Some people might believe I didn’t know what I was getting into when I accepted Aron Ra’s offer to appear on one of his podcasts to be insulted, mocked, and ridiculed. On the contrary, I pretty much knew exactly what would happen, although I must concede that Aron failed to even meet my lowest expectations. Aron didn’t care about anything I had to say. He’d already decided that everything I might say would be wrong or a lie or both before I ever opened my mouth.
An unedited copy of the entire podcast recorded from my laptop can be viewed here.
I was given less than 30 minutes notice before the show started, so I had no opportunity to invite people who might be friendly to my point-of-view. My appearance was exploited purely for his financial benefit. Not that I care all that much, but you’d think he’d be a little nicer to a potential cash cow.
I haven’t been given a link to the podcast or a copy for my own use. Perhaps I’m being premature in judgment, but he’s given me no reason to believe I’ll be getting a copy at any point in time in the future. I have yet to feel like I’ve been treated with even the slightest respect by Mr. Nelson, a.k.a Aron Ra, and the experience is now over. Don’t expect I’ll be getting any respect anytime soon, either, even though I bent over backward to be nice at the start of the show by complimenting Mr. Ra on his undergraduate degree in Anthropology, I believe it was.
Basically, I’ve been treated as nothing more than an opportunity for Aron Ra to fleece his willing audience of a few hundred dollars, or perhaps even a few thousand. We were only supposed to go for an hour but the show lasted more than two, so it must have been entertaining for somebody. I’d hate to think I wasted two hours of my life promoting Mr. Ra, when he clearly didn’t even want to mention the fact that I’d written a book called The God Conclusion, much less talk about it.
The problem was fairly simple: Aron Ra only wanted to win an argument. I was hoping to have a somewhat less contentious, more civil conversation and make my points without vitriol or name-calling. To prepare for my debut, I watched several of his Internet videos and took a few notes to clarify my perspective, which I daresay I am not entirely confident I was able to make because of Aron’s constant interruptions. The point I was trying to make is rather simple and very logical: science has told us, rather emphatically in fact, that our universe had an origin popularly known as the Big Bang anomaly.
Prior to the Big Bang, our universe did not exist — not a star, not a galaxy, not even an atom. This is not my opinion, or something I want to be true, but a virtually indisputable fact agreed upon by every physicist and cosmologist who wrote books I subsequently read. Yet Aron stubbornly continued to insist that our universe has always existed, and said that he could call Lawrence Krauss and ask him to confirm that fact — the same Lawrence Krauss who wrote a book titled A Universe From Nothing. Aron assured me the title of the book was a joke and Krauss didn’t really intend for the words he deliberately chose to market his book to be taken literally.
Any fool should know that the title of the book doesn’t mean what it says.
It’s very frustrating to try to have a civil and polite conversation with someone who adamantly insists that his worldview is true and by extension, the opposing worldview is based on lies. Even though I was doing my very best to describe the errors I’d noted from his earlier videos to be honest mistakes rather than malicious fabrications intended to deliberately deceive people, Aron seemed determined to provoke me by frequently calling me a liar. Finally, at the end of the show Aron apologized for being a dick and I didn’t correct him. In fact, I agreed with him. There is no reason that two people can’t disagree and still be polite to each other.
After our debacle of a discussion ended, I posted this link from the NASA page for children to Aron where the first sentence reads: “The Big Bang is the way astronomers explain the universe began.” I would only add that elementary logic dictates that something cannot be eternal and also have a beginning. Therefore, his claim that the universe has always existed is ridiculously untrue. I figured using the exact words that adults would use to explain this difficult concept to a child would be appropriate in this instance. I almost wish Aron had threatened to call Sean Carroll so I could have told Dr. Carroll that I quoted him in my book, several times in fact. Dr. Carroll is an atheist and we do not agree on everything doesn’t mean I can’t acknowledge he’s a very smart man and deserves to be treated with some measure of my respect and admiration.
My “argument” is very straightforward. It is a probability argument because the scientists have published their calculations and I simply used what they have given me. Unless you want to believe and argue that the universe had no choice except to come into existence, the calculations of Sir Roger Penrose should be used to represent the probability that our universe might not exist if any of six cosmological factors identified by Sir Martin Rees had even the slightest variation. Arguing that the universe had no choice except to exist would seem to be a subtle argument for the existence of God, but I won’t press that point any further at this time.
