The Geeky Atheist

Last night the Center for Inquiry co-sponsored a debate "Was Darwin Wrong?" with Michael Shermer. My wife and I attended, and I video taped a decent portion of it, but unfortunately it was too long for my battery. I'm working on getting in contact with another person so that I can hopefully splice our videos together and get a larger chunk up to YouTube in the near future.

I'd like to highlight a few observations from the evening.

• This wasn't a debate. Hugh Ross and Fazale Rana from Reasons to Believe were given 25 minutes each (and they took a total of one hour and 15 minutes combined) to give presentations that weren't debated. Shermer was only given 30 minutes, and he went over by a few minutes. After this, they fielded questions from each other for about 15-20 minutes, but there wasn't much back and forth. Finally, the audience was allowed to ask questions for another 20 minutes.
• While the title of the event made you think that evolution would be up for debate, it wasn't really. Ross dedicated his entire presentation to how the bible is a cosmologically accurate book. Rana did better to bring up the subject matter, but not very much.
• Shermer did excellent considering the format. He was well prepared, and essentially pointed out all of the flaws in Ross' original powerpoint. Unfortunately with his time limited, he didn't really get to dive into all of the arguments.
• The on-stage debate section was worthless. There wasn't much accomplished, and the moderator didn't do any moderating.
• One audience question asked what they thought of being able to derive Pi from Genesis 1:1. Even the Reasons to Believe folks dismissed it.
• Another audience question was out of left field in claiming that we haven't actually discovered black holes and that there never was a singularity.
• My favorite part was Shermer asking the Reasons to Believe people, "If your model was disproven, would you give up Jesus as your savior?" The crowd yelled, "No!". Update: As Rik pointed out, Shermer then replied, "There you go. That proves my point, this has nothing to do with science." Additionally, later on Shermer had Ross agreeing that if his testable model was disproved, he would give up his faith in Jesus.

All in all it was entertaining, and given how it was stacked, I think that Shermer did excellent. As for the original subject matter, it wasn't really discussed. Afterwards while we made our way to see Shermer, I overheard him taking ill-informed evolutionary questions and taking the time to explain it step by step.

The best part is that another person we know from our Threadgills ACA meetups had a shirt on that he had told us about this past Sunday. He had designed a shirt that listed on the front major transitional fossils that had been found. Shermer noticed the shirt while answering a question about what transitional fossils have been found, and pointed to this guy's shirt and said, "They're right there."

Were people's minds changed tonight? No, I highly doubt it. That's the hardest thing to do in debates. If anyone might rethink anything, it might be that one person who had a one-on-one Q&A afterwards that I overheard. He seemed actually intellectually interested in the questions he was asking, and it might make him go research a bit more.

Over the past few weeks I've been reading Why Evolution Is True by Jerry Coyne. In my original acceptance of evolution, I didn't really dig into the evidence for it initially. Rather, I saw my arguments against it being deconstructed as logical fallacy after logical fallacy via The Skeptics' Guide to the Universe Podcast. Seeing my arguments against evolution destroyed, I read Francis Collins' The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief. Being a Christian at the time, I wanted some input on what really changes if I decided to accept evolution.

Fast forward to a few weeks ago, where I listened to Coyne being interviewed about this book. He explained that there are many scientists who never encounter the true breadth of evidence behind evolution. Back in the early 1900s, the evidence was very crucial to accepting evolution as a fact. But as we got closer and closer to today, we've stopped teaching as much of the evidence because the scientific community largely accepts evolution as truth. This is where he felt he could contribute with his book.

His book is a step by step walk through the breadth of evidence that supports evolution, and he does it with such an eloquent voice. I'm not a scientist, but I didn't encounter a subject that I wasn't able to comprehend. Beyond comprehension, it was truly an entertaining book. His love of biology is evidenced in his writing.

He starts off by explaining the six principles of evolution: gradualism, speciation, common ancestry, natural selection, and nonselective mechanisms of evolutionary change. The remainder of the book sets forth to back up each of these principles with the breadth of evidence found in, but not limited to, the fossil record, the biogeography of plants and animals, and molecular genomic data.

His book does a wonderful job of proving what he set out for in his title: evolution is true. This book is not an end-all-be-all book of evolution, but it's a great primer with lots of facts and examples, and is a great starter or refresher for anyone interested more in the evidence behind evolution.