Why won't Dr. Richard Dawkins debate Creationists?

[vampire0x0master]

there is no "debating" with a creationist (unless its my gf or her parents). its always, "god created the universe and if you dont believe what i believe your going to hell." that or, " we know god created the universe because the bible tells us so because the the bible is gods word and the bible is is true because it says so."

and thats just some of the things my family has said to me.

[stahrwe]

there is no "debating" with a creationist (unless its my gf or her parents). its always, "god created the universe and if you dont believe what i believe your going to hell." that or, " we know god created the universe because the bible tells us so because the the bible is gods word and the bible is is true because it says so."

and thats just some of the things my family has said to me.

THere is no debating with creationists because Dr. Richard Dawkins and Gould before him all decided to Turtle up and run away from the debate.

BTW, Belief in a young earth or the Genesis account of creation is not a determinent of whether you or Heaven bound or not. Either you are being intellectually dishonest in ascribing that belief to Christians or the ones you are dealing with are not versed in Soteriology.

[tat tvam asi]

I tend to think that Dawkins doesn't want to debate creationists simply because there is no debate!

DAY 1 - God said, “Let there be light”… and there was an evening and a morning, ONE DAY.”

DAY 2 – God said, “Let there be firmament in the middle of the waters…and there was an evening and a morning, a SECOND DAY.”

DAY 3 – God said, “let dry land appear”…and there was an evening and a morning, a THIRD DAY.”

DAY 4 – God said, “Let there be lights in the firmament of heaven to divide the DAY (morning) from the NIGHT (evening); and let the lights be for signs, and for seasons, and for DAYS and for YEARS. And let them be for lights in the firmament of heaven to give LIGHT upon the earth: and it was so…he made the stars also. And there was an evening and morning, a FOURTH DAY...”

I can clearly see that the book of Genesis can never be taken “literally” with any degree of seriousness! God created light on the first day and separated it from the darkness and there was an “evening and morning”, one “day”? What light? There was no sun, moon, or any other star in the universe on the first day of creation. What separated the light from the darkness? The evening is merely when one area of the planet is facing away from the sun and the morning is merely when one area of the planet is facing towards the sun. There can be no “literal” evenings or mornings (days) going by without the existence of the sun or some other star to orbit around while spinning on a planetary axis.

Apologists want to try and answer this problem by saying that “a day is like a thousand years” in God’s eye and the creation account is talking about thousands of years of creating and not six literal days. Wrong again! A year is merely the time it takes for the planet to complete a full 360 degree orbit around the sun. With no sun there can be no ‘literal days’ (evenings and mornings) and there can be no 'literal years' going by either. There can’t be so much as one literal year without the existence of the sun let alone thousands of years. The bible says very clearly that on the 4th day God created the sun, moon, and stars for the specific purpose of being able to calculate “days” and “years”. So for the first three “days” of creation there is no ability to calculate time of any type whatsoever and so the “evenings and mornings” (days!) can not be taken “literally” or historically by any stretch of the imagination. They can't symbolize some number of years either.

To pay even closer attention to the format of the creation account, I can see that the first three days of creation consist of light, separating water and air, and dry land appearing. The last three days of creation consist of filling the in the blanks of the first three days by attaching things to inhabit the environments laid out during the first three days, such as the sun, moon, and stars to inhabit the heavens of the first day, water creatures / air creatures to inhabit the sea and air of the second day, and land creatures to inhabit the dry land of the third day of creation. Day four corresponds to day one, day five corresponds to day two, and day six corresponds to day three, and on the seventh day there was no more creating:

1) Heavens and Earth / Light > 4) Sun, moon, stars.
2) Sea and Air > 5) Fish and Birds.
3) Dry Land > 6) Animals and Humans.

This is clearly a mythological storyline written in a mythological format and can in no one way be honestly suggested as the “literal” historical origins of the planet earth that tell us exactly how old the planet is or when or how exactly life started on the earth for that matter. The “days” of creation are not “days” at all nor can they represent some number of “years” either. The creation account is a mythological pairing of environments and inhabitants arranged around the sacred number "7", which is merely the number of visible celestial orbs (sun, moon, and five planets) around the earth. This was a major factor in my understanding of the real issue of creationism. There's absolutely no reason to push against science coming along in the modern era and discovering that the earth is actually extremely old and in the process of evolving. Genesis in no way tells us how we literally got here or when the first humans emerged on the planet! The answer to that question is a work in progress. Creationists are in fact fighting against humanity ever being able to find a real answer to the tough question of origins.

[MidnightCoder]

BTW, Belief in a young earth or the Genesis account of creation is not a determinent of whether you or Heaven bound or not. Either you are being intellectually dishonest in ascribing that belief to Christians or the ones you are dealing with are not versed in Soteriology.

It's a case of many christians being ignorant of their own beliefs. I've had numerous people babbling at me in the past, claiming exactly what vampire0x0master said.

