 In the recent debate between Atheist philosopher Christopher Hitchens and intelligent design creationist William Dempsey, Dempsey opened his arguments with a string of logical fallacies beginning with this composite strawman. Is atheism demands a materialistic form of evolution? And there's only one going theory of it, namely Darwinism. The alternative, which places us here as the result of design, is for him a non-starter. It's unthinkable. Of course, atheism doesn't demand anything. We have neither the need to believe nor the required defensive belief that religion does. Nor does atheism necessarily dismiss design. But scientists cannot honestly assert that which has never been indicated, and atheism only says that theists haven't justified the assertions that they make. Dempsey also lied about what he called Darwinism and also about the definition of evolution. At one point, he says, Evolutionary ideas go back a long way. They don't take precisely the form of Darwinism. But if you are an atheist, that's really the only game in town, matter, the natural world has to organize itself. And if you look at the old creation myths, and in my elish, the Greek creation myths, Hesiods, theogony, what you find are natural forces, the cosmic egg, the waters, Tiamat, the opposite of sweet and salt waters, and the Babylonian mythology, and they organize themselves, and then finally at the end you get Marduk, the prince of the gods. So you go from simplicity to complexity, and that's always the direction of evolution. This is another bold-faced lot. A whole bunch of lies rolled into one, in fact. Let me show you why. First of all, the Genesis fables go from simple to complex, yet obviously don't qualify as evolution, so Dempsey's analogy is already absurd. But he gets worse in that when you read the other creation myths he mentioned, because they start out complex and actually simplify from there, opposite of what he said. It is true that anything which can be changed or revised can be improved and thus become more complex, not that increased complexity is necessary for evolution, but we know that mythologies have been retold many times over with subtle embellishments occasionally added, so these old stories have evolved in a sense, but not in the way that Dempsey wants us to realize. First of all, he sees the Agony may be contemporary to Genesis too, but Enuma Elish is the oldest creation met known to archaeology and has many other myths associated with it, which are all older than the Bible, yet written by the very ancestors of the biblical authors. All these myths anthropomorphize natural events. The Agony gave human personalities to the earth and sky, while Enuma Elish declares a river to be the masculine lover of a feminine sea. Likewise, the Bible's book of Proverbs personifies wisdom as though she were a goddess. This is how most gods were created. But now let's look at what these stories actually say. In the Greek creation myth, we see that the same prophecy is shared at the birth of Zeus as with Moses and Jesus, that the child shall overrule the current Lord if not killed in infancy. The men of the earth were also cursed by the God of gods for their discovery of forbidden knowledge. Whether it is the acquisition of fire or the release of evil from Pandora's box, there are parallels to Genesis 2. But the Agony shows parallels with the New Testament, too, because the God Prometheus is crucified to atone for the sin of man. Enuma Elish describes the creation in six generations of gods recorded on seven tablets. The sixth divine generation included Marduk, who created man to complete their work so that future generations, beginning with the seventh, could rest. Even the method of creation is similar to Yahweh's creation of Eve in Genesis 2. The creation of the first men and women in Genesis 1 is paralleled by another pre-biblical myth, the Epic of Atrahasis, wherein clay figurines are washed in the blood of a God who was sacrificed that they might come to life. All of these evidently inspired the familiar revisions which are eventually compiled into the Bible. None of them are remotely evolutionary or materialist, and all of them are quite the opposite of everything Dempsky said they were. A professor of philosophy with degrees in both theology and psychology has no excuse for an error of this magnitude, especially when... My dad was a biologist, he taught evolutionary biology. When Hitchens took the floor again, he accurately observed that Western monotheism has always been initially hostile to significant revelations of science until these became so humiliatingly obvious that even those in the business of denying reality were forced to accept them. Hitchens also turned to the void already absent of any evidence to indicate God and filled that with negative evidence further diminishing the likelihood, things like universal chaos, rampant extinctions, various examples of scriptural and practical contradictions inherent in the common assumptions of Abrahamic Theism, but in defense of evolution, Hitchens usually cited Christian evolutionists preemptively disproving some of Dempsky's predicted allegations, although Dempsky still went on to make those accusations anyway. Most importantly, Hitchens argued for the value of objective analysis, which he described as... Evidence against interest. He also pointed out that we are primates, and all that that implies, both for evolution and against Dempsky's idea of the image of God. I would have fleshed out our taxonomy a good deal further, but of course, Dempsky exhibits no knowledge of that subject and is required by his faith to dismiss it, which he tried to do using one of the staples of creationist misrepresentation. I think there's a fair amount of common ancestry, but I'm certainly not an advocate of universal common ancestry. I just don't think the fossil record bears that out. I think the Cambrian explosion is a perfect example where you have just other, you have these forms which are just there, poof, and there are no precursors. The Cambrian is the first period of the Paleozoic era. It's a span of about 50 million years, where in the earliest forms of all the current phyla appeared, and many more were already extinct by the end, and it ended hundreds of millions of years ago before there were any mammals, reptiles, amphibians, or anything else of that sort. Not even sharks, insects, or recognizable plants existed yet, but Dempsky expects us to believe that Bambi and Thumper and Curious George were suddenly poofed into a world of trees and flowers and chirping birds out of nothing all at once. He believes this only because his storybook says so, but that is not what paleontology shows, and he knows it. Very few Cambrian fauna still look like their modern descendants, and most of the rest died out since then, and some were so alien to our time as to defy classification. There were even some macroscopic animals assumed to have gone extinct before the Cambrian explosion. How is any of that either inconsistent with evolution or supportive of intelligent