example, Behe does this thing in his books, where he includes bits of the most technical, unintelligible verbiage, boxed off into sections that people aren’t actually supposed to read. He just uses the text to point at and say, “See? This is really scientific stuff, folks, and you can trust my broad assertions that have nothing to do with the technical words I just used.
They actually don’t want people to know the real arguments, because the arguments are crap. The style they use fits with the authoritarian mindset of the religious people they’re preaching at.
On the other side, people like Dawkins and Jerry Coyne try to break everything down into the most easily understood language to get their points across.
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