Debate, or train crash? Matt Dillahunty vs Michael Egnor

Two hours, or more? Did I really want to watch a debate that long on the topic Does God Exist? Maybe I'd watch the first 20 minutes, and give up if it didn't seem to be going anywhere. In the event I watched the whole thing without a break (and slept in the next morning).

It started off amicably enough, though the production quality of this live-streamed YouTube video left a lot to be desired, both technically and from the moderating point of view.

Here's the video, hosted by the Theology Unleashed YouTube channel:

 

It was streamed live last September and has to date been viewed over 136,000 times, with over 8,000 comments. As far as I can tell (not having scrolled through all of them), the comments are overwhelmingly in favour of Matt Dillahunty, or against Michael Egnor. This will not be a surprise if you watch the video first.

Michael Egnor has blogged about the debate at the Discovery Institute and on Evolution News, though you'd be forgiven for thinking he was at a different debate in an alternative reality.

Matt Dillahunty has posted his own preliminary analysis of the debate on his own YouTube channel, with a promise of more in-depth analysis to come:

 

The most gobsmacking moment in the debate for me was when Michael Egnor claimed that the singularity at the Big Bang that began the universe was supernatural (therefore God). Less of a surprise (because one gets used to such shenanigans from the Discovery Institute) was Egnor's unwillingness to engage in proper debate, instead resorting to personal attacks on his interlocutor. Even less surprising, therefore, is Dillahunty's refusal to debate Egnor again.

A short rant on "explanatory power"

This was sparked off by this week's Atheist Experience TV show, in which Matt Dillahunty encapsulated in very few words why I find intelligent design wholly unsatisfactory:

"...we tend to explain things in terms of things that we understand."

This is science, this is maths, this is software development, this is education in general. This is how we find out how things work and why.

What Matt is describing in that almost throwaway line is the progressive method of explanation. When faced with something complex, which as a whole we might not understand, we tend to break it down into its component parts and seek to understand them. If these components parts are also complex, we will further break them down until we get to a level we do understand. This is a lot like maths. Higher mathematics can be complicated, but it's built up from lesser principles, all of which can be ultimately reduced to something basic and comprehensible.

Likewise engineering, technology, and indeed all of education can be seen as a series of hierarchical steps based on something lower down the tree of complexity. We explain things in terms of other things for which we already have explanations.

Intelligent design proponents don't use this method, so their claim of "explanatory power" is bogus. Trying to explain something in terms of something else that we don't understand is clearly a non-starter. It's not helpful, and it's not explanatory.

http://blip.tv/the-atheist-experience-tv-show/atheist-experience-719-greg-paul-and-the-problem-of-evil-5408591

The Comfort zone of a fundagelical Christian

Well, it happened. Ray Comfort was on the Atheist Experience last Sunday. I listened to the podcast, and it was one of the fastest hours I can remember.



I didn't know what to expect, although I thought it likely, given the professionalism of the Atheist Experience hosts, that it would be a civilized affair. Ray is a decent chap, that's clear, though plainly misguided and lacking intellectual rigour when it comes to matters of science — especially biology. At one point he started in with his argument about male and female evolving separately; that he still proposes this as a refutation of evolution demonstrates that he has minimal grasp of what the theory of evolution actually states, and that he's willfully ignoring patient explanations offered to him in the past (P. Z. Myers', for example).

One problem the Axp has with a discussion like this, is that an hour is nowhere near long enough to address all the various nonsense that Ray continues to come out with over the years. Matt Dillahunty and Russell Glasser did a good job, but the show could easily have been three times as long and just as packed.

If I have reservations, these would be about the wider effect of a match like this. Though it was hugely entertaining, the show let Ray appear as pleasant but deluded — not as a raving fundagelical who actively promotes a hellfire and brimstone version of Christianity that he wants everyone else to adopt. Which of these portrayals is more likely to motivate active opposition? When two members of the Rational Response Squad debated Ray Comfort and Kirk Cameron the latter were shown up as creationist loons. When Ray Comfort and Thunderf00t took part in a video-recorded discussion, Ray came over as sincere but disastrously wrong. And here on the Axp he seemed to be a regular guy with some wonky ideas about evolution and nature.

Whether this show motivates opposition to Ray's wrong-headed views or not, it's necessary to challenge such views wherever and whenever they threaten to impinge on people's rights, and on that score the Axp hosts continue to be supremely competent.

The Atheist Experience — listen or watch, but don't miss it

Given the name* of this blog and the tenor of most of its posts, readers would not be surprised to learn that I listen to several atheistically themed podcasts. The atheist podcast that I look forward to most, however, and have done since I first encountered it a couple of years ago, is The Atheist Experience, a live call-in TV show from the Atheist Community of Austin. It's available via an audio podcast feed (on iTunes, for instance), and that's how I normally listen.

If a show is especially good one week, I'll make a point of watching the video version. This week's was one such, hosted by Jen Peeples and Tracie Harris. Even before substituted host Matt Dillahunty called in at the end, I had already decided it was worth a blogpost. The hosts of The Atheist Experience are the sharpest explicators and defenders of the atheist viewpoint I've come across. Their consistently high standards of debate, argument, explanation and critical thought make the show archive a treasured resource.

For your enjoyment and education I embed this week's show here — #693: Misconceptions About Atheists — and I particularly recommend the exchange with caller Mike starting around 21'40":
http://blip.tv/file/4674944


The ACA also sponsor audio-only podcast The Non Prophets (which will occasionally be referenced on the TV show), along with many local activities.

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*"Notes from an Evil Burnee" is a dead giveaway, considering the last two words are an anagram.