Clovis Star, a couple months ago, someone referred me to one of your videos and asked me to comment on it.
Presentation by BW Cartman to Disprove Evolution (Dec 5th 2017)
Therein you presented yourself as a creationist objecting to evolution. So in an attempt to reason with you, I posted the following questions in the comments.
- If evolution is true, what observation, discovery, or experiment could reveal that?
- If evolution is not true, what observation, discovery, or experiment do you predict would disprove it forever?
- If creationism is true, what observation, discovery, or experiment could reveal that?
- If creationism is not true, what observation, discovery, or experiment do you predict would disprove it forever?
You immediately directed me to an older video you had already made directed at and about Richard Dawkins, one which did not address any of these four questions. Worse than that, you said your video was proof of creation, but it was a copy of someone else repeating the logical fallacy of argument from improbability. It also included the lie that Christian writing is older than Hinduism. You obviously don’t understand anything about any of that.
After some prodding, you eventually answered only the first two of my questions, both with the same answer. You never answered the last two questions in any way at all, and really didn’t provide an adequate answer to the first two either: since you said nothing that was either testable or falsifiable. You still hadn’t said what would convince you either way. So I asked you to clarify your answer. You refused, saying you wouldn’t answer any more questions, and in fact you didn’t.
Instead you said it was my turn to answer those same questions, so I did. I defined evolution for you and distinguished it from abiogenesis, because you had those two confused. You thought the origin of life was the evolution of life, but they’re not the same thing.
Then you contradicted your own answer. You originally said that you would be convinced of evolution if it were “more than a theory” (by which you apparently meant “guess”). Not knowing what a scientific theory is, you said “there would have to be observable science of this being the origins of species”. You asked me to prove that “evolution is the origin of life”, which it isn’t. I had to explain to you how abiogenesis and evolution are very different processes.
Once I began to explain what a theory is, you objected, saying theories are disproved all the time. You even provided a list of disproved scientific theories to support that, but (just as I had already said) the most recent of the items on your list was disproved over 90 years ago, and that one was only ever a hypothesis. So scientific theories obviously don’t get disproved all the time, now do they?
You said quantum physics had disproved many scientific theories, but no. There may have been some revision of physics, but you can rewrite the laws of physics without changing the theory. Quantum physics has never disproved any scientific theory that I am aware of or that you could name—or else you would have already. You said there were too many to list, but zero is not really all that many.
Having unwittingly changed the subject from evolution to abiogenesis, you then changed it again, this time to cosmology, which you erroneously equated with quantum physics. You also erroneously equated the big bang with chaos and contrasted that with your god, which you imagine to represent order.
You said, “there is still no known process of creation that we are aware of where random occurances [sic] can make something intelligent”. You said that knowing that there is a process called evolution, whereby intelligence may be derived as a property of emergent complexity. Even if you don’t know about emergence, (which you obviously don’t) you still knew there was this process universally accepted by mainstream science that does account for the emergence of intelligence. So you told a lie there.
You said “there is no process that we know of on earth that currently produces intelligence without a designer”, but there is no process we know of on earth that produces intelligence WITH a designer. God’s magic is not “known” and it’s not any sort of process!
Then you said, “Intelligence always comes from intelligence.” You didn’t say you merely believed that; instead you presented baseless speculation as though it were a matter of verifiable fact. So I challenged you to present any scientific precedent to support that, which of course you couldn’t. When you claim “facts” that aren’t facts, that too is a lie.
You said, “From the “big bang” to the “origins of species” and everything in between, the only explainations [sic] from science is “we know sort of what probably happened”. Yet it has not been duplicated in the slightest”. So I showed you a video explaining how some of the processes of abiogenesis HAVE been duplicated in a series of different scientific experiments, contra your comments made in ignorance. Clearly you will never concede any error no matter how well it is proved.
Were this an attempt at intelligent conversation, it should have remained in one thread. But that’s not what happened. Instead you made another video, such that our conversation had to move to the comments over there.