There was once a time where no life existed, and then life came into existence. Science calls the hypotheses that attempt to describe this process of animation “abiogenesis.” Naturally, Aron and I argued quite a bit about abiogenesis, and he made several more claims that I believe are factually inaccurate. For example, he said that a number or small population of organisms formed as the result of abiogenesis, which is a claim I’ve never read in any book on the subject. Abiogenesis, if it can even be alleged to have ever happened due to random chance rather than directed processes, is such an unlikely event that it is most often speculated that it only happened once, which means at one brief point in time, there was only one living organism on Earth before that organism began to replicate.
I tried to provide some statistics to explain my point of view, pointing out that the estimated probability of ten base pairs of DNA forming by random chance are 1 in 4 to the 10th power, or 1 in 1,048,576. The estimated minimum number of base pairs needed to make the simplest living organism is 530,000. But then I mentioned Fred Hoyle, probably one of the top ten scientists of the last century, as calculating the probability of a living cell forming by random chance as 1 in 10 to the 40,000th power, which I believe represents a number greater than the estimated number of atoms in the known universe. According to Aron Ra (holder of an undergraduate degree) Fred Hoyle (who taught at Cambridge) was a moron. Sir Fred Hoyle. The man knighted for his many scientific accomplishments. By comparison from what I know, Aron Ra hasn’t accomplished anything of comparable note.
And that’s when I finally got angry.
How can one even attempt a civil conversation with a person that arrogant? My frustration bubbled over and I told Aron something to the effect that he couldn’t even carry Fred Hoyle’s jock strap. I probably should be sorry I said that, but I’m not. Disrespecting me is one thing. I would never describe myself as brilliant, but disrespect for perhaps the greatest scientist of the 20th Century, a man who taught at Cambridge and suggested the Nobel Prize-winning Carbon 12 atom experiment that showed the anthropic principle was true, was just a little too much for me to take.
Frankly, the man to whom I was speaking does not deserve to be mentioned in the same sentence as Fred Hoyle. Fred Hoyle was absolutely brilliant. Aron Ra is an absolute blowhard.
Dr. James Tour, a synthetic chemist voted one of the top 50 scientists in the world by his peers, said this about entropy and abiogenesis: “Time is actually the enemy. If you let these chemicals that have been made sit around, they show degradation in a period of weeks. Weeks is the twinkling of an eye when it comes to prebiotic timescales. The chemicals decompose. To think that molecules could be made and sit there waiting for other molecules to form doesn’t happen. Organic chemistry doesn’t work that way.” Aron, if he’s not already familiar with Dr. Tour’s work, will naturally hate him and probably also call him a moron simply because Dr. Tour is a Christian with a very impressive list of scientific accomplishments to his credit.
No matter how brilliant the scientist in question might be, he’s a blithering idiot if he happened to say something with which Aron disagrees, or believes in a God that Aron rejects.
Some people are sadly predictable. Some people become so committed to their beliefs they can’t ever stop and think even for a moment about what someone else is trying to say because they are too busy trying to think of a rebuttal, which is fine until you start making knowledge claims that aren’t true — like when the scientific facts that clearly say that the universe had a beginning but the other guy claims it has always existed. How does one respond? Disagreements with zealots rarely if ever end well.
Aron seemed extraordinarily confident in his beliefs, even though I am equally confident based on my reading that his beliefs are wrong, and thus the claims he was making were false. The universe clearly had an origin, meaning it has not always existed, and that really should not be a point of dispute in my opinion. Life has not always existed, and he grotesquely oversimplified the requirements for a living cell to form. He could not seem to understand why I said entropy be putting negative pressures on the forming cell to break apart before it be completed. Where I was trying to stress the point that life cannot evolve until it exists and before evolution is even theoretically possible, creation has already occurred, but Aron apparently wanted to talk about macroevolution and nothing else. Evolution is allegedly just the change of an existing thing, and I’m interested to learn more about how things came to exist.
According to Aron no matter what I said, I was wrong or lying, or both. He could not admit to any mistake, no matter how egregious. My favorite moment came when I challenged his claim that Hitler was a creationist who rejected belief in evolution as a sin. I quoted historian Richard Weikart, author of the books From Darwin to Hitler, Hitler’s Ethic: The Nazi Pursuit of Evolutionary Progress, and Hitler’s Religion: The Twisted Ideas that Drove the Third Reich, as Weikart quoted Hitler from a 1937 speech: “When we know today that the evolution of millions of years, compressed into a few decades, repeats itself in every individual then this art, we realize, is not modern. It is on the contrary to the highest degree archaic, far older probably than the Stone Age.” That is not creationist rhetoric.
Weikart also wrote, “The official biology curriculum endorsed by the Nazi Ministry of Education, as well as lists of books approved for schools, uniformly taught biological evolution, including human evolution. Specifically the biology curriculum endorsed Darwinian theory and rejected Lamarckism.” To no surprise whatsoever, Aron refused to admit he was wrong about that and repeated his belief that Hitler believed in creation, in spite of the evidence to the contrary.