[geo]

BTW, Belief in a young earth or the Genesis account of creation is not a determinent of whether you or Heaven bound or not. Either you are being intellectually dishonest in ascribing that belief to Christians or the ones you are dealing with are not versed in Soteriology.

It's a case of many christians being ignorant of their own beliefs. I've had numerous people babbling at me in the past, claiming exactly what vampire0x0master said.

They are not only ignorant of their own beliefs, but they are dishonest about the basis of their beliefs which comes from a position of faith. They attack those whose worldview is science-based, attack or dismiss science itself, all to preserve the illusion that their beliefs are also grounded in science and reason. I think this is the source of all rancor between faith and science and why no debate is ever possible. Because one side will not admit that their belief in God comes from faith and is not—and cannot possibly be—founded on reason and science. The attempts to draw Dawkins and others into a "debate" are intended only to lend credibility to a position which is dishonest at its core.

[tat tvam asi]

BTW, Belief in a young earth or the Genesis account of creation is not a determinent of whether you or Heaven bound or not. Either you are being intellectually dishonest in ascribing that belief to Christians or the ones you are dealing with are not versed in Soteriology.

It's a case of many christians being ignorant of their own beliefs. I've had numerous people babbling at me in the past, claiming exactly what vampire0x0master said.

They are not only ignorant of their own beliefs, but they are dishonest about the basis of their beliefs which comes from a position of faith. They attack those whose worldview is science-based, attack or dismiss science itself, all to preserve the illusion that their beliefs are also grounded in science and reason. I think this is the source of all rancor between faith and science and why no debate is ever possible. Because one side will not admit that their belief in God comes from faith and is not—and cannot possibly be—founded on reason and science. The attempts to draw Dawkins and others into a "debate" are intended only to lend credibility to a position which is dishonest at its core.

Word!


After the problem of the creation account comes the next problem of the patriarchs lives, which are used to back date from the time of Jesus to the dawn of creation in order to arrive at the theory of a young earth, which is then used to try and debate science and discovery. As far as the lives of the patriarchs between Adam and Noah goes, the numbers given in the bible are merely designed around mythological reasons, not around the documentation of literal historical lives:

"The Inner Reaches of Outer Space: Metaphor as Myth and as Religion"

P. 9-12

"For example, in the Hindu sacred epics...the number of years reckoned to the present cycle of time, the so-called Kali Yuga, is 432,000; the number reckoned to the "great cycle", within this Yuga falls is 4,320,000. But then reading one day in the Icelandic Eddas, I discovered that in Othin's warrior hall, there were 540 doors, through each of which, on the "Day of The Wolf" (that is to say at the end of the present cycle of time), there would pass 800 divine warriors to engage the antigods in a mutual battle of annihilation. 800 x 540 = 432,000.

...In Babylon, I then recalled, there had been a Chaldean priest, Berossos, who c. 280 BCE., had rendered into Greek an account of the history and mythology of Babylonia, wherein it was told that between the rise of the first city, Kish, and the coming of the Babylonian mythological flood (from which that of the bible is taken), there elapsed 432,000 years, during which antediluvian era, ten kings reigned. Very long lives! Longer even than Methuselah's (Genesis 5:27), which had been of 969.

So I turned to the Old Testament (Genesis 5) and counting the number of antediluvian patriarchs, Adam to Noah, discovered, of course, that they were ten. How many years? Adam was 130 years old when he begat Seth, who was 105 when he begat Enosh, and so on, to Noah, who was 600 years old when the flood came: to a grand total, from the first day of Adams creation to the first drop of rain of Noah's flood, of 1,656 years. Any relation to 432,000? ...it was shown that in 1,656 years there are 86,400 seven-day weeks. 86,400 divided by 2 equals 43,200.

And so it appears that in the book of Genesis there are two contrary theologies represented in relation to the deluge. One is the old tribal, popular tale of a willful, personal creator god, who saw that "the wickedness of man was great in the earth..." (Genesis 5:6-7). The other idea, which is in fundamental contrast, is that of the disguised number, 86,400, which is a deeply hidden reference to the Gentile, Sumero-Babylonian, mathmatical cosmology of ever-revolving cycles of impersonal time, with whole universes and their populations coming into being, flowering for a season of 43,200 (432,000 or 4,320,000) years, dissolving back into the cosmic mother-sea to rest for an equal amount of years before returning, and so again, and again, and again.

It is to be noticed, by the way, that 1+6+5+6=18, which is twice 9, while 4+3+2=9: 9 being associated with the goddess mother of the world and it's gods. In India the number of recited names in a litany of this goddess is 108. 1+0+8= 9, while 108 X 4 = 432. ...It is strange that in our history books the discovery of the precession of the equinoxes should be attributed to Hipparchus, second century BC., when the magic number 432 (which when multiplied by 60 produces 25,920) was already employed in the reckoning of major cycles of time before that century.