Response to AronRa about Evolution vs Creation (Dec 11th 2017)
In that you said that you had answered my “false claims” about abiogenesis. Of course you hadn’t; nor could you, since nothing I said was false. I corrected you there of course, but you dismissed all that.
This started out very politely, but then you started ducking and dodging and lying about whether you answered anything. You even bragged that you answered everything. You didn’t. For example, in the comments on the previous video, I had already asked you about taxonomy.
Are domestic cats related to each other and all other feral felines?
Are all felines related to each other as well as panthers and scimitar cats?
Are all felids related to nimravids or viverrids?
And how could we tell?
Are all of Feloidea related to any or all other members of the order Carnivora?
Similarly, are domestic dogs related to each other as well as wolves and all other feral canines?
Are all canines related to each other as well as the African wild dogs and Asian wild dogs?
Are all types of living dogs related to each other as well as foxes and extinct forms like the giant “bone-crusher” dogs from the fossil record?
Are canids related to modern bears as well as fossil bear-dogs?
Are caniformes related to feliformes?
I explained that these simple yes-or-no questions are extremely important, because they illustrate the most significant out of all the failures of creationism. But answer came there none.
So I repeated my questions, asking how creationism explains all the species of dogs and cats, for example? Not just domestic breeds but genetically distinct and separate species of wild variants too? I asked you to answer with a simple yes or no whether creationists accept each of those biological relationships. I told you again that this is important and asked if you understood that. Yet you still didn’t offer any answer to any of this at all even when I repeated it.
I had also previously asked you to imagine that you’re monitoring security cameras for a department store. At some point you see a woman entering a little-used ladies’ room. She is immediately followed by a man. He comes out of the restroom carrying that woman’s purse and hurries away. Hours later, it’s closing time, and that door hasn’t opened again. That woman still hasn’t come out of the ladies’ room. So you take a look yourself and find her dead. Would you know beyond reasonable doubt why she died?
You didn’t reply to that at all, but you bragged in your video that you did.
I asked you another question, which you didn’t answer, about what it means to be “more than a theory”. In that, I explained what a theory is, and I asked whether you understood that explanation. You obviously didn’t, but you wouldn’t say so.
That wasn’t the only lie you told in that video. You also said that Dawkins admitted that Intelligent Design was possible and that Darwin taught scientific racism. Neither of which is true.
You refused to answer anything on the excuse that your answers would be “a square peg in a round hole”, which I could take as an admission that you already know your answers would make no sense.
I told you then that you should learn not to spread one conversation into multiple videos and several different threads of comments. That’s too much effort to avoid the questions on one thread. You obviously hadn’t learned anything, because you made another video.
Atheism Debate Peer Reviewed (Dec 12th 2017)
In that you repeated your own errors as if they hadn’t already been corrected. You told a few more lies too, like that there are no transitional species. I made a video showing hundreds of them. You said that creatures that were thought to be extinct have been found alive and have not changed. That’s not true either. Neither of the two living species of coelacanth (for example) are the same as the several distinctly different species that are only known from the fossil record. You said the same species of ants or bats existed fifteen million years ago and still exist today with the same exact structure; no they don’t. You said that more and more flaws in evolutionary theory are being exposed. I would challenge you to produce even one such example, but I know how difficult that would be for you to do—since you still don’t know what a scientific theory is, nor what a law is either.
You also said that Intelligent Design has peer-reviewed evidence to support it, and that they KNOW there is “an intelligent source for our DNA”: all nonsense. They don’t know any such thing because there is no evidence for it. So you’re either lying or you’re repeating their lies. Yes, I already know about Stephen Meyers’ article that should have been properly screened and rejected before publication rather than after.
You said there’s no evidence that one species has changed to another. That’s a whopper of a lie. Not only is there substantial fossil and genetic evidence, it’s also been directly observed and documented dozens of times, both in the lab and in naturally controlled conditions in the field. I made another video talking about that too.
