Eric Hovind pwned by a 6th grader

[mr friendly guy]

Got this in my youtube inbox



Basically he asks Hovind - How do you know God exists.

Hovind replies that if you don't know everything, then you can't know anything to be ABSOLUTELY true.

The kid then points out the obvious flaw - If I don't everything, then that means I don't know God exists (and by extension Hovind can't know God exists either).

Hovind then proceeds to flounder and you imagine the metaphorical wheels falling off in his head.

[Singular Intellect]

It's awesome to see a demostration that even a young child with some basic logic can destroy the god argument. Goes to show just how weak the argument is.

[Serafina]

"But Mr. Hovind, how can i be certain that the relevation is 100% accurate if i don't know everything?"
That's what destroys that entire argumentation for god. Because while we can't be 100% certain about anything, religious people can't either.

And of course we do have methods to make sure that we can be as certain as possible, and our main one is called science.

[Pelranius]

"But Mr. Hovind, how can i be certain that the relevation is 100% accurate if i don't know everything?"
That's what destroys that entire argumentation for god. Because while we can't be 100% certain about anything, religious people can't either.

And of course we do have methods to make sure that we can be as certain as possible, and our main one is called science.

Ironically, the same thing problem faces the Objectivists, despite their staunch atheism (though their worship of Ayn Rand borders on the cult like, if it ever stopped being that).

[Batman]

I not only suspect that a lot of objectivists would be insulted by being associated with Ayn Rand but one of the things science is famous for is proving itself wrong. However, when 90+% percent of experiments (half of them done by people trying to prove that theory wrong) result in what science predicted while the vast majority of religious texts have about the same grounding in reality as the Harry Potter novels, yeah, I think science has the upper hand.

[SilverWingedSeraph]

I not only suspect that a lot of objectivists would be insulted by being associated with Ayn Rand

He was talking about Ayn Rand's philosophy of Objectivism, I believe, rather than this, which is what you're probably thinking of.

[Scrib]

I'm confused. What is his argument anyway? You can't know anything without God? Isn't that some old ass Descartes-esque thinking? It didn't work for him and I don't see why it would work for this guy.

[Channel72]

His argument is simply that without knowing everything (being "omniscient"), you can't be absolutely certain of anything. Therefore, any belief you have could potentially be wrong. Therefore, you can only achieve absolute certainty by getting a revelation from an omniscient being.

Of course, this doesn't work since the omniscient being could be lying to you, or you could be wrong about hearing the revelation, or the channel of communication between you and the omniscient being could be corrupted or imprecise, or blah blah etc. Also, if you hear from an omniscient being you're still using your senses (empiricism) to form the belief that you've received the revelation, and your imperfect, non-omniscient brain to interpret the revelation.

Whatever - it's really hard for me to understand why Hovind thinks this is actually a good argument. But it's certainly hilarious watching him flail around and repeat himself like an idiot while being intellectually bested by a 6th grader.

[Serafina]

The purpose of that argument is to appeal to non-scientific minded people and show them "see, science can't know anything for certain. Hence, we need god."
It's basically intended as a rebuttal - though to the sheep, not to the ones making the argument - to the argument that science needs no god to explain things. He's trying to rebuke that by saying that science is imperfect (as if science didn't know that) without god.

At least thats my take on it.

[Singular Intellect]

It's just a ridiculously obvious appeal to ignorance fallacy. "You don't know X, therefore Y!"

I'm sure the eleven year old will be figuring out logical fallacies soon enough and beating dumbasses over the head with them.

[Lord Zentei]

Hovind doesn't seem to get that his closing shot contradicts his earlier premise. If we need a deity because we can't find 100% certain proof for any given claim of knowledge on our own, then NO, going by that it's not possible to find 100% certain proof of that deity's existence either.

[Pelranius]

I not only suspect that a lot of objectivists would be insulted by being associated with Ayn Rand

He was talking about Ayn Rand's philosophy of Objectivism, I believe, rather than this, which is what you're probably thinking of.

Pretty much. Maybe I'll just refer to them as Randroids from now on to avoid future confusion.

[Darth Wong]

Hovind doesn't seem to get that his closing shot contradicts his earlier premise. If we need a deity because we can't find 100% certain proof for any given claim of knowledge on our own, then NO, going by that it's not possible to find 100% certain proof of that deity's existence either.

Perhaps more to the point, if the justification for God is that we cannot have 100% certain knowledge, then the obvious question is: "and how does belief in God solve that problem?" Belief in God does not grant you 100% certain knowledge of anything. They honestly don't seem to realize that all the religious "truths" they cling to are nothing more than an arbitrary choice. One could just as easily say that he's 100% certain that The Force is real, and when challenged, simply reply that he has faith.

You see, this is an underlying problem with the religious mindset: it either creates imaginary problems which it purports to solve, or it claims to solve unsolvable problems and then hopes you won't ask them to actually show this solution.

[The Duchess of Zeon]

The only reasonable justification for religion I've ever found proposed was that the human mind hasn't evolved to the point where all humans are capable of psychologically coping with the fact that they're both self-aware, and inevitably going to die. So religion is a memetic evolution that neatly bridges the gap between self-awareness and self-termination by simply declaring the later won't happen if we follow a few rules. Now, if humanity hasn't evolved to the point where it's default as opposed to exceptional for a human to be able to deal with this, then religion still has a valid function--it keeps people sane. This is a testable hypothesis though I don't know if anyone has tested it yet. This however means that any belief system whatsoever from Buddhism to the lyrics of Norman Greenbaum's Spirit in the Sky could, if believed by an individual, effectively satisfy their religious need to let them function in society, so a belief system that maximizes rather than minimizes the destructive byproducts of belief, as evangelical Christianity and radical Islam do for instance, is still an especially unnecessary and bad idea to perpetuate, promote and defend.

