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Happy's avatar

About this line in Natan's latest post:

"Back when I was having arguments with people about the scientific merits of evolution, I gradually came to a realization that such arguments were a bad idea. Beyond the general impossibility of changing people’s minds in an argument, there was another problem. The whole idea that we were having a “scientific argument” was a farce. Science is about weighing up evidence from the physical world. But for my opponents, the only thing that mattered was their theological conviction that it was heresy. While they may have pretended to be interested in discussing the scientific arguments for or against, this was actually not at all relevant to them - and obviously their “conclusions” about the scientific evidence were predetermined."

This is a vacuous and dishonest way of escaping from the debate, by calling your opponents crazy. He did a similar thing in the back and forth about his revoltingly idiotic article "Was Rashi a Corporealist?", when he was utterly TROUNCED debating Rabbi Shaul Zucker, and then instead resorted to calling everybody who disputed him "biased".

The truth is that the basic idea of design, and thus against random evolution, is an extremely strong philosophical argument that has existed for millenia among many different philosophers of many different cultures. Not a "theological conviction". See more here https://irrationalistmodoxism.substack.com/p/what-we-have-against-evolution

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shulman's avatar

MB - It's hard to watch someone who has thousands of subscribers, i.e. a large audience, bash those who live their lives to serve God. If you care about God and see this person disgracing His name, shouldn't we stand up for ourselves, play his own game and show how fallacious he is being? Is that not something that would move you as well?

Perhaps you don't think of Natan as awfully as the authors here, but I think they've been pretty clear about their mission.

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