Aron also claimed that Darwin didn’t believe in racial superiority, but the original title of Darwin’s book was On The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favored Races in the Struggle for Life. What is a favored race, if all races are supposedly equal? But of course, according to Aron, Darwin was talking about races of cabbages.
I wanted to talk about ape-to-human evolution, and tried to work my way through a thought experiment with Aron on how human chromosome #2 could have formed, but I’m almost afraid to watch the video now to see if I actually made it to the finish line. I was about to say there is no logical way for human chromosome #2 to “evolve” from a rare mutation to a recessive gene and finally to a dominant gene without bending the basic laws of sexual reproduction, which say the dominant genes always win as long as they exist. And if you can’t observe it, you can’t call it a fact.
Unfortunately, I’d rather have surgery without anesthesia rather than attempt having another conversation with the guy, so I guess I’m just going to have to let it go. I don’t like to say negative things about people as a general rule and I will say he is very intelligent, but not very polite. I have a confession to make. Aron made me want to sin on a live broadcast by speaking my true feeling on the air. I’m glad I kept my mouth shut.
Finally, at the end of the show Aron apologized for acting like a dick and I agreed with him, because he had been exceptionally rude. There is no reason that two people can’t disagree and still be polite to each other and have a civil conversation instead of participating in a gladiator sport. He was unnecessarily rude and confrontational.
My tongue can really get me into trouble sometimes. I had to bite it several times last night to keep myself from saying what I was really thinking.
That’s never a good thing.
Aron should not be compared to a dick because a dick can be at some times useful, pleasurable and life giving. Aron displays non of those positive traits.
I would compare him to an irritable bowel, producing and disseminating offensive flatulence to no one’s benefit but his own. Seems far more appropriate.
His atheism is at least more consistent than most people’s, because it is turning him into an immoral monster of selfish tyranny. May God bring him quickly to the end of himself, where he faces what he has become, loathes it, and has a chance for true repentance and a better life.
The rest of us have already gotten to the point of loathing him. It’s time for him to get on the bandwagon!!
I agree with you that our Universe had a beginning. The BGV theorem supports this. Alexander Vilenkin (one of the contributors) says an expanding universe like ours has to have a beginning in the finite past. Krauss’ idea of nothing is using the quantum vacuum as nothing. Vilenkin says the vacuum has physical properties (e.g., fields). Krauss is misleading people with his book.
Einstein’s equation proves the universe is not static. Edwin Hubble confirmed this. If our universe is eternal, then why is the energy output today less than when it first began expanding? Most scientists agree that the universe is going to experience a heat death billions of years down the road.
It’s obvious Aron Ra is not following the science. Can he explain how we got a single cell from a pre-biotic environment? I agree with you regarding Fred Hoyle and James Tour.
A former atheist philosopher of 50 years+ named Antony Flew became a deist before he passed away. What changed his mind? Maybe Aron can explain that. Dr. Sy Garte, a former atheist and scientist, also believes in God now. Aron needs to stop hiding from facts and accept the truth.
Lynn Margulis, an evolutionary biologist, said about macro-evolution, “Although random mutations influenced the course of evolution, their influence was mainly by loss, alteration, and refinement…Never, however, did that one mutation make a wing, a fruit, a woody stem, or a claw appear. Mutations, in summary, tend to induce sickness, death, or deficiencies. No evidence in the vast literature of heredity changes shows unambiguous evidence that random mutation itself, even with geographical isolation of populations, leads to speciation.” “The accumulation of genetic mutations were touted to be enough to change one species to another. I was taught over and over again that the accumulation of random mutations led to evolutionary change – led to new species. I believed it until I looked for evidence.”
Stay strong, keep the faith, God will reward his children for sharing the truth. I pray that God will open the minds of individuals like Aron Ra, Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, to see the truth. Antony Flew and Dr. Sy Garte did. God bless.
you make me laugh
What bothered me most about this discussion was the way you refused to accept or acknowledge ANY correction whatsoever. You would say something that was provably wrong, Aron would correct you, and you just sat there quietly for a moment and then said “Okay” and moved on to another topic. In one instance where he suggested you both go to the same website ON CAMERA and check the definition TOGETHER and you outright refused to do that.
No wonder Aron Ra became so frustrated. I would have too.
looking up a website on the Internet in real time is not my idea of research. I was trying to communicate a point and he was trying to overwhelm me with data. He had no interest in hearing what I had to say. Nor do you, for that matter.