[Channel72]

The only reasonable justification for religion I've ever found proposed was that the human mind hasn't evolved to the point where all humans are capable of psychologically coping with the fact that they're both self-aware, and inevitably going to die. So religion is a memetic evolution that neatly bridges the gap between self-awareness and self-termination by simply declaring the later won't happen if we follow a few rules.

This hypothesis doesn't account for the fact that the earliest organized religions had a very murky, depressing concept of the afterlife. Early Mesopotamian and European religions (Sumerian, Greek, etc.) had a vague concept of an underworld, where spirits wandered eternally in a semi-conscious state. But it certainly wasn't anything to look forward to - simply read the Babylonian "Ishtar's Descent into the underworld", or Homer's account of Odysseus's journey to Hades. The spirits of the dead he meets there are sad and tormented, and have no real hope. There was no Paradise in the mythology at this point, all mortals went to a depressing underworld. Heaven (or Elysium) was reserved only for gods and demi-gods. Early Egyptian religion had a similar framework - mortals went to a depressing underworld; only members of the aristocracy went to Heaven. Even the Old Testament had no concept of an afterlife other than, again, a vague, depressing underworld (Sheol).

It was only until Zoroastrianism and later developments in Egyptian mythology that the idea of an eternal Paradise developed, which later spread through Persia and was incorporated into certain Jewish circles around the 4th century B.C., and was later incorporated into various mystery religions and cults throughout the Roman world, including Christianity.

But it's hard to imagine that the earlier concept of the afterlife - a murky, depressing underworld - was a defense mechanism against the cognitive awareness of death, since this afterlife is hardly better than non-existence. I think it's more likely that early religious ideas about an afterlife were more an by-product of ancestor worship, which led to the idea that deceased loved ones or important figures who died were still vaguely existent in another realm, and could be contacted via rituals or dreams. The universal human experience of dreaming about dead loved ones, along with the default assumption of mind-body dualism that self-awareness seems to encourage, probably played a large role in this development as well.

[Dr. Trainwreck]

Hey, wait. Ancestor worship neatly falls in with the Duchess's idea that a human cannot bridge awareness with mortality; we can't accept that our ancestors are no longer with us, so we just say they are, somehow. Nobody said that we only have this mental handicap in regards to ourselves. We may as well have them about other people's mortality.

And as to the idea of a depressing underworld, remember that death, which causes you to think of an underworld, is a depressing concept as well. It doesn't mean everlasting pain either; the Greek underworld had Lethe, a river from which all souls were supposed to drink and forget their past lives. The only way to reconcile self-awareness with mortality was to say that only the unaware would be blissful about death.

About Paradise, well, it's only natural for a cult that celebrates death to say that the dead are chilling in the best place around. I don't know much about Zoroaster, but late Egyptian mythology and Christianity sure are preoccupied with death.

[The Duchess of Zeon]

Anyway, life was pretty brutal and miserable in Babylon and Egypt for peasants, yet people didn't go out and commit mass suicide because of the total hopelessness of improvement in those static societies. "Something is better than nothing" may epitomize the entire idea.

[Darth Wong]

Anyway, life was pretty brutal and miserable in Babylon and Egypt for peasants, yet people didn't go out and commit mass suicide because of the total hopelessness of improvement in those static societies. "Something is better than nothing" may epitomize the entire idea.

But that "something" need not be authority-based, which theological religions always are. It is "scriptural authority" which keeps the Islam, Christianity, and Judaism permanently welded to the Dark Ages. Absent this authority, many of the behavioural problems we see with these religions would be mitigated. Of course, you would still have institutional authority, conformism, and social traditionalism, all of which are powerful agents of harm, but those are more malleable with changing times and cultural values than these damned Bronze Age "scriptures".

[The Duchess of Zeon]

Anyway, life was pretty brutal and miserable in Babylon and Egypt for peasants, yet people didn't go out and commit mass suicide because of the total hopelessness of improvement in those static societies. "Something is better than nothing" may epitomize the entire idea.

But that "something" need not be authority-based, which theological religions always are. It is "scriptural authority" which keeps the Islam, Christianity, and Judaism permanently welded to the Dark Ages. Absent this authority, many of the behavioural problems we see with these religions would be mitigated. Of course, you would still have institutional authority, conformism, and social traditionalism, all of which are powerful agents of harm, but those are more malleable with changing times and cultural values than these damned Bronze Age "scriptures".

Oh, exactly so. After all, we can look at "religion" such as it is in China and Japan--unquestionably present and sometimes leading to retarded things like designing buildings according to Feng Shui principles, but of basically minimal consequence to society.

[Dr. Trainwreck]

Oh, exactly so. After all, we can look at "religion" such as it is in China and Japan--unquestionably present and sometimes leading to retarded things like designing buildings according to Feng Shui principles, but of basically minimal consequence to society.

(I think that) Over there, religion is more "ethical guidelines" than "divine revelation", and it's better that way. If you think that your beliefs are what God himself told you (the original meaning of the word apocalyptic), you're far more likely to kill people over them. Or just prevent them from marrying, if you're slightly more liberal about these things.

[EnterpriseSovereign]

What I find funny is that these bible thumpers claim that it's the word of God, yet how do they explain when it was written by man?

[Darth Wong]

What I find funny is that these bible thumpers claim that it's the word of God, yet how do they explain when it was written by man?

That's easy: they say it was "inspired by God". They pull a similar trick for explaining why we're supposed to put such absolute faith in a document that was cobbled together from dissimilar manuscripts which a bunch of priests chose in the fourth century: those priests were "guided by God" too.

You can explain anything away when you get to make up stories with no rules.