Percent of Knowledge? Please Help!!!!

[suitnthaiguy]

I wonder if Hovind took his argument from this guy:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zJpEQEs-6bs

It's funny that you should bring this clip up, because this is where I first saw this argument surface. This guy tries to convince his congregation that he "stumped" the most learned communist scholars. I don't think it's a coincidence that a year later we are seeing this same argument pop up in other places. Thanks for posting it.

[Lausten]

(When he says the infamous "couldn't God be in the 95% that you don't know" most of the audience laughs. I really hope that at least some of them laughed because they realized how bad of an argument from ignorance this is.)

Sounds to me like they are laughing in agreement. The story is either completely made up or he was not understanding their reaction and just believing in his own head that he converted anybody. This is similar to a Chick's Tract where a kid challenges a professor who says there is no god and the kid comes back with questions like "does darkness exist?" and answers it himself saying, "darkness is just the absence of light", eventually leading to a "we don't know" argument. The professor gets all red in the face, in the real world, it would be pretty simple logic for any professor with any philosophy training.

This guy exposes his weakness more than most do when he repeats "if those were your only two options and both were believable". There are infinitely more options and the option of a loving god that has a room for you in heaven is not believable. There are thousands of other gods to choose from, and infinitely more that could be imagined. Heaven stopped being believable sometime around when Galileo could see beyond the clouds and just saw space and rocks. Actually, it was never believable, but I can at least understand how people were tricked into it before that.

So, he presents an argument from ignorance, gives you a false dichomoty, and admits it is a false dichomoty, then presents Pascal's wager. His communist audience didn't interrupt him, probably because they were just fascinated to watch him make this ridiculous argument and his audience in the video had already made their choice. So, he could just go on a roll about how great god is at that point.

This is the place all preachers want to get to. That point where they can just bask in the glory of god and expound on how wonderful he is and how his creation is just for us and how much better you are because you believe it and who wouldn't want to make that choice?

Of course, there is that one requirement, that you do make the choice. You don't get any of the benefits if you don't accept the choice without any further evidence. The irony is, by taking the choice of living his life as if this is it, this is the only shot you get, he misses out on living a full life in the real world.

[Fyrebrand]

This is similar to a Chick's Tract where a kid challenges a professor who says there is no god and the kid comes back with questions like "does darkness exist?" and answers it himself saying, "darkness is just the absence of light", eventually leading to a "we don't know" argument. The professor gets all red in the face, in the real world, it would be pretty simple logic for any professor with any philosophy training.

Oh, why did you have to remind me of that horrible story? There is a video made from an adapted version of that story, with many copies floating around YouTube. It made me absolutely furious the first time I saw it, just because of how well it manipulates people into swallowing vile deceit and propaganda. It encapsulates emotional appeals and logical fallacy in a well-told, poetic, little parable -- making a snooty intellectual bully look foolish at the hands of a child, which on some level we all enjoy seeing once in a while -- and then shamelessly attributes the exchange to Einstein, of all people.

When I first found this, I would try and find copies of the video (there are many) and comment on them. I'd try to warn people that the story was made-up, that there's no evidence to show Einstein ever said any of that, that Einstein didn't believe in a personal God -- even that people didn't need to take my word for it, and that they should look it up for themselves (Snopes has a page on it, for simplicity) before believing the video. The result, every time, was my comments being voted down by a few theists with multiple YouTube accounts, just so that my comments would become invisible. To me, that spoke volumes about religion.

[Lausten]

Yeah, I saw that one too. It was on some new age-y website with about a dozen comments about great it was. I exposed the fallacy and kept checking back, but no one commented back to me. youtube gets pretty nasty pretty quick. Don't despair. I have been on the Internet since 1992 and discovered snopes.com early on for things like taxing email or "cough CPR". I had gentle yet firm ways of directing people there and after about 5 years it became more common for people to check things for themselves. Probably businesses cracking down on all the useless emails going around the office helped too. It will take a while longer for god fallacies to stop, but maybe someday.

Thanks for your diligence.

Part of the cure is to propogate videos where little Socratic kids take on mean priests. There's one out there with a young woman taking on some guy who does the college circuit. I'll see if I can find it.

[DjVortex]

Oh, why did you have to remind me of that horrible story? There is a video made from an adapted version of that story, with many copies floating around YouTube. It made me absolutely furious the first time I saw it, just because of how well it manipulates people into swallowing vile deceit and propaganda.

I have never seen that video before, and I must fully agree with you. Making such a silly argument is one thing, but dragging the name of one of the greatest persons who has ever lived into it is incredibly dishonest and infuriating.

[DjVortex]

Making such a silly argument is one thing, but dragging the name of one of the greatest persons who has ever lived into it is incredibly dishonest and infuriating.

By the way, it might not be immediately apparent why the argument is silly.

The thing is, even if the argument were true, it would still not free "God" from responsibility. The key concept here is criminal negligence.

If I had a child under my custody and I let the child starve to death by doing nothing, I would be as guilty of murder as if I had killed the child directly. "But I didn't do anything" isn't a valid excuse. (On the contrary, that's precisely the crime.)

Thus it doesn't really matter whether "God" created evil, or evil is just "the absence of God", he would still be equally responsible in either case. Since he deliberately chooses not to do anything about it, he is by definition evil.

[DjVortex]

I found another instance of this exact same argument from ignorance:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HEFbV8r1PUQ

Seemingly some Christians think this so such a clever argument.

The video also spouts the misconception that atheism means "I know that no god exists". What I wonder is: Even if that were true (ie. that "atheism" means that), then so what? Does that say anything at all about the existence of a god?

[sepia]

One very stupid thing on this argument is, that Theists have the same amount of knowledge. So with the same argumentation we can show that theism isn't credible, because one premise of the argument is that god does not exist inside the things we know. But the guy in the video looks so sure of his claim; this is so ridiculous. He even defines atheists as people, who "don't belief, that there is a god" (0:11 bis 0:13)!