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dprjones: One of the books that they were dishing out
I'm not sure if you're going to be able to see this
on BlogTV, it is called...
The Man in the Red Underpants 0:0:150:0:20 (Crowd: LOL!)
It's not entirely clear who this is
supposed to be, but I know that
PZ has already posted on Pharyngula.
I think you were under the impression that
he was supposed to represent science
PZ: It did, but it's so badly written it's hard to tell 0:0:36.0:0:37 who it's supposed to represent
dprjones: The first reference to the man in the red underpants
that I found came on page 4.
with the question: what would you do if a man
with red underpants came knocking on your door
saying he had come to read the gas meter?
(Crowd: ROFL!)
AronRa: And if that doesn't compell you to accept religion, what could?
dprjones: But again, PZ has already mentioned on his
blog site Pharyngula, that an update of
Paley's watch. I'm going to ask about...
...the update
really puts a totally complexion on Paley's argument.
PZ: Yes, this will change your whole view of...
Paley's watchmaker on the heath argument.
He says, "Now what if I told you that I was...
...walking along in the desert of Arabia...
...and picked up a mobile phone which I...
...found was lying there?"
Do you get it? A radical change! Heath is turned into
desert, and the watch is turned into a mobile phone.
He's definetly updated it for the future.
dprjones: And does the argument get any better? 0:01:50,0:01:0:01:54 PZ: No it does not get any better...(Big lulz)
When you read the rest, it is exactly the same
as William Paley's argument that...
"Oh man this is complicated, it must have...
...been created by a designer, therefore we...
...find complicated thing in the natural world, they...
...must have also been created by a designer".
That's it.
AronRa: And it couldn't have been the product
of reproduction, that two mobile phones
had made it...(lulz)...and that there would be a
variety of offspring of the mobile phones for like
Nokia and Sprint and AT&T, and that they would
diversify, and spread out...
(Crowd: Lulz!)
dprjones: I got somewhat ahead of myself
though, because what I was going to hopefully ask
the panelists. PZ, starting with you
I don't mean this in an offensive way, you're a
veteran of this sort of event, how does this compare 0:02:43,0:02:0:02:45 PZ: The meeting as a whole?
dprjones: Yeah
PZ: Oh man, I can't diss all the other ones, but,
Its been a very good meeting.
dprjones: You have got a live audience here, I think you should.
(Crowd: ROFL!) PZ: Lulz, no!
AronRa: They paid 100 Euros to be here!
PZ: Where's my cut?
(Crowd: LOL!)
AronRa: Then they'd know it was well invested.
PZ: It was a very good meeting that
one of the big differences in this
meeting and other meetings that I've been to:
this one tried to bring out the more participatory
nature of discussions, by having more panel discussions,
where there were only a couple of the formal lectures
where somebody stands up there and yells at you for an hour.
Most of them were groups of...panel discussions of 4 people
each one would spend about 10 minutes summarising
an issue an then they would open it up to questions.
One of the things we noted here is: man these atheists
ask a lot of questions! They're just yapping off the entire time
and none of these...(connection problem)...
...needed to say "okay it's time to stop, we'll move on to
the next one". That was very impressive, and I think it's just an indicator
of the kinds of discourse that atheists (connecton problem)
like us and all that great stuff, and that was going on this weekend.
AronRa: I did also notice that despite much
encouragement, that it is virtually impossible to get an entire room
full of atheists to dance a jig
(Flock of militant atheists: LOL!!!)
You weren't supposed to tell them about that!
(Crowd: ROFFLES!)
dprjones: What stood out for you over the week Aron?
(Flock: LOL!)
AronRa: I'm not (connection problem...again).
dprjones: It comes effortlessly for me.
Alright, Dr Frank, what was the highlight of your weekend?
Dr Frank: Its been surrounded by some interesting people
having intimate conversations with some of them staying up till 6.... (connection problem!- chunk missing)
dprjones: Sorry, I'm trying to get some Skype calls
coming in and I'm not having the best of results with that...
Is there anyone in the audience that wants to raise any issues..
...or should we carry on Muslim bashing?
(Crowd: Woo! LOL!)
dprjones: Sorry, wrong way of putting it, I think you actually had
a discourse with some of them, yourself and Aron.
PZ: Yes, here are this gang of Muslims that showed up here with this fellow Tzortzis,
Hamza Tzortzis, he has a bit of a reputation here.
I will say that he was polite and well mannered, and also
fairly glib, he was fairly intelligent in his conversations.
I noticed though that as we were arguing
he got progressively more, I don't know how to describe this...
...you could just see him quivering as he continued the discussion,
and I was kind of afraid that he would explode at some point (connection problem)
...I had AronRa backing me up (points at the Klingon looking guy with long hair).
So I was okay.
The kinds of arguments that he was making were
really unremarkable rehashes of Christian creationism.
There was absolutely nothing original in anything he said.
It was largely a philosophical where he said that there
has to be a first cause, he would occasisonaly recruit in
a little bit of poorly understood physics which
he typically got wrong.
AronRa: And reverse embryology (connection problem)
PZ: (video/audio chunk missing before)...formal biologist
and they claim that the koran has a very specific
description of the embryology of humans that
could not possibly have been known to
Moohammad in his time. Which actually sets up
an interesting conundrum, because most of our arguments
what he'd say is "well, your empiricalist demands are...(empirical evidence no needed?)"
(vid/aud chunk missing :( )...addressing your complaints...
And then when I turned around and ask him what's the evidence for
your belief , he immediately trotted out empirical evidence they is good.
And foremost of among these, are these claims about how the koran
describes various phenomena like mountains have roots,
and that embryos go through developmental stages
Yeah...
