A couple of years ago, I faced the rather formidable challenge of engaging in public debate against Ed Buckner, former president of American Atheists.
Ed was very experienced in that sort of thing; it was my first and remains as of today, the only formal debate I’ve ever had in my life.
Therefore, my work was certainly cut out for me.
Fortunately for me, video existed on You Tube showing Ed present his best arguments while debating a Muslim scholar in the U.K. named Hamza Andreas Tzortzis.
So I took copious notes, seizing upon the opportunity to anticipate Ed’s best shots.
In fairness, Ed also should have been able to anticipate my best shots coming, if he’d bothered to read some of my work as the Atlanta Creationism Examiner.
In my opening remarks, I enumerated the seven points that Ed made that were the foundation his best arguments for atheism and then eviscerated them, point-by-point.
I sort of expected that once the logical flaws in Ed’s argument were systematically exposed and shredded before he’d ever opened his mouth, we would then be able to spend the remainder of our time arguing about points about the science that has now officially become the crux of my Counterargument for God.
Because I knew Ed to be quite an intelligent man, I will now confess that I was expecting the alleged “freethinker” would be a little bit more open-minded.
I foolishly assumed that Ed would be able to defend his own beliefs, rather than simply attacking what he supposed to be mine with every opportunity.Sadly, Ed disappointed me.
Also in my opening statement, I had suggested we conduct the debate without making reference to the Bible, saying we could “leave that anthology in the narthex.”
But Ed would have none of that. It turned out that his argument solely depended on attacking the Bible, which is most certainly not “God.”
I countered that the Bible should be thought of as nothing more than a useful tool, such as a hammer, and pointed out that a hammer would never be worshiped.
In reflection, I now realize why Ed was so compelled to focus his attack on Christian beliefs based on literal interpretations of the Bible and the Old Testament in particular. Ed realized if he wasn’t the offensive, his argument was quite vulnerable.
When the debate did temporarily stray into my science arguments, Ed got into some trouble by making factually incorrect statements. For example, he incorrectly exclaimed that Darwin never wrote the words, “Monkeys make men.”
It didn’t matter to him when I said that I’d just seen the Darwin exhibit at the Fernbank museum, which included a page from his notebook highlighting that exact phrase, and I was quoting it verbatim.
Ed seemed to naturally assume that I was somehow being deceptive or distorting the truth by telling it.
He wasn’t the least bit receptive to any possibility that my argument might have been formed using superior logic and constructed with more accurate information than that in his possession.
He must have assumed he would win the debate merely because I freely admit that I am a Christian.
Ed finally conceded his mistake on that one minor point, but that admission came privately, long after the debate was over.
But implying that I had somehow been deceitful wasn’t the worst part of our debate. I was more disappointed when Ed showed me a brief glimpse of his hypocritical side, admitting to his own willful ignorance. After all, he was the one who suggested that our epistemic duty was to seek knowledge and test the truth. Ironically, that had been the only one of his seven points arguing his atheist philosophy that I conceded was true.
However, when I offered Ed several examples of scientific research that he should investigate because he had made statements that conflicted with scientific evidence, he changed his tune and claimed that his real duty was only limited to topics of his personal interest.
In other words, Ed had no real interest in seeking truth. He was only there to win an argument, and I’m not even sure he accomplished that.
But if nothing else, he gave me plenty of fodder for the second half of my Counterargument.
Yet the debate against Ed was nevertheless quite instructive, and therefore well worth the time and effort I invested. I learned that one of the most prominent atheists in America was willing to admit he would not consider new ideas with an open mind, in spite of what he had claimed was his epistemic duty.
But what isn’t worth my time is having an argument on the internet with some character who calls himself “Doc Cos”, who lurks on a Facebook page called God on the Slide.
While Dr. Buckner was pleasant and quite cordial, and without question an authentic doctor, this “Doc Cos” person hides behind a pseudonym and only seems capable of personal attack.
