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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