You also said that I’m a cult leader and that you think my mission is to prove there is no god, which isn’t true either. I advocate for truth, and your god isn’t. The truth is what the facts are, what we can show to be true. Nothing that requires faith goes in that category.
I commented on that video too, only once. Mine was the only comment. Yet there was no response. Instead you made another video.
No More Trolls – New Year Resolution (Jan 4, 2018)
By that point, it was too confusing trying to keep track of all the threads where you kept dodging and ignoring anything I said in writing. So I decided to invite you to a Google hangout where we could talk sensibly in real time: even though you accused me of being “trollish” and implied that your critics should go out and get a life. We were both traveling in Europe then, though not in the same countries at the same time. So I asked when you would be available to do this. You never said. Instead you made another video.
Clovis Star is Gonzo Journalism more about our style (Feb 4, 2018)
In this one, you accused me of being biased, though you can’t show what my bias is or that it is one. I explained that bias is a prejudice, and that I am not prejudiced. I explained that science tries to minimize or eliminate bias where religion *is* a bias.
You still hadn’t given me a date and time to have our live discussion. Instead you made yet another video, further confusing everyone by moving our conversation to the comments there.
Why I believe that AronRa is just an insincere internet troll. (Feb 5, 2018)
According to Wikipedia, an internet troll “is a person who sows discord on the Internet by starting quarrels or upsetting people, by posting inflammatory, extraneous, or off-topic messages in an online community (such as a newsgroup, forum, chat room, or blog) with the intent of provoking readers into an emotional response or of otherwise disrupting normal, on-topic discussion, often for the troll’s amusement.
Trying to reason with you is not starting a quarrel. I may say things you disagree with, but that is not necessarily inflammatory. Nor was it extraneous or off-topic, since this started on a video about evolution vs creationism, and that’s what we’re talking about. At least I’m trying to.
Wikipedia’s definition continues, clarifying that trolls are not looking for serious sincere discussion, as I am, but rather trolling someone is a form of harassment. One example of that would be the video you just posted where even the title is a disparaging pejorative.
You admit that I’m trying to have a reasonable sensible serious and sincere discussion with you, but you forgot to mention where I said we couldn’t do it until I get back to the states. Instead you accused me of deflecting, which is actually what you’re doing in this video. Because I’m state-side now, and you STILL haven’t given a date or time when we can schedule a hangout. Instead your response is to make more videos simply to insult me. THAT is trolling.
You couldn’t reply to that properly either, so you proved what a troll you are by posting ANOTHER video of inflammatory, extraneous content simply to insult me.
AronRa – I have met the most religious atheist in my life (Feb 6, 2018)
You repeated some of your errors in science, and I corrected them again. But you also posted off-topic accusations. You accused me of making videos promoting feminism and countering Men’s Rights Activists, but I’ve never made even one such video in either category. I even wrote an earlier post years ago in this very blog where I explained WHY I never have. In one presentation, I described myself as a 2nd wave or equity feminist, (both by definition and generation) and several dozen other people tried to blow that up into something I never did or said or thought or meant.
You also said that my being a former Mormon says a lot about who I am and what motivates me now; except that I’m not a former Mormon in that sense. I was baptized against my better judgment at 8 years-old, and I never accepted or identified with Mormon belief. So you’re wrong again—as always.
In the comments of that video, I reminded you again when I’m not on the road, I can accommodate any hour of almost any day that is convenient for you to have a one-on-one live conversation. Yet you STILL didn’t name that day and hour. Instead of replying properly, guess what? You made ANOTHER trollish video just to insult me
Clovis Star Vs. AronRa will we ever have a productive debate? (Feb 6, 2018)
You said that I used “word salad” arguments with that philosophy professor. That’s a lie. He’s the one who did that, as was indicated in so many of the comments of the majority of people who heard that exchange, both on my posting of that video and even in the original posted by his own students. I explained that in more detail earlier in this blog.