His most frequently used descriptors of me are “idiot” or “liar”, which he invariably spews using poor grammar and misspelled words. The delicious irony of that faux pas is apparently lost on him.
The only reason this nebulous “Doc Cos” merits any mention outside of Facebook is because he accused me of willful ignorance.
This is the same man who refused to accept a free copy of my now award-winning book Counterargument for God so that his criticisms would no longer be littered with ignorant remarks.
However, if ignorance is bliss, Doc Cos is determined that he will live in ecstasy.
And then again recently, I was reading Tom Krattenmaker’s editorial piece for USA Today that asserted “Evolution is not a matter of belief” but an indisputable fact.
Krattenmaker wrote,
But here’s the problem: As settled science, evolution is not a matter of opinion, or something one chooses to believe in or not, like a religious proposition. And by often framing the matter this way, we involved in the news media, Internet debates and everyday conversation do a disservice to science, religion and our prospects for having a scientifically literate country.
Here’s a real problem with Mr. Krattenmaker’s assertion — there’s no such thing as settled science.
If science were ever “settled”, people would still be taught that the earth was flat.
Only a couple hundred years ago,the prevailing wisdom about combustion was phlogiston theory.
Within the last century, many of our smartest scientists and philosophers were convinced the universe was eternal beginning because they recognized the problems posed by the universe having an origin.
Then Edwin Hubble provided evidence of red shift, validating the Big Bang theory in the minds of an overwhelming majority of astronomers and physicists.
The consensus of opinion is now that [the universe] all started with a big bang, as the jingle for the television show of the same name suggests. Yet even today, not every physicist agrees with the Big Bang theory. There are competing theories, like the Big Crunch, and brane cosmology.
Now, I have been known to express my utter contempt for phrases such as “scientific consensus” or “peer review”, but with good reason.
Those are nothing more than buzzwords, simple phrases that censor competing opinions out from public consumption.
If you don’t believe me, read the true story of what happened to Boris Belousov.
Consensus is the death of original thought. A consensus of opinion in the scientific community may well exist about any given theory at some point in time, but there is no such thing as a theory that is immune to challenge. The challenge itself may very well fail, but the ability to challenge will always remain.
But what really irritated me the most with Mr. Krattenmaker was his assumption that my beliefs about evolution theory are borne of willful ignorance, as he insinuated in this passage:
As a progressive, I’m tempted to blame willful ignorance by those on the “other side” when I see the sharp rise in Republicans rejecting evolution, and the always-high percentage of white evangelical Protestants (64% in the Pew poll) who believe that humans were created by God in their present form; i.e. no evolution.
I would be more than happy to debate Mr. Krattenmaker about the science of evolution theory.
Because of the willful ignorance of people such as “Doc Cos”, I haven’t been able to even give away a free copy of Counterargument for God to an atheist willing to read it, even thought it has won an award.
Alleged “freethinkers” like Mr. Krattenmaker mistakenly believe that the evidence for speciation is as conclusive as the evidence for natural selection.
But the real problem with speciation is not to think that humans and apes could be related by descent via sexual reproduction, simply given enough time. The real problem occurs after one realizes that the exact same biological processes allegedly explain the relationship of both humans and apes to the bananas we both like to eat.
People who believe in the possibility of Divine Evolution could consider our cousin-ship to both turtles and turnips via sexual reproduction a questionable proposition at best.
And they may very well take umbrage at the suggestion that they suffer from mental defect merely for having a few doubts about how much Darwin’s theory can do about answering our existential questions.
On the other hand, antitheists such as “Doc Cos” revel in their own willful ignorance, smugly confident that their limited knowledge is somehow superior to an argument they don’t even know.
“Doc Cos” won’t even spend a couple of hours reading a book that was offered to him for free.
Sure, it’s easier to criticize what you don’t understand.
But if that isn’t a prime example of willful ignorance, what is?