And what I did was, in my argument with him, I explained
that first of all the descriptions of embryology in the koran are
very very poor. They're very vague, for instance, when you look
in the koran, the description of embryology, they've got 2 stages.
And, one stage looks like a clot of blood, and the other stage
looks like a chewed piece of gum.
That's the level of description we have here.
And also, the other interesting thing about the descriptions in the koran
is that they actually correspond fairly well to the kinds of
descriptions that you find in the common medical scientific
literature of the era. That at the time of Moohammad of course
doctors would have recieved training in the books of Galen and Aristotle
and Hippocrates. And it was basically the same story as
Aristotle, Galen, but what this is obviously indicating, is the most rational
way to interpret this, is that Moohammad was recieving information
from the doctors and the parts that were wrong, he was getting.
But, Tzortzis said people were ignorant at this time, that they couldn't possibly know anything.
They got isolated from everybody else, and that's why it's so magical
that he generates a description... (chunk missing) That at the time of Moohammad,
Moohammad was part of the trading cartel in a backward place, but
at the same time, it was trained in the courts of
north Africa, Egypt, and places like that. They were actually quite scholarly and educated.
So that was no excuse at all.
It also it ignores the fact that some of the claims that
*** comes from a place between the ribs and the back,
which we know better as kidneys.
(Laughter)
So kidneys produce ***, is the message from the koran, ideas from the east and west,
it's also wrong, kidneys do not produce ***.
That's the role of the ***, which *ahem*, excuse me...
and at that time they had some primitive idea what your *** are for,
according to the science of the 7th century, is they were
little counter weights to hold open the ducts that allowed
*** to (escape?)...Yes, that's what theyre for.
And of course, that's also wrong, right. But that's in the koran,
and no, Tzortzis didn't happen to mention that this information
was not acquired divine revelation.
Because presumably, Allah knows the right answer.
dprjones: Aron, what was your experience with them?
AronRa: My experience with some other scientist I couldn't catch the name.
They said "he's an embryologist", when PZ was saying he was wrong
they said "he's an embryologist, that's his field" and
PZ said "It's mine too",
and they stopped and they said "it is?"
(Everyone: LOL!)
Probably should have read the program before...
The highlight for me on this was that PZ doing very well but
of course in all these discussions it's not about content,
it's about trying to confuse your opponent, so that your oponent can't make an intelligible argument.
(Audience claps, "thank you very much. finally somebody says that, finally")
So they use rapid fire nonsense and idiocy and maybe they don't
see it as idiocy, somehow to them it sounds logical.
And I apologise and I know people think I'm confrontational,
I'm wearing this because because of last weeks show (T-shirt)
when everybody gave me all that hell for being rude to that other guy
that refused to answer questions. So I'm wearing that in honour,
yeah I understand the criticism by being confrontational.
I'm standing on the street, unable to stay out of this argument
I know that they are after him (points at PZ, vid not synched) because he has
a name, he has a presence, and they have these gigantic movie cameras,
I swear it's this big, and they had it in his face and I'm
steaming as we're standing in the street, I want into this fight.
PZ: Tag team!
(Someone in the audience: I had exactly the same conversation on Friday...
..., so I was the guy with the bag they were referring to).
dprjones: I hope people hear us on Blog, can people hear comments from the audience...
So far as I understand it, there doesn't seem to be a significant
difference between what they're saying and for example what Ray Comfort
is saying, they put a different spin on it...
PZ: Tzortzis is a bit more polished, Comfort is a clown.
What was interesting was that (garbled audio)
dprjones: Aron I think you've got your mic on
AronRa: I turned it on because I thought it would help. 0:12:150:12:16 (Crowd: Lulz!)
dprjones: Don't try and help Aron
PZ: But anyway, as was mentioned, that
their intentent was to sew confusion as you just mentioned, and as an
audience member just mentioned.
What would happen is I would be making these arguments
saying these things about embryology for instance, and all of a sudden,
Tzortzis would stop and spew out a bunch of philosophical
gobbledegook about Kant or whatever, and would rattle off
this stuff, bring everything to a halt, you know, stop me from
talking about empirical evidence from my side.
The other tactic he used was if I was talking about embryology
and starting to make progress and getting this across to him,
he immediately switches some thing, and "oh well, what about the roots of...
...mountaints that's predicted in the koran?".
And this is classic creationist manouver, that "***! Change the subject!"
whenever something is going wrong with your argument.
dprjones: I do want to emphasise this is a family show, and when PZ
said "Kant", that's spelt with a "K"
(More laughter)
PZ: Yes, the German philosopher Kant
(More heartless laughter from the baby eating atheists)
Dr Frank: I was just thinking that, I didn't meet with these
guys last night at all, but I recently had a strange experience
with the state of science literacy in the Arabic world.
I wrote a book a couple of years ago, called "Mind Field", which is
a book about brain science and how brain science might change
the way that we look at ourselves, as human beings and so on,
very interesting book. It was translated into various languages,
it was bought by Arab Scientific, which is based in Lebannon I think.
And suddenly, they sent the contract back with a little note saying:
"Oh we read this now, and we can't possibly publish this" 0:14:09,0:14: Because there's a chapter on what we know about
religion and the brain. And temporal lobe epilepsy will bring on
religious experiences and stuff like that, and I think that
I mentioned that it's possible that Moohammad's
revelations actually came under epileptic seizures in the temporal lobes.
So, they can't even publish something like this for such a remark
and it's a book about science, this is really disheartening I think
and in a time where the Arab world is politcially moving on
I'm wondering how long this is going to go on there.
Kind of scarey.