design? How is it that animals as complex as trilobites and brachyopods could spring forth so suddenly, completely formed without a trace of their ancestors in the underlying strata? Trilobites are the earliest members of a clade which today includes horseshoe crabs, scorpions, spiders, mites, and a handful of other horrors, none of which yet existed in the Cambrian, or they existed but were not yet fully formed. All these groups were derived during the Cambrian, along with Eurypterids and the Glaspids, earlier Xiphosaurs, with a dozen or so eyes on their tails of all places, and many other crazy things which survived that age, and all of them were found in a chronological sequence implying stages of development from trilobites. Even if we forget about all these subsequent or descendant groups, the family of trilobites alone eventually grew to include roughly 15,000 species, and those are just the ones that are still recognizable as trilobites. Yet all of them were already gone millions of years before the first dinosaurs appeared. How is that inconsistent with evolution or indicative of a divine design? And incidentally, trilobites do have pre-Cambrian precursors in the underlying strata. It's a not quite trilobite, not fully formed. It doesn't even have eyes yet. So Demsky is definitely lying when he tries to cite the Cambrian explosion as either a challenge to evolution or indicative of design, and he can't pretend not to know better because I was raised in a largely secular home biologist father who taught evolutionary biology. Ultimately, Hitchens hit Demsky with one of my favorite questions, where he lists some of the other facts of evolution and cosmology, which we can actually prove to be true of our position, and challenged his opponent to do the same. What is true of your view? Of course, Demsky had no way to answer this question, so he ignored it too. He quite wrongly assumed that Hitchens' rejection of God was a result of accepting evolution. As I have already shown, this is the first and foremost of the foundational falsehoods of creationism. Demsky based his entire presentation on his own rejection of evolution. He denies evidence of any type all in the same excuse that that doesn't prove anything. Thus he ignores everything which only evolutionary science can explain while forgetting that his religious alternative explains nothing. Note that the full positive case for God's existence can and should be fleshed out. Typically such a case flows from critical reflection on the big questions of life. Why is there something rather than nothing? Where did we come from? Where are we going? Why should we take morality seriously? Why is the world comprehensible to our minds? Why does mathematics, presumably a human invention, have such a precise purchase on physical reality? Each of these questions can, in my view, be answered better within a theistic than an atheistic worldview. But of course, religion doesn't answer any of these questions with any measurable degree of accuracy like only science can. And in my view, cosmology and evolution do a better job of that in each of the cases he mentioned. Demsky claimed to have ample evidence of his intelligent design alternative but failed to list any of it. He seems to think that complaints about evolution misunderstood and misrepresented could somehow count as evidence of miraculous creation. He criticized Hitchin's skepticism but gave no explanation why the audience should assume the same conclusions that Demsky does, nor could he, since he admitted in the debate that his own conversion was based on emotion rather than evidence. And without presenting any evidence at all, Demsky said that his argument had somehow already established the existence of God. But all he did was assume God and assumed that everyone else assumed the same thing, without reason, since he had none to give. Neither did he refute any of the points Hitchin's actually made either on stage or in his book, yet he claimed to have just done so while we were watching. I've watched the video again a couple more times since then and no, he didn't. Less than halfway into his opening comments and obviously delusional Demsky has evoked at least a half a dozen logical fallacies and lied no less than nine times so far but hasn't yet presented any sort of case and was already claiming victory. I know what you're all thinking. Since the evidence for evolution is so underwhelming and since Hitchin's has hitched his wagon to evolution, shouldn't he now be ready to ban an evolution and consider the existence of God? The one thing Demsky did make clear, albeit unwittingly, was that his position was based on circular arguments and assumed conclusions left unquestioned because even if his critiques were all correct, they still wouldn't imply a divine designer and whenever we do not yet know the real explanation, we cannot simply throw up our hands and say that it happened by magic. But this is what Demsky expects us to do. His argument depends on an absurd false dichotomy and it only deteriorated from there. Hitchin started off very slowly but picked up steam as things progressed. I feel more, I feel suddenly combative and engaged. While Demsky seemed increasingly weak, confused, even discouraged with how indefensible his seemingly unexamined belief obviously is, Sunni added equivocation to his list of logical fallacies already in play and ultimately tried to project his own faults onto an opponent who will not share them. Hitchin's exhibits a very selective concern for truth. What seems to matter most to him is not whether a claim is true but whether it makes a good stick to be religion. Changed the last word of this lie and Demsky is describing himself. In short, Demsky's comments were entirely empty yet the audience of this church sometimes applauded him anyway especially when he praised his sickness as though it were the cure. Demsky apologized for the evils ordered or condoned by God throughout the Bible but failed to realize the obvious implications of that. In the end, he even lamented the fact that the Bible was written the way it was and admitted that he only accepted the whole of his dogma as a package deal. In summary, Demsky seemed to ignore every point that Hitchins had made and made no points of his own which Hitchins did not adequately address. Demsky wasn't prepared to debate the man but apparently only wanted to critique his book. I mean, what poisons everything? Is it religion? I would say get a mirror and look at it. We all poison everything. That's right, Bill. And as someone with your education should know religion is a human construct and is thus poisoned. So you're critiquing the wrong book. This one is full of poison and is so obvious about it that it threatens anyone who realizes that with a fate worse than death. That's how we know it is dishonest because it tells you to believe something beyond reason, without reason and against all reason regardless whether any of it could even be true or not. Knowing only this should be enough for you to reject religion.