For any “corrections” of Aron Ra about evolutionary biology to have been true, it would have meant his entire worldview was true, and it simply isn’t. The universe has not always existed in this current form. Therefore, it is inherently reasonable and logical to allow that this universe had a beginning, popularly known as the Big Bang. Aron was trying to deny an entire body of evidence in both physics and chemistry that say his claims are either grossly overstated or simply untrue.
Life cannot evolve until it exists. Q.E.D.
Yet I was the one constantly being called a liar, which I do not appreciate.
Aron’s corrections were on point because he knows this subject well & is honest, if abrasive. Not once did you ever admit fault or correct the record. Accepting science isn’t to be equated with a worldview, though the religious cannot be dissuaded from this fallacious accusation. No one claimed the universe has always existed in its current form but the matter & energy making up the universe are believed to have always existed in some form according to astrophysicists.
All of it might be perfectly natural without any supernatural component whatsoever. Abiogenesis may be the mechanism for life to arise, & if we find life elsewhere then the God hypothesis becomes even more shakier & unfounded.
There’s no good evidence a God started life, that’s just a claim sans evidence. First, you’d have to prove this god existed & then prove this god did the creating and not any of the other millions of gods that are purported to exist.
“Life cannot evolve until it exists. Q.E.D.” – I’m not aware of anyone claiming otherwise. Is this an admission that you accept the theory of evolution?
If I was trying to think of a list of Aron’s positive qualities, honesty would be nowhere near the top. He’s still insisting that Hitler was a creationist, even now.
The funny thing is that you’re using conditional words like “might” and “could”, which means you don’t know. You don’t know what my God hypothesis even is, yet you judge it shaky and unfounded from total ignorance. Not a great argument, in my opinion. Now you’re just making claims to counter the arguments of my book but you’re doing so without any scientific evidence to support you, where I have put together a whole book full of evidence.
If you truly understood the beauty and simplicity of that one statement, that Life cannot evolve until it exists, then you wouldn’t be asking me such silly questions.
I’ve never seen or known Aron to be anything other than scrupulously honest. Here’s a compelling argument supporting Aron’s view: https://thisviewoflife.com/was-hitler-a-darwinian/
Churches both within Nazi Germany, and without, supported Hitler. The churches have done a lot of apologizing for their inaction, and even overt support, for that genocidal monstrosity. Attempting to link Darwinism with Hitler is not just false but a dishonest attempt to smear one of the single best ideas anyone has ever had. It’s disgraceful behaviour.
That’s correct, if I don’t know something I’m open & honest about it. I would never assert as fact something that is not known to be a fact, I’m the same as Aron in that way. You are a lifelong Christian and I’m very familiar with the Christian god. I was raised Christian, so I’m pretty sure I have an accurate understanding of your god hypothesis. Your god hypothesis has no good evidence for it, so it is indeed very shaky on evidentiary grounds. A lack of good evidence, especially when good evidence should be apparent, is a compelling argument against the validity of the god hypothesis. There is no good evidence for ANY god EVER. Q.E.D.
I’m very familiar with ID. ID doesn’t have any scientific evidence. That’s why it’s not taken seriously by anyone who knows anything about the subject. I can fully rebut your arguments by prominent Christian scientists alone. They’re Christian and credentialled, respected scientists. The Catholic Church accepts evolution.
“If you truly understood the beauty and simplicity of that one statement, that Life cannot evolve until it exists, then you wouldn’t be asking me such silly questions.”
I fully accept the statement, I’ve already acknowledged that. I agree with you. In fact, it’s so axiomatic that I’ve never never known anyone, anywhere that wouldn’t confirm it as true.
Life MUST EXIST for evolution to act upon it. Are you confusing abiogenesis with evolution? Those are two separate and distinct subjects. I notice you didn’t answer any of my questions.
“Life cannot evolve until it exists. Q.E.D.” – I’m not aware of anyone claiming otherwise. Is this an admission that you accept the theory of evolution?
“I believe it is an established maxim in morals that he who makes an assertion without knowing whether it is true or false, is guilty of falsehood; and the accidental truth of the assertion does not justify or excuse him.”
― Abraham Lincoln
Look, I have neither the time nor interest in long-winded reply wars on my blog page. I will clear up a point or two, however — you said I have been a life-long Christian, and that isn’t true. I never really was a Christian until I’d reached my mid-thirties. I was an apathetic agnostic prior to that, and a capitalist more than anything else.
