Special Investigation - Evolution

One of the most fascinating things for me about the whole religion debate, is the quality of the arguments that come from the religious side in response to the atheist/anti-theist kickback of recent years. Quality? It's too positive a word. The quality of the arguments is dreadful.
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It truly fascinates me to see these desperately bad arguments, so easily debunked and deflected, coming back at us time and time again. I dealt with one of them in a recent video called "Atheists Secretly Believe in Yahweh", and this video is a similar thing, about creationism's terrible arguments (if you can call them that).

I know next to nothing about science - really, only what I've learnt by being interested in this debate for the last few years. And what is fascinating for me, is that the anti-science (creationist) side have such amazingly bad arguments. Their arguments are rarely, if ever, any better than utterly wrong. They're either flat out wrong, or make things up, strawman style, and then when their errors are pointed out, - they NEVER admit their mistakes, and seem to go on arguing the same things. It is just too plain to see to be a mistake - it's clear that as long as theyve got a flock of believers to preach it to, they'll keep on going like this, even when they are knowingly lying.

So this is based on a debate I recently heard between Kent Hovind and a christian who accepted evolution. Hovind just bulldozed his way through, spouting things that EVEN I know are wrong, and that, I have no doubt whatsoever, he has been corrected on time after time after time.

Its also based on P.Z. Myers famous debate against Geoffrey Simmonds (early 2008) - a guy with doctoral qualifications who didnt know the scientific meaning of the word theory, and used it as a pejorative. Quite a few elements of the script came from that exchange (whales, ignorance... etc).

There are so many "arguments" or "tactics" that they use repeatedly that I just couldn't squeeze into 11 minutes.
This video also came about by me realising how easy it is to get educated about evolution. I cannot recommend Dawkins' The Greatest Show On Earth highly enough. It is full of jaw-dropping information. It is an unbelievable privelige to be alive at a time that allows us to know so much about our universe. If I believed in a god, I'd be thanking it for allowing me to be alive at such an incredible stage in history, where so many mysteries are being, or have been, solved. Only a few hundred years ago - people didnt even know what stars were! Let alone dating rocks with atomic precision. Amazing.

Creationists - get educated before you argue about these things. And when you're corrected, try to learn something. Can you imagine if Dr. Finch here refused to be corrected about Moses or Noah, and spouted the same mistakes the rest of his life, like Hovind is SURE to do once he gets out of prison?



Thanks to Waldheri for coming up with the surname of the scientist when I asked for suggestions on Twitter. Charles seemed a reasonable given name to put with it.

I also appealed to AronRa for help with the thing about the monkeys - but Im afraid, Aron, that your explanation went way over my head and I was too embarrassed to ask you to clarify further! I played around with it and am confident it isnt wrong.

The thing about creationists believing in evolution should a monkey give birth to a human is directly from Coughlan666.
"Whales don't live for millions of years" came from a Skype conversation with BornInAsphodelMeadow.

I had my doubts when I listened back to Dr. Finch's initial clarification about evolution not being about sudden random manifestations of complex things - it was re-worked about 20 times and I"m still not 100% comfortable with it, but I let it in rather than go for another take.


This was pretty much written by the time my PC died, back in October (?) and I have struggled to find a comparable graphics program on the Mac that I bought. These pictures, therefore, were drawn on my girlfriend's 5 year old PC over the New Year break. Actually, since only then, I've now found a suitable Mac application that will allow me to make pictures the way I want to in the future.

But it might be a while. This one was quite an effort. It took three recordings, and a very painful day of drawing. (Scoliosis and RSI dont make for happy long sessions on a computer.) I'd like to get another one up before the Global Atheist Convention in March, but with a speech to write, for an address to 700 people (!!!!) Im not promising anything.

I'll keep an eye on comments for this one for a while, but I've now turned off email notification of comments because I'm getting too many.

Thanks for your support.
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