The long lives of these 10 pre-flood patriarchs are carefully arranged in the bible in to relate much older cyclical time data drawing from the older Babylonian astrtheology, not to document literal years of peoples lives that are to be back tracked in order to arrive at a young earth theory! As I see it now, creationists have more problems to deal with in terms of the content of the bible itself than they do from the discoveries of secular science. Once again, the debate over creation or evolution is essentially illusory at best. The creationists have built up a house of cards resting on a sand foundation.

[LanDroid]

I gotta admit the discussion with Wendy Wright does look more like a debate than an interview. For one, they're both standing as in a debate rather than sitting. For another, Dawkins makes detailed statements of fact and asks for her reaction rather than just posing questions as in a typical interview.

Perhaps a debate would work if it was done like the Lincoln/Douglas debates where each side spoke for and hour or so uninterrupted with the same time for the other side - I believe these went on for most of a day. Not possible with our modern attention span.

But in the end I suspect the reason debates aren't scheduled is they would be fruitless - it is essentially impossible for either side to be swayed in the least by the other...

[Nullifidian]

I am a bit confused, I have read the Gould letter and comments from Dr. Richard Dawkins about not lending the legitimacy to Creationists which they desire, by engaging them in debate. Frankly, I think that is a copout, but it is a reason. The problem is that Dr. Richard Dawkins interviews some of the very people he refuses to debate.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=US8f1w1cYvs
Wendy Wright

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OeDoSFCy ... re=related
Nick Cowan

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X4IBv043 ... re=related
Steven Rose

Perhaps Steven Rose is a bit of a ringer, but bother Wendy Wright and Nick Cowan are Creationists, doesn't Dr. Richard Dawkins legitimize them by interviewing them?

Seems like he really doesn't care about being associated with them provided that he controls the discussion.

Yeah, I think someone who holds professorships in neurobiology and biology at the University of London and the Open University and has no problem stating, at the start of the interview, "evolution is a fact" is probably not a creationist. Steven Rose disagrees with Dawkins on the whole "selfish gene" idea (as do I), but that doesn't make him a creationist any more than my disagreement with Dawkins makes me a flat-earther.

The reason debating creationists lends them unearned legitimacy is that it allows them to pretend that there is a controversy regarding evolution, instead of near-unified acceptance of evolution by every relevant expert and a coterie of denialists who object to evolution for religious reasons. I'd be happy to have a debate where the time allotted was proportional to the percentage of creationists among life scientists. The creationist would have one tenth of a second, and I'd get two hours.

Another cogent reason not to debate creationists is that it genuinely is a waste of time. You claim that debates are educational. When was the last time you learned something from a debate? I watched the presidential debates in 2004 and 2008, and all I learned was why half the electorate stays home on Election Day. If debates were a good way of creating teachable moments, then history teachers would debate Holocaust denialists, earth science teachers would debate flat earth proponents (or hollow earth proponents), microbiology professors would debate AIDS denialists, engineers debating 9/11 truthers, etc. The reason you don't see this happening is that debates are, in fact, a lousy way of educating people. They're a great way for pseudoscientists to rattle off a stream of superficially convincing nonsense, then claim to be 'vindicated' when the person defending the mainstream consensus view has to take hours to unpack all the misconceptions.

I will assume, for the sake of demonstration, that you do not believe the WTC towers were brought down by a controlled demolition. Would you be able to rebut the piles of nonsense spouted by Truthers in their arguments? That it was "unusual" that they could get cell phone service at cruise altitude? That only buildings that are detonated in a controlled demolition fall at near-free fall speeds? Could you explain the concepts of static and dynamic load to an audience in a 30 second soundbyte?

That's what you need to convey information in a debate, which is why debates are useless as tools for education and are, instead, means by which ideologues spout a stream of lies, half-truths, and dogmatism to the faithful (and by "faithful" I don't mean the just religious faithful, but also political partisans and other such people).

Lastly, and most fundamentally, it is not the job of biologists to convince creationists, but rather the job of creationists to convince biologists. Like it or not, that evolution has occurred is the consensus of biologists for a reason: it works. Everything from genomics and proteomics to ecology is built on evolution as the foundation of biology. If the creationists want to come along and tell us that we've got it all wrong, then they should do it like scientists, not like carny barkers.

I know the standard copout is that biologists are slavishly devoted to evolution and won't listen to the creationists, but if that is the case then by all means let them take their 'science' elsewhere—for example, to biotech firms. Biotech is often based explicitly on evolutionary biology, so if we're all wrong about evolution, then any biotech CEO should welcome creationists coming along to set his own researchers straight. And yet, despite the massive amount of money they have to throw at creationist museums, not a single creationist to my knowledge has ever approached a biotech firm with a research protocol guided by 'creation science', nor has there ever been a successful creationist biotech startup.

And that's why some people won't debate creationists: they offer literally nothing to debate.

[Bart]

I agree with the posters here. To put it another way.

Imagine Jonas Salk, the discoverer of the Polio vaccine, being challenged to debate a religionist who [still] believed that illness is caused by Satan, or the Wrath of God.

Why would a man of his credibility, scientific achievment, and knowledge stoop to such idiocy?

[Chris OConnor]

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