I’m going to be starting my own podcast soon. If you’d like to appear on the show as a guest, we can talk for as long as you’d like, or at least as long as I “talked” with Aron. Mostly, I listened to him bluster and call me names. I can’t promise you what all we will discuss, but I can promise that I will not be anywhere near as unpleasant as Aron was the other night. On the other hand, I’m not going to put up with abusive comments from guests, so the show remains in the planning stages as I try to work through a few more issues…such as live streaming versus recorded and edited podcasts. If you have any interest, leave another comment. If not, it’s been interesting speaking with you this way.
As for Aron’s allegedly scrupulous honesty, I can’t agree with you because he called me a liar for two hours straight. I don’t recall the first lie that I told…can you? Conversely, when I spoke of things about which Aron and I strongly disagreed, such as Hitler being a creationist and religious person, I suggested that his misunderstandings might be attributed as honest mistakes. In reply, Aron called me a liar as I was quoting experts who flatly contradicted him. If Aron is calling me a liar as I am providing evidence that he is wrong, that might qualify as a form of projection but at any rate, we can’t both be speaking the truth. One of us has to be wrong. I have supported evidence to buttress the claims I was making during the podcast, and the only evidence Aron offered in response was his claim and opinion that I was stupid or lying or both.
By the way, using Aron as a resource on this was a waste of your time as you tried to waste mine. Aron as a resource versus a university professor and author of several books on this one narrow topic. Not even a fair fight.
As for my ignoring your questions, yes. I am ignoring silly questions such as whether or not I understand evolution and abiogenesis are not the same thing. Of course I do. I also understand that the theory of evolution is absolutely predicated on the belief that the hypothesis known as abiogenesis can ever lead to a living organism, and the only reason for doing so is the circular reasoning that life exists, so it must have happened. That is an assumption and a fatal flawed logical error. There is absolutely no reason to assume that a single-celled organism could have created itself as a series of chemical processes. Anyone who believes that it is simple and we can therefore assume it must have happened should listen to a lecture or two on abiogenesis. It’s a virtually unsolvable problem.
Your bio indicates you were schooled religiously & very likely come from a religious family & from a very religious part of the US. I’ve heard this claim many, many times, but when questioned it never turns out to be true. It plays well with other Christians and for some reason, theists seem to think it gives them credibility when speaking to non-believers. The degree to which you hold extremist positions without evidence argues strongly against the case you were ever an atheist. I don’t believe you.
BTW, I never did what you are accusing me of, I didn’t provide Aron as a source, not once. The source I provided was from an independent academic source that demonstrates that Hitler was not a Darwinist. A quick click on the link would have demonstrated that. That’s not a fair tactic, _to quote yourself._
Aron clearly explained to you the difference between abiogenesis & evolution. You do seem chronically confused about the distinction. We have two candidate explanations for the origin of life – a supernatural one & a natural one. Neither has been conclusively eliminated, both are theoretically possible. As we have zero evidence for the supernatural in all of history, one of those explanations has a lot more credibility than the other.
You did tell Aron that you had evidence for God, yet you didn’t provide a single scrap. What you did have (and what Aron correctly predicted you’d do) was arguments, bad apologetic arguments that were debunked decades ago if not longer. One can easily Google how all of them are fallacious reasoning.
An example from probability: Whenever someone tries to bring up the astronomical odds of evolution happening, I point out this simple fact.
Pull five cards out of a deck of cards at random. The odds of getting those five cards are 1 in 300 million. The odds of getting them in that order are 1 in 37 billion.
The evidence for evolution is insurmountable, that’s why many Christians accept it. They still accept a supernatural cause for the origin of life but the evidence for evolution is too vast & convincing for them to pretend otherwise.
Even if the theory of evolution were falsified tomorrow (it won’t be) it still wouldn’t move the needle one millimetre in the direction of proving any god real. Creationists would still have all their work ahead of them to prove this god they claim exists. Even if proven wrong, it doesn’t prove your god. The fact of evolution at this point, due to overwhelming evidence from multiple academic streams, is not going to be overturned by religious fanatics who use fallacious reasoning and really bad debunked arguments.
Convicted fraudster & jailbird Kent Hovind (the guy with the fake doctorate) appears to have had at least two of his YouTube Channels deleted in recent days – a savage blow against Creationism & pseudo-science.
YouTuber Erika (Gutsick Gibbon) puts the final nail in the Intelligent Design argument’s coffin and firmly falsifies ID, proving it wrong. See here:
https://youtu.be/eTWmd2F-eWQ
I invite you to call The Atheist Experience and present your argument & “evidence.” It’s a Youtube call-in show favouring theists to explain what they believe & why. Another similar show is The Line. Both are weekly & you’d have a pretty good chance of getting on and an audience of thousands. I encourage you to call & bring your best argument & evidence.