You also lied when you said that the definition is only relevant if it defines the word the way I want it to be defined. No, we need to use common terms or we’ll talk past each other. That means I have to make sure that I understand the term correctly and I have to be sure that others are using it correctly too. That means they could correct me, but only if they were right, and I’ve already made sure that I am.
You also lied about the reasons why I object to certain words being used in certain ways. Sometimes dictionaries contradict each other, and sometimes they don’t accurately define scientific terms. We know that because scientific sources are the authority and correct those terms. So you can’t use one common language dictionary as your authority on all things. It’s never because “I don’t feel like it” or “I dunno, magic” like you said. Those are more of your lies.
For example, you argued that atheism was a belief system because it had the suffix ISM to make it such. Then you pretended not to understand my rebuttal that vulcanism obviously isn’t a belief system even though it has that same suffix too. There is no “system” to atheism. There are religions that are atheist (anamists, druids, some Buddhists) while some other atheists are skeptics, and some are neither. There is no “system”. Atheism is certainly NOT a religion. It isn’t defined as such either commonly or legally, only in terms of fair treatment in the prison system.
It was already obvious that you don’t want a sincere dialogue. You want to keep the conversation one-sided, so that you can continue spouting nonsense without correction. So I told you again, that I can’t set up the Google hangout until you name the date and time that you’ll be available to do that. So when are we gonna do it? Still unable or unwilling to reply properly, you made another video insulting me
AronRa – I have met the most religious atheist in my life (Feb 6 2018)
You lied again about me being Mormon, knowing from your own citation that I never adopted that belief. You call me dishonest while lying about me lying. You repeated the lie that I “made a lot of videos about feminism”, but you can’t cite any, because there aren’t any. I’ve never been on any video discussing my “feminist agenda” either.
Again, my only comment on that video was to say “How many times can you lie about me in one day? [already three videos so far] When are we gonna do that Google hangout you SAY you agreed to?” Did you reply accordingly? Of course not. Instead you made another video!
What is the definition of religion and how is atheISM a religion? (Feb 6, 2018)
Here you keep repeating the lie about atheism being a religion. You cited one dictionary’s erroneous comment and ignored the consensus of other sources, which all show how and why your one is wrong. That’s called cherry-picking, another of the logical fallacies religious believers depend on.
You really need to learn about logical fallacies, because you accused me of making logically fallacious statements, but you can’t show any because I didn’t make any. For example, when you define anything, including your love or sports or family as religion, you’re committing the sharpshooter fallacy, where that which explains everything explains nothing. That actually applies to your god too.
By this time, it was obvious that you’d only use any comment to deflect and make another video. So my only comment there was “When are we gonna do that podcast? Gimmie a date and time.” You STILL couldn’t answer that, and instead made yet another video.
AronRa meet me on Google hangouts (Feb 6, 2018)
This time you complained about how much time you were wasting posting video replies to me. You said it would’ve taken even longer to type out replies on your phone. But think about it. What if you said back in December that you could set aside say 7:00pm GMT on Thursday, February 8th? How long would it have taken to type all of that out on your phone? Because for all your whining about being too busy to type that, over the last three days, you’ve made eight videos averaging over ten minutes each, almost an hour and a half in total. Seriously, how many seconds could it have possibly taken longer to type out a day and time? You spent more time than I asked for just creating the thumbnail for one of those eight videos.
If you would just allow two-way communication, this would be so much easier; because this way you’re doing it, you don’t understand what I say and you misrepresent what I say, and you say in one video that you didn’t say what you said in the last one.
You don’t know what most of the words you use even mean. So again you lied about me using “word salad”. If your level of cognizance is incompetent to comprehend what we’re talking about, then the problem is not my “word-salad”; it’s your brain-jumble,
At least this time, you gave me your email address, but all you got for a date and time was “right now”. If you were half as busy as you say you are, and you know how busy I am too, then we’ll need to match our schedules for one hour, and at that moment, I was occupied on other things such that I couldn’t do a video podcast right then.
You say you agreed to discuss this with me, but until you give me a date and time, then you haven’t agreed to it yet, which you still haven’t. An hour after I sent you that email, you still hadn’t answered it. Instead—of course—you made another video.
More about “What Is Religion” (Feb 6, 2018)
Here you say that you didn’t have time to type out a schedule date. However, immediately after that you show that you wasted the last couple hours having a conversation with someone else entirely in text. Why can’t you do that long enough to post one short message to me? Or keep focused on one conversation?
You identify yourself as a-theistic because you lack theism, in that you say you have no religion. Yet you say that my being irreligious is religious and that my lack of religion is religion. You’re using equivocation, another logical fallacy.
You complain that I never replied to your video, but I had. That’s why I posted that comment telling you to check your email! Did you? No, instead you made yet another video!
Atheist activist says that a cell membrane is not needed for DNA (Feb 7, 2018)
I only knew of this video because it auto-loaded after another of your videos ended. In this one, someone else corrected your error, when you said that DNA needs a “nook-yu-lar” membrane. You ignored when I already corrected you about “naked DNA” existing outside the cell without a membrane. Just because we find DNA inside inside a nucleus doesn’t mean it can’t exist without one.
So of course you had to make yet another video addressed to me.
Answering AronRa’s stupid questions while waiting for our Google Hangouts (Feb 7, 2018)
You lied about me again. I never sent you any message saying “OK, I’m ready. Let’s go!” I said nothing like that in any context. What I did say was that I would NOT be able to do this “right now”, that I need forewarning so that we can both set aside our schedules for an hour. I wasn’t available last night or this morning, and I said so both times.
You even admitted in this video that you saw my earlier comment that “You gave me your email address. So I sent you an email. That is the appropriate way for us to schedule a time and then to share a hangout link. Did you really expect me to do that in the comments on one of your videos?” You apparently did expect that, because you said that we should both post our email addresses for the public. You said “that’s how this works”. No, it isn’t, not at all.
The way this works is, you answer your email with the date and time that you’re ready to do this hangout. I’ll make sure to set that hour side, and I would create the hangout so that we can begin at that time. I would also send you the participants’ link to your private email address rather than posting that on a live video comment too, because otherwise this would NOT ever work.
In this video, you explain that you created the hangout instead of letting me do it, because I hadn’t done it yet. But I wasn’t supposed to do that yet, and that wasn’t the deal. I meant to include my interview with you as part of my “Why do you believe” playlist on my channel, where I try to reason with people who hold irrational beliefs. So all I needed from you was a date and time when I should schedule that, and for you to know how to answer your #^@%!*& email.
How obtuse can you be? This is why I wanted to talk in real time, because you can’t find or read or understand your text messages.
You said I did nothing to set up this live discussion? Except ask you again and again and again for a date and time when I could schedule it—which you would never answer.
You say here that you asked me when I would set it up, and I said, that’s up to you. NAME A DATE AND TIME and we’ll do it then. Why can’t you get that?
You said you came to the Netherlands early to meet me. Did it never occur to you to ask me if I would be there then? Yes it did. You commented on one of your earlier videos whether I would be there then, and I said no, that I’d by in London by then. I know you read that, so why did you go to the Netherlands early? You said in this video that you got here before finding out I was already gone. Liar!
You’re still trying to keep the conversation going in comments? After telling me you haven’t got time to do that? After you’ve already given me your email and should be checking that instead? The reason I never answered your questions in this video is because I never even saw this video until now, more 24 hours later, because I was waiting for you to reply to my email instead, or at least reply to one of my comments. If you make a new video, how could you expect me to know about it immediately without automated notifications? Someone else has to tell me when you shoot your mouth off again because I am not one of your subscribers.
At least you finally tried to answer a couple of the questions you lied about answering earlier. Remember, you said before that you’d answered all of them. Now you admit you haven’t.
You lied about me refusing to answer my own questions too. You didn’t have to get me to do that. I just had to see your comment that you weren’t outright refusing to—yet—on the grounds that we’d take turns.
Regarding the question on taxonomy, I already knew you couldn’t distinguish these, but if you accept the entire phylogentic tree of common ancestry, that’s not adaptation; that’s evolution!
Regarding the question about the dead woman in the ladies’ room, I’m sorry if you didn’t understand how it was relevant to the comments you were making at that time. It wasn’t a stupid question, but your answer sure was. If the man who left there with her purse was her husband running to get heart medication, then her corpse wouldn’t still be there hours later with no emergency services alerted to that. Whoever that man is would have to have some criminal responsibility regarding her death.
Mind you, this video was completely unnecessary because while you were making this one and the two that came before it, I was waiting for you to answer your email. So you pretend that you’re waiting for me, but really I’m the one who is STILL waiting on you!
You also lied about me wanting you to create the meeting, which I obviously never did. And you lied about me refusing to answer your questions, just like you lied about having already repeatedly answered mine. You said I avoided or ignored a dozen questions from you, but I haven’t. The one example you gave was answered in your email, which you obviously haven’t even looked at yet. You said you wanted me to give you a topic. I did. I said, “Hopefully we’ll be able to get back to what I was trying to discuss with your first video. But every new one you make talking about me only adds several more things to correct.” So of course you made another video.
Inviting AronRa to Google Hangouts
So you finally checked your messages. Imagine how much of your time wouldn’t have been wasted if you had just checked it a couple videos ago, when you saw my comment telling you that I sent you an email?
You sent me a Hangout invite immediately after you read the message saying that I needed forewarning? And then you immediately hang up on that invitation, so that even if I did have time right now, you still wouldn’t be there? How dense are you? Dense enough to make another video.
AronRa lies on his own data that he produce about his own data
You accused me of lying, by saying in one place that we don’t know how life formed and in other place that we do know. But that’s not what I said in either place.
In text, I said, “I never said we don’t know how life began. We know it happened and we’ve already confirmed a few of equally viable ways that it could have happened, most of which could be true at the same time. You’re saying that if we don’t know which processes occurred in which order, then we don’t that it happened at all. That’s wrong.”
I went on to clarify that, “While we haven’t solved every facet of abiogenesis yet, we know enough to know that’s what happened. We also know for certain that life didn’t come about by any incantation followed by a golem spell and there was never a talking snake”.
In the video you cited, I said, “So how did life begin? We still don’t know, but we have a working hypothesis, the only one currently supported by modern experimental science. So I didn’t lie. In both instances, video and text, I said that we don’t know all of it, but we do know some of it.
You however claimed that this is incorrect, that we know that “Life had a designer, and the origin of life has been written down and explained for a very long time.” Wrong. First of all, your supposedly sacred scriptures don’t explain how life began. Saying “God poofed everything out of nothing with his magic” doesn’t explain anything.
More importantly, as I told you before, knowledge differs from mere belief in that knowledge is demonstrable, measurable with testable accuracy: meaning that you can show what you know. But if you can’t verify your claims to any degree at all, by any means whatsoever, then you can’t even know *if* you know what you merely believe. You’re only pretending to know things you don’t know, and that no one even can know.
So why did I write all this here? Because you can’t follow even the simplest instructions. So I can’t get on a hangout to reason with you sensibly. Any comment I post on any of your videos will only be seen by you, and you’ll just twist that into another troll vid. You’ve already gotten much more of my attention than you ever deserved, and you’re not gonna get any more. This topic is much too petty for me to make a video about it, and believe me, you wouldn’t want that either. But this is the only way that I can say MY side and prove that I’m right with all the necessary citations, using your own words against you. I’ve heard you comment before that you should own what you say. I’m only holding you to that.
I predict it’ll only be a few seconds before you make another video, but I won’t be the one to reply to it.
